Comparative Theology as Fundamental Theology

Lingering Colonial Maps in Ad Gentes

While the first schema of what would become Ad Gentes primarily reflected the preconciliar territorial and juridical approach to mission, the final document includes a profoundly trinitarian and ecclesiological missionary theology, thanks to the influence of Yves Congar and other members of the conciliar Commission on Mission, who were almost all bishops native to their mission dioceses. ¹⁴ The text produced by this drafting body was debated, revised, and finally approved 2,394 to 5, making it the most unanimously approved document of the council. ¹⁵ Ad Gentes frames the missionary nature of the church as participation in the paschal mystery: The initial “fount-like love” that flows from God the Father through the Son in the Incarnation and commissioned to the Apostles and the whole church, animated by the Holy Spirit, describes the trinitarian mode of the church’s mission to the world. ¹⁶ This theology finds authority in the biblical account of Pentecost: “There was presaged that union of all peoples in the catholicity of the faith by means of the Church of the New Covenant, a Church which speaks all tongues, understands and accepts all tongues in her love, and so supersedes the divisiveness of Babel.” ¹⁷ In light of this theological account of the church’s missionary nature, the document defines missionary activity in a strict sense as “those particular undertakings by which the heralds of the Gospel, sent out by the Church and going forth into the whole world, carry out the task of preaching the Gospel and planting the Church among peoples or groups who do not yet believe in Christ. . . . The proper purpose of this missionary activity is evangelization, and the planting of the Church among those peoples and groups where it has not yet taken root.” ¹⁸ Here, instead of defining mission work by the church’s quantitative presence in particular territories, this definition focuses on the quality of a people’s assent to the Gospel. Ad Gentes 22 further conceives of the Christian message as a seed nourished by the soil of local cultures and traditions, depicting human cultures as positive recipients of the Word and encouraging the cultural adaptation of the Gospel throughout the world.

In addition to this theological development of mission, there are also explicit remnants of a contrasting preconciliar territorial and juridical approach. In article 6, the document affirms that mission work is “mostly exercised in certain territories recognized by the Holy See.” The article further clarifies that “missionary activity among the nations differs from pastoral activity exercised among the faithful as well as from undertakings aimed at restoring unity among Christians.” This language differentiates between how the church’s missionary nature is enacted toward “the nations”/outsiders as missionary activity properly understood and toward “the faithful,” including non-Catholic Christians, as pastoral activity. Suso Brechter affirms, “It is a mark of the missions that they are always the first proclamation of the Gospel. The dechristianized countries and unbelieving masses of Europe and America create their own difficult problems for the apostolate but do not present a missionary situation.” ¹⁹ Here, the apostolic work of the church in Europe or North America is to be considered pastoral work, even if the people largely do not assent to the Gospel, since the church exists in these countries as an institution and the offer of salvation can be considered to be publicly available.

The problem with this ongoing distinction between the church’s missionary nature carried out as either missionary or pastoral activity is that it was applied inconsistently, over and against Ad Gente’s own missionary theology oriented to the quality of a people’s assent to the Gospel. Insisting that the church’s presence in Europe and North America amounts to “pastoral activity” overrides the people’s explicit dissent to the Gospel, thus undermining both these populations’ freedom of conscience and Ad Gentes’s theology of mission. In this case, Christianity’s cultural aspect is highlighted; even though large numbers of Europeans and North Americans may not assent to Christian faith claims, this tradition of reception of Ad Gentes asserts that Christianity is publicly accessible to the degree that, culturally, the bishops judge North Americans and Europeans to be more Christian than “other,” more “like” than “unlike.”

On the other side of this problematic distinction is the situation of many Latin American dioceses. A footnote to Ad Gentes 6 specifically names Latin America as a region where the Catholic Church’s history as an institution—a longer history than that of many North American dioceses—may not be cause to categorize the church’s activity there as “pastoral”: “In this notion of missionary activity, as is evident, according to the circumstances, even those parts of Latin America are included in which there is neither a hierarchy proper to the region, nor maturity of Christian life, nor sufficient preaching of the Gospel.” ²⁰ Here, the council judges that Latin American institutional status, maturity of conscience, or familiarity with Christian teaching may still be insufficient for consideration as “like”; the possibility that they are “other” remains. The footnote goes on to say that it falls to the Holy See to determine the status of particular dioceses, referring to the Propaganda Fide, whose responsibility it was to oversee mission territories as well as administer and delegate missionary funds and personnel. Indeed, many territories where the church had traditionally carried out mission work happened to be impoverished and exploited countries in the majority world, and for some of these territories, it was essential to be considered “mission countries” in order to receive financial support from the Propaganda Fide for the church’s charitable work in the region.

