Theology and Non-western Philosophy
- Contemporary Comparative Theology ====================================
Contemporary comparative theology, as a self-conscious commitment to do theology in a positive encounter with other religious traditions, might seem the least likely of all modern theological disciplines to present as the heir of mediaeval Scholasticism. Yet contemporary comparative theology has considerable common ground with the approach found in Aquinas. Christian comparative theologians also see theology as the reasoned exploration of faith, in which their perspectives and commitments are shaped by their being members of their Christian communities. Moreover, their engagement with other religious traditions is remarkably similar to Aquinas’ account of the probative science ofsacra doctrina . Other religious traditions function as authorities, which along with human reasoning become the resources out of which the theological account is constructed.
The work of Francis Clooney and Keith Ward helps us grasp something of the character and variety of contemporary comparative theology and to consider its relationship to Scholastic theology. These two theologians differ markedly in terms of the scope of their engagement with non-Western philosophy and in their understanding of the task of Christian theology and of central Christian doctrines. Nonetheless, they share a commitment to theological engagement with non-Western philosophy that has much in common with the approach of Aquinas, while their work also reflects and addresses contemporary concerns about Western engagement with non-Western culture in a way that cannot be expected of Aquinas.
Francis Clooney
For Francis Clooney comparative theology takes the form of a Christian theological engagement with particular texts from different Hindu traditions.[^24] Clooney is an accomplished and recognised Indologist, fully competent in Sanskrit and Tamil. He undertakes detailed and precise studies of Hindu texts, which are then set in comparison with other texts from the Christian tradition. This manifests his own preference that comparative theology should resist the temptation to make grand statements about religions in general and instead proceed by way of individual case studies. Clooney is very attentive to contemporary reflection on hermeneutics and its application to such textual study, as expounded by such figures as Hans-Georg Gadamer and Roland Barthes.[^25] Clooney’s main model for the theological act is, in fact, as a form of attentive spiritual reading. Comparative theology is an exercise in which the texts from the two traditions form an expanded narrative and where the theologian learns and is transformed through reading texts from a number of different traditions together. However, Clooney is also concerned to explore such engagement as an exercise in theological reasoning across traditions about central themes in theology.[^26]
Thus, inTheology After Vedanta (1993) Clooney compares texts from one of the most influential of Hindu theological traditions, Advaita Vedanta, with Aquinas’Summa Theologiae and its commentaries. He characterises his own work as Indological, comparative and theological.[^27] As ‘Indological,’ such engagement with Hindu texts has to meet the standards of good scholarship and give an accurate account of that Hindu text. As ‘comparative,’ it is concerned to consider carefully the relation between the accounts, being open to dissimilarities as well as similarities. As ‘theological,’ such work is properly ‘faith seeking understanding,’ in which the theologian is concerned about the truth of what is being studied, about what is being learned about God and the human relationship with God, and about the identity of the faith of the theologian and his and her community after the encounter.[^28]
Accordingly, Clooney first undertakes a detailed study of the sacred texts and commentarial traditions of Advaita Vedanta. He identifies the textual character of the Advaitic tradition and its theology, in which the theological account is built up as a rich text woven from layers of sacred scripture and commentaries and in which religious truth is realised through transformative reading, through study and meditation on scriptural texts as interpreted by the commentaries. Advaita is centred on forms of textual reasoning, since it is driven on by exegetical and textual strategies for understanding and connecting sacred texts and sections of commentaries together.[^29] Second, and in the light of this, Clooney considers how Aquinas himself constructs theSumma Theologiae and how authoritative texts are important to his theological method, as well as the pedagogical character of the construction of theSumma as a whole. He also considers the importance of a commentarial tradition on theSumma in Catholic Thomist theology. In this comparative section Clooney draws on modern Western discussions of hermeneutics and reading theory, in order to explore what it means to read the textual traditions of Advaita and Thomism together.[^30] Third, Clooney considers what implications this has for the faith and identity of the theologian and for his relation to his religious community. The theology that emerges after Vedanta is for the most part simply a greater understanding of the textual character of both theological traditions. For a Christian Thomist theologian this may well mark a retrieval of an aspect of the Thomist tradition that has tended to be obscured by an emphasis on theSumma as simply a mine for doctrines and reasoned arguments rather than as a text to be read in its entirety. The Christian theologian engaging with Advaita Vedanta has, meanwhile, a role as the mediator for such comparative engagement for the service of the whole community.[^31]
