Circling the Elephant: A Comparative Theology of Religious Diversity

Introduction: Revisiting an Old Tale

Is it really our desire to build a monolithic society: one party, one view, one leader, and no opposition? Is religious uniformity desirable or even possible? … Does not the task of preparing the kingdom of God require a diversity of talents, a variety of rituals, soul-searching as well as opposition? … In this aeon diversity of religions is the will of God.

—ABRAHAM JOSHUA HESCHEL

Revisiting an Old Tale: The Elephant and the Blind(folded) Men

Is religious diversity fundamentally a problem? Religious diversity may give rise to problems—conflict, for example—but that is a different matter than thinking of religious diversity as intrinsically problematic. A thing might be good but nonetheless bring in its wake deep challenges. What about religious diversity? I pose this question because recourse to talk about the problem of religious diversity has become so commonplace in Christian theological discourse that few have stopped to ask whether reflection about religious diversity might begin from an altogether different point.¹ Can we imagine theological reflection that begins with a delight in multiplicity, reflection that even invites us to grow an appetite for religious difference?² Might we begin to think of religious diversity as promise rather than as problem? That is the question that Circling the Elephant sets out to explore.

To think of religious diversity as a problem is to fall all too neatly into a larger global pattern in which allergy to difference and a love for a nationalistic monolithic are everywhere on the rise. In a time of ecological crisis, nationalists hell-bent on diminishing ecological diversity aspire to do the same with religious diversity too. Islamophobia, anti-Semitism, and allergies also to sexual difference—all are expressions of an international axis of xenophobia in a time of diminished economic expectations. Hence, a great deal is at stake should religious communities uncritically fall into the habit of thinking of religious diversity as problem rather than promise. Giving into such habits is a capitulation to those who wish to characterize religious diversity as intrinsically dangerous. To imagine religious diversity as promise instead of problem is to refuse those who seek to turn diversity into divisiveness.

The US context, the one in which I write, is marked by profound contradiction. On the one hand, there is immense appreciation for religious diversity and even openness to multiple religious participation, and not just among theological progressives. Even as the pews empty out, there is a profusion of religious experimentation. SBNRs, the spiritual but not religious, are growing in number, as are those who take up multiple religious participation.³ On the other hand, the nation’s president foments Islamophobia and anti-Semitism and endorses policies that do the same. The Muslim ban still stands. Hate crimes skyrocket in number, and the Far Right is emboldened as never before.

Christian theologians, indeed religious thinkers from all traditions, bear special obligations in so dire a season. Their obligation is not merely to plead for national policies of tolerance. Tolerance is a limited imaginative register, at best a stopgap first step, at worst a failure to ask why some hold the upper hand and so have perks, power, and privilege to tolerate those they’d rather not. What is required instead is a celebration of diversity, not as frilly ornamentation, but as essential to life itself. Might we come to imagine that we desperately need religious diversity just as we do ecological diversity? Might we come to believe that a loss in religious diversity diminishes us too? Abraham Joshua Heschel’s work remains unfinished, the work of showing that religious diversity is an intrinsic good and indeed the very will of God. That is the call that ought to animate interreligious theology.

If religious difference receives theological endorsement and not just acceptance, another possibility presents itself: a holy desire, even a holy envy, for the wisdom of our religious neighbors.⁴ We can learn to love and love to learn from what is not already our own. After generations of seeking to convert the world and thereby erase religious diversity—a project that has underwritten all manner of colonial violence—the time has come to receive rather than to propagate, to reorient Christian communities toward the virtues of humility and hospitality rather than an aggressive giving that believes that it has nothing to receive. What is a closed hand that is unwilling to receive but a fist?

Standing in the way to such a reorientation is that, for many, a love for the "unum triumphs still over the pluribus" out of which the unum is to arise. We have not yet learned to cherish the many and the multiple; that shortcoming is both an ethical and a theological failure. No robust vision of justice is possible as long as we remain in the thrall of the monolithic and allergic to difference, not an uncritical and indifferent letting be of difference, but a welcoming of demanding difference, even difference with which we must wrestle. That sort of theological eros is an unmet need of this historical moment.