William R. Burrows affirms that fundraising and charitable concerns were a driving factor behind much of the text of Ad Gentes: “They wanted it to state clearly and solemnly that northern hemisphere ‘sending’ churches had an obligation to support the ‘receiving’ mission churches generously with both personnel and financial assistance.” ²¹ However necessary this funding was for important humanitarian and community-building work, continuing to designate these regions’ dioceses “missionary” in the strict sense despite their long history of Christian presence and life suspended the full, adult communion of some dioceses, maintaining a hierarchy of local churches that mapped on to colonial geographies and perpetuated the tendency to a territorial ecclesiology that imagined the world as sharply divided between “mission countries” (“the nations” or outsiders) and Christendom proper (“the faithful,” insiders). As a result, even congregations of baptized faithful in Latin America for whom Christianity had been publicly available for generations remained, at least to some degree, “the nations,” second-class ecclesial communities, outside recipients of the missionary activity of the church proper. Meanwhile, even as increasing numbers of Europeans and North Americans began to explicitly reject Christian belief and ecclesial belonging, those dioceses’ insider status remained unquestioned in a context of a sort of secular Christianity recognizable to the council. Burrows explicitly judges that this internal inconsistency of Ad Gentes functioned “to keep churches which ought long ago have become self-ministering dependent upon Euro-American churches.” ²² Thus, despite the development of a profound theology of mission in Ad Gentes, remnants of the decree’s territorial, juridical missiology undermine its theological developments and betray a lingering Eurocentric image of full Christian belonging and subjectivity.

Eurocentric Religious Hierarchies in Nostra Aetate

The Secretariat for Promoting Christian Unity (SPCU) initiated a document on the relationship of the church to the Jewish people, which was considered as, among other options, a chapter of the draft on ecumenism or as an appendix to Lumen Gentium. Ultimately, the document was promulgated in the final session of the council as Nostra Aetate, the “Declaration on the Relation of the Church to Non-Christian Religions,” now considered to be a milestone in Catholic approaches to religious diversity. ²³ Over the course of many debates, the scope of the document had expanded to include, first, Islam, in response to the petitions of Catholics living in majority-Muslim countries, and then to other non-Christian religions. This openness was facilitated by Pope Paul VI’s first encyclical, Ecclesiam Suam, and his December 1964 speech to non-Christians during the Eucharistic Congress in Bombay, India. ²⁴ In both cases, the pope lays out an ecclesiology of dialogue conceived as a series of concentric circles, starting with the Hebrew people, then looking to Muslims as fellow monotheists, and finally to “the followers of the great Afro-Asiatic religions.” ²⁵ This ecclesiology is reflected in the council’s documents, first and most clearly in Lumen Gentium 16, which offers a new paradigm of a spectrum of relatedness to the ecclesial body instead of a stark boundary delineating who is in and who is out. This ecclesiology makes possible the broadening of Nostra Aetate’s scope to include openness to genuine dialogue with non-Christian religions and to affirm the church’s positive relationship to all groups and peoples when gospel values are shared in pursuit of peace and justice. ²⁶

The most significant positive development of Nostra Aetate for later shifts in Catholic theologies of religions is the explicit affirmation in article 2 that God is present to members of non-Christian religions and that non-Christians truly seek and find God through their own religious practices and traditions. It reads: “There is found among various peoples a certain perception of that hidden power which hovers over the course of things and over the events of human history; at times some indeed have come to the recognition of a Supreme Being, or even of a Father.” ²⁷ Here, the council affirms not only that non-Christians can know God through reason but that they can know God in a revealed, personal way, as Father. Article 2 continues, “Likewise, other religions found everywhere try to counter the restlessness of the human heart, each in its own manner, by proposing ‘ways,’ comprising teachings, rules of life, and sacred rites. The Catholic Church rejects nothing that is true and holy in these religions.” This affirms that non-Christians are able to arrive at true and good answers in their quest to know God and to do what is right by way of at least some aspects of their traditions. These claims are found and reaffirmed throughout other council documents, especially in Ad Gentes 7 and Lumen Gentium 16.

