Journal of Religious History Vol. 31, No.

4, December 2007

Author FAITH,running head:Asia ORIGINAL ARTICLES JournalOF Religious History XXX 2007 ETHICS, AND COMMUNICATION 0022-4227 Journal of Religious JORH Association for the Melbourne, Australia JOURNAL of RELIGIOUS HISTORY Blackwell PublishingHistory

JOHN DARCY MAY

Faith, Ethics, and Communication: Some Recent Writing in Philosophical Theology

Four very different books on the relationship between faith and ethics are reviewed from the point of view of coping morally and intellectually with difference. Marty focuses on the stranger in pluralist societies and nds that more than mere tolerance is needed as a response to religious difference. Humility and hospitality draw more deeply on the resources of the religions as a basis for true civility. Muers explores the communicative possibilities of silence: how can one speak of Gods self-communication without silencing others? She draws conclusions for sensitive questions such as the right to privacy. Schweiker identies spaces of reasons in which the religions can be moral resources in a time of many worlds. Burrell sets up an inter-religious dialogue across the ancient world, bringing thinkers as diverse as Aquinas, al-Ghazali, and Maimonides into conversation about the relationship between creator and creature.

Martin E. Marty: When Faiths Collide (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005); pp. ix + 193. Rachel Muers: Keeping Gods Silence: Towards a Theological Ethics of Communication. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004; pp. viii + 246. William Schweiker: Theological Ethics and Global Dynamics in the Time of Many Worlds. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004; pp. xxv + 239. David Burrell: Faith and Freedom: An Interfaith Perspective. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004; pp. xxi + 266.

The way religions religious people, but also the faiths as great complex propositions communicate has emerged as one of the most intractable problems facing both philosophy and theology in the West. Each of these very different books tackles it in its own distinctive way. Martys When Faiths Collide offers a timely critique of liberal tolerance and argues for a realized or civil pluralism that would stop trying to pretend religion doesnt matter and pay heed to the religions ways of dealing with the stranger, themes he shares with Schweikers Theological Ethics, which advocates the rediscovery of the religious sources of moral thinking and the struggle for human wholeness in a time of global reexivity. Muerss Keeping Gods Silence
John DArcy May was formerly Associate Professor of Interfaith Dialogue at the Irish School of Ecumenics, Trinity College, Dublin, where he is now a Senior Research Fellow.

