Having devoted myself to the field of comparative theology, and recently developed a typology of types of learning from other religions, this new book by David Brown immediately spiked my interest. Learning from other religions represents the new frontier in theological reflection and any classically trained theologian who is willing to explore this frontier can only be applauded. It must be made clear that the book involves “Christian” learning from other religions which is not specified in the title, and which, in the context of religious diversity should not be taken for granted. The author situates himself as a Christian theologian who while “making generous use of modern studies in comparative religion and Christian theology” differs “from most practitioners of the former by insisting on going beyond objectivity into sympathetic identification with the religion concerned” and from the latter by going “beyond generalities into recognition of specific areas where I believe God may have spoken through that religion” (1). Curiously, there is no mention of the discipline of comparative theology, which for decades has done just that. Christian comparative theologians with expertise in the languages, texts, and teachings of other religions have been involved in deep theological engagement with particular texts, teachings and ritual practices of other religions, little or none of which is mentioned in this book. Brown mentions Keith Ward and Francis Clooney in passing, but seems unaware of the comparative theological scholarship that has been produced by other theologians. In the area of theology of religions, Brown seeks to distinguish himself from the classical models or approaches of pluralism, inclusivism and exclusivism. But he does not engage any of these approaches with much depth or nuance, or realize that his own position is in fact very close to that of many other inclusivist theologians.

In spite of these shortcomings, there is certainly much to gain from following the thoughts and insights of a distinguished theologian who seeks to identify particular areas of strength or, as he puts it, “superiority” in other religions, and suggest ways in which Christianity might learn from them. Brown’s aim is thus not to go into the historical details or the internal diversity or complexity of particular religions, but rather to lift up particular ideas or practices in which he recognizes God at work in other religions. Each chapter begins with a general introduction to another religion, focusing then on a particular area or “test case” which he believes is ripe for theological learning. He offers a clear, sympathetic picture of other religions, albeit here and there with minor mistakes. The chapter on paganism is mainly intent on demonstrating the continuity between Christianity and ancient forms of polytheism, considering “whether it is possible to conceive of the single, unique God acting through the forms and symbolism deployed by polytheistic worshippers for a specific, more limited deity” (48). This sets the stage for his openness to the ways in which God might also reveal Godself in the particular manifestations of the divine in other religions. In Hinduism, it is in particular the visual element of the religion and the experience of darshan, seeing and being seen by the divine, which Brown regards as possibly inspiring for Christians. Another area in which he believes Christianity might learn from Hinduism lies in its more fluid conception of the gendered nature of the divine. The Hindu pantheon indeed contains multiple female, as well as male gods which, when viewed as different manifestations of the one ultimate reality, might help to overcome the predominantly male identification of the divine. With regard to the religions of India (Jainism, Buddhism and Sikhism), Brown is mainly intent on demonstrating that some of their central beliefs are not all that far removed from Christianity. The Jain belief in reincarnation may be aligned with Christian notions of ultimate justice, Buddhist notions of suffering and craving with Christian ideas of sacrifice, and Sikh ideas of the radical transcendence of God with Christian analogues. On the basis of these similarities, Christianity might then learn from particular accents of the other religion, from Jainism its critique of human-centeredness, from Buddhism its practical dealings with suffering and its practices of meditation, and from Sikhism its rejection of any personal conception of the divine. From Taoism Christianity might learn to adopt a more serene attitude toward the natural cycle of birth and death, and from Confucianism greater social etiquette and respect for others. Brown refers to the changes that occurred in Mahayana Buddhism in China and Japan as a basis for acknowledging analogous changes in Christology. While somewhat less sympathetic to Zen Buddhism, Brown argues that the understanding of divine grace in Pure Land Buddhism “could clarify and indeed improve more traditional Christian presentations of grace” (258). When discussing Islam, Brown first calls attention to the threat of fundamentalism, pointing to resources within the Muslim tradition itself, and in particular within Sufism, to resist this trend. In comparing the Qur’an to Christian scriptures, Brown points to particular areas in which “the Qur’an has the edge” in showing “a more sympathetic and less petty conception of divinity” (308). The history of Islam may also be inspiring insofar as it has been exemplary in the areas of science and architecture.

From this all too brief summary of areas of Christian learning from other religions, some general trends or orientations become manifest. Brown is mainly interested in the general conceptions of the divine itself in various traditions. This is what draws his attention in paganism, Hinduism, Sikhism, Shinto, Pure Land Buddhism and Islam. It is not surprising that a theologian would be drawn to these aspects of other religions. However, this leaves out the internal diversity and complexity of religious traditions, the varied ritual practices, and the history of interpretation and development within religions. Though Brown does deal with the difference between Theravada and Mahayana schools of Buddhism, there is little reference to particular thinkers or traditions of thought. This may leave readers with a rather reified and static conception of other religions, which cannot have been the intention of the author.

A striking omission in the book is any discussion of learning from contemporary Judaism. Brown attempts to justify this by stating that Judaism “is the one with which modern Christian theology has most often sought to engage, so readers may confidently be left to the many reflections on the matter in other writings” (29). There is, however, no reference to other writings, and the neglect of any constructive engagement with Judaism raises some questions. Does the author simply presume a continuity between the Hebrew Bible and contemporary Jewish conceptions of the divine? Is there an implicit supersessionism in his approach? Here and there, the book contains a subtle jab at Judaism. In the chapter on Islam, for example, Brown speaks of the Qur’an retelling Biblical stories “in a way that is presumed to be most compatible with the identity of who God really is: not, for example, partial toward the Jews, nor someone who grants special privileges to his favorites” (307). And when acknowledging the special relationship between Christianity and Judaism, he states that “such an admission should not of course lead to the automatic endorsement of every presumed expression of that continuing covenant with Judaism” (356). These statements would be more palatable if Brown had also discussed positively what Christianity might actually also learn from contemporary Judaism, or raised similar qualifications with regard to other religions. The treatment of Judaism in interreligious dialogue and comparative theology is indeed often a point of contention. Some Christian theologians regard Judaism as a privileged partner in dialogue and a test-case for all other dialogues. There is of course a troubled history of Christian-Jewish relations that needs to be addressed. But there is also much to be said for treating modern Judaism as a distinct religion and with the openness and respect, and the possibility of learning equal to any other religion. To ignore developments in the Jewish conceptions of the divine over the past two thousand years inevitably raises questions.

