”Sitting to the Pope’s right were Orthodox Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew of Constantinople and Dr Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury, and to his left were Rabbi David Rosen, representing the chief rabbinate of Israel, and Wande Abimbola, president of a Nigerian institute”
”Dr Williams told the participants they must help the world see how much wisdom religions have to offer “in the struggle against the foolishness of a world still obsessed with fear and suspicion, still in love with the idea of a security based on defensive hostility, and still capable of tolerating or ignoring massive loss of life among the poorest through war and disease”.
// Irène
Att B16 har bjudit in representanter för världsreligionerna till Assisi III kan väl ses som en sorts outsagd, postum upprättelse av Jacques Dupuis’ komplexa livsverk. Granskningen av JD: s verk resulterade i att varje ord står kvar oförändrat. Ratzinger den nitiske, ödmjukar sig nu till dialog och interreligiöst fredsmöte.
JD var aldrig synkretistisk, vad jag förstår, utan fullständigt kristocentrisk i sitt tänkande. JD var en av huvudtalarna under ”Interfaith Congress 2003 – The Future of God” och gjorde då uttalandet:
”The religion of the future will be a general converging of religions in a universal Christ that will satisfy all. The other religious traditions in the world are part of God’s plan for humanity and the Holy Spirit is operating and present in Buddhist, Hindu and other sacred writings of Christian and non-Christian faiths as well. The universality of God’s kingdom permits this, and this is nothing more than a diversified form of sharing in the same mystery of salvation. In the end it is hoped that the Christian will become a better Christian and each Hindu a better Hindu.”
I sitt banbrytande verk “Toward a Christian Theology of Religious Pluralism” förordar JD en inkluderande pluralism elaborerad i en trinitarisk kristologi. Treenigheten är själva hjärtat, både källan och målet, för mänsklighetens religiösa historia:
”The mystery of the Trinity implies at once unity and plurality, personal identity in interpersonal relationships. It discloses to us the immanent life of the Godhead as consisting of total mutual exchange and sharing – in sum, that God is absolute communion of love. The diversity and communion of persons in the Godhead offer the proper key for understanding the multiplicity of interrelated divine self-manifestations in the world and in history.” (208)
JD identifierar Kristushändelsen som oöverträffad i historien, den centrala tolkningsnyckeln för gudsförmedling:
”The becoming human of the Word of God in Jesus Christ, his human life, death, and resurrection, is the culminating point of the process of divine self-communication, the hinge upon which the process holds together, its key of interpretation. The reason is that the Word’s ‘humanization’ marks the unsurpassed – and unsurpassable – depth of God’s self-communication to human beings, the supreme mode of immanence of his being-with-them.” (320-321)
Kristusmysteriet är alltings mittpunkt:
“The Christ-event is the midpoint and the focal point. It is the pivot upon which the entire history of the dialogue between God and humanity turns, the principle of intelligibility of the divine plan concretized in the history of the world. It influences the entire process of history by way of a final cause, that is, as the end or the goal drawing to itself the entire evolutionary process: both pre-Christian and post-Christian history are being drawn by the Christ-Omega to himself.” (221-222)
JD säger om de icke-kristna religionernas roll i helheten:
“The various religious traditions of the world are the many ways in which God has, in anticipation of the coming of his Son, disclosed the divine self to the nations and in which he continues to do so. They all form part of the history of salvation, which is one and manifold. They all contain elements of divine revelation and moments of divine grace, even though these remain incomplete and open to a fuller self-gift and disclosure on the part of God. The gracious moments enshrined in the religious traditions of humankind open their followers – through faith and agape – to God’s grace and salvation. They do so insofar as in God’s providence they anticipate God’s fuller disclosure and decisive self-gift in Jesus Christ.” (325)
Den interreligiösa teologi som JD utvecklade negligerar inte skillnaderna mellan religionerna:
“The question of what basic elements and religious insights can be shared by Christian theology and other religious traditions, as they come in contact with each other, is a difficult one which admits of no easy resolution. For each religious tradition constitutes a whole from which the various elements cannot be easily isolated. We are faced in fact with distinct, global worldviews within which, as within living organisms, each part plays its specific function, with the result that a ‘dynamic equivalence’ between the components on either side is not easily available. (..) harmony between religious communities will not be served by a ’universal theology’ which would claim to bypass differences and contradictions.” (384)
JD relativiserar inte Jesus Kristus till en frälsare/profet bland många andra. Jesu identitet som Guds son är unik, en ontologisk grundval, och mänskligheten finner sin frälsning genom honom. Kristushändelsen, som inte uttömde gudsmysteriet, är relationell till Guds fortsatta uppenbarelse av sig själv genom andra religiösa traditioner. Så här förklarar han i den senare artikeln “Trinitarian Christology as a Model for a Theology of Religious Pluralism”:
“In accordance with the mainline Christian tradition, the constitutive uniqueness and universality of the Jesus-Christ-event must be maintained. Such uniqueness must not, however, be construed as absolute; what is absolute is God’s saving will. Neither absolute nor relative, Jesus’ uniqueness is ‘constitutive’ and ‘relational’…in the sense that the singularly unique event of Jesus Christ is inscribed in the overall ambit of God’s personal dealings with humankind in history, and, therefore, related to all other divine manifestations to people in the one history of salvation.” (T. Merrigan, J. Hears (eds.), “The Myriad Christ: Plurality and the Quest for Unity in Contemporary Christology”, 2000, 96-7.)
Mottagandet av JD: s verk har varit skiftande, men verkar huvudsakligen mynna ut i en förståelse av hans teologi som en legering av nyskapande praxis och grundläggande, urkristna dogmer.
Inez