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Need for a Comprehensive Approach to Comparative Theology
Theology has always been an inherently comparative discipline. Major developments within the theological systems of communities of faith frequently grow out of at least implicit comparisons among systems of thought or doctrinal options presented by those communities as they define themselves. Such implicit comparison is part of the larger process of "development of doctrine." The history of religious thought also offers examples of explicitly comparative thinking of several kinds. Many have been in response to the adversarial impulse that results in polemical and apologetical writing. In addition, the theological genre known as "heresiography," while it often arises from apologetical motives and ultimately serves polemical purposes, sometimes hints at the beginnings of a more dispassionate and "objective" account of how theological schools develop and disappear. But one also finds examples of explicitly comparative thinking that take serious account of other systems, acknowledging the best they have to offer and even appropriating and incorporating congenial elements. Thomas Aquinas' evaluation of important features in the thought of major Jewish and Muslim thinkers, for example, certainly moves in that direction, even when Thomas ends up passing a negative judgment.
Of a slightly different tenor are the results of Christianity's encounters with, and efforts to accommodate, new cultural matrices. The articulation of early Christological language and the Chinese rites controversy are two prominent examples. In our time, religious pluralism is the theological air around us rather as Hellenistic culture was long ago. It is tempting for many to imagine that we can survive theologically by stockpiling tanks filled with the pure oxygen of confessional theology, but artificial survival is already a kind of death.
More recently the emerging subdiscipline of "comparative theology" has begun to open two large areas of fruitful investigation. First, it offer opportunities for further advancing the kind of systematic work Maimonides, Ghazali, Aquinas, Shankara, and a host of eminent theologians from other traditions began centuries ago. But, perhaps more importantly, it can illuminate critical dimensions of theology's historically comparative nature across traditional lines, dimensions hitherto rarely if ever studied directly. When James Fredericks defines the task of comparative theology as seeking "to interpret tradition conscientiously in conversation with the texts and symbols of non-Christian religions,"1 he is...