203 - Many Mansions: A Christian's Encounter with Other Faiths

Many Mansions: A Christian's Encounter with Other Faiths
By Harvey Cox
Boston, Beacon, 1988. 216 pp. $18.95.

In this collection of nine essays (four of them previously published), Harvey Cox again demonstrates his proven ability to read and lead the agenda of liberal Christianity and to do so in a way that, combines biography and theology, popular appeal and scholarly analysis. In describing his own highly personal encounters with other believers, he makes clear that dialogue with other faiths is not only an intriguing and rewarding pastime that all Christians can take up, but a demanding and unsettling challenge that Christians must embrace if they are to understand themselves and save our threatened world and species.

Before beginning his own journey, Cox offers a sobering assessment of the current state of interrefigious travels: many of them have become stalled or sterile because "the universal and particular poles have come unhinged." He warns his fellow Christians that those who (like myself!) have taken a "universalist" or "pluralist" turn in approaching other faiths have all too often downplayed the particularity and centrality of Jesus. While John's Jesus announces "many mansions" (John 14:2), he adds, only four verses later, that "no person comes to the Father but by me."

As he takes up his own interrefigious conversations, Cox tries to keep tight the bond between particularity and universality. In his chapter on "The Gospel and the Koran," he reminds us that the Muslim rejection of the divinity of Christ was perhaps much more a political than a theological act and that today Muslims and Christians can join minds and hands in a shared commitment to the victims of this world; both religions, after all, were born as calls to liberation. His chapter on "Rabbi Yeshua ben Joseph" starts with a report on the renewed interest in Jesus within Judaism and then delivers a staunch appeal to Christians to abandon all supersessionist models for relations with their Jewish brothers and sisters.

The two chapters on Eastern traditions-Hinduism and Buddhism - are somewhat scattered. When devotees of Krishna remind Cox of the importance of feminine qualities of God, he goes on to reflect on the exclusion of women from interreligious dialogue and then offers the encouraging prophecy that "when women become full partners, the interreligious dialogue will change so much so that what is now going on will be regarded as only an insufficient and misleading beginning." Though Buddhists rattle Cox with their notions of emptiness and

204 - Many Mansions: A Christian's Encounter with Other Faiths

ignorance, he spends much of his conversation with them speaking about the dangers of identifying Jesus as a guru--or as anything. The usual cast of dialogue participants expands when Cox reports on his conversations with Soviet citizens about the new and promising "search for a Soviet Christ."

The last three chapters form a loose unity and grand finale. All of them argue convincingly that not only the nature of religion but also the method and promise of religious dialogue will be properly understood only if related to liberation-to overcoming the suffering and oppression that rack both our species and our earth. Marx was right: all religions, in varying ways, express the "sigh of the oppressed creature." Taking Marx seriously, Cox seems to change the tone of his opening chapter. If the dialogue among religions is presently stalled, it can be reanimated and redirected by basing the dialogue on a shared listening to the sighs of the oppressed and a shared commitment to liberation. Liberation theology and religious pluralism have much to learn from each other. Cox saves his most heady wine for the end of his book.

As an enthusiastic fellow traveler with Cox, I have two questions that I hope will help clarify the directions he has given. (1) Yes, for Christians, the universality of their openness in dialogue cannot lose hold of the particularity of their commitment to Jesus Christ. But Cox does not seem to recognize the different ways such particularity is understood. Jesus can be understood as the object of my full commitment, or as the vehicle of God's full revelation. If I enter the dialogue with full commitment to Christ, I can still genuinely listen to others; if I claim to possess in him God's full and final revelation, I cannot really listen to others, for in the end all must agree with my divinely given "last word." (2) While I have tried to follow Cox in linking liberation and dialogue, I would welcome more advice from him on how to respond to critics of such a move who argue that the insistence on this-worldly liberation is another clever imperialistic ploy on the part of Christians. It turns a Christian concern into a central ingredient or even pre-condition for dialogue. Not all religious persons are that concerned about oppression and poverty in this world. Are they to be excluded from the dialogue?

For its many new insights and its many new questions, both academic and general readers will read this book with delight and appreciation.

Paul Knitter
Xavier University
Cincinnati, Ohio