InHindu God, Christian God (2001), Clooney develops a somewhat different emphasis, this time exploring the work of reasoning about major themes across religious traditions. Here Clooney describes comparative theology as ‘interreligous, comparative, dialogical and confessional.’[^32] These last two terms are important elements in understanding Clooney’s work as a whole and build on the approach taken inTheology After Vedanta . Comparative theology is ‘dialogical’ in that such theology should be accountable to others. What is said about them should be accurate and the goal is a genuine conversation between theologians and theologies. The expectation of Christian theologians is that members of other religious traditions will also engage in the same type of theological conversation, using Christian texts as their other tradition for study. It is ‘confessional’ in that the comparative theologian is a committed believer within his or her own tradition and the purpose of comparative theology is to seek a deeper understanding of his or her faith, but that this process of understanding now includes engagement with another religious tradition. The theologian will still hold to the faith claims of his or her own tradition and critically appraise others, challenging and rejecting, as well as accepting some of the ideas encountered.[^33]
In this book Clooney considers what a number of Hindu and Christian theologians have had to say about five central theological themes: rational proofs for the existence of God, the nature of God, the possibility of divine embodiment and the relation of revelation to reason. Thus, for instance, he considers and compares the fact that theologians in both Christian and Hindu traditions have developed forms of the cosmological proof for the existence of God, as well as accounts that reject this proof.[^34] All these arguments are of interest and importance to any theologian who seeks to resolve this particular issue:
Since the arguments cross cultural and religious boundaries, theologians of all traditions regardless of their faith positions must decide where they stand on issues related to reasoning about God’s existence. They must discern which theologians from which religious traditions are their real allies and then pose their arguments in forms that are comparatively and dialogically intelligible and credible. Nor do the sides, once recognized, remain entirely stable. Arguments may actually lead somewhere; persuasion may work; theologians may change their minds; intellectual and religious conversion becomes possible.[^35]
In these five case studies what emerges is both that there is reasoning within these traditions about these themes and that a rational conversation can take place across the traditions. The positions theologians develop and the reasons they give for them are open to scrutiny by others. They are accountable to others and are likely to be better reasoned accounts if they take into account what others say.
Thus comparative theology is simply theology that considers all the views and arguments available to it. Clooney argues that in the contemporary context where religious traditions are in such close proximity it is difficult to justify limiting theology to the study of just one tradition and to ignore these other traditions:
Religions are unique and truths are revealed, while theology remains in large part a more mundane, complex and interreligious activity in which there is no substitute for comparative and dialogical practice.
While individual theologians might be excused due to their narrow specializations, on the whole no theologian can intelligently avoid theology’s interreligious implications. Consequently, good theologians are inevitably involved in reconstructing theology as a comparative and dialogical project that thereafter can be seen as confessional, attentive to specific traditions’ views and confident in asserting arguable religious truths.[^36]
For his own part Clooney does not attempt to develop a systematic theology out of the interreligious engagements he undertakes. He is primarily concerned to explore what is involved in such comparative theology itself, what methods are to be employed and what counts for good practice. He is content to point to the presence of what seem to be common themes and methods across traditions, be they textual or discursive in nature, rather than make any major claim about any theological account that might be constructed out of this encounter.
Clooney’s view of comparative theology has much in common with Aquinas’ approach, though the scope has now widened to include Hindu traditions. Both use texts from non-Western philosophy as authorities and enter into reasoned discussion with the views found in them. Both show a confidence that communication can take place. At the same time, Clooney differs from Aquinas both in the attention he gives to modern hermeneutical theory and, related to that, the emphasis he places on the dialogical character of good comparative theology. He is sensitive to questions about whether, or to what degree, someone outside a tradition can enter into it and understand it.[^37] He is aware of the fact that such comparative study uses and reads texts in a way that is different from their traditional role and understanding. This is where the dialogical character of such theology is very important. A theologian should attempt to get an authentic and accurate understanding of the traditions he or she is studying and be accountable to members of those traditions. Such a theological conversation is not intended to be a one-sided exploitation of another tradition, but a mutual, positive and respectful interaction, open to such transformation as the faith commitments of theologians and their traditions allow and encourage.
