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The Immanent Divine: God, Creation, and the Human Predicament—An East-West Conversation
by John J. Thatamanil
Fortress, Minneapolis, 2006. 256 pp. $25.00. ISBN 0-8006-3793-3.
This book is part of a bold new effort to reorient Christian theology to our religiously plural world through the discipline of comparative theology. Christians, who make up one-third of the human family, cannot ignore the other religions of the world and still maintain their claim to universality. Secular ideologies have not been the answer, because they relativize the truth claims of all religions. John Thatamanil argues that the dialogue with non-Christian religions springs not from ideas outside Christianity, but from ethical imperatives of the gospel: love of neighbor and the prohibition against bearing false witness.
To show love of neighbors is to be concerned with who they are and what they believe. It is to be open to their existence as people of faith. We must shun the caricatures and falsehoods that polemic religion and chauvinistic cultures have fed us about the non-Christian religions. It then becomes possible to listen to one another and discover how the mystery of human existence is approached from our different faith commitments. Thatamanil brings into dialogue the Advaitic Hinduism of Sankara and the existential Christian theology of Paul Tillich. It is a bold leap from the eighth century to the twentieth century.
What makes this possible is that Thatamanil respects the truth claims of both partners to the dialogue as they illumine the human predicament from which we must be saved. He is not arguing the superiority of one position against the other, nor is he claiming that everyone believes the same thing. Rather, as a physician of the human spirit, he compares these very different traditions to find how they characterize human lostness and the way in which it is healed. This is not a book of speculation about God as the Ground of Being or Brahman and Atman. It is a penetrating look at the source of the anxiety, dread, fear, and suffering that mark human life and how they are overcome in the divine.
Both parties to the dialogue have truths that illumine human existence. For the timid and uninitiated, who have not been reading much Tillich of late, let alone Sankara, Thatamanil is a good teacher who writes clear expositions of these great, but often difficult, thinkers.
Donald G. Dawe, Professor Emeritus
Union-PSCE
Richmond, Virginia
Hagar, Sarah, and Their Children: Jewish, Christian, and Muslim Perspectives
edited by Phyllis Trible and Letty M. Russell
Westminster John Knox, Louisville, 2006. 211 pp. $24.95. ISBN 0-664-22982-4.
Modeling a community that respects and values difference, seven scholars representing three religious traditions have contributed to this volume in an effort to honor the perspectives of Hagar and Sarah in the Genesis stories about their lives. Their purpose is to read with the marginalized, to envision the action from Sarah and Hagar’s point of view, which undercuts the assumptions of patriarchy and “may help us create a different vision of human and gender relations” (p. 26).
Surveying interpretations of the Hagar and Sarah story within Muslim, Jewish, and Christian traditions, the authors demonstrate that the conflict between these two women has been used by theologians in various historical contexts to perpetuate conflict among people with different religious convictions. Typically, interpreters have shaped interpretations of the story to address contemporary disputes, consistently elevating one community’s “truth” over another’s.
Like the many theologians who precede them, the authors in this volume are compelled to revisit the story of Hagar and Sarah by the pressing needs of their own current context. Conflict between Sarah and Hagar’s descendants continues to endanger the well-being of God’s creation. Yet unlike their predecessors, they intentionally shift focus away from Abraham, the traditional star of the narrative, to the mothers of Abraham’s descendants, seeking reconciliation within this broken family.
The writers present new insights into the biblical text. Phyllis Trible, with her characteristic eye for detail, locates compelling parallels between the Hagar and Sarah story and the garden story of Gen 3. Though patriarchy marginalizes Sarah and Hagar, Trible underscores details in the story-telling that are in tension with patriarchy’s assumptions and undermine them. Letty Russell critiques Paul’s allegorical reading, noting how it reinforces hierarchy and opposition, and praises the work of feminist scholars who seek to disarm Paul’s rhetoric, so that his words are not used “as weapons in the battle for authoritative truth” (p. 92).
Each survey of Jewish, Christian, and Muslim interpretations is admittedly brief and uneven. Adele Reinhartz and Miriam-Simma Walfish summarize Jewish treatments of Hagar and Sarah from the earliest postbiblical sources (second century B.C.E.) to analyses published as recently as 2005. Elizabeth Clark traces interpretations from the Christian church fathers (second to sixth centuries C.E.). And Riffat Hassan explains how Sarah and Hagar are revered in Islamic tradition. Yet each chapter is insightful and easy to understand.
In the last two chapters, Delores Williams and Letty Russell describe new and creative ways of appropriating the stories of our ancient mothers. In doing so, they encourage hope that we will learn to respect and value our brothers and sisters.
Janell Johnson
Mercer University
Macon, Georgia
The Experience of God: Icons of the Mystery
by Raimon Panikkar
Fortress, Minneapolis, 2006. 141 pp. $16.00. ISBN 0-8006-3825-5.
In this meditation on the experience of God, Raimon Panikkar, a Roman Catholic priest from India and the son of a Hindu father and Spanish Catholic mother, eloquently rehearses key themes of his radically pluralist religious vision. The work grew out of a conference for theology professors at the Benedictine monastery of Silos, and thus the “atmosphere” and “language” of the pages are explicitly Christian. In spite of its Christian particularities, Panikkar believes the work is comprehensible to those embedded in other traditions. Indeed, Panikkar’s idiosyncratic use of Christian symbols exemplifies his notion that no expression of the truth can be identified with truth itself and that truth is accessible across cultural boundaries.
