In this book, James L. Ford, professor of religion at Wake Forest University, has set himself a formidable, some would say audacious, task: he wants to use one hermeneutical flashlight to explore multiple religious traditions. Casting aside postmodern warnings of incommensurability, he asks four different traditions—Judaism, Christianity, Hinduism, and Buddhism—the same question: how do you understand the Divine? And the answers he finds are surprisingly illuminating and interconnecting.
Faced with such a complex assignment, he carefully lays out his methodology, parameters, and terms. His selection of traditions is grounded in his conviction that any divine quest cannot be limited to Western monotheistic religions. (But he does not make clear why, especially in our present day of widespread Islamophobia, he omits Islam.) And while he declares that his quest is “primarily phenomenological” and “not a book of constructive theology or philosophy,” the subtitle of his book, and especially its final chapter, make clear that he very much wants it to be a “comparative study” (28–29). Is a serious comparison of views of the Ultimate possible without getting entangled in theology? Ford is, happily, more of a “constructive theologian” than he admits.
He turns to theologians and philosophers to define his central terms. To offer a notion of Ultimate Reality that he thinks would apply to all religions, he endorses the definition proposed by Robert Neville and Wesley Wildman: “that which is most important to religious life because of the nature of reality” (3, Ford's emphasis). As for religion, he believes that Mark Taylor's rather complex definition would be equally multiapplicable: a “network of symbols, myths, and rituals” that in a “quasi-dialectical rhythm” both “structures and stabilizes” as well as “disrupts and dislocates … life's meaning and purpose” (18–19). In tracing how a religion's notion of Ultimate Reality can both ground and provoke the status quo, Ford's interpretative guideline, drawn from Peter Berger and applied consistently throughout the book, is that every image or symbol of the Ultimate is the product of the human imagination (which, he adds, can be considered the vehicle of revelation) as it is challenged and inspired by the ever-changing social, cultural, economic, and political context.
Ford's description and analysis of the divine quest in each of the traditions, too rich to be summarized here, include a selective but adequate historical summary, and then a breakdown into “acts” that identify how the quest shifted and expanded according to ever-new historical realities. His phenomenological thoroughness reveals, without explicit intent, a diversity between the religions that is refracted in similar diversities within the religions. There appears to be a common “morphology of the Ultimate” (308). In all the traditions’ efforts to imagine what is “most important given the nature of reality,” we can identify a dynamic tension between the one and the many, the personal and the impersonal, the transcendent and the immanent. And amid the astounding diversity of images and symbols, Ford convincingly makes clear that although there are disagreements among the traditions about the ontological transcendence of the Ultimate, there is an overwhelming agreement about its epistemological transcendence (326). While all religions affirm that the Ultimate can be known, they also insist that there will always be more to know.
Thus, in his conclusion he announces that “pluralism” is not only “unavoidable” but must be embraced in an interreligious “endless interpretation” (338). In these final “reflections on the divine quest,” Ford steps out of the closet as a comparative theologian. And it's clear that he believes that in this comparison of Western and Eastern divine quests, the West has much to learn from the East. Classical theism, he declares, is waning. Here Eastern insights and experience, especially Buddhist, can help guide Western theists toward a “trans-theistic” understanding of “Ultimate Reality as a single process or as nondual in its essence” (332–38). His comparative study leads to engaging constructive theology.
Given the quality of its content and the clarity of its style (honed, I imagine, by his undergraduate teaching), Ford's Divine Quest could well serve both graduate and undergraduate courses in world religions, interreligious dialogue, and comparative theology.
