¹ An earlier version of this article was presented at the 1997 annual convention of the College Theology Society, held at the University of San Diego.

² This is one of the themes taken up at the 1997 annual convention of the Catholic Theological Society of America, held in Seattle.

³ “The theology of religion, therefore, remains, for the most part, purely a priori…. And while the a priori theologizing is a necessary component in any theology of religion, the danger is that it begets a complacency that one's work is finished. This illusion blunts any sense of a need to study seriously the aims and forms of life pursued by non-Christians. Certainly, the lack of interest in specifics is not necessarily ingredient to an a priori theology of religion, but it is all too common. The thinking seems to be that obstacles impeding an adequate understanding of the relationships between [and among] major religious traditions can be eliminated if only we get our doctrines right” (Duffy, Stephen J., “Encountering the Stranger: Christianity in Dialogue with the World Religions,” Yamauchi Lectures in Religion, Loyola University, New Orleans, Spring 1994, 4Google Scholar).

⁴ A well-known and important theology of religion in the last half of the twentieth century comes from the Jesuit theologian Karl Rahner. Rahner's teaching is not about the structures and ideas of religions but about the Christian self-interpretation of how it understands what Jesus calls “the reign of God” and theologians after Paul have called grace. Rahner's theology (known at first in the poor phrase “anonymous Christians”) is about the extent of the effective offer of divine friendship and salvation to individuals. Rahner did not intend to propose a universal arranging theory of religions or to evaluate forms and beliefs; he was not an expert in the history of religions and so would not venture into that field. He was concerned with the a priori questions not of the human nature of religion but of the fundamental teaching of Christianity about salvation with its attendant view of the extent of grace. Rahner and his contemporaries mark an advance in Catholic theology because they understand grace as coming not to individuals only (articulated by theologians since the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries) but through the concrete mediations of other religions. About the value of those mediations they have had nothing to say. I am grateful to my colleague Thomas O'Meara for pointing this out. For a thorough presentation of the Catholic theological background of Rahner's theology on this point and of the theology itself see Schwerdtfeger, N., Gnade und Welt. Zum Grundgefüge von Karl Rahners Theorie der “anonymen Christen” (Freiburg: Herder, 1982).Google Scholar Rahner's teaching and the interdenominational evaluation of his theory of “anonymous Christians” has been well summarized by Poorman, Janice, “The Critics of Karl Rahner's Theology of the Universal Offer of Salvific Grace through Jesus Christ,” Ph.D. dissertation, University of Notre Dame, 1996.Google Scholar

⁵ The term “comparative theology” has been operative since the nineteenth century. See Clooney, Francis X., “Comparative Theology: A Review of Recent Books (1989-1995),” Theological Studies 56 (1995): 521.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁶ It must not be forgotten, however, that comparative theologians share with the constructors of theologies of religion a preconditioning of faith and theology from within their tradition that they bring to their work. It is one of the achievements of Francis Clooney to have articulated some of the principles of the hermeneutics operative in Christian comparative theology in his Theology after Vedanta: An Experiment in Comparative Theology (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993).Google Scholar

⁷ Clooney, , “Comparative Theology,” 522.Google Scholar

⁸ See, e.g., Fredericks, James L., “The Imcomprehensibility of God: A Buddhist Reading of Aquinas,” Theological Studies 56 (1995): 506.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁹ “For years I had been studying the Vedanta and had begun to realize its significance for the Church and the world. Now I was given the opportunity to go to the source of this tradition, to live in India and discvover the secret of the wisdom of India” (Griffiths, Bede, The Marriage of East and West [Springfield, IL: Templegate, 1982], 7Google Scholar).

¹⁰ “The end of all religion is the realizing of God in the soul. If there is one universal truth in all religions, I place it here, in realizing God” (What Religion Is in the Words of Swami Vivekananda, ed. Vidyatmananda, Swami [Calcutta: Advaita Ashrama, 1991], 8).Google Scholar

¹¹ “Vedantic ‘inclusivism’ is the very framework and basis for Vivekananda's encounter with the West” (Halbfass, Wilhelm, India and Europe: An Essay in Understanding [Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988], 228–29Google Scholar).