Another important contribution of Nostra Aetate 2 is its mention of religious traditions beyond the “Abrahamic religions” treated in sections 3 and 4; the document names Hinduism and Buddhism, and “other religions found everywhere.” Though these traditions have worldviews and histories that differ significantly from those stories and figures shared by Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, the style of engagement that the document prescribes with all non-Christian religions is unequivocally dialogical. In Nostra Aetate, the faithful are encouraged to “enter with prudence and charity into discussion and collaboration with members of other religions. Let Christians, while witnessing to their own faith and way of life, acknowledge, preserve, and encourage the spiritual and moral truths found among non-Christians, together with their social life and culture.” ²⁸ Recognizing the presence of God among religions that do not share the accounts of salvation history and advocating for a dialogical relationship with them emphasizes the council’s affirmation that God is present to creation beyond the (hi)stories that are legible to Christianity.

Like Ad Gentes, Nostra Aetate represents a significant shift in the church’s teaching, here toward an inclusive theology of religion. However, it also reinscribes Eurocentric categories of “otherness” that contribute to confusion about how dialogue and mission are to be engaged in relationships with non-Christians. Throughout the drafting process, bishops from Spain, Japan, India, Cameroon, Lebanon, Turkey, and Vietnam all petitioned for the expansion of the declaration beyond Christian-Jewish relations to account for encounter with all non-Christians, and several African bishops expressed a desire that “animism” be explicitly mentioned. ²⁹ However, once the declaration was definitively expanded, only Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism were explicitly mentioned beyond the original Jewish-Christian scope. On its own, the limited enumeration of the world’s religious and spiritual/sapiential traditions with which Nostra Aetate imagined Christians to be in relationship is not necessarily a problem; certainly, not every spiritual orientation or practice could have been mentioned. However, the traditions that are mentioned, the way the document describes them, and those traditions that went unnamed betray a Eurocentric understanding of religion itself.

In the text of Nostra Aetate 2, the religions of “an advanced culture” associated with “philosophical inquiry” and “illumination” (exemplified by Hinduism and Buddhism) are divided from the unnamed “other religions found everywhere” that are expressed through primarily practical or ritual acts thusly:

Religions, however, that are bound up with an advanced culture have struggled to answer the same questions by means of more refined concepts and a more developed language. Thus in Hinduism, men contemplate the divine mystery and express it through an inexhaustible abundance of myths and through searching philosophical inquiry. They seek freedom from the anguish of our human condition either through ascetical practices or profound meditation or a flight to God with love and trust. Again, Buddhism, in its various forms, realizes the radical insufficiency of this changeable world; it teaches a way by which men, in a devout and confident spirit, may be able either to acquire the state of perfect liberation, or attain, by their own efforts or through higher help, supreme illumination. Likewise, other religions found everywhere try to counter the restlessness of the human heart, each in its own manner, by proposing “ways,” comprising teachings, rules of life, and sacred rites.

It again bears repeating that this way of speaking explicitly in a positive way about non-Christian religions’ knowledge of the divine is a watershed moment for the Catholic Church. However, the elevation of so-called “great” religions of “advanced culture” who use “more refined concepts and a more developed language”—here, as in Hinduism and Buddhism—betrays how the Council Fathers’ religious imaginary was shaped by categories like “world religions” or “natural” and “ethical/universal” religions—Eurocentric taxonomies that were common religious studies language in the early modern period. ³⁰ The elevation of some “great” religions over others is additionally problematic when combined with the fact that no “non-great” religions are explicitly named in the document; they are grouped together as second-tier, and these unnamed religions are practiced largely in territories that, as in Ad Gentes, cohere with colonial maps. Further, the very language of “natural” religions obscures the divine self-communication to non-Christians that Nostra Aetate affirms as a possibility. This distinction among non-Christian religions in the document, based in European knowledge and cultural values—“more refined” according to whom? “More developed” according to whose criteria?—is unjustifiable.

