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The Journal of the American Academy of Religion, L / l

Religious Pluralism and Truth:

From Theology to a

Hermeneutical Dialogy

Carl A. Raschke

That primal being, God in human form, is real in this process, which shows

the separation of the divine Idea and its reunion, and for the first time its

com pletion as truth This is the whole of history

- H e g e l

Zwischen uns sei Wahrheit

—Goethe

I

No other issue has summoned reflection for theologians and

philosophers of religion in recent years more than the diversity of

"truth-claim s" among the religious traditions of the world Th e

genesis of the challenge lies in the impact of the history of religions and the

sociocultural investigation of religious phenomena upon the traditional

theological enterprise, which has been spurred to relinquish many of its

former magisterial prerogatives in appraising the truth-content of its

assertions from the stand poin t of Ch ristian exclusivism Ind eed , the entry of

what used to be known as "philosophical theology" into the venture of

"religious studies" as an omnibus academic discipline has cast suspicion on

all attempts at resolving epistemological quandaries concerning "divine"

matters without the leavening at least of what has popularly come to be

called "interfaith dialogue " The acknowledgment of religious pluralism as a

cultural and historical fact has deepened into a more sophisticated interest in

Carl A Raschke is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Den-

ver He is the auth or of five books, includ ing The Alchemy of the Word (Scholars

Press, 1979) and The Interruption of Eternity (1980) He is also co-e ditor of the

AAR Academy Series



36 Carl A Raschke

the various metaphysical and semantic conflicts spawned from traditional

statements about the character of God, the nature of man, and the path of

salvation

Yet the encounter with religious pluralism, coupled with the search fora method to work through its cognitive dilemmas, has so far resulted only

in profiling the major muddles and ambiguities. As Raimundo Panikkar has

observed "T he present day problem of pluralism stems from a gen uine

experience of disorientation and chaos, and not from any merely theoretical

problematic" (200) The "pluralistic problem" outdistances the venerable

philosophical preoccupation with the hen kai pan It is a uniquely historical

conundrum arising from the global melding of civilizations and meaning-

systems, which in turn has inflicted lesions, doubts, and dissonances in what

were hitherto parochially self-validating and monolithic "plausibility struc-tures" evolved du ring ages of cu ltural isolation / I / Religious pluralism

looms as a more formidable task than theological pluralism, which has been

a perennial disturbance in all traditions, chiefly because it provokes

tortured assessments of the "truth" and significance of foundational faith-

assumptions A Protestant an d a Catholic, or a Barthian and a process

theologian, can still concur on the priority of the Chalcedoman formula in

their thinking, but they face an arduous task in negotiating any such

prelim inary consensus with a Moslem According to Pan ikkar, "a pluralistic

problem arises when we do not agree regarding the very essence of whatwe are discussing" (220) Or , as the historian of religion R C. Zaeh ner has

framed the difficulty, "the difference between the modern age and all

preceding ages is that there is no longer any religious or even cultural

norm in which m an can feel at ho m e" (1974 4). Homelessness is a m ore

severe predicament than a house divided. Heterodoxy signals dissension;

pluralism courts the peril of fragmentation.

Several general strategies for grappling with religious pluralism have

been essayed, although none have proven altogether satisfactory. Some ofthese gambits are analogous to older philosophical positions; some are dis-

tinctly contemporary.

The first approach is what we might term pistic phenomenalism Pistic

phenomenalism, which finds friends among analytic philosophers and histori-

ans of religion chary of too much "theorizing," attends to the creedal, doctri-

nal, and mythosymbolic data that can be adduced taxonomically as the central

empirical features of religious "traditions." Pistic phenomenalism seeks to

factor out these elements and show isomorphic differences and comparisons

that m ay yield an intelligible conten t for evaluation In this connection it ispistic phenomenalism which has couched the question of religious diversity in

terms of competing "truth-claims," although it is assuredly open to debate

whether religious language consists in "claims" after the fashion of hypotheses

or descriptive propositions / 2 / N onetheless, such a phenomenalism invariably

ends up suspending final judgment on the veracity of the cognitive isolates



Religious Pluralism and Tr uth 37

which it treats, because it is not equipped to advance any interpretations or

discernments that penetrate beyond the prima facie significations of the

concepts it exam ines The best appraisal it can m uster is to flesh out

particular kinds of praxis as well as belief-functions that illumine the largerreligious Lebensform, as W ittgenstein em ployed th e expression These

