Abstract
In this entertaining, instructive, and unsettling book, the three authors engage in a spirited exchange about how best to name and navigate a situation in which Christian faith self-consciously coexists with other religiously inflected forms of life. Their common concern is to clarify the terms in which Christians may speak well about and with people of other faiths; in identifying and debating the centrally relevant issues, they give readers occasion to consider afresh the profound spiritual and intellectual demands of well-ordered theological disputation, and to rejoice that for all its evident frailties this form of human interaction may also—as and where God pleases—issue in genuine understanding.
The book comprises three main parts, most naturally read as sequential stages in an unfinished conversation: Part One sees D’Costa, Knitter, and Strange each submitting a substantial essay outlining the contours of his own position. In Part Two, each takes the papers of his two collaborators under critical scrutiny. And finally, in Part Three, each clarifies and defends his initial claims in face of the questions posed by his colleagues. The position papers severally serve as fine introductions to their authors’ individual approaches; conjointly they reveal moments of deep disagreement about the substance and scope of Christian confession and so also the sources and norms of Christian theology—matters explored with welcome analytical clarity and argumentative courtesy in the response papers.
The book, which contains no substantive introduction or conclusion, defies neat summary. But one may perhaps find a helpful point of entry in the distinction between a doctrinal and missional theology of religions on the one hand and an exploratory and mutually corrective theology of interreligious encounter on the other. The former seeks primarily to serve the Christian church’s proclamation to and service of other communities by locating the historical appearance and continuance of the world’s religions within the terms of scripturally and traditionally governed Christian confession. In the latter, the Christian’s reflected experience of a specific non-Christian religious tradition in its native integrity is held to promise a significantly enriched understanding of God and the world. The first approach is pursued here by Strange, who draws on the doctrinal and cultural resources of Reformed scholastic theology to develop a strong account of the Christian gospel as the ‘subversive fulfilment’ of non-Christian religions. The second is engagingly taken up by Knitter, who over the course of a distinguished career has explored the ways in which intensive engagement with (especially Tibetan) Buddhism has shaped his continuing inhabitation of the Roman Catholic church. D’Costa advocates a third approach, attempting to demonstrate that traditional Roman Catholic teaching as reaffirmed and extended by Vatican II recommends a more holistic theological vision, one capable of incorporating the legitimate concerns of his collaborator’s two very different trajectories.
Readers rightly may wonder after the failure of any of the three authors seriously to question the systematic utility of the term ‘religion’ or explicitly to grapple with the critique of religion variously developed in Protestant theology after Barth. They also may puzzle after the book’s subtitle, which differs—perhaps with considerable theological significance—from the book’s cover to its title page (where it reads ‘Three Christian Responses to the Uniqueness of Christ in a Pluralistic World’). But they certainly will come away from this exchange grateful for the instruction and stimulus it provides.