The main contention of the author is that “conditioning by cultural context might allow different insights to reach prominence at different times within the faith perspective of the various faith communities” and that some religious conceptions of the divine may be superior to others in certain respects. The presumption is that historical and cultural contexts play a constitutive role in the formation of conceptions of the divine and that each context represents “shards or broken potsherds, full of promise yet incomplete in themselves” (19). Though Brown declares himself a committed Christian and calls on members of various traditions to “remain committed to their own perspective but at the same time more open than they were in the past to the possibility of learning how revelation may have operated elsewhere” (10), he rejects the claim to ultimacy of any particular religion. He also distances himself from inclusivism which he characterizes as “the view that other religions may be seen as at most partial and imperfect anticipations of Christianity” (17) and pluralism, which he believes does not sufficiently acknowledge the differences between religions, reducing them to a common denominator. It must first be pointed out that his views of both inclusivism and pluralism are rather narrow or limited and do not reflect the diversity of positions within or approaches to the two models. Scholars have distinguished between closed and open inclusivism, the latter acknowledging the distinctiveness of other religions, and the possibility for serious learning from others. Pluralism, for its part, is not merely focused on the similarities between religions, but on their complementarity. The main difference between the two models is that inclusivism involves the recognition of the normativity of one’s own religion in engaging the truth of other religions while pluralism distances itself from any religion-based criteria of truth. In light of this more expansive understanding of the two models, Brown’s approach fits squarely in the inclusivist camp, although he does not make fully transparent his criteria of discernment. This leads to the impression that it is Brown himself who decides what aspects of which religions are true or false, and what Christianity ought to learn and incorporate. To be sure, all engagement with other religions require choices or selection, and comparative theologians tend to engage particular texts, teachings or practices in another religion to which they are personally drawn. But one important rule in comparative theology is to make as transparent as possible one’s choices and one’s criteria for discernment. In justifying one’s choices, theologians also demonstrate their command of the other tradition, and in clarifying one’s criteria, they inscribe themselves within a particular tradition, submitting their own judgment to revealed norms. In skipping these steps, Brown’s focus on what Christianity might learn from other religions come across as somewhat random, and his judgment of them personal or subjective. Since he identifies himself clearly as a Christian, it is possible, even likely, that he will assess other religions on the basis of Christian revelation. But in not clarifying that point, Brown may be perceived as standing above or beyond all religious traditions and judging for himself how the different shards or broken potsherds of the various traditions fit together into “a more complete picture of the whole” (19).

Though Learning from Other Religions would have benefitted from a more thorough engagement with developments in theology of religions and comparative theology, both of which have developed very nuanced and learned insights into both the conditions for learning from other religions and examples of actual learning, Brown offers interesting glimpses into areas that are indeed ripe for further comparative theological reflection. His own background in Patristics and his interest in architecture shine through in particular. And for any Christian who may not have the opportunity to delve more deeply into the study of particular other religion, this book offers a welcome introduction to what an open and generous attitude to other religions might look like.

It is a pleasure to respond to this engagement with other faith traditions by David Brown (B) in his provocative work Learning from Other Religions. This book is one of the productive fruits of the pandemic as the author admits. There are points I find refreshingly honest, parts which I am sympathetic with but with some disagreement, and important methodological points I find problematic. The latter concerns his performative, implicit affirmation of both pluralism and inclusivism, although he sees both as inadequate.

This is not a typical study of comparative theology/survey of major world’s religions. In the background of the author’s overview is a searching, unthematized theology of religions. One can distinguish between theologies of interfaith dialogue, comparative theologies, and theologies of religions. B. is presenting the reader with comparative theology as he traverses some of the major religious traditions. While he likely intends to practice interfaith dialogue, I suspect his underlying concern is developing a theology of religions.

What I find refreshing in B.’s work is that he does not ignore the difficult differences when dialoguing with other religions, as many Christians engaging other religions do. For instance, he includes the example of the caste system in Hinduism, which can be especially problematic for Christian (especially Catholic) social teaching (356) insofar as the belief reflects a religious sanction of a structural disadvantage to marginalized members of society.

There are different kinds of differences, as the Canadian theologian and philosopher Bernard Lonergan delineates them.1 Complementary differences are those that can be mutually enriching between various interfaith dialogue partners. Genetic differences mark those differences in stages of religious development. With respect to development in religious traditions, it pertains to the extent that the tradition has reckoned with its mythic consciousness. The latter tends to displace the sacred onto outward expressions of the tradition. It is the kind of difference that Lonergan mentioned as a “sacralization to be dropped,” as in the fusion of church and state, self-proclaimed messiahs and prophets, and violence associated with sacrifice.2 Religions can be in various stages of development as Lonergan conceived in the three historical stages of meaning: commonsense, theory and interiority. Dialectical or contradictory differences are those differences that cannot be reconciled easily, if at all, without some change within one or both parties in the dialogue. These differences can effect a transformation in one’s outlook. It can also occasion a creative breakthrough in theological understanding. The latter might be exemplified by Thomas Merton’s experiments with Christian and Buddhist monastic practices that led to the ongoing dialogues following his death.3

Still, many comparative theologians today resist engaging contradictory/dialectical differences for various reasons, as they instead practice epoché (suspended judgment) or its milder variant, empathy. B. is critical of the latter approach as reflective of a liberal modernism where “significant [serious] difference is tolerated” (359) or “real differences are circumvented rather than face[d]” (364).

That said, there are some drawbacks of nomenclature in B.’s work as when he prefers “primitive” to “traditional” religions when referring to “First Nations” or “Aboriginal” religions (221 & n. 34). Needless to ask, would it not be more accurate or respectful to refer to them descriptively as indigenous religions/religious practices?

Further, B. makes a controversial statement (in passing) when he compares the fundamentalism of Islam with that of Christianity: “Christian fundamentalism exhibits little or none of the violence characteristic of the Islamic version” (261). This statement is problematic for several reasons, but it could be avoided altogether by simply referring to the subject as religious extremism rather than fundamentalism. Extremists, who can exist in any religion, are those who co-opt religious beliefs for ideological purposes, and often use violence as a means for advancing their agenda. Moreover, there is also the dilemma of when church and state are suffused, or closely cooperate, which consequently leads to the danger of religion being weaponized as a means to an end. Concurrently, Canada is reckoning with a painful legacy of cultural destruction against First Nations people brought about in part by a partnership between the Canadian government and various Christian denominations with respect to residential schools and child adoptive practices.

Revelation

B. defines revelation as “an awareness or encounter with divine or transcendent reality which communicates non-coercively within specific contexts something significant both for the understanding of ultimate reality as well as humanity’s relationship with it” (313). He then references three analytic philosophers to support his position that the experience of revelation is analogous to the irreducibility of moral values and aesthetic experience. Later in the book he will also reference the famous apparitions of Lourdes, France. In all of this, clarification is called for to distinguish, revelation from revelatory experience; revelation as private (personal) versus general (communal); and how religious experience is different from aesthetic experience and the apprehension of moral value.