belief-functions con stitute w hat N inian Sm art typifies as "different sorts of

religious experience which recur in different traditions, though not

universally" (Hick.55)./3/ In order for these recurring "experiences" or be-

lief-functions to be true in some definitive sense, they would have to ema-

nate from a "common core" of understanding, which Smart does not think

exists After posing the problem of religious truth, pistic phenomenalism

succeeds only in circu m ven ting it And thus it does no more than subtly

elaborate the dodge pronounced by John Hick, namely, "that it is not appro-priate to speak of a religion as being true or false, any more than it is to

speak of a civilization as being true or false" (1973:124)

The second stance toward religious pluralism we shall dub fideistic per-

sonalism. Fideistic personalism by and large bespeaks the well-known course

ado pted by W ilfred Cantw ell Smith Sm ith's fideistic personalism stand s in

opposition to pistic phenom enalism / 4 / Sm ith argues that the arena for

reconciling rival religious representations of truth is not the study of "beliefs,"

but the appreciation of "faith " / 5 / Th e point of dep artu re for Smith's fideism

is his avowal that "fundamentally one has to do not with religions, but with

religious persons" (1964 138) Fa ith is the orie ntatio n of the person in his

"inner life" toward the realm of "transcendence." It refers to a "personal and

inner quality in the life of some men in relation to which overt

observables a re for those men religiously significant" (1964 155). Sm ith

separates faith from "cumulative tradition," which comprises the sum of

"overt observables" and which furnishes the subject matter for pistic phenom-

enalists An inventory of the items of cum ulative traditio n m ay be instrum en-

tal in phenomenological inquiry, but it does not forge a context for grapplingwith "truth." For "truth" is apprehended sola fide Truth stands in immediate

relation with the personal faith posture, and cannot be adjudged according to

public criteria / 6 / It belongs to man 's evolving "self-consciousness," which in

its religious instances is opened to what is originary and ultim ate / 7 /

Although Smith has not given serious thought to how his "personalist" (the

word is his own) method might entail an actual ontology wherein the

meaning of the locution "religious truth" might make eminent sense, his

implication is that "faith" serves as the standard of verification for the

symbols and concepts of tradition which in turn reach toward the "transcen-den t " Thus th e seman tic discrepancies betw een different "tradition al"

formulations of the faith-encounter are resolved through what he calls "imag-

inative" involvement in the lives of religious persons, whose habits of worship

converge on a singular, yet ineffable, object of both reference and reverence

The only trouble is that Smith does not really explain how this convergence



38 Carl A Raschke

might take place, and thus his fideistic "personalism" amounts, in fact, to a

subjective atomism whose unitary principle itself is an article of faith.

The third way is what we shall designate as transcendental esotericism

Transcendental esotericism is an attitude toward pluralism native to theHindu mentality, but it has of late been refined and philosophically honed

in the writings of Frithjof Schuon and Huston Smith, the latter borrowing

from the former Tran scen den tal esotericism strives to overco m e the diversi-

ty of religious truths by viewing them as intimations of, or emanations from,

a single, supersensible reality. This reality Schuon refers to as the "esoteric"

dimension of religion Huston Smith labels it the "prim ordia l tradition "

According to Schuon, all sacred phenomena express a "transcendental

unity " that is obscured b y adve rting to their exoteric particu larities For "the

exoteric or theological point of view, instead of embracing a truth in itsentirety, selects one aspect only as a matter of expediency and gives it an

exclusive and absolute v alue" (1975a 119) / 8 / T he esoteric unity of religious

representations derives from the fact that there is , for Schuon, an "Absolute

Reality" which is glimpsed relatively through the "veil of appearances " The

rou te of access to such a R eality is not "faith," as it is for W C. Smith , but

"intelligence," which probes beyond the profusion of forms and knows "truth"

in its stark lum inescen ce Since all religious symbols are inklings of this divin e

eminence, each is "truthful" in the measure it reflects the Ultimate.