451
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approaches the need for communicative non-violence obliquely, drawing on her Quaker tradition and Bonhoeffers explorations of silence as the creaturely reality that is least unlike God,1 whereas Burrell in Faith and Freedom celebrates Aquinass intercultural, interfaith achievement2 by setting up a dialogue across the centuries between some of the worlds great religious traditions and modernity at a deep philosophical level. Marty identies the stranger as a challenge that the religions, if they would only exploit their own resources for peacemaking, are better placed to meet than liberalism, whose limitations become apparent in a post-9/11 world of global insecurity. Hospitality, not hostility, is the appropriate response to the stranger, even when the stranger metamorphoses into the terrorist (a word which for him connotes both terra and terror 3). The threat posed by the stranger cannot be kept at a distance or neutralised by pluralism; one must advance to the awareness that the self is also a stranger, and that the stranger can become a belonger (Georg Simmel) in contexts of religious practice. Noting that Australia is the country with the highest percentage of foreigners, and that in the New World we (Europeans) are all immigrants and boat people, he re-emphasises his theme: Something deeper, richer, and more reliable than mere tolerance must come into play when dealing with the menace of the stranger, namely humility and hospitality.4 Turning to pluralism as the political philosophy he wishes to afrm, Marty envisages a religiously informed civic pluralism5 which arises from, indeed is, a theology and could be shared with Islam. Such a theology takes us beyond bureaucratic rationality to the demands of the heart.6 Doing away with religion is no solution, nor is the rigid laicit which has led to such an impasse in France. A civil pluralism would mean more than free-form, postmodern collages or assemblages that reject rootage in traditions and seek no warrants in authoritative texts;7 in order to be realised, it would involve the practical compromises and negotiated solutions that arise, for example, in medical practice. Hospitality implies acceptance, and this is already a step too far for many religious people, including theologians (Marty asks why there are no Jewish pluralists apart from Dan Cohn-Sherbok,8 though I am sure Rabbis Jonathan Sacks and Norman Solomon could pass muster in the UK, not to mention the wide spectrum of Jewish thinkers in the US). Hospitality also presupposes civility, but civil discourse in the public square has its limits when we have no common universe of discourse.9 The incommensurable
1. Muers, Keeping Gods Silence, 11. 2. Burrell, Faith and Freedom, 142. 3. Quoting William E. Connolly: To occupy territory . . . is both to receive sustenance and to exercise violence. To become territorialized is to be occupied by a particular identity, The Ethos of Pluralization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), xxii. 4. Martin E. Marty, When Faiths Collide (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), 66. 5. Marty, When Faiths Collide, 70. 6. Marty, When Faiths Collide, 85. 7. Marty, When Faiths Collide, 107. 8. Marty, When Faiths Collide,175. 9. John Courtney Murray, We Hold These Truths: Catholic Reections on the American Proposition (New York: Sheed & Ward; 1960), 15.
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stories of the religions can spawn lethal theologies,10 yet [n]ot to decide about religion in public life is to decide:11 the strangers, if they only realised it, are all challenged to become belongers in the emerging global public sphere. Martys book appears in a series called Manifestos, so it is understandable that there is a single-mindedness about it that eschews protracted debate on underlying issues. It leaves us with a fresh vision but also many questions, some of which are taken up in the other books under review. Rachel Muers, however, does so in a very indirect way. Ostensibly, she is not concerned with inter-religious relations at all, indeed her book barely touches on any religion other than Christianity, though it begins with a passing reference to Buddhist and Daoist conceptions of silence as both closure and disclosure. Silence is neither speech nor the absence of speech, but according to who is keeping silence in relation to whom, silence can make sense. The passive in many cultural settings, women, but also God can be silenced when refused the courtesy of listening. Gods silence, which Muers characterises with Nelle Morton as hearing to speech12 just as a child will speak because someone is listening is God listening to Gods own Word, before we are, giving us what we are. Listening is practised in a communicative environment in which the relationship between speaker and listener is asymmetric, but not to the extent that either remains unaffected by the act of listening.13 This raises the question which leads Muers to solicit the help of Bonhoeffer: is it possible to speak of Gods communicative action in a way that does not perform some further act of silencing?14 even in response to a situation of distorted communication.15 This implies that
the silence of God as thought from the resurrection is the silence of a listener; that the resurrection is Gods hearing of Gods own Word, and the point from which Gods hearing of the whole creation can be understood . . . the resurrection as event for God.16

For Bonhoeffer, the resurrection is the place to stand, the point from which one can live in a new creation discontinuous with the old. Christ, the form of the world, unites the ultimate and the penultimate; Bonhoeffer can therefore reject both world-afrming and world-denying ethics in the penultimate, because the silence of the resurrection excludes principles by which any ethical question could be assessed. One senses here the paradoxes of the dialectical or crisis theology on which Bonhoeffer drew, reminiscent of the Madhyamaka dialectic of Mahayana Buddhism, though nothing like this is alluded to. Dialectical theology is in the background when Muers draws somewhat startling inferences such as [t]he resurrection is . . . what makes
10. Marty, When Faiths Collide, 159. 11. Marty, When Faiths Collide,162. 12. Rachel Muers, Keeping Gods Silence: Towards a Theological Ethics of Communication (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), 50. 13. Muers, Keeping Gods Silence, 57. 14. Muers, Keeping Gods Silence, 72. 15. Muers, Keeping Gods Silence, 75. 16. Muers, Keeping Gods Silence, 73.
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responsible life possible.17 But she also goes on to develop Bonhoeffers idea of the silence out of which Christology emerges as an interpersonal act, a performative speech act whose illocutionary force passes over into the perlocutionary force of personal encounter. In the case of what Bonhoeffer calls the word as address, its truth happens only in community.18 The active listening of the wise contrasts with the fools inability to listen, in other words, to accept responsibility for the self. Silence, as evidenced in worship, is the focal point of communication. It is not mere muteness, a quasi-speech-act conveying a predetermined message.19 As an interruption to patterns of expectation, the absence of signication can function as the sign of liminality.20 Silence was fundamental to Bonhoeffers conception of Seelsorge, which was to take the questioner more seriously than he takes himself . . . It interrupts the succession of supposed wants, and actions to satisfy them, by which a self is produced.21 Silence, in guarding against the imagined self taking over, entails the surrender of power and opens the way to experiencing the other as a oneself and oneself as an other (referring to Ricoeur). There follows an extremely interesting chapter on Gods omniscience and the invasion of privacy, in which Bonhoeffers axiom that telling the truth entails not just a proposition but a situation is developed into a warning against separating information from persons knowing and known.
On this view, the invasion of privacy is wrong most fundamentally, not because it steals knowledge-property that belongs to somebody else, but because it treats the person as one who can be known about without the acceptance of a corresponding responsibility.22

