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have a bearing on salvation. Theologians do their work with an awareness of and concern for these beliefs, and with a desire to defend and preserve them, even if at one or another moment they may have to question, recontextualize and finally reformulate them in modes of discourse quite different from those already familiar to the community. |
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These features remain operative throughout theologians' comparative study as well. Comparativists who are theologians are likely to believe that transcendence, revelation, truth and salvation are real concerns, not simply components of the texts which talk about them; that they are concerns likely to affect not only explicit participants in the religious traditions which revere those texts, but also scholars who might read those texts seriously. Two consequences follow. |
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First, comparative theologians cannot be content simply with cataloguing different traditions' views on these concerns, or with understanding how certain texts make sense to certain communities, or how ''their" texts are like or unlike "our" texts, should the allegiances "our" and "their" survive scrutiny. As theologians, they insist on asking further questions about the truth of their own and other communities' knowledge of God. Unwilling to reduce their own tradition's faith claims to mere information which does not require a response, comparative theologians likewise refuse to reduce other traditions' faith to mere, safe information. Knowledge, taken seriously, changes the lives of the knowers; even if research reveals or creates a series of contradictions which make life more difficult for the believing comparativist, to pass over these in silence is only a shortterm solution which manages to leave out much of what is most interesting in comparisons, the specific, "thick" details which constitute the substance of communities' religious beliefs and their continuing vitality. |
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Second, comparative theologians operate within boundaries marked by the tension between a necessary vulnerability to truth as one might find it and be affected by it in the materials studied, and loyalty to truth as one has already found it, lives it, and hopes according to it. Comparative theologians do not wish to reduce the studied traditions to mere, disposable information to |
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