Christians and Muslims disagree about the nature of God. Christians confess God as triune; Muslims confess Allah as unitary. Nevertheless, both Christians and Muslims believe that God is personal and revelatory. In this they disagree with Advaita Vedanta Hindus, such as Sankara, who view Brahman as impersonal and unknowable through discursive means. Religious comparisons can and should be made, so long as those doing the comparisons adequately comprehend the traditions that they are addressing. Professor Carse to the contrary, all religions have at least three formal or topical elements in common: a conception of ultimate reality or the supremely sacred (whether Yahweh, the Trinity, Allah, Nirvana, Brahman, or the Tao), an assessment of the human situation (either as the image of God, Atman, or no-soul), and a salvific prescription for spiritual liberation (whether faith in Yahweh or Christ, obedience to Allah's law, yoga, or the Eightfold Path). On these thematic concerns conceptual comparisons can be made. I suggest that religious dialogue will only progress when the following assumptions are in place. First, religions make truth-claims that are irreducible. These cognitive claims constitute the core of each religion's identity and differentiate one religion from another, aside from whatever other elements may be vital to religious life (such as ritual and religious experience). Second, it is not impossible to compare the truth-claims of one religion with those of another religion. They can be juxtaposed and rationally assessed so long as those in dialogue sufficiently understand the religious traditions of which they speak. Third, the truth-claims of one religion are sometimes logically incompatible with those of another, as seen above. These disagreements should be recognized and rationally discussed, as Professor Paul Griffiths argues in his fine work, An Apology for Apologetics. OLM - THEOLOGY - WORLD RELIGIONS TEXTS & STUDY QUESTIONS ON THE RELIGIOUS DIVERSITY ISSUE Was my fellow panelist correct in saying, with regard to Buddhism and Christianity, that "one is not better than the other?" Well, both religions cannot be true in their essential beliefs. The Buddha and the Christ held mutually contradictory beliefs on the issues of God, the soul, and salvation. However, Buddhists and Christians can engage in stimulating dialogue when they agree to disagree agreeably in a nation that honors the freedom of religion. Let us hope that such conditions begin to emerge globally as well. Study questions: 1. Identify the problem discussed. 2. What s the relevancy of the problem? 3. Identify P. Carse s two theses. 4. Identify the author s arguments against P. Carses theses. 5. Identify the author conclusive theses. HE WHO DOES NOT LOVE DOES NOT KNOW GOD 1 JOHN 4 * National Forum article, June 1994. CHRIST ONLY IN WHOM CAN BE FOUND THE FULLNESS OF THE RELIGIOUS LIFE NOSTRA AETATE
Nostra Aetate, article 2 Indeed, [the Catholic Church] proclaims, and ever must proclaim Christ "the way, the truth, and the life" (John 14:6), in whom men may find the fullness of religious life, in whom God has reconciled all things to Himself. Pope Benedict XVI, His Companions and Their Deceptions by Khalid Jan The current Pope [John Paul II] has personally endorsed a document called "Dominus Iesus", published in August 2000, by Cardinal Ratzinger, Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. It has been ratified and confirmed by Pope John Paul II "with sure knowledge and by his apostolic authority." This document states that people outside of Christianity are "gravely deficient" in their relationship to God, and that non-catholic Christian communities had defects. An article by Saint Ignatius Press on former cardinal Ratzinger s book: Truth and Tolerance How can Christianity insist it is true in the face of other religions and philosophies making competing claims? Do truth and tolerance inevitably conflict with each other? Does respect for others mean all religions are equally true? Does the diversity of religions prove there s no such thing as religious truth? Or do all religions ultimately teach the same thing? Are all religions capable of saving their adherents? Truth and Tolerance is Ratzinger s careful answers to these important questions. Ratzinger confronts head-on the claim that Christianity has imposed European culture on other peoples. "Christianity originated, not in Europe, but in the Near East, in the geographical point at which the continents of Asia, Africa, and Europe come into contact," he writes. Yes, Christianity has a European element. But above all it has a perennial message that comes from God, not from any human culture, argues Ratzinger. While Christians have sometimes pushed their cultures on other peoples, as have non-christians, Christianity itself is alien to no authentically human culture. Its very nature as a free response to God s gift of himself in Jesus Christ, means that Christianity must propose