Huston Smith goes a step further in postulating a "primordial

tradition," subsisting behind the effloresence of historical religions and

confuting the sensate and positivist dogm as of mo dern science Smith seems

to say straightforwardly that all religious perceptions and insinuations of the

ganz anders are themselves ciphers of this tradition which is atemporal and

has been sum m arily "forgotten" down thro ugh th e ages (145) Th e historical

religions, therefore, in varying degrees can be seen as declensions of

primordial insight. The unity of religious knowledge must be secured by

traversing the road back to origins. "The wave of the future will be a return

to the past," although the "past" does not necessarily signify a juncture in

time "For the issue does not really concern tim e at all; truth of the kind tha t

is timeless" (146). Temporality is the fragmenting prism; the transcendence

of time is the precondition for reunion.

While transcendental esotericism has the advantage of a stated ontology

that can work to smooth discrepancies between religious ideologies, it is in

essence not a "solution" to the dilem m a at all Inste ad, it asserts its own inde-

pendent metaphysical claims and is tantamount to a second-order "theology"

in the more capac ious sense of the word Both Schuon and Huston Smithhave enunciated their own versions of classic monism, embellished with

Ved antist, N eop latonic, and A dvaitist notions Huston Sm ith's own identifi-

cation of a "primordial tradition" smacks very much of theosophy. In this

respect transc end ental esotericism is a bogus pro ced ure for m ediation ; for it

commends gnosis in place of fides, and it tacitly favors contemplative over




revealed religion. It deals as unfairly with the Western traditions as Chris-

tian scholars are frequently accused of doing with the Oriental faiths

The fourth response to religious pluralism is what Panikkar has named

dialogical dialogue. Panikkar apparently has coined such a pleonasm inorder to discriminate his method from the familiar and sometimes fatuous

appe al to simple "dialogue" betwee n religious viewpoints In its m ore con-

ventional settings interreligious dialogue congenitally becomes a mere ad-

mixture of parallel monologues, as in psychological encounter groups where

the participants do not really talk to each other so much as publicize their

own premises, affects, and defenses while using the discussion to clarify their

individual attitudes. At the same time, Panikkar wants to preclude dialogue

from becoming "dialectic"—a tug-of-war between faith-postures that leads

to the triumph of one perspective over the other at a higher level of defini-tion (I suspect that such is the outcome when process theologians start "dia-

loguing" with Hindus and Buddhists). Panikkar calls for "dialogical tension"

rather than "dialectical conflict " The tension ingredient in "dialogical dia-

logue" stems from the affirmation of difference , yet is safeguarded from

lapsing into combative wrangling by virtue of the interlocutor's recognition

of a common "center " This center is not articulated theological consensus,

but one which "transcends the understanding of it by any particular mem-

ber or even by the totality of the members at any given moment" (219). It

coincides (though Panikkar himself does not make such a connection) withwhat M artin Heidegger would du b the "un thoug ht" frontier of discourse.

Such a frontier serves as a negative limit of any assertion, while in the same

vein all interchang es are grou nde d in the faithful avowal of its presence Its

apophantic character is what makes dialogue "into" truth possible. For,

according to Panikkar, it is not the crystallization of a "pluralistic world-

view" that conciliates the disjecta membra of pluralism. "We are pluralistic

by believing that none of us possesses the philosophers' stone, the key to the

secret of the world" (225).

Panikkar's emphasis on the "dialogical" remedies many of the defects in

the other three approaches, inasmuch as it stops short of smuggling in any

metaphysical presuppositions while still managing to expound a principle of

critical mediation. Nonetheless, Panikkar's program is more a profession of

intent than a deliberate method. For his "dialogical dialogue" remains sim-

ply dialogue—i.e., an indeterminate conversation between adherents of dif-

ferent faiths—at th e rud im en tary level Th e dan ger of "dialogue" for its

own sake is that it does not come to terms forthrightly with the aporia of

religious pluralism itself—the conflict of grammars and semantic valencieswithin the divergent "languages" of the sacred. Even Panikkar's implicit

recourse to the Heideggerian ontology of unthought presence is only a proxi-

mate gesture, since even Heidegger allows for an "appropriate" manner of

articulating what is inarticulate or of "saying" what has heretofore remained

"unsaid " Panikkar's "dialogical dialogue," although it sweeps the ground for



40 Carl A Raschke

reconciliation, is bereft of any will to interpretation. And it succumbs to the

paralysis of many scholarly trustees of the world's religious traditions, who

succeed in preserving the integrity of classic forms, symbols, and meanings

at the expense of any hermeneutical revisioning of their semantic implica-tions, which is vital if those engaged with pluralism are to move beyond

feint and posturing.

