371 - The Emptying God: A Buddhist-Jewish-Christian Conversation

The Emptying God: A Buddhist-Jewish-Christian Conversation

Edited by John B. Cobb, Jr., and Christopher Ives

Maryknoll, N.Y., Orbis Books, 1990. 212 Pp. $14.95.

This volume contains a lead essay by the Buddhist apologist Masao Abe, responses to it by six Christian theologians (T. J. J. Altizer, John B. Cobb, Jr., Catherine Keller, Eirgen Moltmann, Schubert M. Ogden, David Tracy) and one Jewish thinker (Eugene B. Borowitz), and a lengthy concluding reply to the replies by Abe.

Abe's central essay is titled "Kenotic God and Dynamic Sunyata."

372 - The Emptying God: A Buddhist-Jewish-Christian Conversation

It begins by analyzing materialistic scientism and Nietzschean nihilism as important examples of antireligious ideology. Then, it attempts, by expounding a particular understanding of the Christian idea of kenosis ("emptying") and the Buddhist idea of sunyata ("emptiness"), to show how both Buddhism and Christianity contain common conceptual resources to combat these and other antireligious ideologies.

Abe has been, for the last three decades, the most prominent and influential Buddhist intellectual engaged in interreligious dialogue. Those responding to him here are some of the most famous names on today's theological scene. Also, almost for the first time, the voices responding to Abe include not only Christians but a Jew. These reasons jointly make the book essential reading for anyone interested in these matters.

Not much new theological ground, though, is broken here; Abe's application of the dialectics of sunyata to any and every theological affirmation is well-known, as are the possible responses to it. But a little new ethical ground is turned in the interesting exchange between Abe and Borowitz on the moral significance of the holocaust and the moral status of the Hebrew Bible. Some elements of this discussion are also present in the essays by Ogden and Cobb. This exchange makes evident, in a striking and important way, the different kinds of moral seriousness that Judaism and Buddhism elicit. I hope that this dimension of the debate will be taken further.

Paul J. Griffiths, The Divinity School, University of Chicago, Chicago, Ill.