A Student's Notes and Comments on
One Earth Many Religions:
Multifaith Dialogue & Global Responsibility
Paul F. Knitter. Orbis Books, 1995

Caveat

These are notes taken (and comments occasionally added) by a student (albeit an aging one). I am not a scholar of this complex subject. But if you find these notes of use, feel free to browse. Actually, I've only just started this book so the notes are just the beginning -- but the book looks good.

Introduction

Paul Knitter was suggested to me by a friend, Conrad Willemse, who is currently taking some type of comparative theological course in Toronto. I got this book (and another Knitter book) from amazon.ca. They've only just arrived and I've just started to read this first one.

However, I should point out that Dr. Ian Ritchie is not to keen on Paul Knitter (or his frequent co-author, John Hick) and much prefers the work of Kenneth Cragg on inter-faith dialogue. I have ordered a number of Kenneth Cragg's books too (not yet arrived). But in the meantime I have started to read this Knitter book (One Earth Many Religions) and, so far, am quite enjoying it.

Contents

• 1. My Dialogical Odyssey
• 2. Talking about What Really Matters
• 3. Problems and Pitfalls
• 4. Global sufferinc Calling for Global Responsibility
• 5. Global Responsibility: Common Ground for Interfaith Dialogue
• 6. Whose Justice? Whose Liberation?
• 7. The One Earth and Our Many Stories
• 8. How Does it Work?
• 9. It's Working
• 10. An Introductory Conclusion

1. My Dialogical Odyssey

• explains how contacts with (a) the religious Other and (b) the suffering Other have transformed his life and his thinking
• traces move from exclusivist to inclusivist to pluralist
• missionary beginnings: exclusivism -- not a dialogue but a monologue -- interested in others not to coverse with them but to convert them
• joined Divine Word Missionaries (the "SVDs" or Societas Verbi Divini) -- first exposure to the religious Other -- by time finished "had the uneasy but distinct sense that the old exclusivist model of Christianity as light and other religions as darkness didn't fit the facts"
• Vatican II and Karl Rahner: Inclusivism -- the Second Vatican Council in 1962 presented positive statements about the truth and values of Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam -- a lot based on the theology of Karl Rahner
• Rahner argued that Christians must look upon other religions as "legitimate" and as "ways of salvation" -- Rahner had concept of "anonymous Christians" (that is, non-Christians are "saved" by the grace and presence of Christ working anonymously within their religions)
• but while on the inclusivism (Rahner) side, was feeling that other traditions were merely "reflections" of the fullness of truth and grace incarnated in Jesus the Christ and could only come to full light in the gospel
• pluralism -- began to explore this in his 1985 book No Other Name?
• in 1984 became an active member of the local Sanctuary Movement -- "a loose ecumenical bonding of churches and synagogues who, in defiance of U.S. government policy, were publicly providing shelter and support to Central American refugees fleeing the poverty and dangers of U.S.-sponsored wars in their countries" -- concluded "I could no longer go about a theology of religions unless it was, somehow, connected with a theology of liberation"
• "have come to realize . . . that the suffering Other includes not just humans but also earthlings, indeed the Earth itself. And just as human suffering and ecological suffering have common causes, they will have common solutions"
• "But personally and in the fibers of my feelings, the Earth has become an object of love and concern through my encounters with particular religious Others -- Native Americans" -- talks of "the sense of Sacred they find in the Earth and all its inhabitants"
• believes that the necessity of linking interreligious dialogue with global responsibiity provides the opportunity not only for a different kind of dialogue but also for an effectively better dialogue"
• "unless I allow the religious and suffering Others to enter into my life, unless I am responding to them from the center of my human and religious values, I am less a human being, less a religious believer, less a Christian"
• "In the language of current christian theology, the purpose of this book is to uge a pluralistic, liberative dialogue of religions."
• prefers to call the approach: a globally responsible, correlational dialogue of religions"
• "a dialogical relationship between religions is impossible in a religious hierarchy that insists that all other religions are to be subordinated and fulfilled in only one of them"
• but says he is still a missionary -- "something I want to persuade people about -- yes, convert them to" -- "convinced that I and other religius persons can and must open our minds and our hearts tothe many religious others and the many suffering others who dwell and toil upon this Earth. Because I believe this deeply, I want others to believe it deeply too" -- knows that this is considered a no-no in scholarly circles (scholarship is upposed to be objective, srcupulously neutral -- but says "Nowadays, I am not alone in recognizing that such value-free objectivity or facts-without-advocacy are always impossible and often immoral

