General Theological Method and the Possibility of a Shared Method for Comparative
Theology
As contemporary theologians in a religiously pluralistic world grope for new, inevitably tentative
formulations of a paradigm to guide their deliberations and inform their expectations, they are
confronted with the question of method. Theological method must always be a secondary matter
for comparative theology, subsidiary to concrete interpretations of the specific symbols of a
particular religious tradition. Method—precisely as a necessarily abstract, heuristic guide—must
always be secondary to the concrete interpretations of each particular theology. But the
secondary also serves. Reflection on method serves the common cause of all concrete
comparative theologies by bringing into sharper focus the principles behind the common search
for a new paradigm—principles that are often obscured in the present sharp conflict among
particular proposals and conclusions in this emerging discipline. The abstract does not merely
extrapolate from the concrete; the abstract also enriches the concrete by highlighting and
clarifying what is essential.
It is helpful, therefore, to reflect on what kind of general theological method may be shared by
contemporary comparative theologians despite otherwise sharp differences among them. The
present hypothesis can be described by four premises. First, comparative theology must be a
reinterpretation of the central symbols of a particular religious tradition for the contemporary
religiously pluralistic world. Second, a new paradigm for comparative theology must be so
formulated that the interpretations of a tradition can no longer be grounded in older, classicist
bases but must rely on new foundations that incorporate both past tradition and the present
religious pluralism. Third, in keeping with the demands of an emerging globalism and a
pluralistic world, theologians in all traditions must risk addressing the questions of religious
pluralism on explicitly theological grounds. Fourth, it follows from these first three premises that
contemporary theologians must engage in two complementary kinds of interpretation of a
tradition—those now known as the "hermeneutics of retrieval" and the "hermeneutics of critique
and suspicion." There is no innocent interpretation, no unambiguous tradition, no history-less
interpreter. There is no merely abstract, general "situation" and no theological method that can
guarantee certainty. There is only the risk of comparative theological interpretation itself: the risk
of interpreting the great symbols in all the traditions for the present pluralistic situation and then
presenting those interpretations to the wider global theological community and the wider
community of religious studies for criticism.
This general model can be made more specific by introducing the following definition of a
shared theological method in the new situation: any theology is the attempt to establish mutually
critical correlations between an interpretation of a particular religious tradition and an
interpretation of the contemporary situation.
Thus, contemporary theology as a discipline shares with history of religions, the humanities, the
social sciences, and, more recently, the natural sciences, a turn to reflection on the process of
interpretation itself. For theology is one way to interpret the elusive, ambiguous, and
transformative reality named, however inadequately, "religion." Theology is not merely a
synonym for any interpretation of religion but rather bears its own methodological demands and
its own criteria. It is necessary, therefore, to clarify this definition of theology and to show how it
can yield a common model for a theological method, one appropriate to a contemporary
comparative theology in any tradition.
Theologians interpret the claims to meaning and truth in the religious classics of a particular
tradition for a new situation. The religious classics are theologically construed as human
testimonies to some disclosure of ultimate reality by the power of ultimate reality itself, as that
power is experienced by human beings. The questions to which such testimonies respond are the
fundamental "limit-questions" of the ultimate meaningfulness or absurdity of existence itself.
Religious questions are questions of an odd logical type, emerging at the limits of ordinary
experience and ordinary modes of inquiry (ethical, aesthetic, political, scientific). Like strictly
metaphysical questions, the fundamental questions of religion must be logically odd, since they
are questions concerning the most fundamental presuppositions, the most basic beliefs about all
knowing, willing, and acting. Like strictly metaphysical questions, religious questions must be
on the nature of ultimate reality. Unlike metaphysical questions, religious questions ask about the
meaning and truth of ultimate reality, not only in itself but also as it relates existentially to
human beings. The religious classics, therefore, are theologically construed as testimonies by
human beings who cannot but ask these fundamental limit-questions and, in asking them
seriously, believe that they have received an understanding of or even a response from ultimate
reality itself: some disclosure or revelation bearing a new and different possibility of ultimate
enlightenment, or some new way to formulate the questions themselves, or some promise of total
liberation that suggests a new religious way to become an emancipated human being through a
grounded relationship to that ultimate reality which is believed to be the origin and end of all
reality.
It is not the case, of course, that theology has only become hermeneutical in the modern period.