How well, then, does Clooney’s work meet the challenges facing comparative theology? In terms of the degree to which comparative theologians are Christian theologians, Clooney does identify himself as a Catholic Jesuit theologian and is concerned that his theology is communicated to and received by the Catholic community. At the same time, his work remains almost entirely articulated within the context of the academy and received by fellow academics. In any case, Clooney concludes very little by way of substantial constructive developments of any aspect of Catholic theology in the light of the engagements he has undertaken, so that it becomes difficult to make any assessment about the difference such engagement might make to reflection on Catholic faith. Rather the focus of his work is almost entirely on the process of doing comparative theology as such. Thus it remains to be seen what degree of acceptance his comparative theology gains within the Catholic community and what contribution it actually makes to Catholic theology. Clooney likewise argues that comparative theology should be concerned with the truth and value from a Christian perspective of what it studies, but refrains in practice from any substantial reading of the Hindu accounts through the interpretative and critical lens of Catholic faith or from making much by way of specific judgement about the truth or value of the Hindu accounts he considers.[^38] For Clooney, the focus of comparative theology is primarily on what the Christian theologian learns from other traditions about his or her own faith in the light of the other tradition, even though it does not exclude questions of appraisal of the other tradition as well. Moreover, he argues that the larger questions of the meaning and truth of other religions as such is more the task of theology of religions than of comparative theology.[^39]
In terms of epistemological concerns, Clooney’s work is many ways a model for good practice. His outstanding Indological scholarship itself is matched by a sensitivity to the dialogical and hermeneutical issues involved in such comparative reading. He acknowledges that a Christian theologian’s entry as an outsider into Hindu traditions will be limited and imperfect, but argues that there can still be a real understanding of the texts and genuine rational discussion across the traditions. However, his work remains a product of a particular tradition, Western Christian theology. As the Hindu academic, Parimal Patil points out in his response toHindu God, Christian God, from a Hindu perspective the work is one clearly framed by the expectations and categories of a Christian theology done in the modern Euro-American academic context, one that extracts and transforms the Hindu materials in the process.[^40]
Keith Ward
Keith Ward’s approach is at once different from that of Clooney because his comparative work is set in a much grander frame of enquiry. Ward takes major theological themes and considers them in the light of a number of different religious traditions, as well as more recent developments in Western scientific, philosophical and historical perspectives. His major and mature work is found in a four volume series,[^41] which he describes as a ‘systematic Christian theology, undertaken in a comparative context.’[^42]
In the first volume of the series,Religion and Revelation (1994) Ward, like Clooney, argues that the comparative approach in theology is the proper theological response to the contemporary world. Theology is faced by an awareness of the diversity of religious traditions and hence of convergent and divergent accounts of the major themes with which theology is concerned. In this context theology should consider and engage with other religions just as in the past it has engaged with the ideas and cultures current at the time:
I think the time has come when it is positively misleading to consider religious traditions in isolation. Theologians have in fact always taken their interpretative clues from philosophical and cultural factors not confined to Christianity. Aquinas, for example, took Aristotelian philosophy, well seasoned with Platonism, and used it to rethink Christian doctrine in the thirteenth century. For a short time, his works were even banned from the University of Paris; but it was not long before they became definitive for the Roman Catholic Church. Does it make sense to treat the content of a religion as a self-contained corpus, as though it at least was immune from external influence, and as though light could not be thrown upon it by a consideration of claims made by other faiths?[^43]
Ward argues that to meet the different contemporary challenges there is need for a modification of Aquinas’ concept of theology assacra doctrina . While accepting a definition of theology as the ‘rational elucidation of revelation,’[^44] he argues that since contemporary theology is faced by a variety of claims for divine revelation, as well as by critical objections to any claim for revelation by developments in modern historical and scientific knowledge, theology cannot be content just to assume the self-evident truth of a given revelation, as Aquinas does, but has to go further back and consider the origins and status of revelation itself and only then to offer a reasoned account justifying a particular revelation.[^45] In regards to other major themes, theology likewise should be open to rethinking beliefs in the contemporary context. For Ward, theology is, thus, a ‘self-critical discipline, aware of the historical roots of its own beliefs,a pluralistic discipline , prepared to engage in conversation with a number of living traditions; andan open-ended discipline , being prepared to revise beliefs if and when it comes to seem necessary.’[^46]
To some extent, Ward wants to differentiate comparative theology from confessional theology. He states that confessional theology is the exploration of a given revelation by those who fully accept it and live by it, whereas comparative theology is ‘an intellectual discipline which enquires into ideas of ultimate value and goal of human life, as they have been perceived and expressed in a variety of religious traditions.’[^47] Ward’s concern is, however, to widen the scope of theology rather than reject the value and importance of faith commitment as such. When he comes to sum up what he has achieved in the last of the four volumes,Religion and Community (2000), he makes it clear that the result for a Christian theologian is meant to be a better Christian theology:
The first result of the investigation in these volumes has been to provide an interpretation of Christian faith that remains recognizably mainstream, while being modified by its response to both critical and complementary insights from non-Christian traditions. The second result is, I hope, to provide a comparative investigation of the concepts of revelation, God, human nature and destiny, and of the nature of a religious community. It is precisely because that comparative study is undertaken from a Christian viewpoint (and all such study must be undertaken from some viewpoint, acknowledged or not) that it comes to constitute a positive Christian theology.[^48]
Like Clooney, Ward is also concerned about the dialogical character of such theology. He stresses that comparative theology is a ‘co-operative enterprise. It is a way of doing theology in which scholars holding different world-views share together in the investigation of concepts of ultimate reality, the final human goal, and the way to achieve it.’[^49] What theologians say about other traditions should also be something that members of those traditions can accept as an accurate description, without excluding critical evaluations from being possible and acceptable.
