At one point in this long and gripping study, Jacques Dupuis remarks ‘Today the debate on the theology of religious pluralism has pride of place on the theological agenda.’ His work is a searching and wide-ranging treatment of the subject which is likely to serve as a point of reference for years to come. His own works listed in the bibliography show the reader the theological path he has followed.
The issue with which he deals could be simply stated as follows. The discovery of the new world following 1492 brought to Christians a long delayed realisation that there had existed from distant times great populations that had had no opportunity to know the name of Christ. Was it the case that their ancestors had been irremediably condemned to hell? And what did that say about God? From the Council of Trent onwards theology began making adjustments, finding Christian substitutes, as Dupuis puts it, for explicit faith and actual baptism.
In the century just passed Christians have for the first time made lasting theological contacts with the great religions of the world: Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Islam. Latterly they have come to recognise the Jewish people as their own flesh and blood. The question has inevitably arisen, Are the adherents of these faiths touched by God’s saving grace? And, do their institutions, and their scriptures, have some place in God’s saving plan?
If these questions are answered positively, questions of another sort arise: What about the necessity of the incarnation and of the cross for human salvation? Can we still say that ‘there is no other name in which men and women can be saved’ (Acts 4.12).
For nearly 40 years Jacques Dupuis (a Belgian by birth) taught theology in India, then took up a chair at the Gregorian in Rome. Obviously he comes to these questions from a real experience of non-Christian religions.
There are two parts to this book, one historical or ‘positive’, the other synthetic. In the first part, he explains how the religions of the nations have been seen from within the Christian tradition, beginning with the Hebrew scriptures and concluding with the debate following the Second Vatican Council.
For all their condemnations of the idolatrous nations, the Hebrew scriptures acknowledged pre-Mosaic covenants, and could extol a non-Israelite saint like Job. Dupuis also cites John’s Gospel: ‘The true light, which enlightens everyone, was coming into the world.’(Jn 1.9) The