tural and religious values. Similar comparative theological
enterprises (generally without Troeltsch’s methodological so-
phistication and without his conclusion of the merely relative
superiority of Christianity for Westerners) may be found in
both liberal Protestant and Catholic modernist theologies in
the early twentieth century.
However, the relative optimism, as well as the com-
parativist theological interests, of both the liberal Protestant
and Catholic modernist theologians soon disappeared. In
Catholicism, the end came through the intervention of
Rome. Among Protestants, it occurred through the collapse
of liberal optimism following World War I. The major theo-
logical alternative for Protestant thought at that time (gener-
ally called dialectical theology, or neo-Reformation theology)
was found in the work of Karl Barth. Barth rejected most of
the liberal Protestant theological program, including its com-
parativism. He held that Christian theology was a discipline
not intrinsically related to the larger question of the nature
of religion (including Christianity as a religion). Christian
theology was determined only by the question of the mean-
ing of God’s self-revelation in the Word of Jesus Christ. As
such, any Christian theological interest in comparativist
analyses of religions was improper to the strictly theological
task.
Barth’s great theological contemporaries Rudolf Bult-
mann and Paul Tillich, however, continued to include some
major historical and comparative emphases in their distinct
and non-Barthian formulations of dialectical theology. In-
deed, at the end of his long career, and influenced by his sem-
inar work with Mircea Eliade, his colleague at the University
of Chicago, Tillich returned explicitly to his earlier
Troeltschian interest in history of religions in an important
lecture entitled “The Significance of History of Religions for
Systematic Theology” (1965). Other Christian theologians,
moreover, continued and refined aspects of the program set
forth by Troeltsch. It is notable that three of the most impor-
tant founders of the discipline known as phenomenology of
religion in the modern period, Nathan Söderblom, Gerardus
van der Leeuw, and Rudolf Otto, were also Christian theolo-
gians who incorporated their phenomenological and histori-
cal work on religion into their constructive proposals for
Christian theology.
Even granted these notable and important exceptions,
however, Christian theology of the period between the wars
largely abandoned its earlier comparativist interests: in
Roman Catholic theology through the suppression of mod-
ernism and the revival of scholasticism; in Protestant theolo-
gy through the ascent of Barthian dialectical theology. These
developments tended to remove Christian theology from its
earlier intellectual alliance with the “scientific” study of reli-
gion. Both Protestant dialectical theology and Roman Cath-
olic scholastic theology gave relatively little attention to com-
parativism.
However, a comparativist theological analysis within the
Barthian perspective, designed to show the radical contrast
of Christian revelation to that of other religions, may be
found in the notable work of Hendrik Kraemer, especially
in his detailed study of other religions, The Christian Message
in a Non-Christian World (1938). In Roman Catholic theol-
ogy (especially in the work of Jean Daniélou and Henri de
Lubac), moreover, the “return to the sources” movement of
the nouvelle théologie of the 1940s and 1950s engaged in his-
torical and comparative work on the relationships of non-
Christian religions and philosophies to historical Christiani-
ty in the scriptural, patristic, and medieval periods.This scholarly work helped set the stage for the affirma-
tive declarations on the world religions by Rome both during
and after the Second Vatican Council (1961–1965). Roman
Catholic theologians (most notably Karl Rahner and Hans
Küng) began to include comparativist elements in their
Catholic theological proposals. In Jewish theology, an earlier
notable comparativist theological enterprise was achieved by
the great Jewish theologian Franz Rosenzweig with his devel-
opment of a “two-covenant” theme.
In our own period, many Christian theologians have re-
turned to the kind of comparativist theological program ini-
tiated by Schleiermacher and Hegel and refined by
Troeltsch. Without necessarily accepting the conclusions of
earlier comparative theologies, and without abandoning the
strictly theological gains of dialectical theology, many con-
temporary ecumenically oriented Christian theologians
(whether Protestant, Catholic, or Orthodox) are concerned
to include explicitly comparativist elements within their the-
ologies. There are, at present, many alternative proposals for
how this might best be accomplished. Among Christian
comparative theologians these include the “theology of the
history of religions” proposal of Wolfhart Pannenberg; the
Christian theologies of religious pluralism of John Cobb and
Raimundo Panikkar that allow for mutual and radical self-
transformation; proposals of Hans Küng and Langdon
Gilkey for dialogue among the religions as intrinsic to all
Christian theological self-understanding; proposals for a
“global” or “world” theology by Wilfred Cantwell Smith, a
thinker who is both a Christian theologian and a historian
of religion; a proposal for radical rethinking of Christianity’s
traditional christological claims by the Protestant theologian
and philosopher of religion John Hick and the Catholic
theologian Paul Knitter; explicitly comparative theological
proposals based on the pluralism within the Christian tradi-
tion as a central clue to a pluralism among all religions
(George Rupp); and revisionary comparative proposals for
different religious models (saint, sage, etc.) from a Christian
theological perspective (Robert C. Neville). Comparative
theologies in other traditions have also been developed, such
as the Hindu global theologies of Swami Vivekananda and
Ananda Coomaraswamy, the Buddhist comparative theology
of Masao Abe, and the Islamic global theology of the sacred
of S. H. Nasr.Important comparativist theological elements may also
be found in the modern period in the philosophers Ernest9130 THEOLOGY: COMPARATIVE THEOLOGY