itself to culture, not impose itself. The issues of truth and diversity in religion are also tackled by Ratzinger. Some people relegate religion to the realm of feelings and taste. As people s feelings and tastes vary, so, too, do their religious ideas and practices. Ratzinger responds by presenting what he calls "the inevitability of the question of truth." Other people argue that all religions essentially affirm the same things. Truth and Tolerance points to fundamental, non-negotiable differences among religions, as well as certain common elements. Ratzinger distinguishes two main forms of religion. On the one hand, there is a kind of mysticism in which one seeks to merge into or become identical with everything, in an allembracing, impersonal unity. Many Eastern religions and the New Age movement are religions of that sort. On the other hand, there is "a personal understanding of God," in which one is united in love with a personal God and yet remains distinct from him. Christianity, Judaism, and Islam are examples of the latter kind of religion. Understanding diversity in world religions* At a medical ethics conference, I shared a panel with representatives from various religions who were asked to explain their views on death. A Buddhist priest explained several of his beliefs, contrasting them clearly with Christian teachings: Buddhism is horizontal or human -oriented, not vertical or God-oriented, and the respective architectures of Christian churches and Buddhist temples demonstrate this. He politely added, "one way is not better than the other--just different from the other." But was his polite remark true? This gets to the heart of Professor James Carse's essay, "Diversity in the World's Religions" (National Forum: The Phi Kappa Phi Journal, Winter 1994): How can we accurately understand and assess diverse religious traditions? The question has urgency. As Professor Carse notes, because cultures are shaped by religion, we often cannot understand a culture without understanding its religious tradition. Furthermore, the resolution of many of the world's conflicts requires that we pinpoint the religious misunderstandings that fuel them. He also correctly asserts that religious "dialogue can only occur when each [religion] can criticize and challenge the other." Yet Professor Carse's proposal to understand these conflicts is somewhat perplexing. He seems to be advocating the thesis that religions are almost totally incomprehensible to one another and that "we cannot distinguish one religion from another on the basis of belief." Religious belief, he claims, is the unique concern of Christianity, "the only religion in the world that has a creed in the proper sense." Religions do differ in how much emphasis they place on creeds; however, it is false that Christianity alone is creedal or that "belief is not itself an issue in any religion but Christianity." Judaism affirms the Shema (Deuteronomy, chapter six), Islam has its own short creed and much theology, and Sankara, the Hindu theologian, stressed the importance of belief for salvation: "If the soul... is not considered to possess fundamental unity with Brahman--an identity to be realized by knowledge--there is not any chance of its obtaining final release." Furthermore, we can distinguish religions according to beliefs. First, Professor Carse's article itself distinguishes among religions on the basis of their beliefs. He mentions that when Hindus speak of Brahman they are referring not to the Judeo-Christian view of God but to "a Reality so inclusive as to have no distinguishing characteristics of its own: no personality, no gender, no will, not even thought or mind." This is true, at least for Advaita Vedanta Hinduism. It is not true for the Bhakti traditions--another distinction made on the basis of belief. Second, he observes that for Buddhism there is no deity, and in Zen, there is no soul as well. It is true that Theravada Buddhism denies or ignores any supreme deity and rejects the notion of a soul. But Mahayana Buddhism is much more metaphysically inclusive (especially concerning the Trikaya, or three levels of Buddhahood) and has a different view of the soul--another distinction made on the basis of belief. Christians, as opposed to some Hindus, Professor Carse notes, reject the avatar doctrine that Jesus was "but one of several equivalent incarnations" to be included in the Hindu pantheon. Again, this is a clear disagreement over religious beliefs, as Professor Geoffrey Parrinder has demonstrated in his distinguished work, Avatar and Incarnation. So, we find that Professor Carse's own illustrations belie his premise that religions cannot be compared on the basis of beliefs. This is related to another questionable claim he makes: "There is no one common element by which all religions can be compared, in spite of the many scholarly and popular attempts to do so." In so far as this statement refers to the fact that religions differ in their claims about reality, it is correct. Any attempt to find a common doctrinal or experiential core in all religions is phenomenologically misguided. However, the fact of diversity does not entail incomparability.