In the time of the postmodern, diversities are celebrated. The creative instability of language and the proliferation of meaning generated thereby are recognized as unavoidable for sign-using creatures. Few would speak with regret about cultural diversity or variety in artistic or musical styles. And no one thinks to begin a conversation about ecology with the phrase the problem of ecological diversity. The core ecological problem that confronts us is not biodiversity but rather its radical diminishment. In these spheres, reflection is not, from the start, imprisoned within a cast of mind that regards diversity as regrettable or problematic. So an obvious question presents itself: Why is religious diversity routinely perceived to be different from other modes of diversity? Christians have been able to affirm natural diversity as a divinely created good but not religious diversity.

Is religious diversity unique in this respect, or do other modes of difference also beget suspicion? How about the diversity of philosophical, moral, and political judgments? In these domains also, diversity is difficult to characterize as unambiguously good. Diversity in the philosophical, moral, and political spheres is often a source of deep discord, division, and even violence. In these domains, it will not do to shrug and say, You say po-tay-toh; I say po-tah-toh. Is that the reason why some diversities are celebrated whereas others are not? Perhaps diversity is likely to be treated as problematic in just those domains in which difference might trigger discord.

In still other cases, the sheer presence of difference suggests that something has gone awry as is the case in matters of perception. If you say, that chair is blue, and I see it as green, at least one of us is wrong. Diversity, in this case, is an unwelcome sign of error. Correction, not celebration, is the appropriate response. Is religious diversity likewise the result of cognition gone wrong?

But suppose that what is going on in interreligious debate, at least in some cases, is tantamount to the following conversation: One interlocutor says, The chair is green! and the other responds, No, you fool, it’s made of wood. In this case, both are in dispute about the same object, but the conflict is apparent, not real. Both parties might be correct. The conflict becomes real rather than apparent only if disputants are comparing the object, in this case the chair, in the same respect.⁵

Of course, when the argument is about chairs or other mundane objects, it is a simple matter to discern that we are not arguing about the same object in the same respect. To make similar determinations when arguing about ultimate reality is a trickier proposition. Do the various parties even have the same reality in mind when engaged in conversation or debate? Is it even right to think of religious traditions as largely given over to determining the nature of some extramundane ultimate reality(ies)? After all, those traditions we have come to classify as religions are as much concerned about death, marriage, economics, politics, and society as they are in arguing about the diverse conceptions of divinity. Our ideas about religion often distort what these traditions are about; we fail to recognize and even marginalize the very mundane, indeed secular, concerns of religious traditions and focus attention instead on the postmortem condition of human souls, forgetting the tragic premortem conditions under which over a billion of us live.⁶

Still, among the projects that religious persons undertake—at least when they are intellectuals within their respective traditions—are arguments about how rightly to understand the nature of reality, and especially if there might be some feature or features of the real that might be characterized as ultimate. Buddhists and Hindus have had millennia long arguments about this question.⁷ Moreover, many of these arguments have also been intrareligious and not interreligious, a truth often overlooked by those who suppose that religious conflict takes place primarily across religious traditions rather than within them.

Given that such arguments take place, how might we come to think of religious diversity as gift and promise rather than as a mark of error? One answer to that question rests in positing, as a hypothesis, that ultimate reality is at least as complex as the chair in our earlier thought experiment. If so, then differences within and across religious traditions might persist because they register distinctive dimensions of divine life. We might then imagine religious diversity not just as a de facto but as a de jure good. We need religious diversity in order to register and receive the rich multiplicity of the divine life.

Might it not be the case that partisans in debate find themselves caught up in conflict because they believe that they are speaking of ultimate reality in the same respect when in fact they are not? Of course, not all cases of religious conflict are merely apparent, but some surely are. Moreover, conflict itself may be vital to the work of truth-seeking inquiry. Not every conflict is a sign that conversation has collapsed. Much depends on sustaining meaningful conflict for the sake of a larger vision than any single interlocutor or tradition might find alone.

