1 - Rethinking theology of religions

Summary

This is a book about what is sometimes called the ‘wider ecumenism’, about the place of Christianity in a world of many faiths, and about that contemporary development within Christian practice known as inter-faith dialogue. But it is also, more broadly, about the ethics of discipleship, about the way Christians are to live in a multi-faith world. The two are obviously connected. Whatever I do, whatever I say, whatever I think, at some point my beliefs, and the practices to which they give rise, raise questions about the means which I use in developing relations with others; in brief, questions about power and control and the risk of violence done to the other. The result is a dilemma. How to remain faithfully rooted in my own Christian vision of a time-honoured truth and yet become open to and respectful of those committed to sometimes very different beliefs and values? Clearly this dilemma has serious implications, not just for how Christians are to live responsibly alongside their neighbours from other religious traditions, but for how the whole project of Christian theology is to be pursued in what I shall call an all-pervasive ‘context of otherness’.

Not that such a dilemma describes a narrowly Christian agenda. In their different ways, all religious communities in the fast-changing secularised world of post-modernity face similar questions–about faith and tradition, loyalty and openness, about accommodation and the place of religion in civic society.