Rev. Ariarajah is a Christian minister from Sri Lanka, and so offers a perspective on the relationship between Christianity and some Eastern religions that one does not often hear. He has held a leadership position with the World Council of Churches, working on the problem of that relationship. Very traditionally-minded Christians will perhaps be uncomfortable with what he has to say.
How does this reading fit into the agenda of PHI 222? We are examining various theological problems generated by conflicting pressures on Christian theology arising out of the basic commitments of that theology, plus the fact that many people have not had any real opportunity to be Christians. (See the Machina reading scheduled for the previous class for a summary of why there is a conceptual issue here.)
In the reading scheduled for last time, I listed various approaches that Christian theology has taken toward this problem. One of those approaches was called Dialogical, meaning that it calls for dialog between adherents of different religious traditions, in order to take seriously what each might have to offer.
Ariarajah in this reading is trying to figure out how Christian theology might justify and support such a dialog, while still remaining genuinely Christian. One of the issues he deals with is the question whether a Christian who embraces such a dialog is being unfaithful to what Christianity has to say about Jesus, about God, about salvation. After all, one might suppose it is essential to Christianity to think that Jesus shows us all we can know about God, since Jesus was in some (hard-to-grasp sense) actually divinity in human form. If Jesus shows people all that people can ever know about God and how to connect with God, then Christians have nothing at all to learn about God or salvation from any other religious tradition. So why have a dialog?
Notice the title of the essay. Ariarajah is not claiming that he has this dialog theology all worked out. He's offering suggestions about how to begin creating a sensible theology that would be Christian and yet would also support meaningful dialog between Christians and between Christians and non-Christians, recognizing that Christian theology has something to learn from other traditions.
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Questions to briefly answer in writing:
1. Ariarajah spends quite a bit of time at the beginning of the reading talking about how Christianity changed its stance toward non-Jews in the early years. Why does he bother to do this? That is, how is this discussion supposed to be relevant?
2. Sometimes students get the idea that a theology of dialog simply says "Christians should be polite and nice when they talk about religion with other people". But Ariarajah claims that some fairly important changes need to be made in Christian theology in order to provide a sound basis for meaningful dialog across relgious divides. It's not about being nice or being polite. It's about changing some fairly common ways of thinking about the Christian faith. Ariarajah seems to think that the changes he is recommending are all for the better. What seems to you to be the basic change in Christian ideas about Jesus and God that Ariarajah is suggesting?