This suggests that the public sphere is intimately related to the private, and that ones inner life can be shared only with one who knows how to keep silent as God does.23 Privacy as forgiveness in advance24 thus has a political dimension, for
knowledge of one another . . . is inseparable from responsibility for one another . . . privacy is never solitary and non-dialogical; the transformation of privacy involves being freed from the self-judging or self-justifying dialog with oneself.25

These are extremely suggestive reections, which while not explicitly addressing the problems of inter-religious dialogue can easily be applied to it. Theology needs to ask about its own ethics of communication, especially regarding the silencing of women in Christian scripture and tradition. To ask about keeping Gods silence . . . is to ask about communicative non-violence.26 It

17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26.

Muers, Muers, Muers, Muers, Muers, Muers, Muers, Muers, Muers, Muers,

Keeping Gods Silence, 82. Keeping Gods Silence, 107. Keeping Gods Silence,146 47. Keeping Gods Silence, 148 49. Keeping Gods Silence, 159 as good a paraphrase as any of Buddhist karma. Keeping Gods Silence, 201. Keeping Gods Silence, 205. Keeping Gods Silence, 209. Keeping Gods Silence, 212. Keeping Gods Silence, 215.

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is also to ask about God, the more than speakable27 (paraphrasing Jngels more than necessary), the very question that will occupy Burrell. But the primary interest of Muerss engaging book is its original approach to a theological ethics of communication. In a sense the book is a sustained metaphor, aesthetically pleasing in its density and subtlety yet at the price of relinquishing a more readily generalisable logic. One cannot help thinking, too, how her imaginative reconstruction of Christian discourse would relate to the silence of the Buddha on metaphysical questions and the cultivation of inner silence in Buddhist meditation. Schweikers bold attempt to construct a theological ethics for what he strikingly calls the time of many worlds is forthright in its demand for a return to the religious sources of moral thinking and the inclusion of the natural world within the scope of ethics. The threat he identies is what he calls overhumanization, his leading question being: is there the possibility of forging an awareness of human dignity not apart from or against nature but within the integrity of life?28 and his basic axiom: in all actions and relations respect and enhance the integrity of life.29 His theme may be summed up in the words of Hans Jonas: responsibility is about power,30 and in the new situation of global reexivity31 the ethicist must address the new reach,32 the fantastic expansion of human power.33 The prohibition of comprehensive ideals of the good laid down by liberals such as Rawls does not take account of the fact that [p]luralism and globalization are deeply linked,34 nor of the inclusion of forgiveness and redemption in creation, which begins immediately to participate in the ongoing event of world-making.35 This involves imagining moral space anew, and here Schweiker links time and responsibility in interesting ways: people inhabit time like a space in which they must orient themselves by what is deemed worth seeking in life.36 Whereas modern thinkers like Kant delimited time by making it a form of the mind, time is a boundless phenomenon at the interface of nature and culture.37 Schweiker continues: There is no moral order outside human beings making time meaningful,38 illustrating this with reference to the moral and metaphysical dualism of the Didache.39 Echoing Martys concern with the political dimension of forgiveness, Schweiker sees political forgiveness as a stage beyond mere tolerance at which it