Partisans of interreligious dialogue have rightly perceived that

pluralism cannot be addressed by depending on any patent or ersatz

theology. Yet in their renunciation of all theological or "speculative" starting

points, they have been left to sojourn in the wilderness of religious

historicism. Religious histoncism is that methodology which takes the stock

of empirical representations compiled from the great traditions as

transp aren t m aterial for reflection Using historico-critical, com para tive, andphenomenological methods, it endeavors to structure and thematize this

material in such a way that essential relationships and broader significations

can be adduced from the data at its disposal. By the same token, religious

historicism self-consciously refrains from any universal or high-level

generalizations concerning what might lie behind the available

represen tations It refuses to deve lop its own seman tics of interpre tation and

prefers instead to let the figurae of the traditions "speak for themselves."

Any such semantic redescription of the symbols other than as a system of

morphological rubrics is considered an im pro per exercise in "theology." For

instance, such a religious historicism would immediately resist talk about

common "incarnational" motifs in Christianity and Mahayana Buddhism,

inasmuch as it would consign such langua ge to a study of Ch ristianity And

it would be obliged to bracket all contentions about the "divine" reality that

might be evident in both the images of the Christ and of the Boddhisattva

Religious historicism will not admit of any tertium comparationis

II

Nevertheless, the choice is not strictly one between a monopolistic the-

ology and a "presuppositionless" historicism. There is another option, which

does not conform straightaway to any of the more familiar treatments indi-

cated so far Such a method is neith er "theological" in the customary sense

nor merely historical and comparative. It is what I shall designate as the

hermeneutical path W hile hermen eutics has been borrowed as a reliable

hand m aiden to contemp orary theological work and is frequently adap ted in

the exposition of particular traditions, it has rarely been essayed as an ap-proach to religious pluralism itself. A suggestion for such an undertaking, of

course, has already come from Mircea Eliade, who has proposed what he

calls a "creative hermeneutics" of the symbolic elements in world reli-

gions / 9 / Yet Eliade's prospectus for such a herm eneu tics is not sufficiently

informed by careful philosophical considerations, and it is ill equipped to




make the kinds of discriminating judgments that would be necessary to

ferret out the cognitive substance of religious forms Eliade's herm eneu tics

remains too heavily freighted with histoncist and phenomenological consid-

erations An auth entic he rme neutics of religion in toto must consist in morethan a structural exegesis of religious facts, it must penetrate beyond sym-

bolic givens to lay bare the originary meanings that constitute ever fecund

seman tic potentials for interp retation In this respect such a herm eneu tics

seeks to bring to light not what is said, but remains unsaid in traditional

religious protocols./10/ It does not succumb to an idolatry of the historical

forms, but aims to give utterance to the dynamic essence of language out of

which those forms crystallized In short, it labors to pe rm it the "ancient

runes" to speak with a message that has not been heard in the past Its cir-

cuit is the history of religions; its focus is a contemporary understanding notof symbols, but of truth. It does not stand at ease with any historico-critical

feat of Verstehen, but only with Denken ("thinking") in Heidegger's sense

Such an act of Denken is fundamentally the thinking of the "unthought," of

bringing to presence as speech what has been previously concealed and

dimly intim ated in the m ultiplicity of religious representation s / 1 1 / It is a

thinking through neither of "God" in the theological context nor of "reli-

gions" in a historicist manner, but of what shows itself obliquely in these

"objects" of formal inquiry—namely, the divine.

A hermeneutics of religions, therefore, performs a "theological" task, but

not in the fashion routinely plied by theology as a discipline. We may recall

Saint Thomas's account of theology as that "science" in which "all things are

treated under the aspect of God, either because they are God Himself, or

because they refer to God as to their beginn ing and end " (S th : 1 , 7) Theology

per se is not hermeneutics, but a "science" which lends systematic coherence

and conceptual clarity to the objective representation of the ultimate—what

in Western thought is called "God." Theology does not interpret so much as

give an account Theology traffics with the pivotal symbolic forms of atradition, but it does lend voice to the essential and originary meaning-

potentials locked within those forms. It is bound by the syntactical constraints

of tradition al discourse Hence, it is possible to hav e a Buddhist theology

which starts with the representation of Nirvana just as Judaeo-Christian

theology homes on the "idea" of God But Buddhist and C hristian theologies

cannot be merged without sacrificing the supreme representation of one to

that of the othe r A "theolog y" of world religions proves in the final verd ict to