A text by Huston Smith* The opening chapter of this book [Textbook on World s Religion] quoted Arnold Toynbee as saying that no one alive knows enough to say with confidence whether or not one religion is superior to the others the question remains an open one. True, this book has found nothing that privileges one tradition above the others, but that could be due to the kind of book it is: It eschews comparisons in principle. Nothing in the comparative study of religions requires that they cross the finishing line of the reader's regard in a dead heat. A second position lies at the opposite end of the spectrum: It holds that the religions are all basically alike. Differences are acknowledged but, according to this second view, they are incidental in comparison to the great enduring truths on which the religions unite. This appeals to our longing for human togetherness, but on inspection it proves to be the trickiest position of the three. For as soon as it moves beyond vague generalities "every religion has some version of the Golden Rule"; or, "Surely we all believe in some sort of something," as a Member of Parliament once ventured following a bitter debate in the House of Commons over the Book of Common Prayer it founders on the fact that the religions differ in what they consider essential and what negotiable. Hinduism and Buddhism split over this issue, as did Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. In the nineteenth century Alexander Campbell tried to unite Protestants on grounds of their common acceptance of the Bible as the model for faith and organization. To his surprise he discovered that denomina tional leaders were not prepared to concede that the uniting principle he proposed was more important than their distinctive tenets; his movement ended by adding another denomination the Disciples of Christ (Christian Church) to the Protestant roster. On a world scale Baha'u'llah's mission came to the same end. Baha'i, which origi nated in the hope of rallying the major religions around the beliefs they held in common, has settled into being another religion among many. Study questions: 1. In regard with religious diversity, what 3 distinct positions does H. Smith refer to in this text? 2. What s H. Smith s position? * Huston Smith is an internationally acclaimed philosopher and scholar of religion. He holds eleven honorary degrees and is the author of the classic college textbook The World's Religions which has been the most widely-used textbook on its subject for a third of a century and has sold over two and a half million copies worldwide. A first-rate theologian, as well as a church leader, Ratzinger also assesses the strengths and weaknesses of the three main contemporary approaches to a "theology of religions": exclusivism, inclusivism, and pluralism. Exclusivism holds that only those who explicitly accept Christ and the Christian message can be saved. Inclusivism is the view that non-christian religions implicitly contain Christian truth and therefore that their adherents are "anonymous Christians." Pluralism holds that there are many valid ways to God among the various religions. At the heart of the discussion about the diversity of religions, contends Ratzinger, is the identity of Jesus Christ. Is he the sole savior, prefigured by other religious leaders perhaps but nonetheless unique? Is he one among many religious figures who bring salvation? Is he the one true God in human flesh, rather an avatar or one among many different manifestations of the divine? Christianity has always held that the revelation of God in Jesus Christ is definitive, argues Ratzinger. The divinity of Jesus is "the real dividing line in the history of religions," which makes sense of "two other fundamental concepts of the Christian faith, which have become unmentionable nowadays: conversion and mission." Relativism, which Ratzinger calls "the central problem for faith in our time," lurks behind most modern mistakes about faith and morality. The net result is a deep skepticism about whether anything is true or can be known to be true. Christianity can help modern thought overcome its relativism and skepticism by presenting the One who is the truth, Jesus Christ, the one who sets people free by their coming to know, understand and love the truth. Ratzinger explains how tolerance, reason and freedom are not only compatible with truth, but ultimately depend upon it. With respect to the difficult subject of things interreligious, Ratzinger strongly supports interreligious dialogue, so long as it isn t understood as assuming all points of view are and must be, in the end, equally valid. Study questions 1. Why are truth and tolerance often seen as conflicting values? 2. Why would the diversity of religions prove there s no such thing as religious truth? 