There are ethnographic and comparative courses in the religious practices of individual traditions, from reading practices to ritual and prayer practices, in the past and today.
There are courses on interpretation theory, on ritual theory, and in philosophical hermeneutics, pertinent to each of the traditions and to broader, comparative studies. And there are courses on the practice and theory of "scriptural reasoning": our term for modes of study, fellowship, and analysis that bring Abrahamic and other text-traditions into sustained dialogue.
Students may also take courses with other members of the Department of Religious Studies and, with approval, other members the Arts and Sciences Graduate Faculty.
Scriptural Tradition : Upon matriculation, students declare their primary and secondary traditions of study.
Currently, most students in the program specialize in Judaism, Christianity, or Islam. Students should engage one member of the Core Faculty in the Study of Judaism as graduate advisor. Individual courses of study must be approved by the advisor, in consultation with the Core Faculty.
All Doctor of Philosophy candidates in Comparative SIP who do not hold a graduate degree are required to pass a minimum of 45 credits in courses at the level and above, plus 27 credits in other courses may be non-topical research for a total of 72 credits. Students admitted directly to the PhD program i. PhD students should complete required coursework by the end of their fourth semester.
It does little good to point out that one person's syncretism is another's creativity. The same kinds of moves cluster around the notion of whether or not a person can participate with integrity in more than one religious tradition. The book's foundation on a study of Confucianism give this exploration of loyalties a specific tone and color; other traditions will certainly raise other kinds of problems for the comparativist faced with the possibility of multiple commitments.
But the basic issue is a constant one, and one of the most prominent to be faced by comparative theologians. As one's research progresses, where are one's loyalties? Are they still to just one tradition, or to both, or to neither?
I place my own work in this section on the self-consciousness of the comparative act, since the reflective angle has been at the core of experiments in comparison. In Theology after Vedanta, I elaborate the comparative theological method in light of the dynamics of the reading process, and undertake a detailed reading of some key texts in the Advaita Vedanta tradition, with attention to how authors within the Vedanta tradition read, how Christian theologians might read with them, and then how the Christian might re-read the Christian tradition thereafter.
As became clear to me in writing the book, and as is indicated in its subtitle, the issue was very basically an attentive understanding of the process by which one becomes aware of what one does when one tries to understand something in particular, how one reads before, during, and after acts of comparison.
In the subsequent Seeing through Texts, I turn to the intensely emotional devotional poetry of the saints of south India, materials that become intellectually and historically related to the Vedanta materials, but in important ways remain quite different, more poetic, imaginative, local, affective, and thus raise quite different and more personal issues for the comparativist.
In studying this poetry and its reception among south Indian Hindus, I found myself drawn into the world of the Vaisnavas; the "virtues" of impartiality and distance became problematic, and the possibilities of transformation and conversion become more real, as research and identity became more closely intertwined.
The questions raised in such works — detailed comparisons and the interiorization of such comparisons as an intellectual and ultimately personal process — must be understood in terms of "a comparative pedagogy. But there are ongoing efforts which are contributing to the refinement of comparative praxis.
For instance, the books in the SUNY series "Toward a Comparative Philosophy of Religions" are dedicated to bringing together the philosophy of religions traditions in the West, the newly appreciated value of comparative study, and the research of those in more empirically oriented disciplines, in the social sciences, history of religions and, indeed, comparative theology.
Works in the Orbis "Faith meets Faith" series are also very helpful and, as our bibliography indicates, they stand at the forefront of the development of comparative study.
Of course, too, the Journal of Ecumenical Studies has for a generation and more pioneered the kind of exploration indicated here. Similarly, the work of the Society for Buddhist-Christian Studies and the newly founded Society for Hindu-Christian Studies and their journals have been helpful in offering instances of specific research aimed at respecting, but crossing, religious boundaries, in the context of ongoing dialogue among actual proponents of religious traditions.
Within the scope of this reflective study, special attention must still be paid to pedagogical issues. In his essay "Beyond a Mono-religious Theological Education," Paul Knitter argues for a broader theological education, to which the study of non-Christian religious traditions is integral, and in which the dichotomy of theology and religious studies is overcome. In "The Study of Non-Christian Religions in the Post-Vatican II Roman Catholic Church: Reflections on the Emerging New Situation," I sought to estimate the likely weight of comparative study according to the prior theological education and ecclesial experience of the comparativist; comparativists educated entirely after the Second Vatican Council are less likely to have to accommodate new information about religion with already formed and set classicist understandings of theology; comparison and theology have been learned together, not in sequence.
