of the issues, objections, questions, and concerns usually brought against the vision of pluralistic theology I have championed. I understand that for many, what I have suggested will strike them somewhere on the continuum between uncomfortable and preposterous. What, they ask, would motivate the “average” creedal, churchgoing, tradition-respecting Christian to follow such a strange and potentially “dangerous” program? Should we not worry about appropriating an other’s religious form of life? Does countenancing the possible value of an other’s religious tradition negate or weaken one’s own? These and other possible objections might be laid at the door of the erstwhile pluralistic theologian and a proper response to them would necessitate a volume of its own. What I propose to do instead is to particularize and personalize my responses to a few significant issues as an invitation to the conversation I hope this chapter will evince.
In traditional presentations of philosophical theology one normally seeks to avoid speaking from a particular and personal location. This detached, abstract, pseudo-objective “voice from nowhere” is sadly all too common in discourses from theology to science.30 However, one of the noted salient features of pluralistic theology is the rootedness of the pluralistic theologian/bricoleur in her or his context, history, and particularities. Moreover, the theologian/bricoleur must meet their responsibility to speak authentically from their location while producing as beautiful a recombination as they can. In this spirit, then, while avoiding self-indulgent autobiography in favor of autopoesis, I propose to respond to some key issues from the perspective of my own history and social location: that is, a first-generation immigrant, born in East Africa to Indian parents, having grown up in a (somewhat) multicultural context in Canada. Like many others, my perspective is that of a multiply hybrid person (or “intersectional” hybrid, in today’s parlance). Culturally, religiously, socially, politically … I find myself in between many overlapping and interwoven identities, and it is from this hybrid, interstitial position that I argue for a more pluralistic theology. I hasten to add that, by indicating my hybridity, in no way do I want to suggest that somehow my responses to any issues concerning pluralistic theology are dependent on my own unique experience. In many ways I share my social location and my immigrant story with countless others, and pluralistic theology does not rely on any particular history nor require a certain kind of perspective. Rather, in locating myself, I seek to disclose (at least partially) my own biases, presuppositions, and commitments, as well as to specify these responses in the belief that, ironically, the universal resides in the particular. As literature shows us, the story of one is often the story of many.
Three major concerns are typically raised in response to pluralistic theology (see Box 1.9): the question of truth, the question of purity, and the question of possibility. For lack of space, as well as to avoid repeating much of what I have (however inadequately) already covered regarding a pragmatic conception of truth, I shall concern myself with only the last two questions here.31
Box 1.9
The author makes this exercise manageable by dividing the objections into three major concerns. Notice the elegant way they are organized, each one is a “question.”
The issue of purity is at the base of concerns regarding mixing, miscegenation, syncretism, crossbreeding, hybridity, and recombination. Pluralistic theology, in bringing together “foreign” religious beliefs, concepts, and practices with their traditional Christian counterparts, is thus suspected of an illegitimate mixing and/or adulteration of Christian tradition. So deep is the worry over purity that in defining religious syncretism as “incorporation by a religious tradition of beliefs and practices incompatible with its basic insights”32 Hendrik Vroom makes extrinsic religious sources incompatible a priori with (in this case) Christian “insight.”
The motivation to conserve what is held dear at one level can often turn into fear, ethnocentrism, chauvinism, and bigotry at the other, and the frequency and ease with which reasonable concern to hold on to what is good slides inexorably into distrust, hatred, and violence cannot be underestimated. This is not to say that all conservative motivation concerning the production of a pluralistic theology is inherently chauvinistic; however, we must be ever vigilant regarding this possibility. Our sensitivities concerning purity itself touch deep into our psyches and social structures. Mary Douglas’s seminal work on purity, pollution, and danger shows us that whenever our sense of purity is threatened by pollution, in this case the interpolation of foreign theological ideas, “our pollution behavior is the reaction which condemns any object or idea likely to confuse or contradict cherished classifications.”33 Religious syncretism is most often the category used to characterize the concern about purity within religious traditions; however, syncretism itself is a very contested term as applied to religious contexts. I would agree with Rosalind Shaw and Charles Stuart that such worries are generally manifestations not of religious or theological concerns but primarily of political anxieties. Stuart and Shaw point out that the term has no determinate meaning but one that has been construed in various ways through history.34 To label something as “syncretic” therefore does not actually accomplish anything since, historically, all religious traditions are mixtures of various diverse elements. The vast weight of historical studies of religion put this beyond doubt. How syncretism is used in a particular context, then, depends on what is at stake, and these are primarily political questions. I suggest that the various religious or theological reasons for labeling something syncretic do not in the end bear scrutiny. What is left after these options are taken away are, simply, political pressures. So the concern regarding the very idea of recombining religious ideas, behaviors, practices, structures, and so on together, that is, the feeling of dis-ease at the possibility of pluralistic theology, must be considered on political grounds, that is, the question of who and what is to be included within the bounds of a particular religious tradition, and who/what is to be left out. This boundary-keeping function is undoubtedly part of what religions do; however, my understanding of the trajectory of Christian belief and practices is toward radical inclusion.35 As someone who grew up outside of Christian tradition, the anomic, radical inclusivity of the teachings of Jesus struck me as one of its most distinguishing characteristics. It seems contrary to the spirit of Christian thought and witness to welcome the sinner into the fold, so to speak, but first require their sterilization of the worldviews which gave rise to and constitute them. My point here is that the program of pluralistic theology I am advocating will necessarily reveal the inchoate political pressures and ethnic boundaries in which we already exist. Bringing these to light is not a defeater for pluralistic theology but rather a virtue, since it is too easy for traditional theology to incorporate their underlying axioms and thus be subsumed by their political, social, and economic settlements (see Box 1.10).36
Box 1.10
The author knows that there are other questions the reader might have. Given he has written extensively on this approach to theology, he uses footnote 36 to acknowledge that there are outstanding questions and invite the reader to look at an essay where he focuses on this objection.
Before moving to the question of the possibility, it should escape no one that at the very center of Christian theology lies the great hybrid, God-man. The Incarnation represents the grossest impurity imaginable in the Semitic context: a being who is fully God and fully human. Christ is the paradigmatic hybrid, through whom human beings are understood to be redeemed, transformed, and sanctified. Any concerns about purity must be put aside if we are to fully understand and appreciate this doctrine.
The question of the possibility of pluralistic theology revolves, I take it, not so much on the nature of its project but rather the likelihood of its acceptance and success in the contemporary Christian world. While I do not wish to avoid the question, to some extent it is a purely empirical matter and thus beyond my ability to settle here. Pluralistic theology may or may not be welcomed, developed, and come to fruition, depending on the particulars of the communities who respond to its challenge. As I have stated, much will depend on the beauty its hybrid theological visions manifest – its attractiveness, promise, and consolation – as well as countless other contingencies of history, identities, time, and space. Whether it is likely to be taken up by theologians or the communities