3. Why isn t it right to say that Christianity imposed European culture on other peoples? 4. Explain, in reference to the classification of religions, Christianity has a perennial message that comes from God, and Christianity must propose itself to culture. 5. Explain, in reference to Nostra Aetate, Christianity itself is alien to no authentically human culture. 6. What s the problem in relegating religion to the realm of feelings and taste? 7. What argument shows the problem in believing that all religions essentially affirm the same things? 8. What are the two main forms of religion? 9. Name and explain the three main approaches to the world religions diversity issue? 10. Why is the identity of Jesus Christ at the heart of the discussion about the diversity of religions? 11. What is the central problem for faith in our time? 12. Referring to anti-religious mindsets, what does skepticism lead to? 13. What doesn t interreligious dialogue imply?
Excerpts from Truth and Tolerance by Cardinal Ratzinger, Ignatius Press 2004 Tacelli 346) 1. Rahner had, quite naturally, regarded the question concerning the salvation of the non- Christian as being really the only question for the Christian who is thinking about the phenomenon of the multiplicity of religions in the world... The three basic lines of response in the present discussions about Christendom and world religions [are] exclusivism, inclusivism [and] pluralism... (Ratzinger 17) 2. The position that Christianity assigns itself in the history of religions is one that was basically expressed long ago: it sees in Christ the only real salvation of man and, thus, his final salvation. In accordance with this, two attitudes are possible (so it seems) with regard to other religions: one may address them as being provisional and, in this respect, as preparatory to Christianity and, thus, in a certain sense attribute to them a positive value, insofar as they allow themselves to be regarded as precursors. They can of course also be understood as insufficient, anti-christian, contrary to the truth, as leading people to believe they are saved without ever truly being able to offer salvation. The first of these attitudes was shown by Christ himself with respect to the faith of Israel, that is to say, the religion of the Old Testament. That this may also, in a way, be done with regard to all other religions has been clearly shown and emphasized only in recent times. We may in fact perfectly well say that the story of the covenant with Noah (Gen 8) establishes that there is a kernel of truth hidden in the mythical religions... This is the way that constitutes [...] the unified background to Asiatic higher religion. What is characteristic for this mysticism is the experience of identity: the mystic sinks down into the ocean of the all-one, irrespective of whether this is portrayed [...] as "nothingness" or, in a positive sense, as "everything". In the final stage of such an experience, the "mystic" will no longer be able to say to his God, "I am Thine"; the expression he uses is "I am Thee". The difference has been left behind in what is provisional, preparatory, and what is ultimately valid is fusion, unity... [In] this experience of inner identification [...] all distinctions fall away and appear as an unreal veil over the hidden unity with the ground of all things... (Ratzinger 33) 3. The essential understanding that we gain from this investigation lies in the perception that the whole panorama of the history of religions sets before us a basic choice between two ways, [...] mysticism" and "monotheism". Today I would prefer to talk instead about "a mysticism of identity" and "a personal understanding of God". Ultimately it is a question of whether the divine "God" stands over against us, so that religion, being human, is in the last resort a relationship-love-that becomes a union ("God is all in all": 1 Cor.15:28) but that does not do away with the opposition of I and Thou; or, whether the divine lies beyond personality, and the final aim of man is to become one with, and dissolve 10. On the one hand, there is a rich and orthodox tradition of Christian mysticism, so why look across the world for diamonds when your own back yard is full of them? On the other hand, we can learn something from everything. On the one hand, we must remember that Eastern methods have been developed as means to non-christian ends; and there is an organic connection between means and ends. The Eastern end is mysticism; sanctity is only a means. The Christian (and Jewish and Muslim) end is sanctity; mysticism is only a means to or a result of this higher end. For a Hindu or Buddhist, sanctity only purifies the individual soul so that it can see through itself as an illusion. For Christians, mysticism is only a reward of sanctity or a motor for more sanctity. Christ tells us to love God; Hindus tell us we are God. Christ tells us to love our neighbor; Buddha tells us we are our neighbors. The Eastern goal is to see through the illusions of ego, soul, body, self, other, matter, space, time, world, good, evil, false, beautiful, ugly, this and that. The Christian goal is to know, love, Please, serve, and enjoy God in this life and the next. (Kreeft Tacelli 349) Study questions: 1. What are the three basic lines of response to the only question for the Christian who is thinking about the phenomenon of the multiplicity of religions in the world? 