Читать книгу The Craft of Innovative Theology. Argument and Process онлайн
45 страница из 123
Three major concerns are typically raised in response to pluralistic theology (see Box 1.9): the question of truth, the question of purity, and the question of possibility. For lack of space, as well as to avoid repeating much of what I have (however inadequately) already covered regarding a pragmatic conception of truth, I shall concern myself with only the last two questions here.31
Box 1.9
The author makes this exercise manageable by dividing the objections into three major concerns. Notice the elegant way they are organized, each one is a “question.”
The issue of purity is at the base of concerns regarding mixing, miscegenation, syncretism, crossbreeding, hybridity, and recombination. Pluralistic theology, in bringing together “foreign” religious beliefs, concepts, and practices with their traditional Christian counterparts, is thus suspected of an illegitimate mixing and/or adulteration of Christian tradition. So deep is the worry over purity that in defining religious syncretism as “incorporation by a religious tradition of beliefs and practices incompatible with its basic insights”32 Hendrik Vroom makes extrinsic religious sources incompatible a priori with (in this case) Christian “insight.”