27. Muers, Keeping Gods Silence, 21314. 28. William Schweiker, Theological Ethics and Global Dynamics in the Time of Many Worlds (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), xii. 29. Schweiker, Theological Ethics and Global Dynamics, xiv. 30. Schweiker, Theological Ethics and Global Dynamics, 27. 31. Schweiker, Theological Ethics and Global Dynamics, 7. 32. Schweiker, Theological Ethics and Global Dynamics, 12. 33. Schweiker, Theological Ethics and Global Dynamics, 26. 34. Schweiker, Theological Ethics and Global Dynamics, 30. 35. Schweiker, Theological Ethics and Global Dynamics, 33. 36. Schweiker, Theological Ethics and Global Dynamics, 68. 37. Schweiker, Theological Ethics and Global Dynamics, 73. 38. Schweiker, Theological Ethics and Global Dynamics, 78. 39. Schweiker, Theological Ethics and Global Dynamics, 93.
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becomes possible to confront the intolerable (with reference to Hannah Arendt: reconciliation without politics is impotent; politics without reconciliation is impossible40). Responsible forgiveness involves restorative justice: Genuine restorative justice begins the political world anew; it comes with a specic moral demand to respect and enhance the integrity of political life.41 In support of this Schweiker reiterates his basic thesis, asking whether the form of moral consciousness needed for an age of globalized political existence [is] necessarily religious in depth and reach? and suggesting that the task requires a trans-human source of worth that exceeds the drive of overhumanization, because the principles of toleration and restorative justice are not just political; they are, in fact, religious and metaphysical.42 This basic position is not argued for, though the whole question of the relationship between rationality and religious conviction is controversial in the study of religion (in the thought, for instance, of Robert Segal, Donald Wiebe, or Russel McCutcheon); it is simply asserted that the religions offer a more hopeful alternative than unaided reason as a source of moral values. Each of the books under review exemplies this problem in its own way. The sacred texts of the great religious traditions provide images of alternative worlds whose self-immediacy must not be allowed to degenerate into violence, which Schweiker, anticipating the liberal agenda objected to by Burrell, formulates as how we fashion concrete moral existence in the light of the multiplicity of possible lives mediated to us by the traditions.43 The exemplars of the followability of the divine commands offered by the sacred texts are discerned against a transcendent horizon; thus, [s]cripture is a sacred but also a profoundly moral space.44 The diversity of scripture offers a certain corrective to Levinass immediacy of the ought at the birth of moral subjectivity.45 Schweiker proposes the concept spaces of reasons, which provide motivations for actions, as the basis of moral comparison across religions; the world is simply a name for the conglomerate of diverse, conicting but also interacting spaces of reasons which, rather than clashing, are reexively interacting in the sphere of global reexivity.46 Reason has its autonomy, which provides the basis for questioning the authority of a moral order based on revelation; otherwise, the result could be moral madness, whose ironies Schweiker goes on to illustrate from the Romantic hermeneutics of cultural identity and the human value-creation of ethical anti-realists. The gratuitous violence of movies such as Natural Born Killers, while repulsive, is not the whole story of moral madness, for such evil does not simply run its course to the point of sheer exhaustion. The abiding value of such maxims as the Golden Rule is that they continually reassert human worth as an intersubjective
40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. Schweiker, Schweiker, Schweiker, Schweiker, Schweiker, Schweiker, Schweiker, Theological Ethics and Global Dynamics, 112. Theological Ethics and Global Dynamics, 117. Theological Ethics and Global Dynamics, 12223. Theological Ethics and Global Dynamics, 139. Theological Ethics and Global Dynamics, 146. Theological Ethics and Global Dynamics, 141. Theological Ethics and Global Dynamics, 15758.