That very possibility is registered in the ancient but now much beleaguered Indian parable of the blind men and elephant.⁸ The fortunes of this extended allegory as a tool for thinking about diversity have been mixed; the allegory has fallen out of favor in contemporary reflection for a variety of reasons—some good, some bad. But the allegory, despite its shortcomings, remains good to think with, and, like any interesting allegory, might be read in a variety of productive ways. I believe that allegory should survive even if some of its uses are problematic.

First a fundamental concern must be raised about the tale itself. In a lecture at the Queen’s Foundation for Ecumenical Theological Education, the practical theologian John M. Hull worried about how the tale depicts blindness.⁹ In conventional narrations, each blind man jumps to a conclusion about the nature of the entire elephant after grasping just a part. Hull, who lost his vision in middle age, said, This is precisely what the blind do not and cannot afford to do. Hull notes that vision as a sense gives the impression of taking in the object of sight comprehensively and instantaneously. Tactile knowing, by contrast, is incremental, patient, and must proceed deliberately.¹⁰ Vision gives the impression of being synchronic; touch is perforce diachronic.

In conversation after his lecture, Hull explained, If I am placed before an engraving of Joseph and Mary traveling with Jesus on a donkey, it will take me some time to make out just what it is that I am touching. Is it a horse? Is it a donkey? I could not hazard a guess all at once. I would have to proceed with care. Hull argues that, given the long schooling in the gradual ways of tactile knowing, no blind person would leap to such conclusions. Hence, this story, he says, can only be about sighted people fumbling about an elephant in a darkened room or blindfolded sighted persons. The blind know better. Sighted persons project onto the blind what the sighted imagine about how the blind proceed, but the projection discloses only the prejudgments of the sighted. So Hull recommends that if we choose to keep telling this tale, it would be wise to retell it as one about blindfolded persons, lest we continue to mischaracterize the blind as ignorant and foolish.

Fair enough, but for the sake of metaphorical consistency, we must confront a problem with the new allegory. Why not simply take off the blindfold? Indeed. Wisdom calls us to remember that we are working provisionally and allegorically. One way to deal with the problem introduced by this contemporary riff on an ancient tale is to imagine that our blindfolded persons have forgotten that they are blindfolded. In any case, might not those who affirm that the divine is marked by an excessive brilliant darkness affirm that no eye, terrestrial or angelic, is equal to the divine, that no one can grasp the infinity of the divine plenitude?¹¹

Still, the tale, suitably reformulated, is appealing because it gives theologians a way to imagine real diversity as a positive good. The tale begins with a king who brings together seven blindfolded men and an elephant. Each approaches the elephant from a particular direction and grasps hold of a different part of the elephant. Jeffery Long offers the following concise retelling, which I will not seek to improve:

One grasped the ear and declared, Elephant is like a large fan. Another grasped a leg and declared, Elephant is like a great pillar. Another found the trunk, and feeling it, proclaimed, Elephant is like a snake. Another grasped the tail and declared, Elephant is like a rope hanging from the sky, while another, grasping only the tuft of the tail, said, Elephant is like a broom. A sixth encountered the side of the elephant and maintained, Elephant is like a wall. The seventh insisted that the others were all wrong, for he had grasped the tusk. He proclaimed, Elephant is not any of those; elephant is like a spear. Each being certain of the truth of his own experience, they began to fight.

A person who was not blindfolded chanced to come by and found them quarrelling. After listening to their individual perceptions from their different points of view, he gently explained that there was no need for fighting over the issue, for each was partially right. But to have complete knowledge of the nature of the elephant, he said, one would have to be able to be aware of and combine all the different aspects of the creature.¹²

Crucial to my reading of the tale is that each blindfolded man truly registers some aspect of the elephant and so rightly says, It’s like a rope (tail), or It’s like a wall (the side), and so on. The diversity of perspectives is a positive good. Each is right about what he affirms but wrong about what he denies. Error results from overreaching. Conflict arises for a variety of reasons: (1) each cannot imagine the possibility that he might be only partially in the right; (2) each, therefore, assumes that he wholly knows the whole; (3) each cannot imagine that the elephant might be a complex reality with many aspects; and (4) consequently, each one cannot imagine that the others might also be in the right in a way that does not entail that he himself is mistaken. To each blindfolded man, diversity of judgment is a sign of error. (5) Each also fails to register the limitations of the sign-concept he employs. The ear is not a fan; it is only like a fan. The use of like should serve to signal a certain tentativeness about the adequacy of words like fan or rope. Yet, in the narrative there is no tentativeness among disputants. They are not much slowed down by the like. Nonetheless, despite the inadequacy of the sign-concept, provisionally true knowledge is granted, and the seeker grasps an important feature of the elephant.

