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Here too, a straightforward question will not get a straightforward answer. If comparison really does enrich our knowledge of God, this increase will occur only gradually, within the same structures of reading, comparison and communication that characterize comparison in general. We cannot tell at a glance what the other tradition will teach us of God. Even if we learn that it is naive to equate "God" and "Brahman," and equally naive to declare "God is not Brahman," the value of Advaita for a Christian audience's knowledge of God remains undetermined, a value to be measured in careful experiments. One might, for instance, recollect what one has learned of God from Aquinas' exposition ST I.1-119, and then rethink it in light of UMS I.1-4. |
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Each Advaita tenet is a complex theological doctrine generated from a series of developed strategies about the use of scripture, the dynamics of meditation practice, the nature of opposing viewpoints and the history of Advaita's apologetic response, etc.; each can be inscribed into Christian theological discourse only gradually, selectively, and with the candid admission that the doctrine as finally received will not be quite the same as it was for another tradition's theologian, e.g., Sankara or Amalananda. Since this inscription remains undone, the question as to what a reading of Amalananda will tell Christians of God must be deferred, though recognized as the key question. |
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Deferral or not, the comparativist who recognizes that theology's truth about God is not identical with faith's truth may still have to face questions such as, "Do you now share the Advaita faith? have you personally found Advaita to be true? have you ever met anyone who is one with Brahman?" Such questions require personal responses which entail various decisions about how one lives one's life. The simple and straightforward question of faith turns our attention to the comparativist, that faithful reader who alone is able to make the necessary transition from much reading, thinking and writingthe complex dissemination of faith in the (comparative or precomparative) theological practice of a communityto the event of realization. Here, then, we find ourselves where we were at the end of Chapter 3, concerned with the resolution of the tension between reading and truth in the person who does |
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