Comparative Theology

Deep Learning Across Religious Borders

Francis X. Clooney

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781444356434
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Asian Religions

Drawing upon the author's three decades of work in comparative theology, this is a pertinent and comprehensive introduction to the field, which offers a clear guide to the reader, enabling them to engage in comparative study.

• The author has three decades of experience of work in the field of comparative theology and is ideally placed to write this book
• Today's increasing religious diversity makes this a pertinent and timely publication
• Unique in the depth of its introduction and explanation of the discipline of 'comparative theology'
• Provides examples of how comparative theology works in the new global context of human religiosity
• Draws on examples specific to Hindu-Christian studies to show how it is possible to understand more deeply the wider diversity around us.
• Clearly guides the reader, enabling them to engage in comparative study

Part I

Starting Points

Chapter 1

Religious Diversity and Comparative Theology

We live in a world where religious diversity is increasingly affecting and changing everything around us, and ourselves as well. No religious community is exempt from the pressures of diversity, or incapable of profiting from drawing on this new religious template. No community, wherever it is and however it is configured, will casually abandon its traditional commitments and practices in the face of religious diversity. If we are trying to make sense of our situation amidst diversity and likewise keep our faith, some version of comparative theological reflection is required.

While religious diversity can justly be celebrated as enormously interesting, it is also an unsettling phenomenon for people who actually are religious. Individual religious traditions are under internal and external stress as they are challenged to engage an array of religious others. Some find themselves under siege, threatened by a bewildering range of religious possibilities; some withdraw and demonize their others; some, perhaps too accommodating, begin to forget their identities. Some of us are relatively untouched by the phenomenon, but none of us avoids changing inside and out.

If we want to take diversity and religious commitment seriously, then there is a need for comparative theology, a mode of interreligious learning particularly well suited to the times in which we live. When I speak of “comparative theology,” I will be arguing the case for keeping “theology” and “comparative” together, precisely for the sake of specific acts of interreligious learning appropriate to our contemporary situation. Doing theology comparatively will be more and not less fruitful, when diversity is most evident and most intensely felt.

Like all forms of theology, comparative theology is a form of study. Now it is true that a commitment to study religions may seem a less than urgent response to what is happening in our world today, a detour that distracts us from our own traditions, perhaps even speeding up the dissolution of particular commitments. But, in fact, the cultivation of a more interconnected sense of traditions, read together with sensitivity to both faith and reason, grounds a deeper validation and intensification of each tradition.

In the following pages I take the United States to be the context of my reflection, and I write from an American Catholic perspective. Readers in other cultural settings, and with other perspectives on the United States, will of course want to modify my insights accordingly. But, whatever the cultural and religious setting, diversity similarly challenges concerned individuals who care about the future of their traditions and the meaningfulness of religious and spiritual commitment. Faith and reason, faith seeking understanding in a world of diversity, will still be at stake.

Diversity around Us

The context for today’s comparative theology is growing religious diversity. Diversity in and among religions is not novel, but its impact has intensified in recent decades as a pronounced and defining phenomenon that is global but still impacts us in the particular places where we live. Fluid immigration patterns have brought people of many religious backgrounds together in the places where we live and work. Religious traditions previously foreign to one another now flourish nearby to one another. It is by habit that we still apply tidy labels such as “Eastern religions” and “Western religions” to religions that are taking root everywhere; by habit, some of us still imagine that “other religions” are to be found only in far-off parts of the world. In varying degrees of proximity and intensity, all religions are near to us; whether we are conscious or not, they are becoming part of our lives and influential on our religious identities.

The challenge impacts us more forcefully as a vast increase in available knowledge about religions creates new learning possibilities. Religious traditions are vividly present in every kind of media. Never before has so much been available so easily, in such quality. As never before, we can learn easily about other religions, but we need to learn deeply across such borders. Even were we to limit our attention to theological concerns, we would be on the spot, since we now have available to us an abundance of great theological texts from many traditions, in accessible translations with ample annotations. It is easy to read, and harder than ever to justify not reading inside and outside my own tradition.

Our time and place therefore urge upon us a necessary interreligious learning. Diversity becomes a primary context for a tradition’s inquiry and self-understanding; particular traditions in their concreteness become the place where the religious meaning of diversity is disclosed. By such learning, intelligently evaluated and extended, we make deeper sense of ourselves intellectually and spiritually, in light of what we find in the world around us. We can respond to diversity with a distinctive set of sensitivities and insights that balances respect for tradition and community with the wider play of what is possible in our era, such as none of our traditions has been able to anticipate.

