In his recent book, Christ in a Pluralistic Age, John B. Cobb, Jr, has taken seriously, and in a radical way, the pluralistic context as established by the history of religions (Religionswissenschaft) within which the enterprise of theology must be today undertaken. Perhaps most importantly, he was offered us a context for rethinking the central issue of Christian faith, Christology, which not only affirms the religious insights of non-Christian traditions, but also the possibility of creative transformation of Christian faith through its encounter with, and appropriation of, non-Christian religious experience.
In this essay, I respond to Cobb as a historian of religion who takes theology seriously, just as he is a theologian who takes history of religions seriously. I focus upon his theological interpretation of the “data” of history of religions along with his conceptualization of the necessary theological response to the present “post-Christian” age of religious pluralism. Since both of us teach and write from Whiteheadian process perspective, I raise certain episemological issues centering upon: (1) his interpretation of Buddhist conceptualities; (2) his notions regarding the transformation of Christian faith through the appropriation of non-substance modes of thought from Buddhism; (3) his notions regarding the transformation of Buddhist faith through the appropriation of Christian ethical insights; (4) his use of Whitehead's process vision as a framework from which to understand and articulate Christian and Buddhist faith; and (5) the epistemological grounds for his at least tacit affirmation that Christian faith is more “universal” than non-Christian faith.
In the concluding portion of this essay, drawing not only from a Whiteheadian process perspective but also from Michael Polanyi's notion of “personal knowledge,” I suggest possible lines of thought which might prove useful in finding solutions to the epistemological issues I think are involved in Professor Cobb's Christology Since both he and I assume a historical variety of truly different ways of apprehending the Sacred, and since I have criticized him for imposing the Christian Way upon the Buddhist Way (although this was not his intention), I suggest four lines of argument for an epistemological orientation which allows both of us to oppose the dangers of “debilitating relativism” in an age of religious and secular pluralism.
