“In a pluralist society like that of India, authentic religion necessarily implies a relationship with other religions… ; in a word: to be religious is to be inter-religious.” This is a text from the Declaration of the Indian Theological Association, which takes up the theme of the contemporary inevitability of a level of inter-religiosity as quoted by J. Dupuis. We are living with next door Hindus or Muslims. Mircea Eliade, once “declared that, if there had been time, he would have written a new Systematic Theology oriented to the whole history of religions and in dialogue with them.” We are in a world society in which other believers, who are equally intelligent, equally pious, are Hindus, Buddhists, Muslims, and without taking into account that their readers are probably Buddhists or have a Muslim partner or have Hindu colleagues, would create their own faith language. The religious experience of the whole of humanity is a completely new task. Never before in the history of Christianity has this challenge confronted us. Ibn’Arabi, a Muslim Sufi, expressed it in an unforgettable way: “There was a time when I rejected my neighbour if his religion was not like mine. Now, my heart has been converted into the receptacle for all religions forms: It is the meadow of gazelles and the cloister of Christian monks, the temple of idols and the Kaaba of pilgrims, the Tables of the Law and the pages of the Qur’an, because I profess the religion of Love, and I go wherever its mount goes, since Love is my credo and my faith.” People who are rooted primarily in the religion of their primary confession, live a trans-confessional religious experience, an experience of a kind of multiple belonging. We refer to the recurrent and growing proposal of going beyond religions.
I may call myself a Hindu Christian. Here, Hindu is not a noun, but an adjective. The process is of integration; not pluralism, but non-duality. Socially and institutionally I am a Christian. I do not look for a kind of hybrid identity of being both Hindu and Christian in a social, communitarian sense. With Bede Griffith one may say: “Besides being Christian, I must be Hindu, Buddhist, Jainist, Zoroastrian, Sikh, Muslim and Jew. Only in this way will I be able to know the truth and find the point of reconciliation of all religions… ”
The Spirit calls us all to go beyond ourselves, bring people and groups into a space beyond the institutions. It is not appropriate to see reality as the way I am. This type of thinking consists in a theology “of faith in all of its forms” or in a theology of the religious history of mankind. Christians and non-Christians, in other words a theology that “is also” Christian, while at the same time it is equally Jewish, Islamic, Hindu, Buddhist, etc. There is confessional quality for theology. “Since if the faith is one, many are the ways of living the same faith,” Saint Anselm said. Consequently, many will be the theologies. Diversity of theologies is not only legitimate, it is also necessary that different theologies exist in order to express with new insights the superabundance of the meaning of the revealed text when accepted in multiple faith experiences. Theological pluralism ought not fall into theological relativism, under pain of jeopardizing the trans-cultural quality of the revealed message. In such a case, theology would become not only a cultural product, but would also reduce revelation to a mere cultural datum and so jeopardize its quality of being transcendent. Taking into consideration the crisis of the meta-discourses, theology cannot resign or restrict itself to mini-discourses fragmented and autonomous by themselves. We cannot forget that unity is the central axis around which all differences revolve so that a theology can be legitimate only when it is in harmony with the essential content of revelation. It is on essentials that differences must be founded. In the depth of revealed mystery, not everything has the same value nor implies the same binding power. A healthy theological pluralism must be founded upon the universal basis of the faith, so that these can serve as a model of mediation and confessional unity, which must always be built around the truth. This brings to mind the Thomistic axiom: cognita sunt in congnoscente secundum modum cognoscentis (The things known are in the knower according to its way of knowing). Theology becomes a discourse about the Absolute and not an absolute discourse.