be a contradictio in adiecto. On the other hand, a hermeneutics of religions

has a definite theological dimension insofar as it takes as its subject mattertheos, not in the classical sense of "God," but with regard to the archaic Greek

meaning of the term as "divinity," that which "shines" or "reveals" itself from

beyond th e horizon of intelligible representations. A herm eneu tics of religions

serves to make manifest, rather than to presume fideistically, the dialogical

"center" of interfaith communication which Panikkar posits. Such a



42 Carl A Raschke

hermeneutics does not consist strictu sensu in "dialogical dialogue," but in

what I will call herm eneu tical dialogy A herm ene utical d ialogy tran scend s

m ere dialogue inasmu ch as it is fund am entally a project of inter pre tative

disclosure. It is not simply conversation, but an adventure with logos. It isthe opening of dialogical speech to the event of presencing that activates

religious languag e It is a clearing away of sem antic space for the em erge nce

of divine "truth" as aletheia (literally, "unconcealment")

All hermeneutics constitutes an invitation to ontology. According to

Richard R Palmer, hermeneutics "discloses something that was previously

hidden; what was 'invisible' to one's eye is suddenly manifest and visible"

(316) Just as the Greek d eity H erm es was the messenger of the gods to men ,

so hermeneutics is a "mediation between worlds." On the semantic plane

this mediation takes place between the ordinary referent of the religiousexpression and the yet unrealized possibility for meaning contained within

it He rm eneu tics taps into a deep er and richer reserve of significations than

is granted through a conventional assessment of linguistic representations. It

widens the parameters and integrates the different senses of what are always

provisionally determined as divine showings. Hence, hermeneutics estab-

lishes a unitary and transcendental basis, without interposing metaphysical

constructs, for the conc ert of religious truth-depo sitions As Ted Peters notes.

"Because it is the concept of the divine in every culture that usually pro-

vides the foundational conceptuality in terms of which the rest of life is

given its explanation, the study of the history of religious traditions presents

itself as the most likely component within the wider field of history to pro-

vide the substan ce for theological reflection" (123) Pete rs's m istake , how-

ever, is that h e sees herm eneu tics as offering a "foundational con ceptu ality"

instead of a fundamental ontology, and thereby seizes on the "divine" as a

topic for theological investigation But the divine in its openn ess can never

be shepherded by theology alone The province of such a radical hermeneu-

tics is not theology, but dialogy.

Whereas theology circumscribes the divine as a conceptual object for

extended reflection, a hermeneutical dialogy cuts through all standard repre-

sentations in order to speak of what remains ontologically prior to them.

Although a so-called "cross-cultural" theology, if that is legitimate at all, can

scarcely do more than mingle and assimilate the traditional connotations of

religious symbols, a hermeneutical dialogy brings them into interpretative

tension with each other, relaxes their iconic rigor, enhances their polysemic

aptitude, and charts new dimensions of awareness whereby they can be

gauged as tokens of an "unth oug ht" reality, as man ifestations of truth Th enotion of religious symbols as tokens of this order is akin to Karl Jaspers's

account of "cyp hers " According to Jaspers, cyp hers ar e symb ol-forms that

lie "between the poles of universal, everywhere recurring types, and of

historical forms" (62; Kane) Th ey act as historical disclosures of tru th in the

ontological sense. They can only be apprehended in complement with what




they m anifest For "out of m ere presentness speaks the hidden essence, the

hidden essence makes the presentness comprehensible" (63). Together, they

compose the "cypher-script of Being" Theology itself "never gets any

further than an intellectual conception of the language of cyphers" (75). But"dialogy" succeeds through tension and mediation in rejoining the cyphers

within a relational totality. That totality is the truth of divine fullness

III

Moreover, Jaspers makes the point that the image for such a reconcilia-

tion of cyphers, or what might be more properly characterized as the herme-

neutical conjunction of religious symbols, is the Christian myth of incarna-

tion. The myth of incarnation bespeaks not so much a metaphysical notion,nor a historical episode, but the ontological ground of all hermeneutical

insight "That th e distant God speaks in the cyphers of the world and of m an

and accomplishes His mediation, indicates a never-ending conceiving and re-

alizing of man in the world and not that God has to become man in the flesh.