Great care must be exercised when this allegory is employed as a means for thinking about religious diversity. Perhaps the primary reason that the allegory has been dismissed as a viable tool is that the tale is told from the perspective of the sighted observer who finds the blindfolded men in conflict. Theologians such as Lesslie Newbigin note that no one can claim to stand in the position of the all-seeing passerby or king and thereby to know the whole when it comes to ultimate reality.¹³ Newbigin writes,

The story is told from the point of view of the king and his courtiers, who are not blind but can see that the blind men are unable to grasp the full reality of the elephant and are only able to get hold of part of the truth. The story is constantly told in order to neutralize the affirmation of the great religions, to suggest that they learn humility and recognize that none of them can have more than one aspect of the truth. But, of course, the real point of the story is exactly the opposite. If the king were also blind there would be no story. The story is told by the king, and it is the immensely arrogant claim of one who sees the full truth which all the world’s religions are only groping after. It embodies the claim to know the full reality which relativizes all the claims of the religions and philosophies.¹⁴

Newbigin is right but only partly so. All, without exception, stand within some partial and limited vantage point, but the one who proposes the allegory appears to violate the constraint of particularity. Hence Bishop Newbigin levels the charge of arrogance. However, the allegory is meant only to suggest how it might be that the traditions are warranted in the claims they advance and still have something to learn from others who propound claims that seem radically incompatible. The allegory might best be understood not as a claim to secure knowledge but rather as a pictorial hypothesis that, if sustained, can help us to imagine how persons within various traditions can hold onto their own claims even as they learn from very different ones.¹⁵ Read in that way, the tale does not neutralize the affirmation of the great religions. The tale suggests that many, if not all, of these affirmations are likely to be true, even if only partly so.

There is a second reason that many dismiss the power of this tale: some readings fail to register a central point of the narrative—namely, that each blindfolded person has true, albeit partial, knowledge of the elephant. If you begin from an abstemious Kantian perspective, one that asserts that all conceptions of ultimate reality fail to access the noumenal real, if there is an opaque curtain between the phenomenon and the thing in itself, only then would you be right to conclude that no tradition’s claims arrive at the real. Parity between traditions is secured by invalidating the knowledge claims advanced by each.

If you wish to make that claim, this tale is not for you. This allegory is ill-suited for Kantian readings, although it is often so misread. Contrary to the perspective imputed to the philosopher John Hick, who acknowledges his Kantian commitments, this story affirms that each blindfolded person arrives at some true knowledge of the elephant. The thing in itself is known, although not exhaustively. By extension, I posit that several religious traditions do likewise.¹⁶ Each arrives at true knowledge of the real from some particular vantage point. Like the blindfolded men, traditions err when they overreach. When traditions, or, more accurately, thinkers within them, claim wholly to know the whole and then reject contrary claims, conversation breaks down. Diversity is dismissed.

For these reasons, this tale cannot be read as a defense of what Newbigin calls religious agnosticism.¹⁷ Each blindfolded man truly knows. All have knowledge but might yet learn more.

This hope for learning from religious neighbors, in their difference, is the animating impulse for this book. The core promise of religious diversity rests in interreligious learning, learning that can be both personal and social with consequences of civilizational scope. Think, for example, of the ramifications of Gandhi’s learning from a variety of religious interlocutors and then the learning of Martin Luther King, Jr., from Gandhi (Chapter 6). To prepare the ground for such learning, traditions must discover resources for the hospitality of receiving—reasons that articulate why Christians qua Christians have much to gain from other wisdoms. While traditions have long cultivated postures of giving—taking the form of superiority claims that fund arguments for the missionary enterprise—few have cultivated reasons for believing that they have much to learn from other traditions. Religious thinkers have gone to great lengths to conceal that they always have been learning with and from others. In this historical moment, few tasks are more important for religious thinkers than this labor of finding reasons, internal to their traditions, for being receptive to religious neighbors. The allegory serves to free the mind for the possibility of such learning and, therefore, as a goad toward a posture of hospitable receptivity.