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good. Moral living presupposes the desire to live rightly, which is why [t]he evil will is impervious to moral claims.47 Human worth is not reducible to human power, and it is at this point that theological humanism reasserts the role of transcendence in guaranteeing freedom a question which Burrell takes up from a rather different point of view. Schweiker uses play, the garden, and the school as metaphors of the struggle for wholeness, and he concludes by reasserting his conviction that the religions are treasure troves of symbolic resources for ethical thinking.48 There is something pontical about Schweikers exalted diction, and while those of a theological persuasion will readily give assent to his scenario of the religions as moral resources for an ethic of human and natural integration, this reviewer is left with a sense of unease at having been persuaded rhetorically without being convinced rationally. The problem was also implicit in Muerss use of theology: at what point do may religious convictions be brought to bear on ontology and ethics? The question is satisfyingly explicit throughout Burrells closely argued yet lightly written analysis of representative Jewish, Muslim, and Christian thinkers, the only one of the four books under review that is truly inter-religious in conception and execution, showing awareness of comparable Hindu and Buddhist philosophies. Burrell explores the ways in which faith and reason were mutually normative in the thirteenth century. Once the idol of pure reason has been shattered, and we can learn to accept diverse ways of arriving at conclusions, we will nd that we can employ the skills learned in our tradition to follow reasoning in another49 (just as Francis Clooney does in his carefully reasoned exercise in comparative theology, Hindu God, Christian God). Burrells book admirably fulls this promise, circling again and again the connections between the basic problems of creation and freedom from the perspectives of very different medieval thinkers (Aquinas and Scotus) and their Jewish and Muslim forbears (Maimonides and al-Ghazali, among others). What interests Burrell in all of them is creation as the setting for freedom, for if creation itself is fully free and not a necessary emanation from a rst principle continuous with it, then the telos of creation as an intentional act corresponds in some way to the telos of human freedom, which is thus much more than mere choice among possible outcomes, as the ideology of modernity would have it. In Burrells view this is bound up with the insight that God is not simply an item in the universe, which is where the medievals unwittingly draw near to Indian philosophers such as Sankara. The book deserves specialist reviews, which it will surely receive, but as one formed in the tradition in which it stands I feel I can at least venture an assessment in the comparative context already established. Dismissing the attempts of process theology to reinterpret creation as creativity, Burrell stays with the question that occupied the ancients: how can a creator who is one and eternal be inferred from a creation that is manifold
47. Schweiker, Theological Ethics and Global Dynamics, 192. 48. Schweiker, Theological Ethics and Global Dynamics, 213. 49. David Burrell, Faith and Freedom: An Interfaith Perspective (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), 202.
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and temporal? Understanding eternity as simpleness in one of many striking formulations by Aquinas: eternity measures to-be (esse)50 Burrell acknowledges that a divinity entirely outside the sphere of becoming must be radically unknowable. But the medieval Christian thinkers were not the rst to recognise this: al-Ghazali, whom Burrell has translated, afrmed that thought cannot retrace the path of becoming to a First, not just because the Quran says it cant, but because to posit any such origin continuous with the world would be to make it part of the world. Al-Ghazali therefore rejected Muslim mystics such as al-Hallaj who claimed identity with the One (I am truth), but he does have something in common with Augustines reliance on the heart over the intellect. The Jewish philosopher Maimonides, working in an Islamic context, proposed the superiority of the artisans practical knowledge of what he makes as a metaphorical alternative to neo-Platonist emanationism, and this in turn helps to solve the problem of Gods knowledge of events before they take place. The theory of participation cannot sufciently explain the difference between Gods knowledge and our knowledge. Aquinas accepted this solution, enhanced by the concept of eternity, which allows us to understand how for God the future is the present. In a fascinating chapter Burrell shows how Maimonides and Aquinas could be said to have bounced ideas off one another over the centuries: for Maimonides, there can be nothing between God and creation, nor as the Islamic thinkers insisted could there be plurality in God; necessary emanation, therefore, does not qualify as creation. This is Aquinass cue to demonstrate how the order of creatures to a transcendental cause can be captured by the use of words somewhere between pure equivocation and simple univocity, in other words, by analogy; thus ordered from and to a creator, dependent beings can be shown to be independent agents.51 The mode of the divine presence is the actuality of to-be, esse, which allows us to make statements about the One which do not distort the creator-creature relation and are compatible with all three Abrahamic traditions. Creation, indeed (in a recurring reference to Josef Pieper), is the hidden element in the philosophy of St Thomas.52 This is particularly important because, as freely created free creatures, we do not choose our ultimate end, though we are free regarding the means to attain it. For Jewish, Muslim, and Christian thinkers, faith has been normative for ontology, and neither Gods freedom to create nor our fundamental orientation of created freedom can be construed as simply making a choice among possibles. Not all Aquinass contemporaries agreed with this radical approach, however, as a point-by-point confrontation with Scotus shows. Whereas for Aquinas intellect aspires to know what is the case not Being as a something in Scotus we nd the essence taken absolutely53 as the thusness (haecceitas) of individual things and as such the object of the