While the council did follow the relational ecclesiology outlined in Ecclesiam Suam by Pope Paul VI, this does not, and did not, reflect the only way of charting the closeness or distance between Christianity and non-Christan religions, even in the 1960s. In September 1964, Bishop Jean Baptiste Gahamanyi of Rwanda, speaking on behalf of about eighty Council Fathers, described animism as more “open” to Christianity than either Judaism or Islam and, thus, worthy of mention; in the view of council historians, this intervention “brought before the European and North American episcopates considerations and sensibilities alien to them.” ³¹ According to Gerald O’Collins, “Both at the time of the Council and later, commentators have regretted the failure to address, even in passing, ethnic or tribal religions.” ³² Evidently, the relationship to non-Christians articulated in Nostra Aetate was informed by the biases and lacunae of North American and European bishops, and the fundamental opening of a Catholic theology of religions toward a dialogical relationship with non-Christians need not be threatened by desiring a recalibration of Christian taxonomies of religious others. ³³

Two Tracks: Dialogue and Mission in the Immediate Reception of the Council

After the council, Ad Gentes and Nostra Aetate were initially received by the church along two separate tracks, though over time this separation became increasingly untenable. The missionary theology inaugurated in Ad Gentes largely developed into a theology of inculturation, as in Pope John Paul II’s Redemptoris Missio and its appeal for a “new evangelization,” in which the Gospel is expressed in the cultural categories of a people and, in turn, transforms human cultures. ³⁴ That is, the difference between the church and the recipients of missionary activity was imagined as primarily cultural difference; missionees’ religious or spiritual traditions were rarely acknowledged, and the implicit assumption was that these potential Christians could understand and accept Christianity once it was thoroughly translated into their language and customs. ³⁵ In contrast, the opening toward an inclusive theology of religions in Nostra Aetate was developed as a negotiation of primarily religious difference proper to what later become the field of comparative theology and developed normatively in curial documents like “Dialogue and Mission” (Secretariat for Non-Christians, 1984), “Dialogue and Proclamation” (Pontifical Council for Inter-Religious Dialogue, 1991), and Dominus Iesus (Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, 2000).

What Catholic theology, broadly, has failed to emphasize in these dual tracks of reception of conciliar reflection on engagement with non-Christians is that the work of inculturation is comparative theology. Cultural difference implies religious and spiritual difference, and so the theology of mission made explicit in Ad Gentes should not be separated from the inclusivist theology of religions incipiently expressed in Nostra Aetate. Tracy Sayuki Tiemeier makes this argument starting from the side of the legacy of Nostra Aetate and comparative theology, arguing that the field must be able to broach topics of cultural in addition to religious diversity: “If comparative theology is to be relevant and avoid the domination of one perspective, it must become more like Asian or Asian American liberation theology: responsive to the cultural, multireligious issues in their theologies.” ³⁶ From the side of Ad Gente’s legacy of missionary activity as inculturation, if there is to be a relevant, historically responsible theology of mission, it must be able to encounter the non-Christian religious and spiritual wisdom of the world’s cultures.

This isolation of supposedly-primarily-religious difference (Nostra Aetate and its reception) from other supposedly-only-cultural differences (Ad Gentes and its reception) is symptomatic of the “world religions” model of comparative religious studies, in which those religio-cultural matrices that Enlightenment Christians categorized as fellow “great/ethical religions” deserve a kind of (albeit twisted and exoticizing) deference and respect that requires specialized study, while those peoples whose “religious” systems did not make the cut were slated for annexation into neo-Christendom. ³⁷ These patterns prevail in Ad Gentes and Nostra Aetate: Both the dioceses that remained “mission dioceses” after Ad Gentes and the regions of practice for the second-tier “other” religions anonymously lumped together in Nostra Aetate cohere with maps of territories and peoples subjected to European Christian coloniality. There remains, then, the threat of the implicit assumption that Christians take part in interreligious dialogue with members of the so-called “world religions”—those who have some sort of equal though other religious content to engage—while Christian missiology enduringly justifies a conversion-oriented approach to encounter with those religious others whom enduring colonial matrices cast as second-tier or less developed.