This tale also invites traditions to humility and suggests that no tradition can claim to know ultimate reality exhaustively. Indeed, thinkers within traditions routinely make such claims on internal grounds, especially in their apophatic modes.¹⁸ The allegorist, therefore, need not make claim to special or comprehensive knowledge. Furthermore, the hope that the various traditions refer to the selfsame reality is a working and contested hypothesis. Traditions may, after all, be oriented to entirely different realities. Of course, every allegory falls short. In the case of religious diversity, the point must be readily granted: there are no omniscient knowers.

A third problem with this tale is that the elephant is silent. The elephant seems incapable of communicating anything about its nature to the blindfolded men.¹⁹ But at the heart of the various religious traditions are claims of revelation: ultimate reality discloses itself to human beings. It does not stand by as seekers paw at it. Many thinkers within these traditions insist that elephant must communicate if it is to be known: all efforts on the part of human beings will fall short apart from divine self-communication because of human limitation or sinfulness. At this point, the promise of the tale is at risk because thinkers within traditions often insist that the elephant has disclosed itself exhaustively to them. That is why they are wholly in the right whereas others are mistaken or at best partially true.

Such claims for plenary revelation lead some philosophers to reject appeals to revelation altogether. When claims to comprehensive knowledge are grounded in appeals to revelation (e.g., you cannot be in the right because God has disclosed Godself exhaustively to me), intractable conflict seems inevitable, and diversity of perspectives is reduced to evidence of error. Might there be some way to insist that the elephant does communicate without also claiming that the elephant has made itself known entirely and only to just one religious community? Must we dismiss claims to revelation in order to generate epistemological parity among traditions?

Other strategies are available—strategies that affirm revelation without disabling the possibility of interreligious learning. A variety of theological strategies in the modern and postmodern period do just that. Paul Tillich, for example, contends that the mystery discloses itself as mystery. Revelation neither removes nor eliminates mystery because then what is revealed is no mystery but a mere puzzle.²⁰ One can affirm that revelation grants genuine knowledge but without asserting that it affords exhaustive knowledge. When such strategies are deployed, we can allow that the elephant does speak but still preserve the power of allegory.

A fourth problem with certain readings of the allegory is that no tradition is like an isolated blindfolded person who holds only one position on the elephant. Each tradition is a long-standing, historical, and ongoing run at the elephant. Contrary to the way in which religious traditions are far too frequently characterized in theological discourse, no tradition is a singular interpretive scheme—a point I make in Chapter 5. Each tradition houses multiple interpretive schemes. As such, there is no single Christian reading of the elephant and no one Buddhist reading either. Contrary to custodians of orthodoxy within each tradition who assert that their dogmatic stance stands in for the entire tradition, historically and contextually sensitive readings demonstrate that every tradition is polydox in character.²¹ No tradition affords a single perspective and hence cannot, strictly speaking, be compared to an isolated blindfolded person.

Moreover, each and every tradition has come to be what it is through conversation with others. As Abraham Joshua Heschel wisely noted, No religion is an island. Theologians have yet to appreciate his claim that the religions of the world are no more self-sufficient, no more independent, no more isolated than individuals or nations. Energies, experiences and ideas that come to life outside the boundaries of a particular religion or all religions continue to challenge and to affect every religion.²² Hence, multiplicity is embedded in every tradition, not least because each has been formed by its interactions with others. Therefore, no tradition and no person within a tradition can be imagined as standing in just one location alone. To reject omniscience is to not foreclose on the promise of multiple angles of vision. The simplest way to manufacture conflict between traditions is to eliminate from view their rich internal multiplicity. Only then can traditions be understood to stand in stark opposition. If you make the whole of a Western tradition stand in for transcendence and an entire Eastern tradition stand in for immanence, then, of course, conflict will seem intractable.²³

A fifth problem has to do with the nature of the relationship between the blindfolded men and the elephant. In the allegory, the blindfolded men are external to the elephant. In conversations about ultimate reality/ies, matters are more complex. Panentheism, pantheism, and nondualism all disrupt the notion that human beings stand over against ultimate reality. On these accounts—and here I extend the allegory in unpardonable fashion—one may be inside the elephant or even just be the elephant. Only the flattest forms of theism, which take ultimate reality to stand in discrete and spatial transcendence to the world and humanity, conform to the pictorial logic of this allegory.

