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2. Truth and the Conflict of Truths in Light of the Textuality of Doctrine
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Nevertheless, if we read patiently and experiment patiently, extending and improving upon experiments such as those involving Aquinas, Amalananda and Cajetan sketched earlier in this chapter, we can expect that the truth of the compared Text(s), and so also the retrieval of the viability of their doctrines, will gradually become accessible. If we can read, we can read comparatively and can be confronted by a truth of reading that is available only in a comparative context. |
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To gather the fruits of this practice as they can be expressed to a wider community, we need a differentiated notion of doctrine which can account for the complex fashion in which communities generate their teachings about their faith and practice out of their (previously) constituted scriptures, practices and traditions in general. We need to understand the ways in which those doctrines are composed in a form that then persists, and the ways in which other theological doctrines serve as the necessary but never entirely fixed or permanent vehicles of those doctrines. |
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Though important, a comparative rereading of a Text such as the Summa Theologiae after Advaita need not result in changes in Christian doctrine in any literal or constitutive sense. Comparative theological reading does not require the abandonment of any particular doctrines, nor a revisionist interpretation of the meaning of any particular doctrine; indeed, comparative theological reading depends on the perdurance of what is said, read, taught, written in a tradition; those who would expect from comparative theology sensational new teachings should inevitably be disappointed. |
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Nevertheless, even if the words of a tradition's doctrines remain exactly the same, they are painstakingly and exhaustingly reread in the light of the compared, other tradition and its Text; if that new reading does not end in new teachings, it must nevertheless conclude in some kind of assessment of what is achieved, or realized. If we are to avoid remaining comfortably |
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