However, the explicit concern with hermeneutics after Schleiermacher has been occasioned,
among Westerners, by the sense of cultural distance from the religious traditions caused by the
seventeenth-century scientific revolution and the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. This sense
of distance has been intensified by the emergence of historical consciousness (as expressed by
Troeltsch and Joachim Wach), and the development of the great liberation movements and their
attendant hermeneutics of suspicion (with respect to sexism, racism, classism, etc.). And it has
been still further intensified by the Western sense of cultural and religious parochialism
stimulated by the emerging pluralistic and global culture as well as by the tensions, conflicts, and
possibilities present in North-South and East-West relationships. The epoch-making events of
modernity have brought about a need for explicit reflection on the hermeneutical character of all
the religious disciplines, including the hermeneutical developments (as elucidated by Wach,
Mircea Eliade, Joseph M. Kitagawa, Charles H. Long, et al.) in history of religions and the
widely recognized hermeneutical character of all theology.
In order to understand the present situation of radical religious pluralism, theologians must
interpret it theologically. Interpretation is not a technique to be added on to experience and
understanding but is, as Hans-Georg Gadamer and Paul Ricoeur argue, anterior and intrinsic to
understanding itself. This is especially the case for any theological interpretation of the
contemporary situation. For theology attempts to discern and interpret those fundamental
questions (finitude, estrangement, alienation, oppression, fundamental trust or mistrust, loyalty,
anxiety, transience, mortality, etc.) that disclose a religious dimension in the contemporary
situation.
Paul Tillich described this hermeneutical character of theology as the need for an explicit
analysis of the given "situation," that is, for a creative interpretation of our experience which
discloses a religious dimension (for example, of cultural pluralism itself). It is possible to
distinguish, but not to separate, the theologian's analysis of the "situation" from his or her
analysis of a particular religious tradition. Theologians, in sum, interpret both "situation" and
"tradition." In some manner, implicit or explicit, they must correlate these two distinct but related
interpretations. Like any other interpreter of the contemporary pluralistic situation, and like any
other interpreter of the religious questions in that situation, the theologian brings some prior
understanding to the interpretation—an understanding influenced by the historical givens of a
particular religious tradition. A Buddhist comparative theology, for example, will inevitably be
different from a Jewish comparative theology.
The clarification of the emerging discipline called "comparative theology" follows from this
brief analysis of theology itself as an academic and hermeneutical discipline. In the sense
outlined above, theology is an intrinsically hermeneutical discipline that interprets intellectually
a particular tradition in a particular situation. Further, any interpretation of a tradition will always
be made in and for a particular situation. In classical Western hermeneutical terms, this means
that every act of interpretation includes not only intelligentia ("understanding") and explicatio
("explanation"), but also applicatio, an application of the interpretation to its context that is at the
same time a precondition to any understanding and interpretation.
A properly theological interpretation of the contemporary situation demands that those
fundamental religious questions cited above be raised, for the responses to them by a particular
religious tradition are the primary, strictly theological, means of interpreting that tradition (e.g.,
an interpretation of the way of Buddhist enlightenment as the response to a fundamental situation
of suffering and a fundamental state of inauthentic existence seen as "ignorance"; an
interpretation of the Christian creed of faith, hope, and love as a response to the fundamental
situation of suffering and an existential state of inauthentic existence seen as sin). Internal to
each theological interpretation of each religious tradition, moreover, is a theological assessment
and identification of the normative elements of that religion (e.g., identification of the proper
canons of the religion, of the proper role of "tradition," of the proper role of modern historical
research, etc.).
Any theology, therefore, involves the development of a set of mutually critical correlations
between two distinct but related interpretations: an interpretation of the tradition and an
interpretation of the contemporary situation. But it is important not to presume that a tradition
will always supply adequate responses to the questions suggested by the contemporary situation.
Rather, as the qualifying phrase "mutually critical" suggests, the theologian cannot determine
before the concrete interpretation itself whether the traditional responses of a religion are
adequate to the contemporary situation.
In strictly logical terms, the concept of "mutually critical correlations" suggests a number of
possible relations between the theologian's two somewhat distinct interpretations: (1) identities
between the questions prompted by and the responses to the situation and the questions and
responses given by the tradition (as in many liberal and modernist Christian theologies); (2)
similarities-in-difference, or analogies, between those two interpretations (as in many Neo-
Confucian "theologies"); and (3) radical disjunctions, or more existentially, confrontations,
between the two (as in the Hindu and Buddhist insistence on the necessity of the reality of a
"higher consciousness"); or the radical dialectic of the sacred and the profane in archaic
ontologies; or the radical correction of traditional self-interpretations of a religion after the
emergence of historical consciousness.
In properly general and heuristic terms, therefore, theology is an intellectual enterprise that may
now be described more exactly as the hermeneutical attempt to establish mutually critical
correlations between the claims to religious meaningfulness and truth of a religious tradition and
the claims to religious meaningfulness and truth within the historical situation for which that
tradition is being interpreted.
This general model of theology as an intellectual discipline within religious studies may be
further specified to demonstrate how "comparative theology" both fits and challenges it.