The proliferation of available knowledge certainly applies, for instance, to the Hindu traditions of India to which I will keep returning in the following pages. The sheer volume of Sanskrit literature available in translation is formidable, and there is also a wealth of still lesser-known literatures – often in vernacular, regional languages – that lead us deeper into the various religious traditions. Thus, we can read texts such as the Bhagavad Gita and the Upanishads, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, which have been available for a long time and for which there are some excellent translations. But we can also study texts of great theological interest that are less known (in the West), such as Bengali goddess poetry, the songs of the saints of Tamil Nadu, Gujarat, or Maharastra, and descriptions of ritual performances in numerous local settings. We have technical scholastic treatises of numerous Hindu traditions, ritual manuals and ritual exegeses, commentaries, poetic works, grand epic narratives, law texts, and the like, and these are pertinent to theology even in its most technical forms. There is also significant modern historical and social scientific research on religious traditions in their origins and in their histories, and much information and interpretation available on the arts in various cultures. We can read the primary sources; we can read about them in some detail as well, and with guidance from traditional and modern academic perspectives.

Where it is possible to learn, there is also a responsibility, if we are not artificially and arbitrarily to cut short our quest to understand our faith. So much information, so easily available, should puncture religious stereotypes and free us of conventional judgments about other religions that persist simply as bad habits. We should be increasingly reluctant to confuse the necessary shorthand claims we make about religions – we cannot ever say all that needs to be said – with the full, adequate accounts of those traditions. Theologians have particular responsibility, since the public credibility of faith positions relies in part on our demonstration that we are interreligiously literate, knowing what to say, how to make measured judgments within the bounds of our learning, and when also to stop speaking about things beyond our expertise. Other religions are not less complex than our own, and there is no reason, no excuse, for not acquiring credible knowledge about them. This learning, and how we use it, is the challenge of comparative theology.

Diversity within Us

Diversity not only envelops us, it works on us, gets inside us; if we are paying attention, we see that attentiveness to other religions affects even how we experience, think through, and practice our own religion. Religious choices become more urgent and more complex, even among people with continuing religious commitments. To make sense of their own faith lives, individuals have to make choices regarding how to form and balance their religious commitments.

Individual sensitivities heightened in the face of diversity in turn unsettle traditions, as more people find at home only some of what they seek spiritually. Communities may find their most alert members deeply affected by what’s going on religiously around them, and accordingly more tentative and fluid in their commitments, more acutely aware of the possibilities available in other religious traditions. At the same time, our culture fosters personal, individual responses to the multiplicity of religious options. (Overly) critical questioning unsettles the learning that traditions have passed down, and raises doubts about whether any particular wisdom is really absolutely superior to other ways of living spiritually and well. Religious diversity, thoughtfully understood, raises awkward questions that can make an exclusive choice seem almost impossible. Perplexed by diversity, we may seek excuses not to take it seriously, on the grounds of the sanctity and sufficiency of our own religion. Or we may find relativism the easier path to tread. But we are better off if we keep paying attention to the dynamics of diversity intelligently and with the eyes of faith. Whatever our commitment and intentions, we need to be able to make intelligent religious choices about where we belong and how we shall be committed. Individuals themselves will make such choices, but cumulatively their choices affect how religious communities remain viable places where God is to be known and worshiped in a religiously diverse world.

If we are attentive to the diversity around us, near us, we must deny ourselves the easy confidences that keep the other at a distance. But, as believers, we must also be able to defend the relevance of the faith of our community, deepening our commitments even alongside other faiths that are flourishing nearby. We need to learn from other religious possibilities, without slipping into relativist generalizations. The tension between open-mindedness and faith, diversity and traditional commitment, is a defining feature of our era, and neither secular society nor religious authorities can make simple the choices before us.

Two points, then, need to be kept in mind. Because diversity is an objective feature of the world around us, we need to keep looking outward, learning to be as intellectually engaged as possible in studying it in the small and manageable ways that are possible for us. Because diversity also touches upon our faith experience and affects our identities as religious people in our own traditions, it is changing us from the inside out. We need therefore to attend with special care and a fresh eye to the wellbeing of our faith in our community, and to the quest to understand it. This spiritual and intellectual response to diversity, with its outward and inward dimensions, is the comparative theological venture.