Rightly, however, there is in the Christ myth the indication that everything

human has in it the possibility of relatedness to God, God-nearness, and that

the way to God goes through the world and through the reality of our histori-

cally to be determined human nature, and not by-passing the world" (77)

Coincidentally, a similar thesis has been propounded by the historian of

religion R C Zaehner, who over twenty years ago offered the provocative

observation that "all the strands [of the varying religious traditions] . . . meet

only in one place, and that is the religion of Jesus Christ" (1958:180). On

first glance such an assertion gives the cloying impression of unabashed,

theological imperialism; but Zaehner is not a "theologian" who begins with

the presumption of sovereign Christianity and works backward to demon-

strate how other traditions are flawed approximations of the one, unqualified

vera religio Zaehner arrives at his conclusion through meticulous examina-

tion of the symbolic weight of non-C hristian faiths Zaehne r's prioritizing of

the "myth of incarnation" rests on a hermeneutical inference. The myth,

Zaehner declares, indicates for man "a restored union with God from whom

he originated and to whom he must return" (1958:180). The goal of restored

union at the incarnate level, adumbrated in the belief in resurrection, con-

trasts with the jiva-atman axis of mystical absorption, which comprises a

regression ad initium. Thus "Jesus Christ fulfills not only the law and the

prophets of Israel but also the Prophet of Iran and the sages of India" (1958.

184)Incarnation means not so much the telos of religious evolution,

however, as it does the manifest logos of divine presence. It is not a

theological doctrine, but a hermeneutical disposition that also informs, for

instance, the avatar legends of Vaishnavite Hinduism As Charles W inquist

has put it in this connection, "incarnation is the unfinished business of



44 Carl A Raschke

thinkin g" (104-5) Incarnation is "hom ecom ing," not in the sense of a retreat

to origins as transcendental esotericism would have it, but as a "re-collection

of reality" that proceeds through interpre tation of the sedim ented layers of

language and experience to expose the unthought "meaning of truth."Hence, hermeneutics as homecoming "carries us toward the future and not

the past" (108). The hermeneutical dynamic leads not to the rarification of

understanding but what Winquist labels the "embodiment of meaning" or

"incar nate thinking ." "Incarnate think ing" is anothe r way of phrasing

Heidegger's "thinking the unthought " It is not thinking about God, which is

the pistic standpoint of theology, but thinking as event of divine

manifestation On this score, incar nate or herm eneu tical thinking transcend s

what Hegel described as the "repres entationa l" fixity of imm ediate faith It

actualizes the process Hegel characterized in unfortunate metaphysicaljargon as "Spirit" which "is infinite return into self, infinite subjectivity, not

imagined but actual divinity, not the substantial but the present in-itself of

the Fath er" (236) Incarnation concerns "revelation," not only in the

historical mode, but in the plenary and ongoing disclosure of divine

presence through the interpretative mediation of all representational

contents, which at the eschatological moment show forth their infinite, but

disguised essence

Still, the thorough significance of "incarnational thinking" can only be

grasped if we divest it of all vestigial theological imp lications For the end of

herm eneu tics, as we have said, is the truth discovered through dialogy For

that reason incarnational thinking must incorporate the drift of dialogy, if it

is not to be trammeled by the cryptic preconceptions of Christian theology

How, then, can incarnational thinking as hermeneutical dialogy be applied

as a legible praxis to the interpretation of myriad, discordant religious arti-

facts? We loiter at an impasse if we confine hermeneutics to the study of

religious texts and canonical pronouncements, whether they are found in

the impersonal depository of authorized faith or mouthed paraphrastically

by devotees

Hermeneutics of this kind—which sets, in fact, the agenda for the disci-

pline in conventional quarters—adds up to nought but a nimble species of

exegesis and is not amena ble to the dialogical und ertaking For the ipsissima

verba of religion are not self-evident characters, but hieroglyphs of logos

that continue to yield up the unspoken secrets of divine presencing. Genuine

logos is not "gram ma tical" (i e , wr itten down and encapsulated with idola-

trous precision), but embodied, interpersonal It manifests itself not as a

dialogue of traditions, but as a dialogue of witnesses to the holy. Dialogue, ifperformed with the hermeneutical attitude of openness and responsiveness

to divine presence, becomes something more than an arbitration of opinions;