Theology of Religions

B. engages the inadequacy of Alan Race’s distinctions of exclusivism, inclusivism and pluralism. B. suggests Race’s more recent work would likely judge B. to espouse another kind of inclusivism (22). However, B.’s image of the various religions as “complementary shards” indicates more of a pluralism insofar as he is suggesting that religious claims of each religion are “equally” valid:

The most complete divine disclosure possible would be rather like a beautiful inlaid pattern on a collection of ancient vases, alluring and fascinating in detail yet currently only detectable in part on a number of shards or broken parts. . . . In other words, each and every religion falls short of the ideal or totality. They are more like these shards or broken potsherds, full of promise yet incomplete in themselves. The fullest pattern is only recoverable by noting complementary elements, different bits of the jigsaw, as it were: fuzzy parallels that need to be worked at, in order to provide a more complete picture of the whole. (19)

By contrast, he seeks to expand the notion of revelation in chapter 8. Although that very idea suggests an inclusivist approach, implying that the expanded notion of revelation would account for other religious faiths. B. does not seem to be aware of Jacques Dupuis’s alternative to Race’s three options. Dupuis suggested the option for inclusivist pluralism.4 If it is true that B. wants to move beyond inclusivism and pluralism (17), could Dupuis’s category be the alternative he is looking for? And, why is Dupuis not resourced?

Concluding Comment

Space does not allow me to respond to what I feel are dismissals of John Hick, Paul Knitter, and Thich Nhat Hanh. Although I resonate with B.’s resourcing of Hindu female deities for Christianity and I find it to be an intriguing suggestion. An earlier published comment I made resonates with his rationale: “The feminine aspect of God is one of the most neglected dimensions in Western religious life. In fact, the lack of [a] feminine dimension of God is a gaping wound, and many are unaware of the ramifications of its absence in our collective psyche.”5 While I am not sure I agree with his appropriation of the divine feminine, I do agree with his sensibilities on the topic. After all, there are roughly one billion Roman Catholics in the world. Presumably half of them are women, yet today, no woman has an official ecclesiastical, constitutive role in the church. This disparity and the attitudes that consciously and unconsciously support this reality are inextricably related to the occlusion of the divine feminine.

Whereas earlier I referred to three stages of meaning in Lonergan, a fourth stage of meaning has been identified as a post-Lonergan development. It recognizes the priority of intersubjectivity vertically (towards ultimate transcendence) and horizontally towards the other. B.’s work operates in the horizon of a paradigmatic shift towards a fourth stage of meaning, a stage whose formal inauguration could be said to lie in what Diana Eck identifies as the significance of the inaugural World Parliament of Religions in Chicago in 1893.6 B.’s work is in the context of a broader, historical, paradigmatic engagement of Christianity with pluralism. The complexity of this paradigm shift calls for a certain level of theological exploration. While his approach may not be agreeable to many North American comparative theologians, some of his insights are worthy of consideration. Moreover, the questions he raises are endemic to our Zeitgeist.

In this optimistic book (an optimism I share), David Brown offers an engaging account of religions in the context of interreligious understanding and the living relevance of religions for practitioners in the contemporary world. The book addresses the issue of the diversity of religions and the question of how we make sense of claims of diverse “revelations” and—acknowledging that complete reconciliation may not be possible—how we can achieve a richer notion of revelation conducive to getting along with one another. The book’s title, Learning from Other Religions, contains the perspective that “other religions” means “non-Christian,” but whereas in the past, inter-faith works might wish to argue for the superiority of Christianity, this book does not, but is open to a genuinely pluralist understanding of revelation. This is a refreshing engagement with religions in the plural that avoids, on the one hand, a reduction to a common denominator and, on the other, to a theological supremacism. The book’s stated aims are firstly to offer a characterisation of each of the world’s major religions in historical and contemporary context, and the second is a theological reflection that posits the work of God in the religions described. In the context of Christianity’s claim to both uniqueness and historicity, this is a bold venture but one that, I think, is exactly what is needed from Christian Theology. God might speak through different religions in their diversity and contradiction, and the book presents possibilities of hearing that voice in the particularity of distinct revelations. For example, Christianity could be enriched by taking on feminine imagery of the divine from Hinduism (101). The history of each of religion is complex, diverse and often due to historical events that could have gone in a different direction to different outcomes. But even so, there are areas in which distinct religions come into proximity, for example the experiential element in Buddhism and the Stoic inheritance in Christian ethics meet in practical attitudes to suffering (152–53), through cultivating meditation and detachment. In terms of the categories of exclusivism, inclusivism, and pluralism, this book is in a sense inclusivist, but it goes beyond these categories in acknowledging “a much more complex reality in which one’s own religion does not always win” (22). Divine revelation is not total in any religion, but rather we have a complex history that reflects ultimate reality, “a jigsaw of broken potsherds . . . with no single religion always in possession of the best perspective on the whole” (311). This entails re-examining the very notion of revelation to be inclusive of otherness, an enlarged notion in which revelation becomes “a suitable model for encountering transcendence” (313). This rich work provoked three lines of thinking in me, the first might be called a metaphysical concern, the second an evolutionary concern, and the third a methodological concern.

The metaphysical concern might be stated that the religions discussed have a wide range of theologies and philosophies about the nature of the person, the world, and the future. But perhaps one common idea is that of authoritative source: they all, even Confucianism and Buddhism, have a revelation that makes claims upon those within the community of reception. In a sense, the notion of revelation might be a placeholder for being filled with different content and being arrived at in historically specific ways, as we see with the Qur’an (280–85) or the formation of the Guru Granth Sahib (158–59). But there are, as the book acknowledges, vast differences in understanding of metaphysical issues such as the fate of the person after death, the purpose of history, and the very status of the world and cosmos. Hinduism, to take an example I am familiar with, advocates the reincarnation of a soul in different bodies according to its action (karma), a position at odds with Christian, Jewish, or Abrahamic eschatology. It is important to appreciate these claims in the context of their occurrence and we can go far in understanding the nature of distinct, historical, civilizational blocks such as China, India, or the Middle East through recognizing such diversity. Thus, we have different historical attitudes to time in pre-modern India where history is part of a cycle of repetition and where a telos to history itself is precluded, which partly accounts for the general lack of historiography in ancient India, perhaps with the exception of Kalhana’s Chronicle of the Kings of Kashmir (12th century). Another example of metaphysical exclusion might be Christian claims about the trinity being at odds with Jewish or Muslim claims about divine oneness. But it seems to me that one of the points of the book is to move away from an incompatibilist model through developing points of convergence while also acknowledging the distinction of theological or metaphysical claims. It is, of course, not possible to adjudicate on such matters from a point outside of thought, as arguably doctrines about God are not empirical claims, although some Hindus regard reincarnation a being an empirical claim. Outside of these kinds of issues, world religions have important and relevant points of contact in concern with environment, in concern with the nature of the person and community, and in concern for the human and planetary future. I do think that some traditions have more positive attitudes to nature and world than others: most Christianity, Islam, Hinduism for example, have positive evaluations of nature while arguably some traditions are gnostic in orientation, where our true home is elsewhere (life as journey back to God, to the further shore, to the alone). These would be less compatible with contemporary values concerning the environment and validity of nature for its own sake.

