¹ Tracy, David, “Comparative Theology,” in Encyclopedia of Religion (ed. Jones, Lindsay; 15 vols.; 2nd edition; Detroit: Macmillan Reference USA, 2005) 13:9125Google Scholar.

² Alighieri, Dante, Inferno IX. 61–63Google Scholar, quoted in Franke, William, Dante's Interpretive Journey (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996) 84Google Scholar.

³ In this essay, I deploy the term “comparative theologian” in the broadest sense, signifying all of those who would self-identify as scholars and/or practitioners engaged in theological inquiry across boundaries of religious belonging.

⁴ This paper grew out of a course dedicated to the consideration of healing in theological/practical contexts. Spurred by my interest in the wounds left by fundamentalist Christian interpretation, I initially took up this project so as to address the wounding and healing of those left disabled by fundamentalist interpretation in terms of their inability to encounter the religious newcomer as “neighbor” rather than as “threat.” The evolution of this essay has moved beyond this scope. My current audience is comparative theologians, particularly those who are mindful of Christian communities that have commitments leading either to their evangelizing the religious neighbor or simply withdrawing from him, either of which responses could be void of a sense that one has anything to learn from that neighbor.

⁵ David Tracy, “Comparative Theology,” 9126 [italics added].

⁶ One may understand this descriptor an extension of Anselm's long-standing maxim with a sharp eye to Tracy's assertion that “on strictly theological grounds, the fact of religious pluralism should enter all [contemporary] theological assessment and self-analysis in any tradition at the very beginning of its task” (ibid.). I acknowledge that Tracy's claim evokes an inclusivist theology of religious pluralism, the development of which is beyond the scope of the present essay.

⁷ This is using the term “text” loosely. Although comparative theologians find written texts highly fruitful loci for comparative work, and the written text will be the focus of this paper, the “religious texts” for comparison may also be rituals, oral traditions, etc.

⁸ Clooney, Francis X., Comparative Theology: Deep Learning Across Religious Borders (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁹ Clooney, Francis X., Beyond Compare: St. Francis de Sales and Sri Vedanra Desika on Loving Surrender to God (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2008)Google Scholar.

¹⁰ I use the tentative language of “might” and “could” so as to allow that, alongside any traditional Christian commitments that would encourage interreligious learning, there are certainly elements in the tradition that would not advance the comparative theological project. A primary example would be the fids ex auditu soteriological principle, which holds that God's salvific action accompanies a person's faith in Christ, which is made definite by her hearing and obeying the preached gospel via repentance, baptism, and Christian discipleship. My purpose in this essay is not to promote a reading of the Christian tradition that would flatly jettison such elements. Rather, I aim to mine the comparative theological endeavor for compelling opportunities for Christian discipleship, particularly for those believers whose commitments would typically lead to their renouncing religious neighbors as persons from whom they have something to learn. See n. 4.

¹¹ See Reiser, William E., To Hear God's Word, Listen to the World: The Liberation of Spirituality (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1997)Google Scholar. Reiser's thesis is that Christians pray most faithfully by living in active solidarity with all other human beings. Another example might be Jürgen Moltmann, who argues that, “above all,” the church “exists wholly in its receptivity for the Spirit's coming . . . . That makes Christianity alive to the operation of the Holy Spirit extra muros ecclesia—outside the church as well—and prepared to accept the life-furthering communities which people outside the church expect and experience. This does not mean that the church is giving itself up. It is simply opening itself for the wider operations of the Spirit in the world.” Moltmann, The Spirit of Life: A Universal Affirmation (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 1992) 231.

¹² I will explain this concept in section one, below.

¹³ See 1 Cor 13.

¹⁴ Bernard Cooke, Power and the Spirit of God (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004) 170 [italics added].

¹⁵ Chauvet, Louis-Marie, Symbol and Sacrament: A Sacramental Reinterpretation of Christian Existence (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1995) 54Google Scholar.

¹⁶ For another interpretation of Chauvet's thought in terms of “otherness,” see Morrill, Bruce T., Divine Worship and Human Healing: Liturgical Theology at the Margins of Life and Death (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2009) 116–118Google Scholar.

¹⁷ Chauvet notes Heidegger's point that such a metaphysics “believes itself to have produced an explanation of being, when in fact it has only ontically reduced being to metaphysics’ representations, utterly forgetting that nothing that exists ‘is’” (Symbol and Sacrament, 26–27 [italics in original]).

¹⁸ Jeffrey, D. L., People of the Book: Christian Identity and Literary Culture (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1996)Google Scholar.

¹⁹ Bloom, Harold, “The Breaking of Form” in Deconstruction and Criticism (New York: Seabury, 1979) 1–38Google Scholar, quoted in Jeffrey, People of the Book, 1.

²⁰ Ibid.

²¹ Jeffrey, People of the Book, 3.