As pedagogical issues are given serious attention in our pluralistic environment where Christian theological backgrounds are themselves greatly varied , it seems inevitable that we will have to identify more specifically the correlations between comparative study and the specific theological resources, developed or not, that individual comparativists bring to their study. Though one might be inclined not to group historical studies with those giving priority to personal reflective issues, an awareness of history provides necessary data for comparative theology's own self-understanding as a discipline.
So it is appropriate to mention here some of the historical studies which are filling in the "prehistory" of comparison, giving it a deeper sense of its own identity — and so to dispose of the notion that until now Christian theology has been innocent of creative interaction with the other religious traditions.
For at least a decade David B. Burrell, already a well-respected Aquinas scholar, has been extending that expertise through a series of experiments in "comparative philosophical theology," exploring issues familiar to him from his study of Aquinas and later Thomists in light of the other "Abrahamic faiths," Judaism and Islam, represented for the most part by Maimonides and Ibn-Sina. Admitting his Christian tradition and standpoint, Burrell nevertheless argues for the theological and philosophical corrective which comparative work brings to chosen topics.
His first major effort in this direction was Knowing the Unknowable God, wherein he explored the relationship between God and the world as a limited but real basis on which God can be known. In the more recent Freedom and Creation in Three Traditions he explores the doctrines of creation ex nihilo and human freedom as these are worked out in the three traditions; here too, Burrell challenges the area specialist to think beyond the limits of cultures and contexts, the philosopher to take them seriously, and the theologian to think, at least twice, before attempting a "purely" Christian, or Jewish or Islamic, theology or ethics of creation and human freedom.
Interreligious thinking on these topics is a venerable part of each tradition; we might as well be comparativists, since we have been for quite some time. Like Burrell, Arnaldez is interested in the interactions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam in the Middle Ages, and provides a broad horizon within which to study them.
He studies Mohammed's views on Judaism and Christianity, and Islam's beginning and differentiation into theological schools, and then traces further interactions in Spanish Cordova, and the ways in which all of this works out in the Christian theology of figures from William of Auvergne and Alexander of Hales to Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas, and how thereafter this conversation waned and fragmented. In the concluding pages of the book, Arnaldez pleads for a resumption of this conversation that is rooted in all three traditions.
Like its encounter with Islam, Christianity's encounter with Judaism is a contemporary and ongoing event, not reducible to historical questions. Certainly, the challenge of a contemporary post-Holocaust Christian theological response to Judaism necessarily raises questions which touch very deeply on the core identity of the Christian.
Here comparison takes a particularly intense turn, for the authenticity of the comparativist is at issue. Williamson seeks to construct an attentive, honest "post-Shoah" theology for Christians which does not reject the covenant with Israel:. The tasks I have undertaken in this volume are a dismantling of the anti-Jewish tradition of Christian theology and a restatement of some of the central themes of the Christian faith.
Post-Holocaust theology pursues this same task [of self-critique in specific encounters with specific hitherto excluded people] on behalf of the Israel of God and various members of the Israel of God whom we have seldom if ever heard in one context — that of the covenant between the God of Israel and the Israel of God — in which they can be understood.
What post-Holocaust theology seeks to do is to criticize and revise Christian self-understanding in ways appropriate to the radically free grace and total claim of the God who redeems the ungodly, hence in ways that do not 'nullify the faithfulness of God' Romans to the Israel of God.
Though of course many theological works that do not think of themselves as comparative deal with the relationship of Judaism and Christianity, it may turn out to be particularly fruitful to treat this relationship from a comparative perspective, wherein similarities and differences can be freshly appraised and appreciated without a rush to the confirmation or critique of already fashioned theological answers.
However deeply and permanently rooted it ought to be in specific practices, the comparative project fails if it remains entirely the domain of specialists, such as those trained in languages. Though I have argued that practical issues are key, there are generalizable, broader issues which may subsequently occupy a wider range of theologians. We turn now to efforts to sketch the ramifications of comparison for the wider range of theological research.