Secondly, my evolutionary concern is more of an observation. The book early on observes how as new disciplines emerge, their advocates have wished to claim their particular explanation to be total, providing a full explanation of religion, be this from sociology, psychology or anthropology, or more recently from the study of cognition (12–13). Brown’s book does not deeply engage with social scientific or evolutionary claims, but neither is it dismissive of them; this book is engaged in a different activity. This activity of interfaith encounter is not that of social science that seeks causal explanations of religion. Indeed, the book eschews the explanation of religion in any mono-causal sense, but I am wondering whether Brown’s generous reading of other religions might actually be enhanced by engagement with evolution (as we saw with Robert Bellah’s Religion and Human Evolution some ten years ago). It is not that we wish to explain religious revelation, but we can raise the question, that I take from John Bowker’s work: what are the constraints that control an event into its particularity (in, for example, Why Religions Matter)? In asking a question not about cause, as social science does, but about constraint, we are opening discussion to a broader range of historical processes and even allowing the possibility of truth to claims of revelation: there could be supernatural constraints operative upon the production of specific revelations within history. This book does indeed engage the notion of “constraint” (318–19), that transcendence could be operative in different revelations, which seems to me to be a central question. Although the book does not use the term, such an approach might be called phenomenological and complementary to an interreligious, theological discussion that the book presents. Theological accounts of religions, such as this book, operate within a context in which contemporary synchronic knowledge of the cosmos along with the depth of the evolutionary past, diachronically, suggest that our categories of operation should exceed the theological languages of traditions in order to remain relevant to contemporary discourse. Learning from Other Religions is an important step from within Christianity in openness to the other and taking seriously claims of other traditions, and I wonder whether a further step might be to incorporate as far as possible the claims of contemporary knowledge about the human species, how we came to be as we are, and about the wider cosmos. But the larger issue of truth claims in the Philosophy of Religions remains beyond resolution other than in the kind of ways suggested by Learning from Other Religions. If we are speaking from within Christian Theology, I suspect that Brown’s position is the best we can do in encountering the religious other: a generous spirit of openness and non-closure. It seems to me that this is not simply an intellectual activity but that the main things that religions share is ritual act that brings communities together and into communion with a wider cosmos. It could be that ritual act draws us more closely into our evolutionary roots and connects us not only to the communities we belong to, but to resonance with a wider cosmos as a function of human freedom. In Bowker’s paradoxical idea, the more complex the web of constraint upon us, the greater our freedom.

Thirdly I can imagine that this book might be critiqued from what we might call a deconstructionist or critical perspective. My own view, and the implicit view of the book, is that the categories “religion” and “world religion” (the book uses the term “faiths”) are still viable. The critique of religion and the world religions paradigm over the last thirty years (one thinks of Masuzawa, McCutcheon, Fitzgerald, to name a few) implies that projects such as this are no longer viable because “religion” is a western category that has, in fact, served to distort the self-representations of “other” traditions. This critique of religion, not so much in terms of evolution or the hard sciences but in terms of cultural values, has almost become an orthodoxy in departments of Religion. If I might attempt an answer my own question using the categories of the present book, we could argue that what Learning from Other Religions teaches us is that there are civilizational dynamics operative through history that are constrained by those forms of culture (i.e. “religions”) and that these cultural forms have had massive impact upon the way we live our lives and the global world order we live within. This is simply a description of what is the case. Whether those forms of life that we call religions should continue to impact our lives is a different question, but areas of the world where attempts have been made to erase religions have turned into historical disasters. It could be that in the secularised West, with the rise of the “nones,” religions as we know them will fade from history, but if there is a human impulse towards what we might call holiness, then other cultural forms will inevitably take their place. But jeopardy lies in the opposite direction too, in fundamentalism, of endorsing a particular religious worldview to the exclusion of others. The book highlights such retreat as a danger threatening contemporary religions of all kinds and a challenge to the social order. Such retreat into reactionary perspectives and old certainties are not conducive to the human good. Rather we need sympathetic and imaginative openness to each other and to the future (346–54). Both fundamentalism and an aggressive secularism underestimate the complexity of historical revelation and the challenges facing humanity. In making this claim the book goes beyond inclusivist and pluralist perspectives in that we need to acknowledge not only the legitimacy of other religious outlooks, but to learn from practices and beliefs (356). Furthermore, this is not only what I would call a horizontal view, but we need a vertical view too, that comparative theology is not simply a human construction but a response “to the outreach of the divine to humanity” (369). While there are other ways of understanding the history of religions (Philology, Phenomenology, Anthropology), this way is important within the horizon of Christian Theology. Religions are crucial as giving meaning to the human enterprise, as ways of telling stories about who we are, and whose function will inevitably continue. This book offers a Christian vision of how that might be. Learning From Other Religions is an optimistic volume that claims that we not only can learn from other religions, but that we should learn from them (at least the good things like beauty, kindness, awe), a claim that I would heartily endorse.

In my college recently I discovered that the neighboring set of rooms had been turned into a “prayer room.” This was surprising since the college has a shortage of rooms. I wrote to an administrator and asked about this development. For whom was this prayer room, and to whom might the prayers be addressed? I received, perhaps unsurprisingly, no answer to this question. This is a predictable problem in a nominally Christian institution after the end of Christendom. Yet for Christian theology this is a genuine difficulty. The greatest Christian theologians have often quietly ignored the question of Christianity’s relation to other great religions. Some of the greatest modern theologians, from Schleiermacher to Barth, have largely ignored comparative religion in their accounts of Christian theology. This is surprising, given Christianity’s close historic relations with both Judaism and Islam. Even Aquinas happily cites Maimonides and Avicenna as authorities! David Brown’s book <em>Learning from Other Religions</em> is an attempt to address this problem in a nuanced and hospitable manner. While he rejects the theological positivism that enables Barth and his followers to ignore non-Christian religion, he also wishes to avoid diluting the distinctive Christian message. Brown is steering between the Scylla of theological positivism and the Charybdis of relativism, or between inclusivism and pluralism. The first position becomes uncomfortably imperialistic; the second gives up the truth claim—or redefines it so as to lose any real focus. In this meticulously researched and thoughtful work, Brown wants to keep the balance between divine address and human response: revelation and hermeneutics, encounter and imagination. It is a work of daunting scope. Learning from other religions is not just a matter of charity but hard work, and David Brown’s Herculean labors are presented with an agile and graceful elegance.