Do these many qualifications vitiate the allegorical promise of the tale of the blindfolded men and the elephant? I think not. The tale stands because, these qualifications notwithstanding, it still manages to propel thought along a trajectory that can recognize diversity as a positive good. Although no tradition is fixed, singular, and homogeneous, nonetheless, persons within a tradition typically think by means of this particular vocabulary rather than that, this set of practices and not that, and this set of conceptual tools rather than the other. The tale reminds us that there is considerable promise in learning to think about ultimate reality by way of conversation with other blindfolded persons, other valid, albeit partial, perspectives on ultimate reality.

This book is a Christian exercise in pachyderm perambulation. Recognizing that there is no omniscient king or passerby who can tell us what the elephant is, this book calls for interreligious circumnavigation. As one walks around the elephant, the Christian qua Christian begins to make a guess at what she is seeing. The categories we use to formulate our hypothesis are necessarily Christian. In my case, these categories are trinitarian. However, the categories and the vision they seek to articulate are transformed in the very process of circumnavigation. I not only hope to add to the wisdom I have, but I stand prepared to revise my tradition’s wisdom and categories in light of newly acquired knowledge. This process is complex, multidirectional, fluid, subject to revision, and always unfinished.

As I walk around the elephant with the guidance of others and learn from them (comparative theology), I retain elements of my warranted belief that the elephant is like a giant fan, but I am prepared to supplement that belief as necessary. I see now that others’ judgments are also warranted. That recognition compels me to revise my initial account of other elephant surveyors and their claims (theology of religious diversity).²⁴ As I begin to recognize the validity and truth of other accounts of the elephant, I acknowledge that my account of ultimate reality, as first formulated, was partial even if that knowledge was granted to me by way of revelation. I am compelled to recognize that my earlier account of ultimate reality stands in need of revision (constructive theology). When others told me that I was mistaken to say that the elephant was a fan, they were right even though they were wrong to dismiss the truth of my position. There are good grounds to hold that my neighbors can often see me not only better than I can myself, but they are sometimes in a position to discern the limitations of my seeing. Now, I can also see how they came to believe that the elephant was a rope.

Here, I pause to register my reasons for speaking of theology of religious diversity (TRD) when referring to the subfield that seeks to make theological sense of the meaning of religious difference. The customary term, theology of religions, risks taking the term religion for granted—something I refuse to do. On the other hand, the newer term, theology of religious pluralism, is incurably ambiguous as the term pluralism is routinely employed in three distinct ways: (a) religious pluralism is sometimes employed as a synonym for religious diversity (e.g., the world is marked by religious pluralism); (b) theology of religious pluralism sometimes stands in as the name for the entire subfield within theology which assesses the meaning of religious diversity; and (c) pluralism is also used as the name for one set of options within that subfield, the one which posits parity between religious traditions. Given these multiple usages, confusion is inevitable. The term theology of religious diversity should, therefore, be the preferred term for that project that seeks to make theological sense of the reality and meaning of religious diversity.

One final word about the limits of this allegory and my use of it: thoughtful readers are sure to recognize that a battery of epistemological questions might be posed, questions that appear to threaten the easy promise of the tale. Put simply, human beings may not be able to shift perspectives on ultimate reality as easily as blindfolded persons can circumnavigate the elephant. Traditions hold that religious knowledge is made possible only by taking up specific practices that are written into the bodies of practitioners. We know because we are enabled to know by means of the therapeutic regimen we follow. Hence, it is no simple matter to be formed otherwise so as to know otherwise. Given the intimate connection between practices of knowing and religious knowledge, some also raise questions about whether we not only see the world as we take it to be (an uncontroversial claim) but also partially constitute the world by our modes of knowing. John Hick’s appeal to the wave-particle duality of light and his observation that what we see is determined by the apparatus we bring to bear is the most telling instance of how our ways of knowing may shape what we take ultimate reality to be.²⁵ In any case, there is no way of standing outside of all such particular accounts to check on their relative merits from some neutral vantage point.