50. Burrell, Faith and Freedom, 9. 51. Burrell, Faith and Freedom, 6768. 52. Burrell, Faith and Freedom, 64, 116. 53. Burrell, Faith and Freedom, 94.
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intellect. For Aquinas, on the other hand, existence is not a property but a perfection, an act, the assertion of which adds the dimension of judgement to the descriptive proposition. Thus it is that for Scotus the possible has priority over the actual, whereas for Aquinas it is the other way around. He is thus able to formulate the difference which existence makes without having to locate it as a feature of things.54 Aquinas is interested in the use of language over and above its structure; interpreted as judgement, this means that analogical discourse needs no univocal ground;55 if they are to be used accurately, both being and true must be used analogously. Freedom is not merely auto-determinism, a view Scotus bequeathed to modern thinkers, nor is creation a choice among possible scenarios;56 hence, ones view of human freedom parallels ones view of creation.57 Willing is not a separate act, implying that freedom is a kind of indifference; rather, for Aquinas the will is an intellectual appetite, just as creation implies the practical knowledge that arises from making. For Aquinas, then, any kind of predestination that would imply the withholding of foreknowledge of decisions not yet made is incoherent, for we have already consented to our orientation to our ultimate end. Being this precise individual is not the same as being precisely one of a kind. Analogy for Aquinas, then, is a logical, not a metaphysical category, which subverts the Thomistic analogy of being by inverting it. According to Maimonidess criteria for participation,
It is esse which accounts for whatever similarity can be had between creator and creature. Indeed, created esse brings them so close that the non-reciprocal relation of dependence, which is participated being, can be likened to Sankaras notion of nonduality: the distinction does not amount to a separation, as though God could be pictured as one more being over against the universe.58

That creation is the unconstrained act of a divine artisan is known only by revelation, but reason, in this fragile synthesis,59 can determine that existence (to-exist, esse) is not an accident, as Ibn-Sina (Avicenna) supposed, but act, in a way that bears comparison with those strands of Indian philosophy that are not strictly monist. Whereas for the worldview of modernity, prepared for by the isolation of the will from intellect by Scotus, Suarez, and Kant, freedom is simply the uncaused agency of self-starters, in the tradition favoured by Burrell freedom is essentially response to the free and intentional act of creation. It is this question of created freedom that occupied al-Ghazali. For him, too, freedom is not constrained by divine aid, nor is it deterministic; lifedecisions, such as the option for a vocation or the commitment to a partner, involve discernment over and above mere choice. For Scotus, on the other hand, there is a concurrence of intellect and will to elicit a free act, just
54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. Burrell, Burrell, Burrell, Burrell, Burrell, Burrell, Faith and Freedom, 100. Faith and Freedom, 105. Faith and Freedom, 107. Faith and Freedom, 109. Faith and Freedom, 120. Faith and Freedom, 135.
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as human and divine will cooperate to produce a fully free act, which would direct [the will] to its true end.60 For Scotus, the act of intellection terminates in the essence, requiring a separate act of the autonomous will to afrm existence; for Aquinas, for whom the act of creation is orientated to esse, grasping the existing individual involves not only the insight into image (conversio ad phantasma) which progressively yields conceptual knowledge, but the intellectual act of judgement. In short, Aquinass realism is not of a conceptual sort, but one which demands an act of the intellect subsequent to understanding: judgement. At the level of understanding, his epistemology is compatible with the most far-reaching historical and hermeneutical criticism.61 For Aquinas, the notion of being is irreducibly analogous,62 but it allows us to understand how [w]e can locate the act of judgement, not in the form of our expressions, but in the ways we use them.63 Even after its masterly transposition into contemporary terms by Bernard Lonergan, this subtle yet powerful epistemology is easily misunderstood. Esoteric as these medieval discussions may seem, they not only manifest surprising links with contemporary philosophies but also represent a communitys experience with revelation, for the doctrine of creation envisages far more than origins: the very meaning and destiny of the universe are at stake.64 Precisely this is the context in which Jews, Christians, and Muslims wrestled with God as the unitary source of all-that-is. After the Enlightenments pretensions to resolve religious differences by reason alone have been shaken by the demise of Eurocentric universality, this mode of argument becomes interesting again as an alternative to mere relativism and at the same time a bridge to Hindu and Buddhist theologies. Creation, in such a context, is not reduced to a mere given, but is discerned as the primary grace or gift.65 Drawing on Sokolowski, Burrell dwells on what he simply calls the distinction, the irreducible difference between creator and creature. For al-Ghazali, the effort cannot be solely intellectual if this is to be grasped;66 for Maimonides, it means that creation cannot be understood as necessary emanation; for Aquinas, the free act of creation does not require an initial moment, for creation ex nihilo is not the same thing as creation de novo. This is a level of reection comparable to Sankaras non-duality. But Christians are dealing with creation-cum-redemption,67 and it was the Christological controversies that forced them to clarify the distinction, prompted by revelation: being is being-related. Neither liberal theology nor process theology nor the theology