²² To clarify, this is not to say that this is how all deconstructionists proceed; rather, this speaks specifically of the nihilistic deconstructionists in Bloom's paradigm. As I will make evident below, a healthy dose of deconstruction is necessary for proper Christian knowledge construction. Bloom's paradigm simply serves as a grim reminder of what happens when either the “now” or the “not yet” of Christian understanding is absolutized. Totalizing the “now” leads to idolatrous logocentrism, while totalizing the “not yet” leads to nihilistic deconstructionism.

²³ Jeffrey, People of the Book, 8.

²⁴ Ibid., 4.

²⁵ Ibid., 17 [italics in original].

²⁶ Ibid.

²⁷ Franke, Dante's Interpretive Journey, 82.

²⁸ Ibid., 83.

²⁹ Ibid.

³⁰ Quoted in ibid., 84.

³¹ Ibid.

³² Quoted in ibid.

³³ Quoted in ibid.

³⁴ Ibid., 85.

³⁵ Ibid. “Scritta morta” is “the letter that kills.”

³⁶ Ibid.

³⁷ Ibid.

³⁸ Ibid., 27.

³⁹ Ibid.

⁴⁰ Ibid. [italics in original].

⁴¹ Jeffrey, People of the Book, 8.

⁴² See Jeffrey's discussion of St. Augustine in People of the Book, 88.

⁴³ Jeffrey, People of the Book, 3 [italics in original].

⁴⁴ Rivera, Mayra, The Touch of Transcendence: A Postcolonial Theology of God (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2007)Google Scholar.

⁴⁵ Ibid., 6.

⁴⁶ Ibid., 7.

⁴⁷ I explain Clooney's use of this term in the next section.

⁴⁸ Cooke, Power and the Spirit of God, 170.

⁴⁹ Including Chauvet's, Jeffrey's, and Dante's insights (as I have outlined them) into what taking up those parameters would entail.

⁵⁰ Clooney, Beyond Compare, 133.

⁵¹ Ibid.

⁵² Ibid., 134.

⁵³ Altieri, Charles, Canon and Consequences: Reflections on the Ethical Force of Imaginative Ideals (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1990) 45Google Scholar, quoted in Clooney, Beyond Compare, 134–135 [italics in original].

⁵⁴ Quoted in ibid., 135 [italics in original].

⁵⁵ Because my present purpose is to delineate responsible comparative engagement with a text's “truth world,” it falls beyond the scope of this essay for me to work to outline criteria for critical discernment when engaging the neighboring text's truth claims. However, critically realist epistemological commitments press us to remember that, though our assessment is never complete, we do now know “in part”; and so making tentative yet normative judgments regarding the neighboring text's truth claims is the telos of theological comparison. Marianne Moyaert helpfully engages this issue in her article “On Vulnerability: Probing the Ethical Dimensions of Comparative Theology” Religions 3 (2012) 1144–1161. Moyaert draws upon Clooney's work to establish that, when comparative engagement with neighboring texts yields fresh hermeneutical and theological possibilities, “the basic question will be about how to make sense, as a Christian, of a set of Christian experiences and texts and theologies that now includes certain non-Christian texts that remain vital and creative” (Clooney, Francis X., “When Religions Become Context,” Theology Today 47 [1990] 30–38, at 36CrossRefGoogle Scholar, quoted in Moyaert 1156). For Moyaert, this evaluative endeavor must be “preceded by a pledge to justice” (Moyaert, 1156). Then, in keeping with this pledge, particularity (rather than grand systematization) should orient truth assessment within the comparative enterprise, which is eschatological at heart: “particular comparisons yield particular insights,” says Moyaert, “insights that might be revised in the future under the influence of other particular comparisons” (1152).

⁵⁶ Clooney, Beyond Compare, 140.

⁵⁷ Jacobs, Alan, A Theology of Reading: The Hermeneutics of Love (Cambridge, MA: Westview, 2001)Google Scholar.

⁵⁸ Ibid., 13 [italics in original].

⁵⁹ Jacobs, A Theology of Reading, 60.

⁶⁰ Ibid.

⁶¹ Ibid., 70.

⁶² Keller, Catherine, From a Broken Web: Separation, Sexism, and Self (Boston: Beacon, 1986)Google Scholar, quoted in Rivera, The Touch of Transcendence, 7.

⁶³ Jacobs, A Theology of Reading, 62–63.

⁶⁴ Ibid., 108.

⁶⁵ As I note above, this means having a sense of one's own particular perspective shaped by one's distinct experience and understanding of reality.

⁶⁶ Clooney, Comparative Theology, 14.

⁶⁷ Clooney, Beyond Compare, 140.

⁶⁸ Jacobs, A Theology of Reading, 63.

⁶⁹ Cooke, Power and the Spirit of God, 167.

⁷⁰ See Augustine, On Christian Doctrine, 2.18.28.