The relations of the major world religions is clearly a pressing matter in an increasingly global context, and it has been long so, of course, agonistic. From the battle of Tours in 732 to the Fall of Constantinople in 1453, the battle of Lepanto 1571 or the siege of Vienna in 1683, the protection of a Christian Europe from Islamic conquest is a recurring theme in Western history, and the traces of these conflicts are still evident to this day in the Balkans. Even such a fragile sense of Christendom was finally ruptured by Christian nations waging havoc against each other in the savagery of the First World War in early part of the twentieth century, generating in turn the secular ideologies of fascism and communism, and indeed that war brought about the end of the Ottoman caliphate. Since the military defeat of fascism and the economic collapse of socialism with the end of Soviet regime, Islam has become a renewed concern in the West. 9/11, and the emergence of increasingly vocal Muslim communities in Europe and North America. The rather odd, indeed dubious, term “Islamophobia” has become a familiar word of vituperation in contemporary discussions in Britain. Since Islam is not a religion tied to ethnicity, and covers a range of conflicted and mutually hostile subgroups, it is not clear what this alleged fear of Islam consists in! Furthermore, the word suggests a pathology, as if this were some social malady among Christian or secular Westerners. It might conceivably mean the traditional Christian objection to the claim that Islam is the final religion and the Qur’an the perfect book. The charge of “Mohammedanism” was used as an attack upon Socinian (i.e. Unitarian) Christians in the 17th century. Without the Trinity, so the argument went, Christianity collapses into the religion of a prophet. Brown’s sensitive and nuanced account of Islam is a timely contribution to a much needed debate.

Hinduism, by contrast, is rather less prominent at present in debate in the West than Islam. Notwithstanding a considerable and prominent Hindu diaspora, it seems the great age of Christian Hindu relations, of Christian non-dualists like Bede Griffiths and Swami Abhishiktananda, aka Henri Le Saux, and Sara Grant, has become rather remote, as have those pilgrimages of celebrities and writers of the counter-culture in the last century to the subcontinent. India itself is a remarkable testament to a major thesis of Brown’s book, of the enrichment emerging through the interaction between distinct religious traditions. Christianity, as Brown notes, is a much older religion in India than Islam, and there were native Christians of India long before arrival of the Portuguese and other European traders. The claim is that is derives from the Apostle Thomas, and Eusebius refers to Christians in India in the second century AD. When the Portuguese first encountered the Christian Indians, they seem to have believed that they were, in fact, Hindus. Whether this was syncretism or dialogue at work is unclear!

Buddhism is a more difficult terrain, with its denial of a transcendent God and the existence of a soul. Its appeal to modern Westerners who want “spirituality” rather than “religion” is well documented. When Western Jesuit missionaries first encountered Buddhism, it coincided in Europe with intense debates about atheism and superstition, and the Jesuits were inclined to see Buddhism as showing signs of both atheism and superstition! Brown’s account of Theravada and Mahayana is rich and sympathetic. Buddhism is largely discussed within chapters on the religions of China and Japan, which include detailed accounts of Confucianism, Taoism and Shintoism. Some great theologians have already ventured into this territory: the learned Jesuit Henri de Lubac (1896–1991) regarded Buddhism to be, next to Christianity, the greatest spiritual revelation in human history.

Christianity itself emerged from a complex and often syncretistic context. The Destruction of the First Jerusalem Temple by Nebuchadnezzar in 586 BC led to a Jewish Diaspora. It was in the period of the Babylonian exile that the institution of the Synagogue emerged. The largest, and culturally most noteworthy, was eventually located in Alexandria. Hence the Jewish Diaspora was not the result of the second Temple Destruction of AD 70: it had been established long before. And the existence of a large Jewish community in the Hellenistic-Roman era, and a community that required a Greek translation, the Septuagint, of its Scriptures is very important for understanding the emergence of Christianity. A thoroughly Hellenized author like Philo attempts to reconcile the Elohist and the Yahwist accounts of creation of Genesis 1 and 2 and explains the Genesis account in terms drawn from Plato’s <em>Timaeus</em>. In his <em>De opificio mundi</em>, Philo develops the idea of a twofold creation, the first as the incorporeal world and the second as the physical cosmos. By the lifetime of Jesus of Nazareth, Jewish thought was manifesting the influence of Greek metaphysics. Hence Christianity as a religion emerging in Palestine, with its earliest texts in the Greek of the Empire, as shown by Paul’s journeys through Syria, Asia Minor, and Greece and eventually to Rome, was not merely an obscure Jewish apocalypticism, but inhabited a world that could receive the fast spread of the Gospel message. Paul arrives in mainland Greece when he arrives in Philippi in Macedonia in AD 49 or 50, on his own journey from Jerusalem to Athens. It hard to judge the philosophical influences upon St. Paul, but as an erudite Hellenized Jew of the period, he is clearly the inheritor of the universalism and stress upon interiority that emerged among philosophers in the age of Hellenism. Of course, he can appeal plausibly to the common ground between him and his hearers as the “unknown God” (<em>Ἄγνωστος Θεός</em>) at the Areopagus in Athens (Acts 17:22–31).

There have always been prominent figures within the Christian tradition who have wished to downplay the dependence of Christianity upon Judaism or pagan thought and culture. The idea of a Christian canon is derived from the proto-canon of Marcion of Sinope (80–160 AD). Though Marcion was roundly criticized by Justin Martyr and Irenaeus, and excommunicated in 144 AD, there has been a strong Marcionite strand in modern German theology. The contrast between the cruel deity of the Old Testament who created the world and the God of Love in Christ is stressed by Adolf v. Harnack work <em>Marcion, Das Evangelium vom fremden Gott</em> of 1920. This meant that Harnack presented not only the rejection of the Hellenic but also the Old Testament (and Judaism) as a path for the renewal of Christianity. David Brown’s book is a profound and learned corrective to a deeply entrenched Christian exceptionalism, yet without collapsing into vapid relativism.