60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67.

Burrell, Burrell, Burrell, Burrell, Burrell, Burrell, Burrell, Burrell,

Faith and Freedom, 171. Faith and Freedom, 184. Faith and Freedom, 186. Faith and Freedom, 185. Faith and Freedom, 199. Faith and Freedom, 208. Faith and Freedom, 225. Faith and Freedom, 236.

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of the cross proposed by Moltmann and Jngel do justice to this: the philosophy of creation is not just a preliminary, but is guided by faith, as philosophers in all three monotheistic traditions afrmed. Faith, of course, is not explanation but conviction, as Burrell shows from the autobiographies of Augustine and the Jewish Holocaust victim Etty Hillesum, narratives shaped by lives that embody different doctrines yet resonate with one another across the ages and the traditions. Theology, faced with new tasks which outstrip its present resources, is continually transformed by communities and their languages. This is not to abandon truth, only a monocultural attitude of certainty in which we know that we are right.68 Etty, secure in her Jewish identity, writes cheekily: Yes, Christianity, and why ever not?69 It is a great pity that Burrell does not develop this insight and rework the foregoing, rather intellectualist discussion in the light of it, for it adds the pragmatic dimension of communication to the semantics of doctrine and the syntax of argument and begins to explain how understanding between religious traditions could be achieved in practice. It was at this point in writing this review that news came of the terrorist attacks in London on 7 July 2005. I had intended to conclude by saying that these books, despite their occasional abstruseness, each make important contributions to the clarication of practical problems of mutual exclusion and global injustice at the beginning of a new (some would say: post-9/11, others post-modern) era, and I do so now with added emphasis. My main criticism is that, with the exception of Burrells sub-plot of dialogue with Zen and Advaita, they give only a passing nod to elements in traditions other than the Christian which could challenge and complement their own thinking. Marty, certainly, sets the scene by reconceiving what a pluralist society could be in a time of global religious interaction, but even he has only brief references to Jewish, Muslim, and Buddhist thinking. Muerss sensitive exploration of silence only hints at dialogue with Buddhist and Daoist experience, while Schweiker acclaims the religions as moral resources without specifying where their resources lie, what differentiates them and under what conditions they could be deployed without creating further problems. Only Burrell, who as a Catholic theologian learnt Arabic and spent time in Muslim countries to equip himself for the task, demonstrates how hard-won real complementarities are, even among traditions as closely related as the Abrahamic. Like Marty, who was invited to write a manifesto, and Schweiker, who unfolds an admirable vision of how ethics could be transformed by the religions in an age of global reexivity, Burrell, of course, has an agenda: his frequent deprecation of mere choice as no substitute for genuine freedom and his nods of approval to advocates of radical orthodoxy such as John Milbank are pointers to his distinctive stance. But his sense of humour and the lightness of his style do as much as the rigour of his thinking to recommend his approach, just as the subtlety of Muerss use of language enhances her equally rigorous
68. Burrell, Faith and Freedom, 255. 69. Burrell, Faith and Freedom, 256.
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conceptual analysis. Collected papers, as in the cases of Schweiker and Burrell, inevitably contain overlaps and repetitions, but apart from becoming very familiar with the authors favourite references and turns of phrase the reader is actually helped by this inbuilt redundancy to come to grips with some very demanding trains of thought. Martys book deserves wide dissemination and could stimulate discussion in any reasonably informed seminar or reading circle; the other three presuppose a considerable background in western philosophy and Christian theology, but could be tackled with great prot by senior semester and graduate students. Albeit for different reasons, each is highly recommended.

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