Panikkar associates the universality of truth’s accessibility with the mythic (spiritual) character of reality, and the relativity of our knowing with its logos quality. Mythos is the undivided truth that grounds the logos, while logos is the language for expressing mythos. Language aims to express the undivided truth but can only capture a part. There is a sense, therefore, in which discourse about God is inappropriate to the character of reality. God is not an object alongside the world or human beings. In fact, God, world, and human beings are not “things,” Panikkar contends. In his view, there is one undivided reality that may be described as divine, cosmic, and human. In what may be his clearest expression of this notion, Panikkar writes, “God, Man, and World are three artificially substantivized forms of three primordial adjectives which describe Reality” (p. 206). Panikkar believes this non-dualist vision (advaita) may be expressed Christianly in terms of the doctrine of the Trinity.
God, the Human, and the World are not one, nor two, nor three. . . . There is a radical relativity, an irreducible connection between the Source of what is, that which Is, and its very Dynamism; Father, Son, and Spirit. . . . Reality is trinitarian. . . . Only by denying duality (advaita), without reducing everything to unity, are we able consciously to approach it. (p. 66)
The Trinity, however, is not primarily a reference to the Christian claim that God is Father, Son, and Spirit. Panikkar believes that Christianity is not alone in viewing reality in trinitarian terms. Others deny dualism without collapsing into monism. They, too, recognize the trinitarian character of reality that renders experience of it possible, but refer to it with other symbols. There is a similar relationship between the Christian symbol “Christ” and the reality it designates. In Panikkar’s view, Christ may no more be identified with the historical Jesus than with the Isvara of Hinduism. Christ is a living symbol for the triadic or “cosmo- theandric” character of reality. The Christian religion is distinct from others by virtue of the logos. Its doctrinal and intellectual differences with other faiths are likely incommensurable. However, Panikkar avers that Christian religiosity may not be reduced to “Christianity” because there is an ensemble of experiences that transcends language-culture. “[P]eople do not live . . . on logos alone; they live also in the Spirit, which breathes into humanity and the universe where, when, and how it wills” (p. 74).
These words beautifully express Panikkar’s conception of reality and the place(s) of human beings and our conscious experience(s) within it. Surely he is right to seek a way between monism and dualism, and the Christian doctrine of God as Trinity provides a promising basis for such an alternative. Furthermore, while I am skeptical of his attempts to separate the Trinity and Jesus the Christ from the particularities of the story of Jesus of Nazareth, I find Panikkar’s efforts to account for the universal activity of God provocative and compelling.
James R. Wilson
Union-PSCE
Richmond, Virginia
Bound by the Bible: Jews, Christians and the Sacrifice of Isaac
by Edward Kessler
Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2004. 222 pp. $75.00 (cloth). ISBN 0-521-83542-9.
Using Gen 22:1–14 as a test case, Edward Kessler pursues the thesis that there was an interrelationship between rabbinic and patristic biblical interpretation in the first six centuries C.E., and that the proper study of one of the interpretive traditions requires sustained attention to the other. He seeks to show that exegetical influence flowed in both directions and that this influence, at times, reveals a measure of respect rather than pure antagonism toward the other. Kessler’s driving category is that of “exegetical encounter,” by which he means “that a Jewish interpretation either influenced, or was influenced by, a Christian interpretation and vice versa” (p. 8).
Kessler admits that his primary interest is the question of Christian exegetical influence on Jewish tradition. After developing five criteria with which to identify that an exegetical encounter has occurred, he devotes six chapters to a sequential examination of the story of Abraham and Isaac. Each chapter begins with early interpretations and then moves to examine rabbinic and patristic readings. A seventh chapter argues that Jewish and Christian artists who portrayed the story are genuine exegetes in their own right. Kessler nicely sum- marizes his conclusions under three categories: seventeen examples of shared interpretations, seven examples of possible exegetical encounter, and nine examples of probable exegetical encounter. By the end of the book, Rabbinic Isaac emerges as an explicit counter to the Christian Christ.
An oddity to be noted is Kessler’s decision not to include Gen 22:15–19 as a part of the investigation. The reason is not explained. On numerous occasions, he points out that omission of certain details in the story can be a powerful interpretive technique, e.g., neither Philo nor Josephus mentions the actual binding of Isaac. Given the fact that the rabbinic concept of “the merit of the fathers” is deeply anchored in Gen 22:15–19, as well as an explicitly non-Pauline-friendly portrayal of Abraham, Kessler’s decision is puzzling.
Bound by the Bible is going to be debated by scholars, not on the issue of whether Jews and Christians are better off for knowing more about the exegetical traditions of the other, but rather on the extent of the actual exegetical interaction between the two in antiquity. Though not intended for a popular audience, the book should prove to be broadly accessible. Technical terminology is adequately explained and the use of Hebrew and Greek is presented in a manner that will not be an impediment to the non-specialist. I readily recommend this book to anyone who is interested in serious Jewish-Christian dialogue.
Brooks Schramm
Lutheran Theological Seminary at Gettysburg
Gettysburg, Pennsylvania
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