Shortcomings of the Intermediate Reception

The subjugation of dialogue to proclamation and the understanding of the flow of missionary activity to be ultimately directed to specific conversion to Christianity is an imperfect solution to the two modes of encounter with non-Christians taught at Vatican II. One consequential loss is the inability of this concept of mission to articulate what Christians may learn from religious others. There remain throughout the postconciliar episcopal magisterium nods to this potential fruit of interreligious encounter, as in Pope John Paul II’s apostolic letter Novo Millennio Ineunte, in which he recognizes that interreligious dialogue promotes important opportunities for Christians to learn from God’s activity in other traditions: “The Spirit of God, who ‘blows where he wills’ (Jn 3:8), not infrequently reveals signs of his presence which help Christ’s followers to understand more deeply the message which they bear.” ⁴⁵ In this discernment, the pope reminds Christians to cultivate “an attitude of profound willingness to listen,” trusting in the Holy Spirit to receive questions as they arise. ⁴⁶

However, this and other impulses toward interreligious learning were overshadowed by a commitment to the ultimacy of the proclamation of Christianity. Just weeks after the publication of Novo Millennio Ineunte, under the prefecture of Cardinal Josef Ratzinger, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) released its “notification” on Jacques Dupuis’s 1997 book Toward a Christian Theology of Religious Pluralism and concomitant “Declaration on the Unicity and Salvific Universality of Jesus Christ and the Church” (Dominus Iesus). ⁴⁷ Both the notification and Dominus Iesus emphasize the importance of proclaiming the fullness and salvific necessity of divine revelation in Jesus Christ and are concerned that Dupuis’s consideration of God’s presence in non-Christian traditions “contained notable ambiguities and difficulties on important doctrinal points, which could lead a reader to erroneous or harmful opinions.” ⁴⁸ This fear of error and the CDF’s instinctive move to protect its own understanding reinscribe the missionary flow described in “Dialogue and Proclamation” wherein dialogue is merely a precursor to proclamation and the formal aim is conversion of religious others to Christianity. Indeed, in 1996, Cardinal Ratzinger described as a central problem for contemporary faith a kind of “relativism” that he understood as unchecked openness to non-Christian proposals found in both liberation theology and theologies of religious pluralism like Dupuis’s. ⁴⁹ For Ratzinger, openness to learning from the non-Christian other is precisely the crisis. In protecting the church from this danger, however, the tradition tends to lose a sense of conversion of all toward the divine and ignores the possibility of Christian learning guided by the Holy Spirit as a fruit of dialogue.

Another reason this intermediate reception of the council’s teachings on dialogue and mission as expressed in “Dialogue and Proclamation” (and reified in Dominus Iesus) is insufficient is because it does not find an intellectually responsibly way to address the urgency of reckoning with Christianity’s violent history of interreligious encounter. A return to this important originating factor for the initial drafting of Nostra Aetate is found in “The Gifts and Calling of God Are Irrevocable,” a 2015 reflection by the Pontifical Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews on the question of whether the church’s missionary prerogative should be applied to the Jewish-Christian encounter. On one hand, if the fullness of divine revelation in Jesus Christ is universally necessary for salvation, as in Dominus Iesus, it follows that this proclamation would be equally necessary for people of all non-Christian traditions. On the other, Nostra Aetate was drafted to counter violent legacies of anti-Judaism and supersessionism that missionary work toward Jews would likely reignite. Out of ongoing reflection on the theological meaning of Nostra Aetate for Jewish-Christian relations, the commission teaches that God’s covenant with the Jewish people is “irrevocable” and that specific missionary activity toward Jews is inappropriate:

