Abstract
Few scholars are better positioned than Gerald O’Collins to clarify the most recent debates in the Catholic Church about interreligious dialogue. Professor emeritus of the Gregorian University in Rome where he taught for more than 30 years, and now adjunct professor at the Australian Catholic University, Melbourne, and Honorary Research Fellow of MCD University of Divinity, O’C. accompanied the late Jacques Dupuis during his difficult conversations with the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. Provoked by Dupuis’s 1997 book, Toward a Christian Theology of Religious Pluralism, these conversations, beginning in the spring of 1998 and ending with a “notification” published by the CDF in January 2001, focused on several questions. The fundamental issue was, and remains, whether, given the trajectory established by Vatican II’s teachings on other religions, it follows that those religions offer their adherents elements of divinely revealed truths that they can access through faith? To pose the question in another way, How can Christians affirm their faith in Jesus Christ as the one redeemer of all of humanity and at the same time recognize the Holy Spirit at work in the world’s other religions and cultures?
While the focus on Dupuis’s argument and the CDF’s response constitute only the penultimate chapter in this volume, all the other chapters provide both a historical and theological basis for O’C.’s defense of Dupuis’s argument, first laid out at length in his 1997 book. Four years later, Dupuis published a shorter, more accessible book, Christianity and the Religions: From Confrontation to Dialogue (ET 2002). There he made important clarifications—too often overlooked by his critics—of such terms as “inclusive pluralism,” “asymmetrical” and “complementarity”; and of the use of “the Word as such” and “the Word incarnate” instead of “Logos asarkos” and “Logos ensarkos.” While the CDF’s notification stated that Dupuis’s 1997 book “contained notable ambiguities and difficulties on important doctrinal points, which could lead a reader to erroneous or harmful opinions,” it did not require Dupuis to change anything in that book. Instead, the CDF asked only that its notification be included in future publications of his book.
Beginning with chapters on the New Testament and such early Christian authors as Justin, Irenaeus, Clement of Alexandria, and Origen, O’C. shows how Augustine’s pessimism about the salvation of people of other religions influenced much of the official teaching of the Catholic Church through the Middle Ages to the twentieth century, despite Thomas Aquinas’s writings on “implicit faith” and despite the bold explorations of the salvation of people of other religions by Ramon Llull and Nicholas of Cusa. The impact of the discovery of the Americas in the sixteenth century and subsequent missionary initiatives made it more difficult to defend a literal reading of extra ecclesiam nulla salus, and opened the way to the sea change of the church’s relationship to other religions ushered in by Vatican II.
In chapters 3 to 7 O’C. comments on the documents of Vatican II; in chapter 8 he accords special importance to the substantive contributions made by John Paul II to the issue. The pope’s encyclicals, the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue’s 1991 document, Dialogue and Proclamation (according to O’C., Dupuis played a major role in its drafting), and the International Theological Commission’s 1997 document, Christianity and the Religions, all lead to the conclusion, not explicit in the documents of Vatican II, that the self-communication of God reaches the followers of other religions not despite but through the religions they accept and practice. These believers, however, still lack the “decisive” revelation (rather than the “definitive,” which will come only at the end of time) of God in Jesus Christ affirmed by Christians.
O’C.’s position, as far as it goes, leaves considerable theological work to be done. If it is the case that others are saved not despite but through their religious teachings and practices, how does one sort through which teachings and practices rather than others make this possible? Also, once it is assumed that other believers can be saved through their own religions, how robust can the Christian’s proclamation of the “decisive” revelation of God in Christ be? And finally, if it is the case, as O’C. argues, that believers in other religions as well as secular people, are saved through the intercessory power of Christ’s priesthood, why have so few authors—with the exception of Gavin D’Costa who is, interestingly enough, in O’C.’s opinion, unfairly critical of Dupuis—explored this possibility?
O’C. recommends as the path forward humble dialogue, reminding us that Dupuis entitled his major work “Towards a Theology” (emphasis added). Such dialogue is not for the theologically faint of heart; ambiguities and mistakes are inevitable, especially in our still largely undeveloped conversations with the followers of Asian religions. We should be grateful for O’C.’s courage and scholarship. This book should be used in advanced undergraduate and graduate courses, as well as by all scholars interested in this important debate.