Hugh Nicholson

A Correlational Model of Comparative Theology

By now it is a commonplace to assert that in today’s ever-shrinking world religious pluralism is no longer simply a theoretically known fact but is rather a matter of lived experience. In fact, for most Christian communities pluralism emerged as an experienced reality some time ago. Yet the practice and conceptualization of Christian theology is only slowly and sporadically beginning to reflect the awareness of the theological significance of the claims of meaning and truth of the world’s religions. The discipline of “comparative theology,” as defined by Francis X. Clooney as the rereading of one’s own tradition in light of other traditions, remains a vaguely understood and marginal discipline within theological studies. In spite of its hesitant beginnings, however, theologians like Clooney and David Tracy regard comparative theology as the future of theology. Indeed, given that the theological questions raised by the fact of religious pluralism are present in the historical situation in which theological reflection takes place today, there is a sense in which the modifier “comparative” is redundant, for it merely singles out for special emphasis a dimension of contemporary theological reflection that is intrinsic to the theological enterprise as such. The seeds of religious pluralism in the contemporary theological situation have the potential to transform traditional Christian theology from within. According to Paul Knitter, the pluralistic situation demands a conception of the relations between the world’s faiths that is

Two Apologetic Moments in Śaṅkara’s Concept of Brahman*

Constructive theological works invariably contain refutations of opposing views. The positive formulation of religious belief is typically bound up with some form of polemics. And yet, what might appear obvious to the outside observer is rarely acknowledged by the religious insider, namely, that the content of religious belief is substantively influenced by the refutation of rival teachings. In traditional theological self-understanding, apologetics is only a secondary theological enterprise; at most, rival teachings influence the formulation, but never the substantive content, of a self-contained system of religious belief. Some contemporary theologians, however, have abandoned the dubious presumption that their tradition’s core beliefs are self-generated, that they occupy a kind of magic circle insulated from outside influence. Appealing to Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of “double-voiced” discourse, Christian theologian Kathryn Tanner writes: “A kind of apologetics or polemics with other cultures is internal, then, to the very construction of Christian sense. . . . Theological statements themselves amount to a transformative and reevaluative commentary on the wider culture insofar as they are double-voiced: theological statements mouth the claims of other cultures while giving them a new spin.” Tanner’s statement is a response to a problematic that is specific to Christian theology in the modern West, namely, the relation of theological claims to secular knowledge, or, to use a more theological idiom, the relation between “Christ and culture.” The understanding of theological statements as double voiced transcends this particular problem-

Religion, Cognition, and the Myth of Conscious Will

Characteristic of the recent cognitive approach to religion ( CSR ) is the thesis that religious discourse and practice are rooted in an inveterate human propensity to explain events in terms of agent causality. This thesis readily lends itself to the critical understanding of religious belief as “our intuitive psychology run amok.” This effective restriction of the scientific critique of agent causality to notions of supernatural agency appears arbitrary, however, in light of evidence from cognitive and social psychology that our sense of human agency, including our own, is interpretive in nature. In this paper I argue that a cognitive approach to religion that extends the critique of agent causality to the folk psychological experience of conscious will is able to shed light on several characteristically religious phenomena, such as spirit possession, ritual action, and spontaneous action in Zen Buddhism.

The History in Front of Comparison: The Reception History of Eckhart and Indian Thought and the Future of East–West Comparison

Abstract Past comparisons between Meister Eckhart and Eastern religious thought typically were based on the notion of a universal religious experience. Today, those comparisons appear quite arbitrary in light of social constructionist critiques of their universalist presuppositions. This paper argues that such comparisons are less arbitrary than they appear, however, when one takes into account the history of the modern reception of both Eckhart and of Hindu and Buddhist philosophy in the West. Comparison between Eckhart and certain aspects of Hindu and Buddhist thought is justified to the extent that the late nineteenth century encounter with Indic religions formed an integral part of the hermeneutical situation in which Eckharts works were retrieved.

The Spirit of Contradiction in the Buddhist Doctrine of Not-Self*

In his comprehensive and authoritative study of the doctrine of “notself ” (Pāli anattā; Sanskrit anātman) in Theravāda Buddhism, Selfless Persons (1982), Steven Collins identifies two distinct functions of this doctrine. He correlates these functions, moreover, to a sociological distinction between the religious specialist and the ordinary Buddhist. Thus, in the context of the practice of the analytical “insight” meditation practiced by members of the former group, the anattā doctrine refers to “the classification of any experience or concept into a known, nonvalued, impersonal category.” Such classification or redescription of experience serves as an effective technique for cultivating an attitude of disinterest toward the object thus classified, thus negating the desire that, according to the Buddha’s Second Noble Truth, is the root cause of suffering. For the vast majority of Buddhists, however, who do not practice such meditation, the doctrine’s main function was to provide “an intransigent symbolic opposition to Brahmanical thought.” Because Collins associates this latter, oppositional dimension of the anattā doctrine with those Buddhists lacking in specialized knowledge of the doctrine or a commitment to the corresponding regimens of meditative practice, one might be tempted to infer that this political-ideological function of anattā appears only in default of the former, as a kind of