The Tradition and the Traditions: The Confrontation of Religious Doctrines

One of the consequences of the breakdown of physical barriers between the various peoples of the world has been that the question of the relationships between the major religious traditions still actively functioning at the present time has become more acute than it ever has been before. Previously a degree of exclusivity, either partial or total, could be maintained without adherents of one particular tradition being seriously troubled by the fact that elsewhere men worshipped ‘other gods’ through other forms. To maintain a rigorous exclusivity today in the name of one particular tradition is a far more difficult matter, for it means denying the validity of what appear to be manifestations of the Spirit outside this particular tradition; and to go to these lengths would be a sign of an extreme prejudice. But how, on the other hand, is one to account for these manifestations? Are they simply to be regarded as evidence of the Spirit blowing where he wills? Or do they indicate the intrinsic sacred quality of the traditional forms through which they occur, with the implication that each tradition within which they do occur is equally and fully with each other such tradition a divinely-instituted way of spirituai realisation? It is to this latter point of view that many most seriously concerned with the question are now tending to subscribe. Yet it does have serious implications. One of these is that it appears to involve the assumption, tacit or explicit, not only that there are the particular traditions themselves but also that there is something which one can only describe as the Tradition: a body of doctrine or form of revelation which is intrinsically superior to other religious traditions and which in some manner completes or subsumes them. How does this come about and what does it amount to?