It is easy to understand that the so-called “mission to the Jews” is a very delicate and sensitive matter for Jews because, in their eyes, it involves the very existence of the Jewish people. This question also proves to be awkward for Christians, because for them the universal salvific significance of Jesus Christ and consequently the universal mission of the Church are of fundamental importance. The Church is therefore obliged to view evangelisation to Jews, who believe in the one God, in a different manner from that to people of other religions and world views. In concrete terms this means that the Catholic Church neither conducts nor supports any specific institutional mission work directed towards Jews. While there is a principled rejection of an institutional Jewish mission, Christians are nonetheless called to bear witness to their faith in Jesus Christ also to Jews, although they should do so in a humble and sensitive manner, acknowledging that Jews are bearers of God’s Word, and particularly in view of the great tragedy of the Shoah. ⁵⁰

Here, the commission recognizes that evangelizing the Jews contains the goal of eradicating Judaism, a core religio-cultural identity component of the Jewish people. Though this could have been recognized before the Shoah, in its aftermath, the commission is clear that missionary work that contains this genocidal goal cannot be God’s will for the church.

Strikingly, the commission does not have an answer for how to understand the role of the Jews in a salvific plan that necessitates Christ’s definitive revelation. Regarding Jewish salvation, and drawing on the witness of the Pauline epistles, the commission states:

From the Christian confession that there can be only one path to salvation, however, it does not in any way follow that the Jews are excluded from God’s salvation because they do not believe in Jesus Christ as the Messiah of Israel and the Son of God. . . . That the Jews are participants in God’s salvation is theologically unquestionable, but how that can be possible without confessing Christ explicitly, is and remains an unfathomable divine mystery. ⁵¹

It is worth noting that the statement relies on an extraordinary amount of epistemic humility and trust in the Holy Spirit; the authors prefer to admit that they do not know how to reconcile Christ’s salvific role with Jewish salvation other than to oblige Christians to continue advocating for the conversion of Jews to Christianity—which they refuse to do. In other terms, the commission trusts God to find a way to redeem creation that does not require the elimination of a people.

Regarding the implications of the document for broader Christian encounter with non-Christians, “The Gifts” only allows itself this epistemic humility because of the “special theological status” of the Jewish-Christian relationship—these are not allowances that the commission is open to considering for non-Christian religions beyond Judaism. For the commission, this special status is rooted in the sacred texts shared by Judaism and Christianity as well as the shared, if conflictual, history of Jews and early Hebrew and Gentile Christ-followers in the first few centuries of the common era. ⁵² Though the Jewish-Christian relationship certainly has distinctive features, affording this relationship elevated status as solely influential for Christian revaluation of the church’s missionary nature may ignore how Christians’ shared histories with members of other traditions also have implications for Christian identity and mission. ⁵³ For example, the enduring metaphysical catastrophe of missionary Christianity in the Americas for Indigenous peoples and enslaved and trafficked Africans and their descendants also makes an ethical demand upon the Christian tradition to excavate its assumptions about missionary work and reach an intellectually responsible approach to encounter with religious diversity that does not rely upon the conquest and subjugation of non-Christian spiritual and wisdom traditions. ⁵⁴

John Pawlikowski identifies some reasons that the Jewish-Christian relationship may not be as uniquely binding at “The Gifts” would imagine. First, Jews do not necessarily consider Christianity to shape their own identity in a mutual way, and, second, many Christian imaginaries that undergird the “special status” of the Jewish-Christian relationship “overemphasize Judaism as a biblical religion and give insufficient attention to the central role of post-biblical commentaries and such experiences as the Shoah and the reestablishment of the state of Israel in the forging of contemporary Jewish identities.” ⁵⁵ Ultimately, Pawlikowski observes, “by overstressing these distinctive aspects of the Christian-Jewish dialogue in comparison with other interreligious encounters we run the risk of giving the discussion with Jews and Judaism a measure of superiority, of special privilege, which has the effect of downplaying other dialogues, leaving the impression that they are of secondary importance.” ⁵⁶ Here again, as in Nostra Aetate, there emerges in the commission’s reflection, a hierarchy of religious otherness founded on partial judgments about closeness and shared identity.