it becomes "dialogy" in the sense of a mutual penetration of cognitive armor

which leads to a bipolar manifestation of the ultimate mysterium For the

"dialogical" is the embodiment, the incarnation, of logos It is the "Word




made flesh " As Martin Buber suggests, the dialogical is appropriate "service

to the logos " It empowers "the ever renewed event of the entrance of mean-

ing into the living word" (104). The living word of dialogical relation—not

between "faiths" as collective abstrac tions, but betw een the "faithful"—is thesole truthbearer; it leaps across the boundaries of all "truth-claims," "faiths,"

and "traditions" to say what has been antecedently shrouded in the "unsaid."

It does not point to the "convergence" of historical beliefs as much as their

reciprocal quickening and fulfillment. In this regard hermeneutics goes

beyond the bare Confucian idea of the "rectification of names." Hermeneu-

tics is the proclamation of the advent of the Messiah.

Such a hermeneutics, or hermeneutical dialogy, is at the opposite pole

to transcendental esotericism. Whereas transcendental esotericism proceeds

from a metaphysics of unity beyond diversity, hermeneutical dialogy isfounded on the intuition of unity through diversity. The preposition

"through" in this instance has a dynamic rather than a homeostatic import

The unity is not conceived, but intimately signalled through the revelation

of its guises. It exhibits the incarnational tension between manifest and

unmanifest. To draw a Hindu parallel, we might say that its hermeneutical

mode of turning toward the divine is not that of jnana, but of bhakti (not

privileged "knowledge," but "devotion") /12/ Or as Arjuna in the Bhagavad

Gita exclaims "I see the gods in Thy body , O God" (XI, 15.56) But A rjuna

is only speaking in a dialogical relation through the manifest forms of "God"

with the revealing and concealing divine presence, which says: "I am the

origin of all, / From me all comes forth" (X, 8:50)

Of course, the noetic focus of devotion for the Bhagavad Gita is the

God, whose nam e is Krishna In a genu ine herm eneu tical dialogy the divine

"name" is more than that of a "God" above the other "gods " And the divine

itself does not simply manifest itself in the gods of other "faiths," but in the

event of presencing that arises in interpersonal co-respondence between the

faithful Belief demands the adjudication of theological representations,which counts minimally as "dialogue." Faithfulness, shorn of its pistic at-

tachments, opens itself to the unceasing activity of divine disclosure, which

is herm eneutical dialogy In the words of Th oreau , "if a man h ave faith, he

will co-operate w ith equal faith every wh ere " This "co-operative" faithful-

ness is what makes the difference between resonance and cacophony.

NOTES

/ I / The well-known discussion of religious pluralism and its erosion of what

Peter B erger term s "plausibility structure s" is found in Berger cha pte r 6

/ 2 / See Raschke, 1974 79-116

/ 3 / More recently, Smart has begun to talk not about "experiences" within a

tradition but about a "Focus" (1973)



46 Carl A. Raschke

/ 4 / See Sm ith's critiqu e of an alytic al philosophy of religion (1977 31ff ) See also

Smart's critique of Smith (1974 57f )

/ 5 / Smith insists that the habit of conceiving religious forms primarily as "be-

liefs" is "the modern West's most massive reductionism" (1979 147)

/ 6 / Con sider Smith's comm ent "Fa ith is a saying 'Yes'' to tru th" (1979 163)

/! / See Smith's argument (1976158-80)

/ 8 / Schuon's actual epistemology is worked out in (1975b)

/ 9 / Mircea Eliade's accounts of hermeneutical method in the history of religions

occur thro ugh out his m ore rece nt w ritings See, am ong othe rs, his discussion of her-

meneutics (1969 chapter 6)

/ 1 0 / See my own discussion of "radical hermeneutics" (1979 chapter 5)

/ l l / Heidegger's remarks about the true meaning of "thinking" as directed

toward the "unth ough t" app ear through out his postwar writings See especially

Heidegger 1968./ 1 2 / See R C Zae hner's central distinction betw een the esoteric way of religious

insight—present in Buddhism, the Upanishads, and the Sankhya system—which is

"to imitate God in his eternity" and the incarnational attitude—evinced in Chris-

tianity and the Bhagavad Cita— which is "to im itate h im in his totality" (1980 133)

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carl raschke - religious pluralism and truth

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