Ward is also a leading contemporary philosophical theologian and his work is a sustained exercise in carefully reasoned constructive theology. Ward’s aim here is again more ambitious than Clooney. Ward intends, we have seen, to produce a ‘systematic Christian theology undertaken in a comparative context.’ Thus in an earlier work,Concepts of God (1998), he argues that there is an understanding of an ultimate Reality as transcendent, eternal and immutable being, but also as the source of the world, present in all the classical or pre-modern accounts of five major religious traditions, including Advaita Vedanta and Thomist Christianity.[^50] InReligion and Creation (1996), on the other hand, he considers four twentieth century theological accounts in which the ultimate Reality is understood as having a more dynamic and responsive relationship with the world than the classical accounts allow. For his part, Ward finds the classical account paradoxical to the point of incoherent and suggests that the modern development provides both a better account philosophically, as well as one that accords with the picture of God found in the sacred texts and spiritual experience of members of these traditions. He thus promotes a ‘dual aspect theism,’ in which God is affirmed to have both an immutable, eternal aspect and a dynamic, responsive and relational aspect. This he finds already implicit in the classical traditions, but only fully acknowledged and developed in modern accounts.[^51]
Ward’s type of comparative theology is thus clearly one that results in an account rather different in theological method and contents from that of Aquinas. His approach is also one that is strikingly different in scope and aims from that of Clooney. Ward is keen to argue that his approach is theology rather than religious studies and is that of an Anglican clergyman working within the tradition of liberal Protestant theology, which is marked by a rejection of the inerrancy of authority and by an openness to significant revision of Christian doctrine and claims in the light of the encounter with other religious traditions, general philosophical reflection and recent scientific discoveries.[^52] Like Clooney, Ward argues that comparative theology engages with questions of truth and value, but for Ward this means the critical examination of all the religious traditions he deals with according to the same principles of revision as he applies to Christian doctrine and claims.
Ward’s general epistemological stance coheres with his liberal Protestant theology. While affirming that the comparative theologian’s work is done from the perspective of the tradition to which he or she belongs, Ward is keen to argue that there can and should be a neutral comparative theology that is distinct from confessional theology. He also argues that there are neutral criteria for rationality that people in different religious traditions share, against the idea that rationalities are particular to the religious tradition a person belongs to.[^53] Here he refers and rejects an argument put forward by Gavin D’Costa that all theology about other religions is done according to the criteria and standards of one’s own tradition, in other words, the kind of confessional theology from which Ward wants to distinguish comparative theology.[^54] Ward seems here, however, to create a dichotomy that is unnecessary. In the case of the confessional and tradition conditioned theology of Aquinas and Clooney the ability to reason across religious traditions is depicted as part of a common human nature, but still formed by the tradition of revelation and faith to which the theologian belongs. In fact, Ward’s comparative theology is as much conditioned by the categories of his own Christian tradition as Clooney’s is. The decision to write a systematic theology, the choice of the major themes for the volumes within it and the type of concepts and terms used to discuss the different traditions are all drawn from liberal Christian theology as done in the Western academy.
Ward’s own approach is then one very much formed by and consistent with the criteria of a theologian working within the liberal Protestant tradition. However, the kind of revisions Ward makes to central Christian doctrines and claims, especially about revelation, God, and Christology, mean that the content of his theological account is unattractive to those outside the liberal tradition, while his epistemological approach seems both to understate the importance of particular traditions in shaping theology and in any case to be unnecessary, in order to secure the possibility of theological openness to other traditions.