On this note, however, I cannot concur with Brown’s high estimate of Said’s <em>Orientalism</em> (271–74). This work presents the European fascination for the Orient (mainly the Arab Orient) as a distorting imaginary, an ornamental antithesis to Western Imperialism: a cloak for raw power. Brown notes that, notwithstanding criticisms, “there seems little doubt that Said was in the main right” (273). Said’s text, however, is a mixture of a Marxist-Gramsci inflected grievance narrative of oppressor and oppressed, together with relativism in the familiar Foucault-Derrida mold. On the one hand, Said is dismissive of the much-vaunted Enlightenment universalism and he himself maintains relativism, whilst scathingly critical of Western Christian culture. I wish to consider a particular example: Sir William Jones (1746–1794), a scholar who exerted a profound influence on the Romantics. By 1783, when he was appointed judge in Calcutta, he was an eminent Orientalist and a feted man of letters in London. In 1784 Jones founded the Asiatic Society. The publications of the Asiatic Society produced a barrage of publications about Indian thought and culture, which had a considerable influence throughout Europe and especially in Germany. Significantly, he had significant theological and philosophical interests, and was the illustrious font of the extraordinary development of Indic studies in Europe, from Herder to Friedrich Schlegel, Schopenhauer, and Max Müller, and indeed facilitated the renaissance of Indian letters in Bengal. As Nehru wrote: “to Jones . . . India owes a deep debt of gratitude for the rediscovery of her past literature” (<em>The Discovery of India</em>, 266). Yet this intellectual titan is treated by Said as “the undisputed founder . . . of Orientalism,” i.e. the study of the East in the service of mastery of it. Jones’s endeavor according to Said, was “to gather in, to rope off, to domesticate the Orient and thereby turn it into a province of European learning . . . To rule and to learn . . . these were Jones’s goals”; “to subdue” was his “irresistible impulse” (<em>Orientalism</em>, 78). To treat the achievements of figure of the stature of Jones is characteristic of a procrustean and intolerant ideology that is committed to unmasking even the most innocent and generous actions as instruments of subjugation. It is of note that Jones had strong theological motivations, and he was inspired in his scholarship by the renaissance idea of an “ancient theology.” Jones exploration of the literature of ancient India was an attempt to explore parallels and differences with the West, and his Christian Platonism was a powerful impulse. Said is oblivious to such genuine (and to my mind legitimate) theological considerations, and as an agnostic American from a Christian Palestinian background, constitutes a problematic source for Christian dialogue with the “Orient,” notwithstanding his considerable influence on our institutions.

I suggest that a figure like the renowned philosopher Henry Corbin shows how genuine conversation between Christians and Muslims need not collapse into exploitation. Corbin is a highly contested figure, and his view of Islam is consciously partial. Living between Tehran and Paris and actively involved in <em>Eranos</em>, Corbin undertook a Platonic Odyssey articulated in terms of the Zoroastrian angelology of ancient Persia. Suhrawardi was Corbin’s greatest influence. With Suhrawardi’s philosophy, Corbin’s dedication to Islamic mysticism is not motivated by the imperialism “exposed” by Said, although Corbin is a pupil of Massignon, and thereby a product of French scholarship. Corbin was also profoundly influenced by Heidegger and German Romanticism. Yet his enthusiasm for mystical Islam was inspired by a sense of the deficit in the West. The materialism and decline of the awareness of the sacred in Occidental culture is precisely the reason for Corbin’s immersion and retrieval of the “visionary recital” of his Persian Platonists. Far from those secularists who regard Islam as a medieval fossil, Corbin presents it as a rich spiritual resource for contemporary thought. Both Brown and Corbin place great emphasis upon the role of the imagination in any serious account of revelation and tradition. Rather the champions of the grievance culture like Said, the future of real dialogue must lie with those inquiring spirits who long for truth in:

The lovely shapes and sounds intelligible
Of that eternal language, which thy God
Utters, who from eternity doth teach
Himself in all, and all things in himself.
Great universal Teacher! he shall mold
Thy spirit, and by giving make it ask.

—Coleridge, <em>Frost at Midnight</em>

It is an honor to join this discussion of David Brown’s Learning from Other Religions. Brown’s thinking on the ways scripture, tradition, and change relate to each other has influenced a good deal of my own writing on those topics. My many references to Brown in Revelation and Authority and in “Dialogical Biblical Theology” provide a happy example of how one religious Jew learned from another religion’s sage—and it’s crucial to note that I learned not simply about the other but about the latent possibilities of my own tradition.

In the book under discussion, Brown describes how Christians can learn from Hinduism and other religions of India, from Islam, and from the religions of East Asia. Throughout Learning from Other Religions, he examines doctrines and descriptions of religious experience from these religions and from ancient, medieval, and modern Christianity. Usually these examinations lead towards a sort of harmonization or negotiation. Brown notes the ways seemingly different religious ideas (such as the notion of a personal God as opposed to an impersonal divine force, or opposed conceptions of what happens to a person after death) ultimately reflect similar theological, metaphysical, or ethical values. Thus the bodily resurrection Christians expect and the reincarnation Buddhists and Jains anticipate seem radically different, but both make manifest a concern for justice. Even where seemingly irreconcilable differences exist, Brown points out that simplistic generalizations create incorrect impressions, because significant exceptions exist on each side. The eschatologies of Buddhism and Christianity appear divergent, as do Buddhist notions of an impersonal infinite and the personal, interactive conception of God in Christianity. But Brown points out that Pure Land Buddhism, with its ideas of grace and the endurance of a human soul, constitutes a major exception to the former generalization, while the testimonies of various Christian mystics constitute a recurring exception to the latter. Thus much of the book focuses the readers’ attention on convergence between Christianity and the other religions. But Brown rejects any shallow attempt to show that, deep down, we’re all somehow the same. On the contrary, he devotes much of the book to providing examples of how differences between religions suggest ways that the doctrine or practice of one religion might benefit from adaptation to those of another. The Daoist perception of yin and yang might temper premodern Christian ideas of original sin, helping the modern Christian to understand that the aggressive side of human nature is balanced by another, more positive side. Humans are not born with a strong disposition towards the one or the other, but constantly face the decision of which side will define us (185). Similarly, the positive value of death as a natural part of the good thing that is life in Daoism suggests that Christians might alter conventional Christian theology’s attitude toward death as something that had not been part of God’s original intention: “Daoism,” Brown writes (187), “would seem to have the capacity of liberate Christian theology into more positive attitudes towards . . . the end of life.”

Suggestive as these proposals are, they suffer, I think, from a tendency towards being presented as observations or assertions; they are rarely defended on any clear basis. In most cases where Brown avers that a given doctrine of one religion might be modified by a given doctrine of another religion, we are left wondering: Why is this modification a good thing? What legitimizes the modification in the thought-system of the religion affected? In the example just given, Daoism “liberates” Christianity—but couldn’t we just as easily say that adopting a more Daoist perspective mars Christianity, or confuses it? Why should a Christian conclude that the Daoist view is an improvement? How can a Christian decide that the modification is legitimate, and that the resulting thought-system truly qualifies as Christian? Why should the adaptation move in the particular direction that Brown suggests rather than the other way around? Similarly, Brown tells us that “although Zen has much to teach Christianity on the value of the impermanent, something essential will have been lost if the Zen notion of Buddha nature is applied universally, even to include transcendent beings” (245). But how do we know what is essential in Christianity, so that the application of some idea learned from another religion must be bounded in some way? What criteria can guide a Christian (or Jew or Jain . . .) to decide on the limits and nature of such learning? How can one determine what is acceptable, and what goes too far?

