|
|
|
|
|
|
|
immersed in endless textual resignification, rereading everything while yet insisting that there need not be evident changes in a tradition's teaching, we need then to project a way to the articulation of truths which can be scrutinized in distinction from the rarified and elitist realm of practice. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
For example: in ST III.46 Aquinas recognizes the centrality of the Passion of Christ in the economy of human salvation. If we juxtapose Aquinas' explanation of the Passion with Advaita's teaching of the salvific power of knowledge of Brahman, we may find ourselves compelled to ask which of the following declarations is true: |
|
|
|
 |
|
|
|
|
1. The historical event of the Passion of Christ is the most fitting, and ultimately the only, source of the salvation for the world; |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
2. Knowledge of Brahman is all that is required for salvation. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
The two claims appear incompatible, and out of a desire to take truth seriously we may feel obliged, however reluctantly, to choose between them. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
However, since both are rooted in the set of interpretive and communicative acts which constitute the faith lives of their communities, the choice cannot be an immediate, stark either/or. Tracing the genealogy of their contextualization through a retrieval of exegesis, and the genealogy of the reader's own contextualization through an assessment of his or her learning and prior commitments remains the primary task in the articulation and understanding of truth. Accounting for this contextualization is crucial in all cases, but most acutely in a case where we are trying to understand and relate the truths of more than one community. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
If we carefully reread the compared claims, seemingly so opposite, the problems related to a comparative reading of them are diminished, though not eliminated. The initial and apparently inevitable choiceis it Christ's Passion and Death which |
|
|
|
|
|