Several expert authors whose work is not explicitly comparative theology nevertheless deserve special attention as providing excellent resources to undergird the comparative project, rubrics by which this study can move forward. Paul Griffiths's On Being Buddha argues for a retrieval of the practice of "a doctrinal study of doctrine," a study which does not reduce doctrine to the "epiphenomena of social settings or institutional arrangements of any kind," and which proceeds with specific attention to the kinds, meanings, and functions of doctrines and the resources we draw on to understand them and make judgments about them.
Though Griffiths works with a solid understanding of the place of doctrine in the Christian tradition, the book is distinctive by reason of its attention to Buddhist materials drawn from medieval monastic Buddhism as available in Sanskrit and Tibetan sources and what they have to tell us about the nature of the Buddha. Griffiths formulates his project in these terms:.
I shall, in the body of this study, attempt to analyze, understand and assess the buddhalogical doctrines evident in some Buddhist discursive practices entirely in doctrinal terms: as substantive claims and injunctions governing the intellectual lives of the virtuosos who engaged in such practices, and in what these claims and injunctions state or imply about the ontology, metaphysics, anthropology, and soteriology of those who assert them.
The book's last chapter, a valuable critical intellectual assessment of the coherence of the various doctrinal systems, shows how the evaluation of doctrines is a plausible venture even within a comparative setting. DiNoia, O. Though the book does not claim to be deeply informed by comparative study, it does draw quite competently on the Buddhist tradition. Moreover, it acknowledges and argues, against a series of well-presented and serious opposing arguments, that contemporary articulations of Christian doctrine ought to be informed by knowledge of the doctrines of other communities.
DiNoia helpfully ponders the problems that beset most theologians who would become informed about traditions other than their own, e. Generally speaking, he takes a moderate position which should be acceptable to many who would be reluctant to undertake more in-depth comparative study: "if Christians have occasion to interact in dialogue or in other settings with religious communities whose doctrines manifest the features he adduces [in previously describing those doctrines], then Christian doctrines about other religions should be formulated in ways that will do justice to these doctrines.
A theology of religions in this vein would be sufficiently general and well within the bounds of its competence as a product of reflection within the Christian community, yet it would still be fit to rise to the challenges posed by engagement in interreligious dialogue. In an interesting balance of exclusivist and inclusivist sympathies, DiNoia defends the particularist roots of Christian exclusivism and argues for a productive response to this particularism precisely through more serious attention to the doctrines of other traditions, instead of by the benign or polemic ignorance of them that still besets many theological writings.
Wilfred C. Smith's What is Scripture? Smith's short answer is given early on: "'scripture' is a bilateral term. By that we mean that it inherently implies, in fact names, a relationship. People — a given community — make a text into scripture, or keep it scripture: by treating it in a certain way. I suggest: scripture is a human activity. After delving into the notion of the "classic" in Chinese and Western Greek, Christian contexts, and a catch-up chapter on lingering questions Do Shintos have scriptures?
How can we distinguish and interweave the Indo-European, Semitic and Chinese strands of the idea of scripture? Is it erroneous to say that oral traditions have "scriptures"? The concept has no metaphysical, nor logical, reference; there is nothing that scripture finally 'is'… at issue is not the texts of scripture that are to be understood and about which a theory is to be sought, but the dynamic human involvement with them.
Equally ambitious, though rather different in approach, more pastoral, more varied in its foci, is John B. Carman's Majesty and Meekness. Carman's investigation is rooted in the phenomenological approach to the study of religion proposed by W. Brede Kristensen and Gerardus van der Leeuw, in Carman's own studies of the 11th century Hindu theologian Ramanuja, and in Ramanuja's emphasis on polarity in God, i.
The books achieves a skillful balance between personal faith and scholarly distance, wealth of detail and the discernment of generalizable patterns. Its concluding section is more directly theological, as Carman traces the consideration of paradox and polarity in modern theology, and how we might go about the task which he does not undertake of reformulating the Christian theology of God on the basis of this broad evidence for polarity in God in various non-Christian theologies.
For many theologians, the book should be a very helpful initiation into the practices and purposes of comparative theology. Though it would be unfortunate to reduce comparative theology to the questions which govern the ongoing theology of religions debate for example, Is Christ unique? Can people be saved through other saviors? Who is the God at work among the Hindus? After an interesting survey of positions on how Christ was understood by Hindus, Dupuis offers mature reflections on biblical and ecclesial resources, classical and contemporary, for an adequate response to other religions; he is motivated by the concern to balance faithfulness to the tradition with openness to how Christ works in the world, particularly in the various religions in their concrete existence.
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