Charles B. Jones

Emptiness, Kenosis, History, and Dialogue: The Christian Response to Masao Abe's Notion of "Dynamic Sunyata " in the Early Years of the Abe-Cobb Buddhist-Christian Dialogue

Between 1980 and 1993, the Japanese Zen scholar Masao Abe resided in the United States, teaching in various places.1 This brought him into contact with many American scholars and theologians, among whom was John Cobb, a Protestant theologian then working in the area of process theology. Many of the ideas that Abe brought from Japanese Buddhism and particularly from the “Kyötö School” of Japanese philosophy appeared to Cobb intriguingly congruent with his theological work, and the two began a series of dialogues that came to include a larger and larger circle of Christian theologians2 and (mostly Western) Buddhist scholar-practitioners. The end result was a series of informal encounters as well as a series of three formal “International Buddhist-Christian Conferences” (1980, 1984, 1987; a second series of dialogues were held without Abe’s attendance starting in 1998 after a hiatus under the name “International Buddhist-Christian Theological Encounter”3). From these encounters came an impressive number of publications from Abe and from a variety of other participants in what is sometimes known as the “Abe-Cobb Encounter.” The agenda, following Cobb’s suggestion and vocabulary, was to allow each side to “cross over” into the other; in other words, to study and internalize the worldview of the other in as much depth as possible without converting or losing one’s connection with one’s home tradition, abiding in the other side as a guest. Later, one was to “cross back,” come home to one’s own tradition and reflect on the benefits gained in wearing the other’s shoes for a time.4 This agenda, which emphasized understanding the other’s worldview and concepts of ultimate reality, suited the highly intellectual style of the dialogues, focused as they were on philosophical and theological concerns.

The necessity of religious diversity

This article seeks to contribute to philosophical discussions of religious diversity in three ways. First, by observing that diversity pervades all levels of human community, it corrects the usual description of the situation as one of diversity between religious systems taken as wholes. Second, it seeks to show, through an analysis of the epistemology of religious knowledge, that religious diversity is logically necessary and thus inevitable. Third, it concludes that because religious diversity is inevitable, it is not a problem to be explained or solved, but a datum with which theories of religion should begin.