Brown devotes a good deal of space to comparing Eastern notions of reincarnation, samsara, and moksha with Western notions of resurrection, noting what we might call shared deep structures of value underlying the respective visions of the afterlife. Against Brown, however, I would suggest that the comparison he draws may be useful not due to the commonalities he finds (such as a yearning for justice) but because the comparison puts essential elements of the religions involved on display. The eschatologies most common in Buddhism and Jainism reflect a tendency to reject this world and to devalue the human body, while the insistence of many forms Judaism and Christianity on bodily resurrection highlights their positive attitudes towards this world and the bodies we are privileged to inhabit in it. Further, the latter’s idea of bodily resurrection evince greater esteem for the human individual, which endures in some form after the final trumpet sounds. The comparison, then, is helpful first of all for making core values of various traditions clear. It also is valuable because it shows that these values are not inevitable: deep-thinking religious folk in other parts of the world don’t emphasize the eternal endurance of the individual and might even wonder if the Jewish-Christian esteem for the individual isn’t a bit narcissistic. The Jew or Christian who confronts that possibility need not alter her theology, but with a greater sense of context she might regard her own theology with more skepticism and therefore more humility.

Throughout the book, Brown maintains that drawing two religions, their doctrines, or their approaches to religious experience closer together is a worthy aim, but here again, we are forced to wonder why that should be the case. Overlap, Brown tells us, leads to common ground (312). But is commonality truly a useful goal? Is achieving greater agreement a step forward, or does it lead us back to the sort of problems religions have so often and tragically bequeathed us? Brown writes movingly about the way that individual religions are “broken potsherds” of a larger truth (see, for example, the beautiful passage on pages 310–11). But I think the value of this metaphor is not any suggestion that we can fix what is broken, connect the shards, and thus achieve a greater unity that yields the whole truth. Rather, the core insight here may be that all of our religions are defective and fragmentary. We all see, at best, through a glass darkly, and perhaps we human beings ought not aspire to anything more. It seems to me that the upshot of the metaphor Brown chooses is that all religious people should be humble and tentative about the truth-claims their religions make. Fixing the situation Brown describes is probably impossible; but even more importantly, it may not be a good idea—or God’s will—to begin with. If God revealed various broken potsherds to different communities, perhaps accepting them as valuable but flawed suffices. The quest for a more complete whole that results from finding overlaps and common ground must lead to a sort of harmonization that inevitably does violence to specific aspects of various religions that might be lost through that harmonization.

Most importantly, putting all the shards together into a complete whole (or believing that we have done so) would undermine the lesson of humility the comparative exercise should nurture. As a Jew, I can observe a saintly Christian or Muslim or Hindu; I can realize that she is a serious and wise person who clearly loves God; and at the same time I can notice she has beliefs different from my own. This realization need not lead me to conclude that my beliefs are wrong or engender a desire to convince the other that she would be better off adopting mine. Nor need we negotiate some sort of compromise that requires both of us to modify our beliefs. Rather, this realization can be useful by forcing me to be aware of the limits of my own understanding of God: I think I’m right, but if I sense that this person from another community with beliefs that contradict mine is truly wise, it will follow that even if I am right, there is something incomplete in my perception of God. Guided by Maimonides in the final section of The Guide of the Perplexed (III:51, in the parable of the palace), I can admit that even those of surpassing wisdom (among whom I cannot count myself or even most of the sages of my tradition) cannot understand God fully. The humility that results from acknowledging gaps in my understanding can temper the dangerous zeal religion so often breeds. Our goal as religious people today should not be more complete knowledge of the divine realm; on the contrary, religious thinkers and teachers need to teach their co-religionists that we have a responsibility to acknowledge how little we know about God. Leaning into acknowledging our limitations is what the world needs from religious leaders, not the confidence that a (chimerically) harmonious whole would produce.

Brown speaks in chapter 8 of “Revelation’s Enrichment,” but the contrast between my own tradition’s wisdom and the manifest authenticity of other religions’ wisdom teaches us that all of us are poor when it comes to knowledge of God. The truly religious person needs to confess that poverty rather than overcoming it. Doing so does not involve abandoning the necessarily incomplete revelation a specific community received from God but embracing it with a level of equivocation that prevents us from wanting to impose it on others. The broken nature of the potsherds God gave us is, epistemologically and ethically, a feature, not a bug.

In part, the difference between Brown’s approach and what I am sketching out here reflects a tension between universalists and particularists. Religious universalism depends on and encourages confidence that one has the whole truth, or as much truth as any human will ever have. The result of over-valuing universalism, historically, has been missionary zeal, conquest, intolerance, and bloodshed. After all, if I possess the truth, shouldn’t I share it with others, whether they want it or not? The politics of religious particularism are far less problematic. If I believe my religion is best for me, then I need not feel threatened by others’ religions, and there’s no reason for me to do the others the favor of improving his lot at knifepoint. Here, the Hebrew Bible’s odd form of monotheism as explicated by the philosopher Hermann Cohen and the biblical scholar Yehezkel Kaufmann provides a useful model. The Hebrew Bible does not deny the existence of all other deities, nor does it regard it as inappropriate that other nations worship them. On the contrary, for most biblical authors, the gods of other nations are real; their authority over the nations who worship them is genuine, because the creator God assigned those gods to those nations (as texts such as Deuteronomy 4:19–20 and 32:8–9 explain). This inclusivist model in Hebrew scripture claims a superiority for biblical religion even as it accepts the legitimacy of other religions outside the boundaries of the nation Israel. In the future (texts like Isaiah 19:16–24 and Psalm 82 tell us), God will afford other nations the privilege of worshiping the creator directly rather than through intermediaries. In the meantime, worshipers of the one God can accept the other nations’ polytheism in all lands other than their own as God’s will, rather than something to be fought against. The contemporary biblical scholar Adrian Schenker, O.P. refers to this theology as “a monotheism of transcendence which encompasses polytheism“—that is, it does not reject or eliminate polytheism but regards it as reflecting the will of the one God who appointed the gods to rule over the various nations. This tolerant form of monotheism is not limited to the Hebrew Bible but appears as late as the thirteenth century C.E., in Nachmanides’ commentary on the Pentateuch, at Exodus 20:3 and Leviticus 18:25.