“The Gifts” does, however, interrupt the singular flow of missionary activity in “Dialogue and Proclamation” from dialogue to climactic proclamation. For Christians encountering Jews, a certain sense of soteriological agnosticism is recommended as a safeguard against repeating destructive patterns of Jewish-Christian history. In simultaneous agreement and disagreement with “The Gifts,” Cornille recommends that Christian theologians adopt such an attitude of soteriological agnosticism for all religious encounter: “From a Christian perspective, one can neither state that other religions are or that they are not ways to salvation. All one can claim in faith and confidence is that Christianity offers the means to salvation . . . one may certainly hope and even expect that God’s salvific action is also at work in other religions, but one can neither affirm nor deny it.” ⁵⁷ Instead of making soteriological claims, then, Cornille suggests that interreligious dialogue might “focus specifically on the understanding of truth in Christianity as well as in other religions, and on the criteria and strategies for determining such truth.” ⁵⁸ In recovering an epistemic focus for interreligious dialogue, Cornille points toward a much-needed recovery of the purpose of dialogue in itself as a general conversion of all, including Christians, toward God. ⁵⁹

In this intermediate stage of conciliar reception, then, normative documents of the episcopal magisterium contain arguments for reconciling the council’s dual-track approach to non-Christians by subjugating dialogue to proclamation, at the cost of potential learning from religious others. If the Dupuis-CDF debates are a reliable indicator, this impulse came, at least in part, from a fear of the risk that Christian participants in dialogue may fall into error or “relativism.” This fear and the protective instinct of the episcopal magisterium demonstrate the need for the Holy Spirit’s guidance in the process of dialogue, as John Paul II affirms in Novo Millennio Ineunte.

Later curial reflections like “The Gifts” recover the instigating motivation for the council’s original exploration of how to more coherently relate to the Jews, and theologians like Pawlikowski and Cornille advocate for a more internally critical, soteriologically agnostic engagement with all religious others. As dialogue recovers a central role in the writings and papal actions of Francis, epistemic humility, soteriological agnosticism, and trust in the Spirit indeed become central values.

Comparative Theology in Ad Theologiam Promovendam

Returning to Ad Theologiam Promovendam, Francis’s understanding of theology as in dialogue with philosophical disciplines is the basis for his broad understanding of who theology’s dialogue partners are. Drawing on a quite traditional, Thomistic understanding of “philosophy,” Francis understands all knowledge-seeking as oriented to God and states that, returning to the quote at the beginning of this essay, “theology can only develop in a culture of dialogue and encounter between different traditions and different wisdoms/understandings (it., saperi; lt., cognitionibus convenientibus), between different Christian confessions and different religions, openly engaging with everyone, believers and non-believers.” Here, Francis puts theology in necessary dialogue with three collectives of partners. First, he says that “all other disciplines and all other knowledge” are relevant dialogue partners for theology. ⁷¹ He calls this approach “transdisciplinarity,” a profound engagement in a “web of relationships” with other knowledge ways oriented toward ultimate truth. ⁷² Concretely, this totality of other relevant disciplines and knowledge beyond contemporary philosophy can include critical studies, cultural studies, history, gender and sexuality studies, artistic and performance studies, studies of trauma and embodiment, and the social sciences and their research tools, among others. Second, Francis is clear that theology must proceed in institutional, synodal dialogue with the church: “The theologian cannot help but experience fraternity and communion firsthand, at the service of evangelization and to reach everyone’s hearts.” ⁷³

Finally, Francis turns to the need for theology to engage knowledge ways beyond scientific disciplines and methods: “The necessary attention to the scientific status of theology must not obscure its wisdom dimension.” ⁷⁴ “Wisdom dimension” indicates those speculative and transcendent knowledge ways beyond empirical data analysis that Christian tradition has long insisted are an important part of faith. ⁷⁵ This language is significant, especially in view of the growing awareness of “religion” as a colonial category and the resistance of humanity’s Indigenous and ancestral wisdom traditions to be reduced or misunderstood by the term. ⁷⁶ Wisdom knowledge is, for Francis, theology’s particular wheelhouse; by acknowledging and speaking from these knowledge ways, “theology can contribute to the current debate of ‘rethinking thought,’ showing itself to be a true critical knowledge insofar as it is wisdom knowledge, not abstract and ideological, but spiritual, developed on one’s knees, pregnant with adoration and prayer.” ⁷⁷ For Francis, Christian theologians’ dialogue partners in wisdom include scholars of the world’s spiritual and sapiential traditions, as well as the common sense of everyday people of all orientations to religion and spirituality—“priority must be given to the knowledge of people’s common sense which is in fact the theological place in which many images of God live, often not corresponding to the Christian face of God, [who is] only and always love.” ⁷⁸ In conclusion, Francis calls theology to “develop, in constant attention to the scientific nature of theological reflection, transdisciplinary dialogue with other scientific, philosophical, humanistic and artistic knowledge, with believers and non-believers, with men and women of different Christian denominations and different religions.” ⁷⁹ Comparative theology, then, can no longer be a marginal task to the field of Christian theology; rather, all theological reflection must develop its capacity to take seriously its context of religious pluralism and to engage in dialogue with other-than-Christian spiritualities and wisdom traditions in the service of truth and life.