¹² Neevel, Walter G., “Ramakrishna,” Encyclopedia of Religion, ed. Eliade, M. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 12: 209.Google Scholar

¹³ Quoted in Kramer, Adelheid, Christus und Christentum im Denken des modernen Hinduismus (Bonn: Ludwig Rohrscheid, 1958), 107.Google Scholar This equating of the personal with the impersonal is expressed here, of course, in a Hindu context using Hindu terminology for the divine. But this theology (if it may be so called) of Ramakrishna extends beyond the Hindu world to include other faiths.

¹⁴ Halbfass, , India and Europe, 226.Google Scholar

¹⁵ French, Hal W., “Reverence to Christ through Mystical Experience and Incarnational Identity: Sri Ramakrishna” in Sharma, Arvind, ed., Neo-Hindu Views of Christianity (New York: E. J. Brill, 1988), 80–81.Google Scholar

¹⁶ French, , “Reverence,” 80.Google Scholar

¹⁷ Thomas, M. M., “Vivekananda: Christ as Jivanmukta” in The Acknowledged Christ of the Indian Renaissance (London: S.C.M., 1969), 112.Google Scholar

¹⁸ Quoted in ibid.

¹⁹ Enumerated in the next paragraph.

²⁰ For Vivekananda nonduality bespeaks the innate divinity of every human person and establishes the metaphysical basis for his ethics of “practical Vedanta” and its agenda of societal reform. See Halbfass, , India and Europe, 234.Google Scholar

²¹ It must be stated, however, that is is a questionable interpretation of both a) Shankara, whose teaching Vivekananda extols as the purest example of advaita, and b) the post-Shankara Advaita tradition As regards Shankara, although it may be argued today against the majority of his interpreters that nondualistic ontology represents a type of ontological realism rather than acosmic illusionism, still it cannot be said that even in such a realist interpetation of Shankara's system the positive reality of the creature is emphasized to the degree that it is in Vivekananda And Vivekananda's divergence from later Advaita is even more striking, post-Shankara Advaitins tend to regard everything but Brahman as ultimately illusory Vivekananda's “illusionism,” however, is generally epistemological rather than ontological Perhaps only the personal God of theists is regarded by Vivekananda as ontologically unreal, illusionism in most cases for him refers to false perceptions about the nature of a very real world In Vivekananda's view multiplicity remains even after the removal of ignorance, but now this world of plurality is rightly understood, as it is seen to be the expression of Brahman “When the Hindu says the world is Maya, at once people get the idea that the world is an illusion But the Maya of the Vedanta is neither idealism nor Realism, nor is it a theory It is a simple statement of facts—what we are and what we see around us” (Vivekananda, Swami, Jnana-Yoga [Calcutta Advaita Ashrama, 1964], 51–52)Google Scholar

²² “Now I will tell you my discovery All of religion is contained in the Vedanta, that is, in the three stages of the Vedanta philosophy” [The Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda [Calcutta Advaita Ashrama, 1979], 5 81)Google Scholar All these three Vedantic systems have in common that they teach a single absolute reality As to the possibility of polytheistic forms of Hinduism, a frequent reproach by Christian missionaries, Vivekananda responds, “there is no polytheism in India” (Vedanta Voice of Freedom, ed Chetananda, Swami [St Louis Vedanta Society, 1986], 104Google Scholar)

²³ At times Christianity is regarded in an even more unfavorable light. “The first stage, i.e., Dvaita, applied to the ideas of the ethnic groups of Europe, is Christianity; Christianity being a religion of faith, and superstitious, occupies the same rank as our religion of the Puranas …” (quoted in Kramer, , Christus und Christentum, 129Google Scholar).

²⁴ Quoted in Thomas, , “Vivekananda,” 125.Google Scholar

²⁵ Vivekananda, , Works 3: 182–83.Google Scholar

²⁶ Ibid., 183, parentheses added. See also 5: 207: “Christianity cannot stand without Christ, Mohammedanism without Mohammed, and Buddhism without Buddha, but Hinduism stands independently of any man.”

