development of the great liberation movements and their at-
tendant hermeneutics of suspicion (with respect to sexism,
racism, classism, etc.). And it has been still further intensified
by the Western sense of cultural and religious parochialism
stimulated by the emerging pluralistic and global culture as
well as by the tensions, conflicts, and possibilities present in
North-South and East-West relationships. The epoch-
making events of modernity have brought about a need for
explicit reflection on the hermeneutical character of all the
religious disciplines, including the hermeneutical develop-
ments (as elucidated by Wach, Mircea Eliade, Joseph M.
Kitagawa, Charles H. Long, et al.) in history of religions
and the widely recognized hermeneutical character of all
theology.
In order to understand the present situation of radical
religious pluralism, theologians must interpret it theological-
ly. Interpretation is not a technique to be added on to experi-
ence and understanding but is, as Hans-Georg Gadamer and
Paul Ricoeur argue, anterior and intrinsic to understanding
itself. This is especially the case for any theological interpre-
tation of the contemporary situation. For theology attempts
to discern and interpret those fundamental questions (fini-
tude, estrangement, alienation, oppression, fundamental
trust or mistrust, loyalty, anxiety, transience, mortality, etc.)
that disclose a religious dimension in the contemporary
situation.
Paul Tillich described this hermeneutical character of
theology as the need for an explicit analysis of the given “situ-
ation,” that is, for a creative interpretation of our experience
which discloses a religious dimension (for example, of cultur-
al pluralism itself). It is possible to distinguish, but not to
separate, the theologian’s analysis of the “situation” from his
or her analysis of a particular religious tradition. Theolo-
gians, in sum, interpret both “situation” and “tradition.” In
some manner, implicit or explicit, they must correlate these
two distinct but related interpretations. Like any other inter-
preter of the contemporary pluralistic situation, and like any
other interpreter of the religious questions in that situation,
the theologian brings some prior understanding to the inter-
pretation—an understanding influenced by the historical
givens of a particular religious tradition. A Buddhist compar-
ative theology, for example, will inevitably be different from
a Jewish comparative theology.
The clarification of the emerging discipline called “com-
parative theology” follows from this brief analysis of theology
itself as an academic and hermeneutical discipline. In the
sense outlined above, theology is an intrinsically hermeneuti-
cal discipline that interprets intellectually a particular tradi-
tion in a particular situation. Further, any interpretation of
a tradition will always be made in and for a particular situa-
tion. In classical Western hermeneutical terms, this means
that every act of interpretation includes not only intelligentia
(“understanding”) and explicatio (“explanation”), but also
applicatio, an application of the interpretation to its context
that is at the same time a precondition to any understanding
and interpretation.
A properly theological interpretation of the contempo-
rary situation demands that those fundamental religious
questions cited above be raised, for the responses to them by
a particular religious tradition are the primary, strictly theo-
logical, means of interpreting that tradition (e.g., an interpre-
tation of the way of Buddhist enlightenment as the response
to a fundamental situation of suffering and a fundamental
state of inauthentic existence seen as “ignorance”; an inter-
pretation of the Christian creed of faith, hope, and love as
a response to the fundamental situation of suffering and an
existential state of inauthentic existence seen as sin). Internal
to each theological interpretation of each religious tradition,
moreover, is a theological assessment and identification of
the normative elements of that religion (e.g., identification
of the proper canons of the religion, of the proper role of
“tradition,” of the proper role of modern historical research,
etc.).
Any theology, therefore, involves the development of a
set of mutually critical correlations between two distinct but
related interpretations: an interpretation of the tradition and
an interpretation of the contemporary situation. But it is im-
portant not to presume that a tradition will always supply
adequate responses to the questions suggested by the con-
temporary situation. Rather, as the qualifying phrase “mutu-
ally critical” suggests, the theologian cannot determine be-
fore the concrete interpretation itself whether the traditional
responses of a religion are adequate to the contemporary
situation.
In strictly logical terms, the concept of “mutually critical
correlations” suggests a number of possible relations between
the theologian’s two somewhat distinct interpretations: (1)
identities between the questions prompted by and the re-
sponses to the situation and the questions and responses
given by the tradition (as in many liberal and modernist
Christian theologies); (2) similarities-in-difference, or analo-
gies, between those two interpretations (as in many Neo-
Confucian “theologies”); and (3) radical disjunctions, or
more existentially, confrontations, between the two (as in the
Hindu and Buddhist insistence on the necessity of the reality
of a “higher consciousness”); or the radical dialectic of the
sacred and the profane in archaic ontologies; or the radical
correction of traditional self-interpretations of a religion after
the emergence of historical consciousness.
In properly general and heuristic terms, therefore, theol-
ogy is an intellectual enterprise that may now be described
more exactly as the hermeneutical attempt to establish mutu-
ally critical correlations between the claims to religious
meaningfulness and truth of a religious tradition and the
claims to religious meaningfulness and truth within the his-
torical situation for which that tradition is being interpreted.
This general model of theology as an intellectual disci-
pline within religious studies may be further specified to
demonstrate how “comparative theology” both fits and chal-
lenges it. Comparative theology fits the model insofar as it
also demands that the theologian attempt to establish mutu-9132 THEOLOGY: COMPARATIVE THEOLOGY