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beliefs in order to restate them more effectively. In keeping with a concern that is central to both Advaita and (my Roman Catholic) Christian tradition, my emphasis on the local and particular resists the reduction of the two religious traditions compared, or of the comparative reading of them, to examples of how "religion" works or of how religions are to be studied. |
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Nevertheless, conclusions about religion and comparison can be drawn from this study, and perhaps there will be many. My point is to emphasize from the beginning that any such conclusions need to be carefully elicited from the particularities of this material, and composed in such a way as to invite the reader to engage the material directly and comprehensively, for the sake of a consequent reappropriation of her or his theological presuppositions and commitments. |
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III. Comparative Theology As Practical Knowledge |
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Theological comparison is therefore a practice in which one must purposefully and perseveringly engage; more specifically, one of the most important forms of this practice is the activity of reading attentively. Since reading is the practice which both Advaita and Christian theologians have usually undertaken, it is this practice of reading which will occupy us here; and while it cannot be adequately anticipated by a theory about it, its key dimensionsits relation to theory, its temporality, its treatment of particularity, its expectations regarding the transformation of the practitioner-must be understood if it is to be unhindered in its performance. |
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As reading, comparative theology entails a combination of activity with an incrementally progressive understanding of that activity; as such, it resists labelling as either "mere practice" and "mere theory."
3 Moreover, the understanding is integral to the practice; comparative theology wishes to perform and understand its practice without making the unnecessary and inept claim that it thereby supplements unexamined religious practices with their previously unarticulated theoretical framework, or that it explicitates and succeeds in making available presuppositions known better to the observer than to the participants in a religion. While comparative theology must be distinguished |
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