²⁷ Vivekananda, , Vedanta: Voice of Freedom, 110.Google Scholar

²⁸ Puthiadam, Ignatius, “Dominant Trends in Modern and Contemporary Hindu Thought,” Zeitschrift für Missionswissenschaft und Religionswissenschaft 61 (1977): 174.Google Scholar

²⁹ Quoted in Thomas, , “Vivekananda,” 126.Google Scholar Sunand Sumithra, a contemporary Indian Protestant theologian, acknowledges that Vivekananda's fidelity to the truth of Advaita prevented him from assimilating Christian Scripture and its witness to the Christ of history. “Further, thanks to his loyalty to advaita, Vivekananda doesn't seriously consider God as being a personal being, and all historical personalities are given even less significance. We need not find fault with his handling of the biblical passages inadequately and eclectically, but it is enough to say that it is the mishandling of the Christian Scriptures that leads him to wrong interpretations of biblical doctrines” (Sumithra, Sunand, Christian Theologies from an Indian Perspective [Bangalore: Theological Book Trust, 1995], 229–30Google Scholar). In contrast to his teacher Ramakrishna, Swami Vivekananda does not appear to have attempted to enter into the experience of Christians.

³⁰ Of Griffiths' many works see especially: Vedanta and Christian Faith (Los Angeles: Dawn Horse Press, 1973);Google ScholarReturn to the Centre (Springfield, IL: Templegate, 1976);Google ScholarPubMedThe Marriage of East and West (Springfield, IL: Templegate, 1982);Google ScholarPubMed and A New Vision of Reality: Western Science, Eastern Mysticism and Christian Faith (Springfield, IL: Templegate, 1990.Google Scholar A Bede Griffiths Society has been established recently in the United States for the discussion and propagation of his legacy, open to both scholarly and nonscholarly readers of his work.

³¹ In this regard he is to be distinguished from Swami Abhishiktananda. See Trapnell, Judson, “Bede Griffiths' Theory of Religious Symbol and Practice of Dialogue: Towards Interreligious Understanding,” Ph.D. dissertation, The Catholic University of America, 1993, 421–66, esp. 448Google Scholar, and Wiseman, James, “Enveloped by Mystery: The Spiritual Journey of Henri Le Saux/Abhishiktananda,” Église et Théologie 23 (1992); 241–60.Google Scholar

³² In this work I will restrict myself to Griffiths' later theological development beyond an earlier period when he still advocated a simple fulfillment theory of Christ's relationship to non-Christian religions. In this later period he continues to maintain the normativity of Christ's revelation, even while he asserts the principle of complementerity.

³³ Griffiths thus goes beyond Vatican II's position on world religions as articulated in Nostra Aetate. Though this document teaches that divine grace and providence are universal and that people of other faiths can attain to experience of God, there is no mention that outside the Jewish and Christian traditions other religions are founded on divine revelation.

³⁴ For example, Griffiths names the religion of the (Native American) Dakota together with Taosim, Buddhism, Hinduism, and Jainism as being granted insight into the Absolute, what Griffiths, called the “Mystery.” See Return to the Centre, 20–25.Google Scholar Griffiths does not go so far as to claim that all religions everywhere derive from revelation. This is more of an open question in his system, one which he does not expressly take up.

³⁵ Griffiths, Bede, The Cosmic Revelation: The Hindu Way to God (Springfield, IL: Templegate, 1983).Google Scholar

³⁶ Ibid., 7-8.

³⁷ Unless otherwise noted I will use the term “God” as synonymous with “Absolute” or “Mystery,” leaving aside the question for now as to whether this supreme Reality is personal or impersonal.

³⁸ Griffiths' references to the insights of the Upanishads are frequent, not only because the Upanishads witness to the all-pervasiveness of the Absolute to the world, but also and especially because of the current of apophatism that runs through them. In my opinion, one of Griffiths' greatest accomplishments is in having made the truth of the Upanishads accessible to a general Western readership. He did this by emphasizing that the Upanishadic teaching of nonduality is essentially derived from mystical experience rather than being primarily a philosophical doctrine.

³⁹ See Griffiths, Bede, “The Sources of Indian Spirituality” in Indian Spirituality in Action, preface by Parecattil, Joseph Cardinal (Bombay: Asian Trading Corporation, 1973), 63–65.Google Scholar

⁴⁰ In his repeated emphasis on interiority and on the journey prescribed by religions from the false self to the true Self, from thinking reason to spiritual intuition, from the world of time and the external universe to the discovery of true Being and eternity, Griffiths shares features common among “Perennialists.” For Griffiths, on the perennial philosophy, see his Universal Wisdom: A Journey through the Sacred Wisdom of the World (San Francisco: Harper Collins, 1994), 7–10.Google Scholar A good summary of the four principles of Perennialism can be found in Shear, Jonathan, “On Mystical Experiences as Support for the Perennial Philosophy,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 62 (1994): 319–20;CrossRefGoogle Scholar “(1) The phenomenal world is the manifestation of a transcendental ground; (2) human beings are capable of attaining immediate knowledge of that ground; (3) in addition to their phenomenal egos, human beings possess a transcendental Self which is of the same or like nature with that transcendental ground; (4) this identification is life's chief end or purpose.” Griffiths differs from Perennialists such as Frithjof Schuon and Seyyed Hossein Nasr by embracing the revelation of Christ as normative.