Comparative Theology as a Response to Twenty-first-Century Religious Diversity

The complications crowding in on us may seem overwhelming. But the situation need not paralyze us, and we need not pull back from theological reflection in the midst of diversity merely because we do not, and can never, know enough about those other traditions. Diversity makes it necessary to focus our thinking, to choose a particular path of learning, commitment, and participation. Liberated by the concrete and measured specificity of actual learning, we need no longer find diversity and tradition incompatible; being traditional too is a way of accentuating diversity. Even imperfect and partially realized comparative theological reflection helps us in reshaping both theology and wider cultural expectations about religion and spirituality.

In our religiously diverse context, a vital theology has to resist too tight a binding by tradition, but also the idea that religious diversity renders strong claims about truth and value impossible. Comparative theology is a manner of learning that takes seriously diversity and tradition, openness and truth, allowing neither to decide the meaning of our religious situation without recourse to the other. Countering a cultural tendency to retreat into private spirituality or a defensive assertion of truth, this comparative theology is hopeful about the value of learning. Indeed, the theological confidence that we can respect diversity and tradition, that we can study traditions in their particularity and receive truth in this way, in order to know God better, is at the core of comparative theology.

Distinguishing Comparative Theology from Related Disciplines

The preceding general reflections indicate some features of the exterior diversity and interior complexity which make comparative theology an appropriate, even necessary form of reflection today. Since there are other appropriate ways to think about and respond to diversity, I wish now to venture a few preliminary distinctions regarding various modes of interreligious reflection, so that we can proceed with greater clarity, though still without entirely fixed categories, in understanding comparative theology. The following definitions cannot cover every case, but they help locate “comparative theology” as I understand it:

Comparative religion (along with the distinct but related fields of the history of religions and social scientific approaches to religion) entails the study of religion – in ideas, words, images and acts, historical developments – found in two or more traditions or strands of tradition. The scholarly ideal is detached inquiry by which the scholar remains neutral with respect to where the comparison might lead or what it might imply religiously. Even if she is deeply engaged in the research and sensitive to communal issues, her responsibility is primarily to fellow scholars.

Theology, as I use the word in this book, indicates a mode of inquiry that engages a wide range of issues with full intellectual force, but ordinarily does so within the constraints of a commitment to a religious community, respect for its scriptures, traditions, and practices, and a willingness to affirm the truths and values of that tradition. More deeply, and to echo more simply an ancient characterization of theology, it is faithseeking understanding, a practice in which all three words – the faith, the search, the intellectual goal – have their full force and remain in fruitful tension with one another.

The theology of religions is a theological discipline that discerns and evaluates the religious significance of other religious traditions in accord with the truths and goals defining one’s own religion. It may be greatly detailed with respect to the nuances of the home tradition, but most often remains broadly general regarding the traditions that are being talked about.

Interreligious dialogue points to actual conversations, sometimes formal and academic, sometimes simply interpersonal conversations among persons of different religious traditions who are willing to listen to one another and share their stories of faith and values.

Dialogical or interreligious theology grows out of interreligious dialogue, as reflection aimed at clarifying dialogue’s presuppositions, learning from its actual practice, and communicating what is learned in dialogue for a wider audience.

In distinction from the preceding ventures:

Comparative theology – comparative and theological beginning to end – marks acts of faith seeking understanding which are rooted in a particular faith tradition but which, from that foundation, venture into learning from one or more other faith traditions. This learning is sought for the sake of fresh theological insights that are indebted to the newly encountered tradition/s as well as the home tradition.

Comparative theology thus combines tradition-rooted theological concerns with actual study of another tradition. It is not an exercise in the study of religion or religions for the sake of clarifying the phenomenon. It reduces neither to a theology about religions, nor to the practice of dialogue.

Comparative in this context marks a practice that requires intuitive as well as rational insight, practical as well as theoretical engagement. It is therefore not primarily a matter of evaluation, as if merely to compare A and B so as to determine the extent of their similarity and which is better. Nor is it a scientific analysis by which to grasp the essence of the comparables by sifting through similarities and differences. Rather, as a theological and necessarily spiritual practice (and, in my use of it, a way of reading), comparison is a reflective and contemplative endeavor by which we see the other in light of our own, and our own in light of the other. It ordinarily starts with the intuition of an intriguing resemblance that prompts us to place two realities – texts, images, practices, doctrines, persons – near one another, so that they may be seen over and again, side by side. In this necessarily arbitrary and intuitive practice we understand each differently because the other is near, and by cumulative insight also begin to comprehend related matters differently too. Finally, we see ourselves differently, intuitively uncovering dimensions of ourselves that would not otherwise, by a non-comparative logic, come to the fore.