Although Francis does not explicitly mention “comparative theology” in Ad Theologiam Promovendam—or any other specific scholarly method, for that matter—the kind of theology he recommends to the Pontifical Academy for Theology reflects precisely the kind of “conscious, open, and systematic engagement of other religions in the process of theological development” with which the modern discipline of comparative theology charges itself. In Fratelli Tutti, Francis directs all people of good faith to interreligious dialogue as a condition for the possibility of growing in wisdom. For Francis, this dialogue comes out of devotion to the divine, who has been truly apprehended in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. For the specific scholarly, intellectual, and sapiential work of theology that Ad Theologiam Promovendam seeks to guide, a comparative approach offers methodological tools and learning goals that are up to the task. This is a fundamental theology because it touches the human ability to know the divine at all, to receive God’s revelation to all beloved creation, to discern truth and goodness and so prepare the way for divine fulfillment. Both the theology of mission inaugurated in Ad Gentes and the inclusivist theology of religion developed from Nostra Aetate converge on this: In a context of the church’s own pilgrim journey, of the millennial witness of diverse and partial human wisdoms, and of the urgency to ground a common ethic in truth and care, Christian encounter with non-Christians can hold both the world’s need for the church to courageously share its own apprehension of divine mystery and the church’s obligation to attend to its siblings’ winnowing resistance to its pilgrim way.

Tools and Challenges on Christian Theology’s Comparative Horizon

Embracing comparative theology as a condition for the possibility of humanity’s full reception of divine revelation—as fundamental theology—brings several tools to the forefront of theological method in the contemporary period. Several have already been mentioned in this paper: epistemic humility, soteriological agnosticism, and a hermeneutical option to rejoice in finding ways to rearticulate normative doctrinal expression so as to correct misunderstandings and reduce harm. Another important shift that can accompany a fundamental embrace of comparative theology is to approach religious diversity, not as a threat, but as a positive resource. John Thatamanil echoes Francis’s association of ethics with ontology along these lines: “When we affirm that we need the other in order to arrive at God, we affirm not only an ethical obligation to, and need for, the neighbor but also a theological desire for her. Religious neighbors must be hallowed because we need them to arrive at a deeper encounter with and understanding of divinity.” ⁸⁰ Finally, the opportunity to consider dialogue as a task of trusting the Holy Spirit and recognizing divine mystery always beyond our understanding can help strengthen the church’s pneumatological, apophatic, and contemplative traditions. By understanding Christian theology to be in close and allied dialogue with our religious siblings and neighbors, we affirm the ultimate otherness of the divine we together seek.

Throughout this paper, the proposal that comparative theology become a fundamental part of Christian theology’s task and method has been buoyed by references to Indigenous and decolonial critique and reflection, especially in the Americas. Randy S. Woodley, Eleazar López Hernández, and George E. “Tink” Tinker, among many others, have written from the anonymity of the unnamed traditions in Nostra Aetate, from the enduring infantilization of the “young” churches in Ad Gentes, and from the silence of colonial death about how the lack of a comparative mode of Christian theology has affected and continues to affect their communities. A follow-up to Francis’s affirmation of comparative theology as fundamental to the Christian theological project and the intuition throughout this development that ethics and theology are partners in the discernment of truth must further attend to the voices of siblings and neighbors from Indigenous, Afrodiasporic, and other millenary sapiential traditions that continue to survive an underdeveloped Christian missionary impulse and to generously engage the church in dialogue for the good of all creation.