2
The Meeting of Religions: A Christian Debate
Paul F. Knitter
Theological method
The job description for theologians has been classically summarized as fides quaerens intellectum – faith seeking understanding.1 That’s what theology is. That, really, is what Christian life is all about – faith trying to make sense of itself within the world, the culture, the particular context of one’s life. Faith naturally seeks understanding. And if it doesn’t find it, it dwindles and disappears. After all, why believe something that doesn’t make sense? Not even God would require that of us.
So to begin my section of this book, I’ll try to lay out, as crisply and clearly as I can: (a) how theology works; (b) the role of language in theology; and (c) two of the most challenging issues that confront Christian faith and theology today.
Theology is an ongoing conversation
Let me offer this as a loose definition of theology: Theology is a mutually clarifying and a mutually criticizing conversation between Christian experience and beliefs on the one side and ongoing human experience and understanding of self and the world on the other side.2 This is how ‘faith seeks understanding’ – by engaging in this honest and open-minded conversation between the two ‘sources of theology’ – that is, the ‘text’ of the Christian message and the ‘context’ of one’s place in the world. It is a genuinely mutual conversation in which there are real questions and real answers on both sides. It’s a conversation between what we believe God reveals particularly in Jesus the Christ and what God reveals universally in creation. God is speaking to us on both sides of the conversation, for while God has truly revealed something new and special in Jesus, God continues to ‘speak’ to us through the world. That’s why we call this conversation ‘mutually clarifying and criticizing’. What God has made known in and through Jesus helps us understand, clarify and correct our human experience. But our human experience and our human intelligence and conscience help us understand, clarify and correct our Christian beliefs. It’s a two-way street.
I can hear the rumble of concern: does this mean that what God is revealing in my own experience and conscience is just as good as what God reveals in the Bible? Well, no, but also yes. Because the Bible – I’m talking especially about the New Testament – is the original witness, the primary source, for our knowledge of and contact with the particularly ‘Good News’ that God has offered in Jesus, it bears an authority that, one must say, is much more reliable than what I think God is making known through my own experience.
And yet – and yet – the truth and the authority of the Bible can become real and powerful for me only when it ‘makes contact with’ my own experience – only when it inspires me, or confounds me, with a truth that I can feel. This means that the truth that God has given us in the Bible is not, as it were, an apple that we can simply pick. It’s more like a potato that we have to dig out. The Bible, in other words, has to be interpreted. And to interpret, we have to make connections between the ‘sound waves’ of the Bible and the ‘antennae’ of our own lives. Or more simply, the Bible will speak to us only if we speak to it. Again, we’re back to our image of theology as a give-and-take conversation.
Watch your language!
But the words that make up the conversation that is theology are a very special kind of words. They’re special because their subject-matter is special. Theology, after all, literally means theo-logia– words about God. And if, as is commonly said, there are some things that are simply ‘more than words can say’, the reality of God has to be on the top of that list. In all the religions of the world, God or Ultimate Reality or Brahman or Sunyata is recognized as Mystery – that is, beyond human comprehension. And that means beyond human words. Therefore, if we ever think that our words or ideas are saying something about God in a final or full way, we are sadly, and dangerously, deluding ourselves. Augustine of Hippo’s version of this truth should take the wind out of the sails of any theologian or Pope:
If you have understood, then it is not God. If you were able to understand, then you understood something else instead of God. If you were able to understand partially, then you have deceived yourself with your own thoughts.3
Therefore, in my work as a theologian, and in my prayer as a Christian, I follow theologians like Paul Tillich and my teacher Karl Rahner in recognizing that all our ‘God talk’ is symbolic.4 To speak about the Divine and things divine, we have to speak in symbols– that is, in metaphors, analogies, images. We should never think that our symbols or our notions capture all that can be said about God. Yes, they say something. But they never say everything. The Buddhists have a symbolic image to make this point: when we try to speak about our deepest spiritual experiences – what they call Awakening or Nirvana – we must remember that our words, all our words, are ‘fingers pointing to the moon’. Our words are never the moon itself. To identify our pointing fingers with the moon – or our language about God with God – is to make our fingers and our words into idols. That’s what Augustine was worried about.
And if all our words are symbols, then, in general, they should not be taken literally. This is a tricky, disputed issue. Yes, the Bible or a church council are making what philosophers call ‘truth claims’, when they tell us that ‘Jesus died on the cross and rose from the dead’ or that ‘the angel Gabriel appears to Mary’. They are announcing something that is really, actually true, something we can rely on. But there is always more to say, always a different way to say it. Religious language is much closer to poetry than to philosophy, more like a painting than a photograph. Therefore, the guideline for enabling religious language to ‘work’ for us is this: always take such language seriously; but be careful of taking it literally.
The two most pressing issues for Christian theology today
If theology is a conversation between ‘what we are given to believe’ and ‘what is going on in our world’, we have to be more precise about what is happening in today’s world. For me, and for many Christians, the two most pressing questions that clamour for answers from my Christian beliefs are the many religions and the many poor. Yes, there have always been many religions and many poor people. But today, they are knocking on our door (sometimes literally!) and pushing themselves into our awareness as never before.
Why, if Jesus is the only saviour and Christianity the only really true religion, has God allowed so many other religions to continue to prosper? And instead of competing and fighting with each other, can the religions dialogue and co-operate together toward a world of greater peace and well-being?
What can we do about the horrible reality of the millions of people who cannot feed their children or provide a roof and medicine for them? How address the glaring inequality of the distribution of the goods of this world between the few who have so much and the many who have so little? And of course, when we talk of ‘the many poor’, that includes the impoverished earth, for the impoverishment of the earth, we are told, and the impoverishment of peoples are intimately and murderously related.5
Unless ‘what I believe’ helps me, if not answer, at least deal with and struggle with such questions, it will not be a meaningful faith for me. What is true must be meaningful. If it’s not meaningful, who cares if it’s true?
Therefore, the two primary characteristics of the theology which I will try to summarize in what follows – or the two criteria by which I will evaluate whether a Christian theology is both meaningful for our contemporary world and faithful to the message of Jesus– will be these: is it liberative and is it dialogical.