This notion of comparative, much less than a fully developed theory of comparison, is important for all that follows. While comparative theology might just as well be thought of as interreligioustheology, by using together “comparative” and “theology” I seek to preserve the creative tension defining this discipline. As we shall see in chapters 2 and 3, I want also to be candid in linking my understanding of comparative theology to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century comparative studies (chapter 2), and to contemporary studies that invoke the name “comparative theology” (chapter 3).

Comparative theology is therefore comparative because it is interreligious and complex in its appropriation of one’s own and another tradition in relation to one another. In some instances this comparison may involve evaluation, but ordinarily the priority is more simply the dynamics of a back-and-forth learning. It is a theological discipline confident about the possibility of being intelligently faithful to tradition even while seeking fresh understanding outside that tradition. It remains an intellectual and most often academic practice even if, like other forms of theology, it can occur in popular forms as well. While I write from a Christian perspective, there is nothing essentially Christian about comparative theology as I describe it. As I will explain in chapter 5, comparative theology can be grounded in other traditions as well, and even in particular personal pathways, provided “faith seeking understanding” is the operative principle.

I wish now to further clarify the relationship of comparative theology to the academic study of religion and religions, interreligious dialogue, and the theology of religions, since its disciplinary location must be clear, if its theological character is to be appreciated.

Comparative Theology and the Academic Study of Religions

Comparative theology must not be confused with comparative religion, since faith is a necessary and explicit factor in the former and not in the latter, where its influence might even be ruled out. But the fields need not be separated entirely, since comparative theology still has to measure up to expected disciplinary standards regarding the religions being compared. Because the comparative theologian is engaged in the study of a religious tradition other than her own, she needs to be an academic scholar proficient in the study of that religion, or at least seriously in learning from academic scholars. This is necessary if comparative theology is to be faithful to text and language, history and context, and not mistaken or lazy in (mis)using what is known about the religions in question. Shoddy or superficial scholarship about religions produces bad theology. To a certain extent, the comparative theologian works first as an academic scholar, even if she also and more deeply intends the kind of religious and spiritual learning that characterizes theology richly conceived.

While acknowledging this disciplinary responsibility, comparative theologians need also to be candid about a cultural tendency, evident in our universities, to exclude theology from the study of religions. They need to defend a space for studies that are theological in intent, pursued with faith, from a particular perspective, for a community. This more ample agenda – area studies-plus, study of religions-plus – will not merely reconfirm settled doctrines with new information, just as what is learned need not be seen as undercutting such doctrines. Scholars who are Christian believers can, for instance, still assert that Christ founded the one universal religion and that Jesus is the universal savior. Scholars of other traditions will make similar universal claims. No one needs to put aside faith and its hope when working as a scholar, although we do need to be able to learn vulnerably without letting even deeply held truths become an obstacle to learning. Comparative theologians may even find that research complicates the case for their faith, by making it easier to appreciate faith claims professed in other traditions. This complication is good, and faith need not suffer from the fact that comparative study does not quickly confirm dearly held beliefs or smoothly undercut what others believe.

Comparative Theology and Interreligious Dialogue

There are good reasons to keep comparative theology and interreligious dialogue closely connected and clearly distinguished. Just as actual, living interaction among people of different faith traditions enhances mutual understanding, personal encounters in dialogue should remind us that religions flourish in the lives, beliefs, and activities of real people living out their faith day by day. It also reminds us that we must be accountable to other communities when we speak about their religion, even as we must give an account of ourselves to our own community. So too, assuming (as I will explain later) that all traditions have their theologians, we can appropriately expect dialogue among theologians. As essentially interreligious, each particular comparative theology is by itself always incomplete, and theologians need to hear from others how they understand and interpret the beliefs of their traditions, and how they think we ought to correct what we say about them. All of this is dialogue. But even a seriously theological dialogue among learned believers is not enough. The comparative theologian must do more than listen to others explain their faith; she must be willing to study their traditions deeply alongside her own, taking both to heart. In the process, she will begin to...