A contemporary point of view is likely to go beyond the inclusivism of this sort of monotheism, and it may demand of the monotheist an even more positive view of polytheism. For me as a religious Jew, the most challenging aspect of studying ancient Near Eastern myth and ritual as well as comparative religions has been the realization that polytheism embodies a profound way of perceiving the reality of the divine. Thus my own monotheism does not encompass polytheism in the Bible’s somewhat condescending manner but acknowledges polytheism’s beauty, depth, and even its accuracy (which, like the accuracy of my monotheism, is limited). But what I learn from the religious others I have studied so intensively as a biblicist and a religionist is not that we should come to some sort of agreement that neither my tradition nor theirs requires. It is that my own perceptions of divinity are correct, so far as they go, but also infinitely incomplete. And admitting this is a good thing.

In Comparing Faithfully: Insights for Systematic Theological Reflection (Fordham University Press, 2016), my fellow contributors and I called on other theologians to incorporate learnings from other traditions into the study of Christian systematic theology more broadly. David Brown’s book, Learning from Other Religions, does just this: he reflects on the insights behind positions that divide people of faith and incorporates them into his theology to good effect.

I picked up Brown’s book with high hopes. I teach in a multireligious theological school with a vision that students will become more deeply rooted in one’s own religious and spiritual traditions while engaging the people, beliefs, and practices of other traditions. Learning from Other Religions not only promises to exemplify such a process, but it also takes up a constructive theology of revelation, which is precisely the sticking point for many students learning with and from peers from other traditions.

Because my hopes were only partially met, I am grateful for the opportunity to query the author about several matters: first, about the overall shape of the argument; and second, about how the book relates to the field of comparative theology.

Brown argues that God’s revelatory action is evident in traditions other than Christianity, leading those traditions to develop certain insights more fully. This thesis has been around for a while. I recall encountering it first in the 1977 series and accompanying book by Ninian Smart, The Long Search. What Brown marks as novel is that he engages the field of comparative religion through “an explicitly Christian perspective,” weighing what he learns from other religions and culling lessons that can enhance Christian understanding of specific topics. Thus, from Hinduism, he learns about the use of images in understanding the divine; from Jainism’s teachings about reincarnation, he learns about a shared instinct about the justice of ultimate reality; and so on.

The book’s argument hinges on a claim about revelation’s embeddedness in particular cultures and contexts. I hope Brown will share more about what he means by these terms. The book lacks a definition of culture; and the “origins and characterizations” (context?) narrated for each tradition seem to be more descriptive than explanatory of why particular ideas reached prominence. It would be difficult for a book that treats so many religions to make such an argument robustly, given how little space could be allocated to each. In the place of cultural contextualization, one instead finds recourse to psychological observations and the category of experience. For example, “the experiential element” in Buddhist and Stoic-Christian ethics accounts for similar “practical attitudes to suffering.” Perhaps Brown can tell us more, as well, about how he theorizes experience (another highly contested scholarly category) in relation to revelation.

Moving toward my query about comparative theology, which tends to focus more deeply than broadly, one might question one scholar’s attempt to learn contextually from so many traditions in one book. Those who teach religious studies are deeply aware of the problems with textbooks that purport to cover entire traditions (or multiple traditions!) in single chapters. Such texts tend to privilege what Orientalist scholars have chosen to study: usually texts over practices or oral traditions, and elite worldviews over popular and lived religious expressions and those practiced by people on the margins. Excellent alternative texts are available today, but these kinds of endeavors will always be subject to critique because they must necessarily choose an approach and what to highlight or downplay.

Brown is aware of critiques of early “world religions” approaches, even if he does not entirely avoid these difficulties. In contrast to essentialist treatments of traditions, he recognizes the presence of multiple traditions interacting in India, China, and Japan (chapters 4–6) and the mutual influence of traditions on one another in their formation (chapters 2, 7). This interaction seems to be part of what he intends when he says that “context” that impacts the question each tradition seeks to answer. Brown also aspires to attend to how religions are lived and practiced, at least as he has observed them as a scholarly traveler (he does not engage ethnographic scholarship).

Brown also marks the limitations of theologies of religious diversity, particularly in their pluralist forms. It is significant that, before theologizing about other religions, he learns about them first: the data informs the doctrine. This has not often been the case in Christian pronouncements on religious others. The author has the humility to acknowledge that his choice of case studies is somewhat arbitrary. Furthermore, by positioning himself as a Christian theologian, he is not only honest that he has a standpoint in encountering other faiths, but he productively revisits aspects of his Christian theology in light of the encounter.

Each of the above assets in relation to comparative religion and theologies of religious diversity has been developed in the discipline of comparative theology over the past 30 years. It is surprising, and a missed opportunity, that comparative theology is not discussed until two brief mentions at the end of the book—one describing Keith Ward as a pluralist who wrote books of comparative theology, and another in the last paragraph indicating that the book under discussion here is a work of comparative theology. The sole work mentioned by one of the field’s most prominent figure, Francis X. Clooney, is listed under “Hinduism” in the bibliography, and the section on “Comparative Studies” is a rather eclectic mix of sources.

Comparative theologians endeavor to represent other traditions in ways that adherents could generally approve. This raises the question of whose voices to privilege when studying other traditions: Adherents of those traditions, or “objective” scholars? Religious authorities within the traditions? Which sects or sub-traditions? This question arises from the multireligious classroom as well as from scholarly debates. The presence of Buddhists, Jews, Christians, and Muslims in class together quickly makes students aware of the internal diversity of these traditions, as well as the sensitivities that arise when encountering scholarship about a tradition by non-practitioners thereof.

I am very glad that David Brown has ventured in the direction of comparative theology. By way of deepening Brown’s comparative engagement, I wonder: how might the book benefit from engaging peers from the traditions he studies? How might it land differently if characterizations of the religions were derived from theologians or practitioners of those traditions?

This wondering arose in my mind at several points, such as claims that the Jews did not go en masse to Egypt, that Hindus are polytheists, and that feminist and queer theology are driven primarily by secular norms. However, I believe the chapter on Islam would most benefit from dialogue with contemporary Muslims. Brown wrestles mightily between not wanting “the challenge of fundamentalism . . . to dominate our discussion” and allowing just that. The chapter breaks form with the earlier chapters, in which some disagreement with Christian doctrine yields insight and meaning for Christians. Brown eventually turns in this direction, but the bulk of the chapter is first devoted to rehearsing the old Eurocentric idea that Islam needs its own Reformation or Enlightenment, so that it might “adopt a less literal approach to the Qur’an but without in any way challenging its revelatory status.”

The latter point goes to the heart of the constructive theology of revelation developed here. What if Christians accepted that Muslim views on revelation truly differ, and that Muslims do not simply hold another version of Christian fundamentalism or biblical literalism? I suspect that engaging Muslim theologians on this issue could also further develop the thesis about “context,” “culture,” and “religion.” These are highly contested terms in relationship with one another, particularly in the multireligious classroom where I teach, so I would be eager to see these categories clarified in further comparative conversation.