2. With regard to other religions, explain the provisional attitude. 3. Describe the mysticism of Asiatic higher religion? 4. What two basic choices does the panorama of the history of religions set before us? 5. What is, for each basic religious choice, the final aim of man? 6. What is the basic constituent of the human experience of existence for Buber? 7. For Levinas, what s the downfall of the philosophy and mysticism of identity? 8. Why can t the Upanishads [sacred Hindu texts] offer an adequate basis for the dignity of every single person? 9. Why does the problem of evil challenge the mysticism-of-identity position? 10. How does Guardini s basic distinction between "opposition" and "contradiction" help understand the mistake of the mysticism-of-identity position? 11. What s the ethic of tolerance and what are its key arguments? 12. What does Ratzinger find unjustified and dangerous? 13. Why is relativism self-contradictory and why is it counterproductive? 14. What s truth in the Eastern tradition and why does it make religious dialogue difficult? 15. What s the stumbling block of East-West dialogue and why? 16. Why would an orthodox Hindu be an unlikely good Samaritan? 17. Why is it tempting to identify religion with morality and to minimize theological differences? 18. How differently do Abrahamic and Eastern religions articulate mysticism and sanctity?
ence between truth and falsity cannot be the difference between conformity and nonconformity between subjective (mind, ideas) and objective reality. For reality to a pantheist is one, not two; truth is not an idea's conformity but its size, so to speak. Only the idea of Oneness or Brahman or Nirvana is totally "true"; all lesser ideas are partly true and partly false, partial manifestations of the Whole. This makes argument between East (Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism) and West (Judaism, Christianity, Islam) extremely difficult. For the West claims that the East is wrong on some points, and the East claims that there is no such thing as being wrong. A Hindu can believe everything, including Christianity, as a partial truth, or a stage along the way to total truth. Even contradictory ideas can be accepted as true; the stumbling block of East-West dialogue is the law of non-contradiction. (Kreeft Tacelli 344) 9. There are some significant ethical contradictions between religions, however, based on their different theological beliefs. For instance, suppose you were an orthodox Hindu. You would believe that (a) this body is ultimately only an appearance; (b) we must all work out our karma, or moral fate; and (c) after death everyone except a fully enlightened mystic must go through many more reincarnations. For these reasons, you would not be swift to rescue a dying derelict from the gutter. For (a) bodily death is not very important; (b) you may be interfering with the person's karma, or fated learning experience through this suffering and dying; and (c) death is not terribly tragic because it is not final - we go round again and may get other chances through reincarnation. If, on the other hand, you were a Christian or a Jew or a Muslim, you would act like the good Samaritan because you believe that (a) the body is real and good and important; (b) we are not fated but free (or both fated and free); and (c) we live only once, so life is incalculably precious. However, such moral disagreements as these are unusual. More often there is not only agreement but remarkable agreement. Moral codes can be classified into three levels: codes for pragmatic survival, codes of objective justice and codes of selflessness. All three tell us not to bash each other s brains out, but for three different reasons: not to get bashed back; because it's not fair; and because we should be unselfish like God, or the Ultimate Reality. Everyone knows level one, and most civilized people know level two, but level three is high and rare. Yet all the great religions of the world teach level three morality. This fact makes it tempting to identify religion with morality and minimize theological differences, thus uniting all the religions of the world. The modernists' reduction of Christianity to its morality, and their willingness to relativize or negotiate away theological doctrines, comes largely from this source. Orthodox Christians should not be afraid to learn something from modernists here. Although it is either stupid or dishonest to negotiate away Christian doctrines (like