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knowledgment of the working of the truth of the Christian religion outside its boundaries, inclusivism best replicates the tensions and revisions which accrue to the reading process as I have described it throughout this book. Its insistence that salvation occurs through Christ alone, and is yet universally available, is a perplexing double claim which, if merely stated, may suggest incoherence or at least a reluctance to resolve the difficult issues involved. Yet in the context of the dialectic of reading and extended signification this perplexing complexity appears as part of its vitality. It neither abandons its starting point in faith and in a vision of the entirety of the world in Christ, nor does it imagine that world in so narrow a fashion as to excise the Christian faith from the universal context it is said to articulate; there is a world, it can and needs to be encountered, read. Just as the comparative theologian insists on reading back and forth from Text to context, in the act of creative amplification of what has already been "written" from the start, the inclusivist insists on salvation in Christ alone and the true universality of salvation, and the need to keep these truths together in creative tension. Moreover, both inclusivism and comparison mirror the tension we discovered in Advaita, between the simple and universally available truth of Brahman and the complexity of the Text in which that truth remains steadfastly inscribed. |
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A comparative theology allied with the inclusivist position would therefore begin with a reading of the Advaita Text, for this Text and its multiple literary riches and its theological possibilities are now all included in the set of Christian theological resources. This inclusivist appropriation would be committed to the practice of reading the Text, instead of replacing it with a theory about it, an abstraction such as "the sacred texts of the world" or "the Hindu experience of the eternal." This inclusive reading would happen even if the inclusivist does not confuse this Text with the Bible, which remains the privileged Text formative of the inclusivist's thinking. |
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The inclusivist position, thus revised, becomes the practice of including; this, in turn, is a major revision of the theology of religions as such, a shift from a theoretical enterprise to a set of |
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