Reviewing Ephraim Meir’s Interreligious Theology: Its Value and Mooring in Modern Jewish Philosophy, Peter Berger launches into a discussion of the extent to which religious faith can accommodate pluralism. Berger praises the idea of the book’s title—interfaith cooperation that goes beyond mere dialogue—but argues that such attempts to transcend religious differences should go only so far:
John Hicks (1922-2012), the British Protestant theologian who wrote influential books about interreligious dialogue, created a very telling metaphor: we need a “Copernican revolution” in theology—instead of looking at the earth/our own faith as the center around which everything revolves, we should see our faith as one of several planets revolving around the sun of ultimate reality. Each planet provides an instructive perspective on that reality.
It is a very attractive picture, but it leaves out one possibility—that some planets may not look at the sun at all, but are facing away from it. If all perspectives are equally true, there is no truth at all. I think that such sharp alternatives appear in . . . the dialogue . . . between the perceptions of reality emerging from the religious experience of the Indian subcontinent and the perceptions of the monotheistic faiths that originated in the Middle East. Still, I want to emphasize that this dialogue, too, could occur [amicably].
But there could be a rather less amicable reason for saying “no” to a dialogue—a moral reason. This could be . . . because one wants to have nothing to do with the putative interlocutor: I don’t think I would want to enter into dialogue with whatever degenerate imams legitimate the hell on earth being instituted by Islamic State in the areas it controls in Iraq and Syria. Or suppose there still survived the cult of human sacrifice that existed in Mesoamerica in pre-Colombian times. Imagine, say, that a delegation of Aztec theologians were welcomed to an interreligious conference at the World Council of Churches in Geneva: “Thank you very much for coming to this conference. We are greatly looking forward to hearing your paper explaining why the gods have to be fed by the blood of sacrificial victims. . . .”
Read more on American Interest: http://www.the-american-interest.com/2017/01/11/a-jewish-take-on-pluralism/