Christ s divinity and resurrection) to popular acceptance, it is nevertheless true and important that there already is a great amount of agreement among world religions on morality... (Kreeft in, the All-One... "Is it a question of dissolving into the unity of the whole or of the most basic trust in an endless 'Thou', in God"... [Buber says:] "It is not merging into unity but encounter that is the basic constituent of the human experience of existence." Levinas regards the resolution of multiplicity into an all-absorbing unity as confusion of thinking and as a form of spiritual experience that does not get to the bottom of things. For him, Hegel's "infinity" represents the most dreadful example of such a view of unity. He objects that in the philosophy and mysticism of identity the "face of the other", whose freedom can never become my possession, is eliminated in a nameless "totality". In reality, however, true eternity is only experienced in trustfully putting one's hopes in the freedom of the other to remain other. Over against the unity of merging, with its tendency to eliminate identity, should be set personal experience: unity of love is higher than formless identity. Biirkle has shown again from another angle, that of actual practice in the life of society, how the idea of a person is irreplaceable, an ultimate value: The development of modern Hinduism shows that for the idea of man in India today, also, this concept of personhood has become indispensable... The experience of identity as found in the Upanishads [...] offers no adequate basis for the enduring validity and dignity of the uniqueness, as an individual, of every single person. This cannot be reconciled with the notion that this life is merely a transitory phase in the rhythm of changing levels of reincarnation. It is impossible to maintain the individual value and dignity of the person if this is merely a passing phase and subject to variation... The modern reforms of Hinduism are thus quite logically committed to asking about the dignity of man. The Christian concept of the person is taken over by them in the Hindu context as a whole, without its foundation in the concept of God." It would not be difficult to show, however, that the concept of the individual as a person, and thus the defense of the individual value and dignity of each person, cannot in the end itself be maintained without its foundation in the idea of God. Finally, in the course of his reflections, Sudbrack draws our attention to a criterion that is no less fundamental and by which the difficulties in the mysticism-of-universal-identity position become glaringly obvious: "The problem of evil, as a turning against the absolute goodness of God, most clearly reveals the difference in the conceptions of being." In a philosophy of the unity of everything, the distinction between good and evil is necessarily relativized. We can find some important clarifications of this question in the thinking of Guardini. In his philosophy of opposition, Guardini thought out the basic distinction between "opposition" and "contradiction", which is what it finally comes down to here. Oppositions are complementary; they constitute the richness of reality. In his most important philosophical work, he made "opposition" the central principle of the way he looked at reality, in which he saw in the many tensions of life the wealth of existence.
Oppositions refer us to one another; each needs the other; and only between them do they produce the harmony of the whole. But contradiction breaks out of this harmony and destroys it. Evil is not even - as Hegel thought and as Goethe tries to show us in Faust - one side of the whole, and thus necessary to us, but is the destruction of being. It is in fact unable to say of itself, as does Faust's Mephistopheles, I am "a part of that power which always seeks evil and always works good." Good would then have need of evil, and evil would not really be evil at all but would just be a necessary part of the world's dialectical process. The sacrifice of countless thousands of victims by Communism was justified with this philosophy, building upon the dialectic of Hegel, which Marx then turned into a political system... God, [...] as a threefold unity represents [...] pure goodness, whereas in the mysticism of identity there is in the end no distinction between good and evil [and] neither has priority over the other. (Ratzinger 45-49) 4. So in fact relativism has become the central problem for faith in our time. It by no means appears simply as resignation in the face of the unfathomable nature of truth, of course; rather, it defines itself positively on the basis of the concepts of tolerance, dialectic epistemology, and freedom, which would be limited by maintaining one truth as being valid for everyone. Relativism thus also appears as being the philosophical basis of democracy, which is said to be founded on no one's being able to claim to know the right way