ভূমিকা

Shiavault - a Vault of Shia Islamic Books Intellectual Responses To Religious Pluralism Scholarly Perspectives on Religious Pluralism Wilfred Cantwell Smith[^17] Wilfred Cantwell Smith says that theology needs to be true to a modern perception of the world. His rejection of supernaturalism can also be discerned in the writings of some contemporary religious pluralists.

Smith rejects the idea that God has constructed Christianity in favor of the idea that God has inspired us to construct it, as He/She/It has inspired Muslims to construct what the world knows as Islam, or…Ramanuja to write his theological commentaries.

He also rejects the idea that, “God has given Christianity privileged statutes,” and he adds that the assumption by Christians that they have been accorded quite special treatment by God, available to no one else in like measure is “theologically wary.”[^18] He instead affirms “pluralism,” according to which the figure of Christ is only one from among others (through) which God has entered history, so that we can hold that God has played in human history a role in and through the Qur’an, in the Muslim case, comparable to the role in the Christian case in and through Christ.

Smith’s rejection of the idea of God as an omnipotent being who, whether always or only sometimes, simply determines the events of our world, is suggested by his statement that part of the truth about God is that “God is confronted with recalcitrance…of us human beings.”[^19] Smith strongly urges the necessity of learning each other’s religious language and thought forms. Only then will the vocabulary problem be solvable.

As a contribution to the process that one must go on while learning their language, Smith offers the following suggestion as a possible basis for discussion between theists and non-theists: “by the term God one means a truth-reality that explicitly transcends conception, but in so far as conceivable is that to which man’s religious history has at its best been a response, human and in some sense inadequate.”[^20] Smith strongly urges that our understanding of each other’s concepts be anchored in history, even for history-transcending and self-transcending concepts such as God.

The problem is that some religions claim that truth is not anchored or revealed in that historical process, but in the reality that is behind or beyond it. In his book, Toward a World Theology , Smith gives careful attention to the importance of language in religious dialogue.