2. Talking about What Really Matters: A Correlational and Globally Responsible Model for Dialogue

• "pluralism" is defined in many different ways and he doesn't want to be confined by others' definitions
• In No Other Name? he adopted the following confessional tags:
  • conservative evangelical: 'Christianity is the one true religion'
  • mainline Protestant: 'other religions contain revelation but no salvation'
  • Roman Catholic: 'other religions may be true and good but need fulfillment in Christ'
  • theocentric: 'there are many ways to the one Divine Center'
• from a christological perspective, Christian models for evaluating other religions can be described as:
  • 'Christ against the religions' (as one who negates the value of other religions)
  • 'Christ within the religions' (as a universal saving presence)
  • 'Christ above the religions' (not within them as cause of salvation but ahead of them as the fullest embodiment of salvation)
  • 'Christ together with the religions' (as one among many possible saving figures and manifestations of Truth)
• He puts them together as follows:

  Exclusivism	Conservative Evangelical Mainline Protestant Ecclesiocentric Christ aginst the Religions
  Inclusivism	Mainline Protestant Roman Catholic Christocentric Christ within the Religions Christ above the Religions
  Pluralism	Theocentric Christ together with the Religions

• further notes on exclusivism:
  • the historically dominant Christian view of other religious individuals -- esp within fundamentalist, evangelical, pentecostal churches
  • "although God is clearly a Parent who loves and wishes to embrace all God's children, this loving Parent has chosen to make the possibility of salvation ... available and impelling only through the historical reality of Jesus Christ and through ... the Christian church"
  • 'Asked about the salvation of the millions before and after Jesus who through no fault of their own have never heard of him, the exclusivists will not, generally, affirm their perdition (say, it's God's business to sort out)
• further notes on inclusivism:
  • dominant attitude of so-called mainline Christian churches
  • attitude is: "If God's love reaches out to all people, then it must be made concretely, actually, available to all peoples. Evidently, the religious of the world -- despite their corruption and because of the evident fruits of the Spirit among them -- will be the vehicles of God's love and presence."
  • depends on christology -- if believe salvation only possible by the historical life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, then any truth found in other faiths is in some way "anonymously Christian"
  • but "representative" inclusivists view Jesus as representative of God's saving love and truth (not the cause of it) and do not talk of 'anonymous Christians' but rather of 'potential Christians' -- but, like the constitutive inclusivists, they agree that "other religions, for all their truth and goodness, are intended by God to find their final fulfillment and identity in Jesus the Christ." -- salvational "monists"
• key ingredients in a correlational, globally responsible model
  • says negative reasons for new approach are shortcomings of exclusivist and inclusivist approaches -- "neither the exclusivists nor the inclusivists are being faithful to what God is revealing in Jesus Christ and in the world around us"
  • positive reasons are "the growing conviction that dialogue among religions and nations is necessary for the survival of our species and planet"
  • "Without claiming that all religions are equal, Christians with a correlational mentality hold that at the outset of dialogue every partner in the conversation should recognize the equal rights within the dialogue of all religious believers"
  • "without holding that there is a 'common essence' ... within all religions, pluralists acknowledge what has been called a "rough parity" among religions ... not that all religions deep down are saying 'the same thing', but that because of their differences from Christianity, other religions may be just as effective and successful in bringing their followers to truth, and peace, and well-being with God as Christianity has been for Christians"
  • "with a correlational theology, Christians insist on the possibility, and urge the probability, that the Source of truth and transformation that they have called the God of Jesus Christ may have more truth and other forms of transformation to reveal than have been made manifest in Jesus."
  • "out of such a dialogue ... there will not result a final unity in which the many finally become one ... Rather, through the dialogue and encounter of religions, there will be greater unity, yes, but it will produce ever more and exciting diversity" [RJA comment: some parallels to the Canadian mosaic vs the melting pot theory]
  • criticism of pluralism is that it leads to relativism (everything goes -- all religions are the same and it's just the cultural trappings that are different) [RJA comment: but the difference seems to be a very tricky, albeit important, fine line]
  • says "the deeper and longer I am involved with another religious person or community, the more evident it becomes that many of our differences are irremovable and that our relationship is as difficult as it is rewarding"
  • says some critics says pluralists are too hasty in declaring that 'there are many true religions' instead of saying that simply that it is possible that other religions are true [RJA comment" but Knitter really seems to move beyond the 'possible' through the 'probable' to the 'actual' -- which sounds fine to me]
  • Knitter's main argument is that if you believe in a God who truly wishes to save all people, one would expect his presence to make itself felt in other religions
• dealing with the uniqueness of Christ
  • is about to bring out a new book, Jesus and the Other Names, which in Chapter 3 addresses more fully this issue
  • the problem is how to reinterpret such traditional claims as "there is salvation in no other name but that of Jesus"[Acts 4:12] [King James Version reads: "Neither is there salvation in any other; for there is none other name under heaven given among men, whereby we must be saved."]
  • core content is maintained: he is divine, he is risen and with us, he is savior for all -- "none of these central assertsions about Jesus needs to be denied by Christians who are searching for more correlational ways of relating to other faiths" -- refers to John Hicks' unsettling and provocative reassessment of the "Myth of Incarnation" but doesn't explain
  • argues that this doesn't mean Jesus is simply "one of the boys" -- says "Jesus is different -- wondrously and consequentially different -- from Buddha, and Muhammad, and Krishna, and Lao Tzu
  • says Jesus is divine but no longer need insist that he solely is divine and savior
  • "A pluralistic christology, therefore, does not at all question whether Jesus is unique but only how
• basis and goal of dialogue:
  • new model is not only "pluralistic or correlational" but also "globally responsible or liberative"
  • dialogue arises out of the urgency or the moral obligation to respond, as Christians and as humans, to the suffering Other and to the religious Other
  • wants "to show that if dialogue is globally responsible, it can be more effective, rewarding, and transformative than it has been in the past. This is where the necessity becomes an opportunity."
  • suggests gradual trend from ecclesiocentric (church-centred) to christocentric and then to theocentric (God-centred) and finally to soteriocentric (salvation-centred)

