Hocking and F. S. C. Northrup, the historian Arnold Toyn-
bee and the psychologist C. G. Jung. Each of these thinkers,
although not a theologian, exerted a powerful comparativist
influence upon many theological enterprises.
GENERAL THEOLOGICAL METHOD AND THE POSSIBILITY OF
A SHARED METHOD FOR COMPARATIVE THEOLOGY. As con-
temporary theologians in a religiously pluralistic world grope
for new, inevitably tentative formulations of a paradigm to
guide their deliberations and inform their expectations, they
are confronted with the question of method. Theological
method must always be a secondary matter for comparative
theology, subsidiary to concrete interpretations of the specif-
ic symbols of a particular religious tradition. Method—
precisely as a necessarily abstract, heuristic guide—must al-
ways be secondary to the concrete interpretations of each
particular theology. But the secondary also serves. Reflection
on method serves the common cause of all concrete compar-
ative theologies by bringing into sharper focus the principles
behind the common search for a new paradigm—principles
that are often obscured in the present sharp conflict among
particular proposals and conclusions in this emerging disci-
pline. The abstract does not merely extrapolate from the con-
crete; the abstract also enriches the concrete by highlighting
and clarifying what is essential.
It is helpful, therefore, to reflect on what kind of general
theological method may be shared by contemporary compar-
ative theologians despite otherwise sharp differences among
them. The present hypothesis can be described by four prem-
ises. First, comparative theology must be a reinterpretation
of the central symbols of a particular religious tradition for
the contemporary religiously pluralistic world. Second, a
new paradigm for comparative theology must be so formu-
lated that the interpretations of a tradition can no longer be
grounded in older, classicist bases but must rely on new
foundations that incorporate both past tradition and the
present religious pluralism. Third, in keeping with the de-
mands of an emerging globalism and a pluralistic world,
theologians in all traditions must risk addressing the ques-
tions of religious pluralism on explicitly theological grounds.
Fourth, it follows from these first three premises that con-
temporary theologians must engage in two complementary
kinds of interpretation of a tradition—those now known as
the “hermeneutics of retrieval” and the “hermeneutics of cri-
tique and suspicion.” There is no innocent interpretation, no
unambiguous tradition, no history-less interpreter. There is
no merely abstract, general “situation” and no theological
method that can guarantee certainty. There is only the risk
of comparative theological interpretation itself: the risk of in-
terpreting the great symbols in all the traditions for the pres-
ent pluralistic situation and then presenting those interpreta-
tions to the wider global theological community and the
wider community of religious studies for criticism.
This general model can be made more specific by intro-
ducing the following definition of a shared theological meth-
od in the new situation: any theology is the attempt to estab-
lish mutually critical correlations between an interpretation
of a particular religious tradition and an interpretation of the
contemporary situation.
Thus, contemporary theology as a discipline shares with
history of religions, the humanities, the social sciences, and,
more recently, the natural sciences, a turn to reflection on
the process of interpretation itself. For theology is one way
to interpret the elusive, ambiguous, and transformative reali-
ty named, however inadequately, “religion.” Theology is not
merely a synonym for any interpretation of religion but rath-
er bears its own methodological demands and its own
criteria. It is necessary, therefore, to clarify this definition of
theology and to show how it can yield a common model for
a theological method, one appropriate to a contemporary
comparative theology in any tradition.
Theologians interpret the claims to meaning and truth
in the religious classics of a particular tradition for a new situ-
ation. The religious classics are theologically construed as
human testimonies to some disclosure of ultimate reality by
the power of ultimate reality itself, as that power is experi-
enced by human beings. The questions to which such testi-
monies respond are the fundamental “limit-questions” of the
ultimate meaningfulness or absurdity of existence itself. Reli-
gious questions are questions of an odd logical type, emerg-
ing at the limits of ordinary experience and ordinary modes
of inquiry (ethical, aesthetic, political, scientific). Like strict-
ly metaphysical questions, the fundamental questions of reli-
gion must be logically odd, since they are questions concern-
ing the most fundamental presuppositions, the most basic
beliefs about all knowing, willing, and acting. Like strictly
metaphysical questions, religious questions must be on the
nature of ultimate reality. Unlike metaphysical questions, re-
ligious questions ask about the meaning and truth of ulti-
mate reality, not only in itself but also as it relates existential-
ly to human beings. The religious classics, therefore, are
theologically construed as testimonies by human beings who
cannot but ask these fundamental limit-questions and, in
asking them seriously, believe that they have received an un-
derstanding of or even a response from ultimate reality itself:
some disclosure or revelation bearing a new and different
possibility of ultimate enlightenment, or some new way to
formulate the questions themselves, or some promise of total
liberation that suggests a new religious way to become an
emancipated human being through a grounded relationship
to that ultimate reality which is believed to be the origin and
end of all reality.
It is not the case, of course, that theology has only be-
come hermeneutical in the modern period. However, the ex-
plicit concern with hermeneutics after Schleiermacher has
been occasioned, among Westerners, by the sense of cultural
distance from the religious traditions caused by the seven-
teenth-century scientific revolution and the eighteenth-
century Enlightenment. This sense of distance has been in-
tensified by the emergence of historical consciousness (as ex-
pressed by Troeltsch and Joachim Wach), and theTHEOLOGY: COMPARATIVE THEOLOGY 9131