Sleeper, Awake

Setting out from the question “How do we live as/for a time being?,” Sharon Betcher observes that for many Western persons in the milieu of the “spiritual, but not religious,” the Christian promise of salvation as immortality of soul—a ballast for the anxiety of our transient passage—has become nonfunctional. She consequently considers the question by thinking with a contemporary guru that is often of first, popular resort—Deepak Chopra. While appreciating the ways in which teachers such as Chopra refresh interest in spiritual practice, Betcher notes a tendency toward uncritical appropriation of their presumably “perennial wisdom.” Further, she suspects these paths reduce soteriology to individual matters of health, itself a bit of an imperial conceit. Consequently, she holds Chopra in conversation with Anantanand Rambachan’s elucidation of Advaita Vedanta and a Christian theopoetics of Spirit, epitomized in the work of process theologian Catherine Keller. Amidst global economic fragility and given the onset of the Anthropocene, the question of soteriology here revolves around spiritual resilience to live in the midst of the mundane.

Comparative Theology and the Postmodern God of “Perhaps”

Kristin Beise Kiblinger responds to Elaine Padilla and Jon Paul Sydnor in conversation with the view of God developed by John D. Caputo. She observes points of agreement between Caputo and both comparative theologians with their common emphases on immanence (Padilla) and relationality (Sydnor), but argues that Caputo’s thought also challenges them both in significant ways. For Caputo, we inevitably condition what we know and thus God as the unconditioned cannot be known or present but remains “to come.” Caputo uses Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction as a hermeneutic principle that exposes conditionedness and thus keeps our theology humble and open. Kiblinger suggests that Sydnor and Padilla could benefit from following Caputo in his theology because Caputo’s work 1) helps respond to problems that have plagued past theology, 2) illuminates issues involving immanence and relationality, and 3) helps to justify (and lay the necessary theoretical groundwork for) comparative theology.

Salvation in the After-Living

While both Sharon Betcher and Joshua Ralston turn attention away from interpreting salvation in terms of salvific ends, Shelly Rambo’s chapter questions whether the discourse of ends and the afterlife might be employed to speak to the present afterlife of trauma. It reflects on how discourses of salvation within Christianity, in particular, might be redirected to address lived somatic realities, thus registering fear and anxiety. Situating readers in the Johannine Upper Room in the aftermath of the death of Jesus, this chapter recasts the meaning of salvation in light of endings. It gestures toward aesthetic modes of comparative theology as offering a means of countering religious violence, turning a discourse of ends into practices of living in the aftermath of violent endings.

Response: Christology in Comparative Perspective

Hugh Nicholson’s essay first highlights the salient points of the essays by Bidlack and Moyaert. The second part of the essay takes as its point of departure the contextual factors for the development of doctrine highlighted in each essay, to raise the disquieting possibility that polemic is integral to the Christological concepts that sustain Christian identity. It highlights the role of polemic, especially anti-Jewish polemic, at key moments in the development of Christological doctrine, as well as the tendency toward what Nicholson calls “Christological one-upmanship.” Christological development exemplifies a feature of religion more generally, the constitutive role of inter-communal polemic in the development of religious belief.

What Child Is This?

Similarity across religious boundaries attracts many comparative theologians to the effort of their work. But what happens if the similarity is so striking that a doctrinal turf war erupts? Engaging the Chinese Taoist tradition, Bede Bidlack looks to the similar beginnings of two stories to ask, “What Child is This?” His chapter examines the birth narratives of Jesus Christ and Lord Lao, the sixth-century BCE author of the Daode jing, for clues to their roles as “saviors.” Instead of letting the comparison dissolve into a quarrel over competing truth claims––who is the real savior?–– the chapter allows the similarities to propel closer examination of what the texts claim about these divine children and the function of those claims within their original contexts. The result is a Christology that holds Jesus’ cosmic function in tension with his call for the temporal realm.

Longing and Gender

This chapter is a response by Muslim theologia, Amir Hussain to the work of Holly Hillgardner and Tracy Sayuki Tiemeier. It takes the connections between the Christian and Indic traditions discussed in their chapters and connects them to Islamic concepts, particularly Muslim understandings of Mary, the mother of Jesus. There is also a discussion of Sufism, the mystical tradition in Islam. The work of scholars Wilfred Cantwell Smith and María Rosa Menocal is introduced as a way of talking about the lived experience of religion. There is also a discussion of music that connects across various religious traditions.

Longing and Letting Go

Holly Hillgardner develops a relational notion of the desiring self by reading the thirteenth-century Christian beguine Hadewijch in light of the sixteenth-century Vaisnava poet-saint Mirabai. Christian mysticism has often been read as moments of blissful union interspersed with long periods of painful absence, with union celebrated as the goal of the spiritual life. Mirabai, however, interprets this mystical ebb and flow through the category of viraha bhakti, defined as a bodily, all-pervading “love-longing.” Read in light of Mirabai’s viraha bhakti, Hadewijch’s descriptions of separation and union can be seen as integrated by the concept of love-longing. Viraha bhakti thus provides a schema to celebrate and cultivate such longing, not as a means to an end, but as an end itself. A conscious and sustained lingering in the middle spaces of longing opens Mirabai and Hadewijch to possibilities for mutual, non-possessive relationships with the other, divine and otherwise—a passionate non-attachment.

Like a Dog’s Curly Tail: Finding Perfection in a World of Imperfection

Jeffery Long, a Hindu theologian, explores the problem of evil as it is raised and addressed by thinkers in the Ramakrishna Vedanta tradition of Hinduism and by two separate schools of thought from contemporary Christianity. The textual sources used from the Ramakrishna tradition consist of the teachings of Sri Ramakrishna as found in the primary sources on his life, as well as the Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda. From Christianity, Long employs works of John Hick and David Ray Griffin on the topic of theodicy. Despite the fact that the latter two authors hail from the same religious tradition, Long shows that Hick and Ramakrishna are in closer agreement on this topic than either is with Griffin’s process theology. The essay offers a revised version of the Ramakrishna-Hick theodicy that takes Griffin’s objections into account.

The Dance of Emptiness

Jon Paul Sydnor’s essay, “The Dance of Emptiness,” compares two doctrines, Nagarjuna’s Buddhist doctrine of emptiness and Jürgen Moltmann’s Christian doctrine of the social Trinity. The essay is an attempt to produce constructive theology in relation to the doctrine of God that is relevant to individual and church life. The two doctrines are rich in the similarities that make comparison possible and the differences that make it fruitful. Emptiness and social Trinity gradually draw near to each other as the essay moves from discrete, mechanical comparison to a more concrete, organic mode of comparison. The conclusion reflects on the data gained through the comparison, the promise of comparative theology, and the importance of interdependence between the religions.

“Only Goodness Matters”

In conversation with the essays by Jeffery Long and Klaus von Stosch, Wendy Farley interrogates theology itself as a source of evil. This essay argues that defense of free will as the basis of theodicy obscures the arbitrary and bound nature of human agency. The distortion of free will is a question theodicy might address rather than its answer. The predominance of the sovereignty motif in images of the divine also contributes to the problem of evil by sacralizing structures of domination. The essay concludes by drawing on Hindu, Muslim, and Christian views of goodness—human and divine—as a theological and practical antidote to evil.