3. Problems and Pitfalls: The Critics Weigh In

• critics of the so-called pluralist model argue that pluralists often neglect or violate the diversity of religions -- i.e., don't take pluralism seriously enough or downplay ineradicable differences in their desire to dialogue
• the postmodern perspective: the dominance of diversity
  • "postmodernity seeks to signal and then move beyond the limitations of the Enlsghtenment and the dangerous modern world that has derived from it: an excessive confidence in reason, an authoritative appeal to empirical data, a close-minded exclusing of the mythical-mystical, and a naive endorsement of universal truths or methods."
  • cental pillar of this postmodern criticism is its insistence on the dominance of diversity
  • they argue that (1) all human experience/knowledge is filtered; and (2) the filters are incredibly diverse
  • Nietzsche announced that "all our declarations of truth are not really derived from what we see but from what we ourselves have created and imposed on what is before us"
  • "the diversity of filters wins out over the possibility of a universal filter"
  • "The postmodern suspicion that there is an irreducible diversity among cultural-historical perspectives and an obstinate incommensurability between them has been seeping, slowly but consistently, into the awareness of Christian theologicans."
  • quoting Lindbeck: "Adherents of different religions do not diversly thematize the same experience, rather they have different experiences,"
• Pluralists become Imperialists
  • critics "indicate two general ways in which good-intentioned pluralists can nonetheless become dangerous imperialists: (1) they too quickly presuppose or describe the common ground that establishes unity among religions, and (2) they too easily draw up common guidelines for dialogue among the religions"
  • "in thinking that they can speak universally, for everyone, they [the pluralists] end up speaking individually, for themselves. In failing to realize that the Universal can be grapsed only through the particular, pluralists end up imposing their own particularity on others."
  • They can end up with a seemingly smug viewpoint: "I announce that I am willing to take your point of view seriously. If you are not willing to do the same, then I am 'open' and you are 'closed', so it turns out that I do not have to take your point of view seriously."
  • critics argue "Hick and many other contemporary philosophers of religion claim to want to foster a universal religious dialogue, but it turns out that evangelical Christians, Hasidic Jews, traditional Muslims, and so on are not really eligible to join that dialogue, because they will be unwilling to accept the proposed rules of the game, rules that seem to emerge from a modern, Western, academic tradition"
  • Knitter agrees that a danger that pluralists "don't recognize how limited their own universal projects really are" -- "they can end up as half-baked pluralists who have become anonymous imperialists"
• Whose Justice? What Salvation"
  • "The 'kingdom of God and its justice' is a vacuous phrase if it is not given some normative content, be it Christian, Jungian, or Buddhist."
  • "William Placher warns theologican who take a liberation-centred approach to dialogue that when they talk about 'liberation and moksha [Hindu concept of liberation] and mukti [Indian term also] and nirvana' in the same breath they are not speaking about different roads tothe same destination, but rahter 'radically different goals'"

4. Global sufferinc Calling for Global Responsibility

5. Global Responsibility: Common Ground for Interfaith Dialogue

6. Whose Justice? Whose Liberation?

7. The One Earth and Our Many Stories

8. How Does it Work?

9. It's Working

10. An Introductory Conclusion