Comparative theology fits the model insofar as it also demands that the theologian attempt to
establish mutually critical correlations between the claims to religious meaning and truth in the
same two sets of interpretations. What renders any theology within a particular tradition
explicitly comparative, however, is a substantive (and not merely methodological) change in the
interpretation of the contemporary situation. Any comparative theology in a particular tradition
will insist on theological grounds that religious pluralism in the contemporary situation must
receive explicit theological attention. Insofar as that crucial hermeneutic and theological change
of focus is made at all, the theological task is notably altered. For now the different questions and
responses of the various religions present in the contemporary pluralistic situation must be
explicitly and comparatively analyzed as part of the task of any theological interpretation in any
tradition. A sense of the cultural parochialism of traditional theological interpretations of both
situation and tradition is likely to follow. A confrontation with any traditional, purely exclusivist,
interpretation of the one tradition is also likely—just as earlier confrontations with traditional
interpretations were occasioned by the emergence of historical and hermeneutical consciousness.
A sense of the need for any comparative theological interpretation to take account of the
comparative analyses of history of religions is also likely to arise, with the result that
comparative theology will also recognize the need for the kind of interdisciplinary discourse
found in "religious studies."
Comparative theology is an emerging discipline with as yet no firm consensus on conclusions,
but with a possible agreement on the revised method of correlation that it implicitly employs. It
is a branch of the general field of religious studies that must learn from the comparative method
used in the study of history of religions, by reflecting on the results of those studies in explicitly
theological ways. Traditional theological self-interpretations in all traditions are likely to
undergo radical revisions—indeed, even at this early stage in the discipline, such revisions are
visible. The final conclusions for any tradition's self-understanding in a religiously pluralistic
world will be determined only by further, concrete comparative theological studies in and among
all the traditions. Yet this much is clear: any contemporary comparative theology in any tradition
must relate itself explicitly to the comparative studies of theologies in history of religions and to
the theological dialogues among the religions. It must also explicitly raise the traditional
theological questions of meaning and truth that earlier, secular comparative enterprises were
legitimately able to "bracket."
In sum, comparative theology, as theology, is an academic discipline that establishes mutually
critical correlations between the claims to meaningfulness and truth in the interpretations of a
religiously pluralistic situation and the claims to meaningfulness and truth in new interpretations
of a religious tradition. The central fact of religious pluralism, as well as the existence of
religious studies (especially history of religions), has challenged all theologies in all traditions to
become explicitly comparative in approach. The future is likely to see the evolution of most
traditional theologies into comparative theologies in all non-fundamentalist traditions. With that
development, the conflict in interpretations among various models and differing conclusions
among contemporary comparative theologians may eventually yield to a disciplinary consensus
for all theology. Any theology in any tradition that takes religious pluralism seriously must
eventually become a comparative theology.
Bibliography
Systematic Views
The following list of contemporary publications in English is representative (but by no means
exhaustive) of theological work that functions, implicitly or explicitly, as comparative theology.
Hick, John. God and the Universe of Faiths. New York, 1973.
Hick, John, and Brian Hebbletwaite, eds. Christianity and Other Religions. Philadelphia, 1980.
Küng, Hans. "The Challenge of the World Religions." In his On Being a Christian, translated by
Edward Quinn, pp. 89–118. Garden City, N.Y., 1976.
Panikkar, Raimundo. Myth, Faith and Hermeneutics: Toward Cross-Cultural Religious
Understanding. New York, 1979.
Panikkar, Raimundo. The Unknown Christ of Hinduism. 2d ed., rev. & enl. Maryknoll, N.Y.,
1981.
Pannenberg, Wolfhart. "Toward a Theology of the History of Religions." In his Basic Questions
in Theology, translated by George H. Kehm, vol. 2, pp. 65–118. Philadelphia, 1971.
Rahner, Karl. "Christianity and the Non-Christian Religions." In his Theological Investigations,
vol. 5, pp. 115–134. Baltimore, 1966.
Rupp, George. Beyond Existentialism and Zen: Religion in a Pluralistic World. Oxford, 1979.
Schuon, Frithjof. The Transcendent Unity of Religions. Rev. ed. Translated by Peter Townsend.
New York, 1975.
Smart, Ninian. Beyond Ideology: Religion and the Future of Western Civilization. New York,
1981. See pages 17–68.
Smith, Huston. Forgotten Truth: The Primordial Tradition. New York, 1976.
Smith, Wilfred Cantwell. The Meaning and End of Religion. New York, 1963.
Smith, Wilfred Cantwell. Religious Diversity. Edited by Willard G. Oxtoby. New York, 1976.
Smith, Wilfred Cantwell. Towards a World Theology: Faith and the Comparative History of
Religion. Philadelphia, 1981.
