3 - Facing the other

Summary

In the first chapter, I briefly drew attention to the way the threefold paradigm in theology of religions misreads the history of Christian engagement with people of other faiths as a progressive move towards a normative pluralism. I then went on in the previous chapter to explore the Jewish matrix within which all Christian theology has to be done. My point is that Christians cannot claim to possess an independent finality for their own vision of reality, for the symbolic language which they use has its roots elsewhere. Indeed, they cannot even claim to know the origins of that language except in so far as that language is mediated to them by an other. If this is correct, if Christian faith depends in some sense for its own coherence on the living tradition of Judaism, then the crucial conceptual issues for theology of religions are those which arise from within the experience of dialogue and encounter–not comparatively minor issues about commensurability and ‘family resemblance’, but issues about subjectivity and relationality.

The Jewish matrix for Christian theology shifts the terms within which the debate about the ‘otherness’ of people of other faiths is conducted. How is it possible to know the other as other–without, that is, risking the assimilation of the other to the category of sameness? How, on the other hand, does one avoid positing an otherness which is simply unknowable?