⁴¹ Griffiths does not subscribe to an essentialist or “common core” theory that all experiences are essentially the same, only articulated differently. He does find commonalities among the experiences of different religions, nonetheless. An excellent summary and critique of the contemporary essentialist vs. constructivist debate about mystical experience is provided by Stoeber, Michael, Theo-Monistic Mysticism: A Hindu-Christian Comparison (New York: St. Martin's, 1994), 7–38.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁴² When comparing the Hindu spirituality of divine immanence, especially as revealed in the Upanishads, with the Christian orientation to divine transcendence, Griffiths remarks, “I feel these two different ways are complementary. Just as the Christian, starting from above, discovers the Holy Spirit as immanent and realizes the presence of God in the whole creation around him, so the Hindu, starting with the immanence of God in the creation, in the human heart, rises to the idea of God beyond the creation and beyond humanity These are two complementary visions and we have to bring them together in our lives, so that each enriches the other Theology today is concerned with discerning the relationship between these different visions” (Cosmic Revelation, 24)

⁴³ Ibid, 8

⁴⁴ Griffiths recognizes the power of the Hindu avatar stories to inspire and transform human lives, but he does not consider these “incarnations” to be truly historical, to have fully assumed human nature as did God in Christ “Here we come to the great difference between an avatara and an incarnation When we compare the Avatara with the Incarnation we can see that the Avatara has its roots in mythology” (ibid, 123-26, esp 123) Diana Eck's reflections on the avarar-incamation link serve well to explicate further Griffiths' position “In the whole sequence of avataras, only Rama is said to be fully human, and yet his was a super-humanity, suffused with supernatural strength and divine weapons that always hit their mark The humbling of God to ‘earthen vessels’ is unheard of in the mythic heritage of the Hindu tradition The avatara is a divine descent, God coming ‘down’ into this world, but yet as God It is not really incarnation with the full meaning of taking on the body of flesh and blood” (Eck, Diana, Encountering God [Boston Beacon, 1993], 90Google Scholar, emphasis in original) Griffiths makes clear, however, that the avatar stories are not to be discounted as spiritually unimportant He writes “We no longer despise mythology today A myth is a symbolic story which expresses, in symbolic terms which rise from the depths of the unconscious, man's understanding of God and the mystery of existence Myths are of infinite value and importance I do not think it is too strong to say that God revealed Himself from the earliest times in the form of myth Let me say, therefore, that to say that Hinduism is rooted in mythology is not to depreciate it in any way” (Cosmic Revelation, 115)

⁴⁵ See also Eck, , Encountering God, 89Google Scholar, who speaks of a “double revelation” in Christ: “Faith in Christ rests on two remarkable affirmations: Jesus Christ reveals to us the face of God, which is love. And Jesus Christ reveals to us the meaning of the human, which is love.”

⁴⁶ On the uniqueness of Christ's death when compared with the stories of the avatars, see Eck, , Encountering God, 85Google Scholar: “And that intersection of life with death is at the heart of the Christian message. He did not transcend the body. He did not grow to gigantic proportions and crush his enemies beneath his feet. He did not have the magical weapons of Lord Rama, nor did he have Rama's helper, the valiant Hanuman, who came flying in with a mountain of medicinal herbs from the Himalayas to bring the decimated armies of his master back to life. When Jesus hung on the cross, bruised and bleeding, there was no miraculous intervention. He really died—no miracles and no magical herbs—a fully human death, as we all will die.”