Several complex responses to these challenges can be offered, none of which entails recourse to epistemological naivete. One can appeal, for instance, to some mode of critical realism that suggests that the world is rich enough to speak back to and so correct the perspectives we bring to bear on our world interpretations. Moreover, without underestimating the difficulty of bearing out such a claim, as I have already been suggesting, our world interpretations are neither impermeable nor monolithic. They are porous to and revisable by the real and by other traditions. Our traditions and our worldviews are neither like clothing that we don and doff at will nor straightjackets into which we are forcibly bound.

In any case, the allegory itself does not make appeal to a flat objectivity. It suggests only that we are not locked into monocular vision. Persons can and routinely do learn to see the world otherwise; they can learn to see the world, at least to some extent, as others see the world and thereby acquire what might be called binocular vision—the capacity to see the world through more than one set of lenses and be enriched. The empirical reality of multiple religious participation and multireligious identity demonstrates as much. If such multiplicity is possible, then we can hope to correct for and revise our interpretations of the world by appealing to other interpretations thereof. We need only open the door to that possibility to see how we can learn from and with persons of other religious traditions. Such interreligious learning is the promise of religious diversity.

The Itinerary for Our Journey

The coming chapter expands on this highly compressed allegorical account by describing the relationship between theology of religious diversity (TRD), comparative theology (CT), and constructive theology. In terms of my pachyderm imagery, theology of religious diversity is the religion-specific work of giving an account of other elephant surveyors and the status of their claims about the elephant. What do they say about the elephant, and what should we make of their claims? Comparative theology is the detailed, slow, partial, and patient work of elephant circumnavigation. It is the labor of learning with and from persons who stand on some other side of the elephant than our own. Constructive theology is the work of generating revised accounts of the elephant and our relationship to it in light of what has been learned by way of TRD and CT. The goal of the book as a whole is to show that these three projects can and must be integrated. The book shows how this might be done. It also offers a sustained analysis of obstacles that have thus far prevented such integration.

This chapter also invites readers into an alternative starting point or stance for examining religious diversity. Might not prejudices built into an inquiry’s beginnings predetermine the outcome? If so, it stands to reason that if we begin by taking religious diversity to be a problem to be resolved rather than as a promise to be celebrated, the tenor and conclusions of the theological project are sure to be constrained by such assumptions. Certain options will be foreclosed, and we will walk the path wishing that the world were otherwise, that this problem did not belabor and beleaguer us from the first.

Chapters 2 and 3 introduce and assess theologies of religious diversity, albeit in a new key. To date, most theologies of religious diversity have been preoccupied by questions of soteriology and parity. The driving goal has been to determine which TRD can most vigorously affirm the saving presence of God outside the Christian tradition. With respect to parity, the driving concern has been the desire to affirm that many, though not all, religious traditions are equally salvific and truth-bearing. Theologies of religious diversity are mapped on a sliding scale from those that are most soteriologically restrictive and least willing to affirm parity to those that are most optimistic on questions of salvation and religious parity. These are not the goals that drive my presentation of TRD.

My concern is whether any particular TRD can offer compelling reasons for interreligious learning. I hold that some varieties of pluralism appear to make such learning neither possible nor necessary, and quite surprisingly, some recent exclusivist positions leave room for interreligious learning. To the degree that any given TRD recognizes interreligious learning as possible and commendable, then that TRD is not without some merit. We might find it wanting for other reasons, but we can celebrate the promise of such theologies for opening the door to interreligious learning for traditionalist religious communities. Questions will remain about whether the possibility of interreligious learning is only begrudgingly acknowledged. My hope is for a robust TRD that celebrates diversity and hence interreligious learning as positive goods. I offer just such a trinitarian theology of religious diversity in Chapter 7. Chapter 3 also builds to a notion of relational pluralism that seems closest to my own position.²⁶

A