forward... (Ratzinger 117) 5. In the Roman crisis of the late fourth century the senator Symmachus [said] "It is the same thing that we all worship; we all think the same; we look up to the same stars; there is one sky above us, one world around us; what difference does it make with what kind of method the individual seeks the truth? We cannot all follow the same path to reach so great a mystery." This is exactly what enlightenment is saying today: We do not know truth as such; yet in a variety of images, we all express the same thing. So great a mystery as the Divinity cannot be fixed in one image, which would exclude all others, to one path obligatory for all. There are many paths; there are many images; all reflect something of the whole, and none is itself the whole. He is practicing, the ethic of tolerance who recognizes in each one a little of the truth, who does not set his own above what is strange to him, and who peacefully takes his place in the multiform symphony of the eternally unattainable that hides itself in symbols, symbols that yet seem to be the only way we have to grasp in some sense the Divinity. Has the claim of Christianity to be religio vera [true religion], then, been overtaken by the progress of enlightenment? Is it bound to step down from its claim and take its place in the Neo-platonic or Buddhist or Hindu view of truth and symbol? (Ratzinger 176) Excerpts from Without Roots by Cardinal Ratzinger and Marcello Pera 6. The dominant culture in the West [...] reveals its prejudices through a major flaw in reasoning. It thinks that "ought" descends from "is." According to this way of thinking, if a person maintains that the West is better than Islam - or, to be more specific, that democracy is better than theocracy, a liberal constitution better than sharia [Islamic law applied to social and political realms], a parliamentary decision better than a sura [a verse of the Koran], a civil society better than an umma [the Muslim community], a sentence by an independent tribunal better than a fatva [a religious legal decree], [...] and so forth - then he or she ought to clash with Islam. This is an error of logic that compounds the error of believing that our institutions have no right or basis to be proclaimed as universal I personally reject these positions. I deny that there are no valid reasons for comparing and judging institutions, principles, and values. I deny that such a comparison cannot conclude that Western institutions are better than their Islamic counterparts. And I deny that a comparison will necessarily give rise to a conflict. I do not deny, however, that if an offer to dialogue is responded to with a conflict, then the conflict should not be accepted. For me the opposite holds true. I affirm the principles of tolerance, peaceful coexistence, and respect that are characteristic of the West today. However, if someone refuses to reciprocate these principles and declares hostility or a jihad against us, I believe that we must acknowledge that this person is our adversary. In short, I reject the self-censorship of the West. This self-censorship much more than the universalist claims of Western institutions [...] is something that I find unjustified and dangerous. (Ratzinger Vera 9-10) 7. So the answer that the expert theologian provides to the uneducated believer would seem to be to engage in self-censorship. The believer in Christ cannot say that Christ is the truth, because that would be dogmatic and anti-historical. Nor can he or she say that Christ is the sole truth, because that would constitute fundamentalism. Cardinal Ratzinger rejects this thesis, which I, too, find contradictory, false, and counterproductive for Christians. Contradictory, because if relativism leads us to claim that there are no basic truths, then not even relativism can be the foundation of democracy. False, because democracy places at its very foundations the values of the individual, dignity, equality, and respect. Deny these values and you deny democracy. Counterproductive, because if, relativistically speaking, one truth is equivalent to another, what is the purpose of dialogue? And if faith contains no truth, how can we be saved? (Ratzinger Vera 26) Excerpts from Handbook of Christian Apologetics by Peter Kreeft and Ronald K. Tacelli 8. We cannot address this question [are other religions true] until we agree on what is meant by "true." If we use the definition that is commonsensical in the West namely, correspondence with objective reality, then the correct answer seems to be: Partly. (But as we shall see in a moment, other religions. especially Eastern religions, have a different definition of truth.) We could say, for instance, that Vedanta Hinduism is true in being monotheistic and false in being pantheistic, or that Islam's insistence on prayer and justice are true, but its denial that God can have a Son is false. But the very meaning of "truth" changes when you move East. For a pantheist the differ-