⁴⁷ Griffiths, , Cosmic Revelation, 125–27.Google Scholar

⁴⁸ It is important for Christian dialogue with Hindu thought to note here that divine personalism in Griffiths' understanding is not the shallow anthropomorphism Christian personalism is often taken to mean. “[T]his is the experience of God which we have to seek: to transcend ourselves in total self-giving in love and find ourselves taken up into an ocean of love which is at once deeply personal and at the same time transcends all human limitations. It's deeply personal, and we must always keep that in our hearts; but it is also beyond anything we can conceive of person. It's like an ocean really. So the two aspects are there: It's a personal communion, a personal relationship, but it transcends all the limitations of a person and takes us into the depths of the divine being itself” (quoted in Trapnell, , Bede Griffiths' Theory, 413Google Scholar).

⁴⁹ Griffiths, , Divine Revelation, 127.Google Scholar Elsewhere he adds, “I think in each tradition you have to go beyond the dualities and open up to the one beyond, and then you have to reintegrate the whole of humanity and the human experience into that unitive vision. I'm always suspicious of people who leave the world behind or negate it in any way. It has a positive, a real value” (emphasis in original, quoted in Trapnell, , Bede Griffiths' Theory, 448–49Google Scholar).

⁵⁰ See Griffiths, , Vedanta and Christian Faith, 25, 41–42, 80.Google Scholar

⁵¹ It must be made clear that the love of which Griffiths speaks is not a dualistic love in which God is conceived as a distant object of devotion. Rather this love is located in the context of the nonduality of Creator and creature, an understanding in which the love of the creature participates in and is permeated by the divine love itself. “In the mystical body of Christ which embraces all redeemed humanity, we do not disappear in the Godhead, but we discover a personal relationship of love. Each person is fulfilled and is open to the other person; it is an inter-communion of love in which each embraces the other and all are embraced by God…. Jesus expresses it marvellously in the Gospel of St. John, when he prays, ‘That they may be one. As Thou, Father in me and I in Thee, that they may be one in us.’ That is Christian advaita. We are one with one another and one with Christ; we are one in the mystery of the Godhead, and I do not think we can go beyond that” (Griffiths, , Cosmic Revelation, 131Google Scholar).

⁵² Ibid., 128.

⁵³ Ibid., 128-29.

⁵⁴ A similar distinction is made by Noia, J. A. Di when speaking of “God's personal (and not merely causal) presence to his people in love and mercy” (The Diversity of Religions [Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1992], 86).Google Scholar

⁵⁵ Griffiths, , “Sources of Indian Spirituality,” 64.Google Scholar

⁵⁶ Ibid., 63-67.

⁵⁷ This distinction is made by Dupuis, Jacques, Jesus Christ as the Encounter of World Religions (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1991), 48.Google Scholar

⁵⁸ “But the Hebrew was coming more and more to understand that God acts in history. The fundamental difference between the Hebrew and the Hindu revelation is that the latter is the revelation of God's work in creation, and the former is the revelation of God's work in history, the history of a particular people…. There is no longer any sense of cyclic time. God leads His people towards an end, when He will finally reveal Himself” (Cosmic Revelation, 120-21).

⁵⁹ See ibid., 119-22.

⁶⁰ In a remark to me in a conversation from June 1984, Griffiths lamented the widespread popular Christian dualistic understanding of God and world, a view which is finally unbiblical. Further on this in Griffiths, A New Vision of Reality, chap. 8: “God and the World.” See also a similar concern expressed by Rahner, Karl in “Welt in Gott. Zum christlichen Schöpfungsbegriff” in Bsteh, Andreas, ed., Sein als Offenbarung in Christentum und Hinduismus (Modling, Austria: St. Gabriel, 1984), 74–75.Google Scholar

⁶¹ “How can we reconcile these two … ‘revelations’—the cosmic revelation of the infinite, timeless being manifesting in this world of time and change, but ultimately unaffected by it, with the Christian revelation of God's activity in history, of the one, eternal Being acting in time and history and bringing this world of time and change into union with himself? This, it seems to me, is the problem of the modern world; on this depends the union of East and West and the future of humanity” (Griffiths, , Marriage of East and West, 177Google Scholar).

⁶² See Griffiths' comparison of the doctrines of these four with Christian dogma in Vedanta and Christian Faith.

⁶³ See Sharma, Arvind, Hinduism for Our Times (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1996), 70–74.Google Scholar

⁶⁴ Certainly such theological claims as Griffiths makes about a two-fold divine presence must be further tested by the data of comparative theology.