It is an honor and a delight to be a participant in this discussion. When the organizers asked me to join, I jumped at the chance. I really enjoyed this book for its genuine and candid approach to the promise of a more concrete “method” for interreligious encounters.
I discovered James Fredericks' work ten years ago when I began exploring post-Vatican II ecclesiology and arguing for an ecclesiology of friendship to counter the then-dominant conception of communio that was being privileged among the hermeneutics of the council documents from John Paul II and the Extraordinary General Assembly of the Synod of Bishops of 1985. While I did not want to denigrate that achievement of communio, I felt it could not sufficiently account for the concerns of those engaged in dialogue with other religions and those in comparative theology. I then published a number of essays arguing for an ecclesiology of friendship to complement communio. Specifically, I argued that friendship could account for the relations of the church ad extra, while communio addressed the relations of the church ad intra. In the course of these writings James Fredericks' argument for friendship as a method for interreligious engagement helped to inform my arguments, and I have been able to have some fruitful conversations with him on these matters over the last ten years. I had not had a chance to become acquainted with Tracy Sayuki Tiemeier's work until reading this book, and I am grateful for her efforts in bringing it to fruition. These essays are rich, and they raised deep questions for me to think about in my own life and research. This book also afforded the opportunity to revisit the essay on Masao Abe by James Fredericks, and I will soon raise some questions about it.
Paraphrasing Emerson, C. S. Lewis states: “Friends see the same truth.” While it may seem that friends choose each other, in reality, Lewis suggests, it often comes down to the circumstances in which would-be friends find themselves. When friends find each other it is as if they exclaim: “What? You too? I thought I was the only one.”Footnote 8 There is a comfort that settles into the relationship, making it a fertile ground for mutual sharing.
Their mutual identification as mothers provides much of the basis for Tiemeier and Mughda Yeolekar's interreligious friendship. The program they provided for their children to explore interreligious education through experimental play reminds us that in engaging pluralism today an attitude of exploration is to be preferred to one of trepidation.
The resonance between James Fredericks and Masao Abe occurs in light of their reciprocal interests in relating their own faiths to one another. Fredericks insists that it is a “spiritual friendship,” a concept that is fertile for deeper exploration. Their friendship is asymmetrical in the sense that Fredericks refers to Masao Abe as “Sensei,” although he admits it is not a formal student-teacher relationship in the sense of traditional Japanese culture. Fredericks is protective of this friendship in light of their religious differences. He states: “My friend's Buddhist life cannot be situated comfortably within my Christian understanding of the world without doing violence to Buddhism and to our friendship” (169). Again, Fredericks does not try to interpret his friend as an “anonymous Christian,” for fear of doing violence to the friendship (162). I agree with him to the extent that Rahner's phrase has been overused; after all it was more of a hypothesis, invoked at a time when the church's theology of grace and of the Holy Spirit needed to develop. Further, I am sympathetic with Fredericks' position. When I teach about the traditional Diné (Navajo) aesthetics in my course on beauty, I face a dilemma. On the one hand, I want students to appreciate the genius of the Diné approach, but on the other hand, I do not want them thinking they know Navajo aesthetics, or, as is tempting after learning about it, to read it in terms of Jungian psychology. Still, I cannot help wondering if there is not a natural human impulse, at least initially, to try to understand the other from one's own perspective. Indeed, when Fredericks points out that Abe speculates that “Christ is a kind of bodhisattva” (162), I find Abe's statement intriguing; I do not view it as violence to my Christian faith, nor do I receive it as Abe's attempt to view Christ in terms of a Buddhist grand narrative (160). At the same time, however, I would not be content to leave it at that; I would want to explore it further and more deeply. Is it the kenotic or, if I may say, sunyu-tatic, aspect of self-sacrificing love that Abe is emphasizing as a point of comparison with Christ?
But this also leads me to questions I have had about comparative theological method in general. While I do not consider myself to be a comparative theologian per se, I do consider myself friendly to the tasks of comparative theology. I have often wondered what the goal of comparative theology is, especially given Fredericks' calls for a moratorium on theologies of religions. What is the relationship between systematic or constructive theology and comparative theology? To express the matter in terms of my own Lonerganian approach, “What are comparative theologians doing when they are doing comparative theology, and why are they doing it?” or “What is the relationship to be between the fruits of these accounts of interreligious friendships and the broader tasks of theology?”
In the concluding essay, Mary Funk is correct that one should not presume that everyone in these essays has the same understanding of friendship, whether it be “egalitarian or somewhat asymmetrical” (219).
Fredericks points out in the introduction: “Nostra Aetate would not have been possible were it not for interreligious friendships” (5). In this spirit, I believe we have entered into a fourth stage of meaning in human history, an innovation I have proposed as an addition to Lonergan's three stages of meaning (common sense, theory, and interiority), one that transcends previous antagonistic and rivalrous stances toward other religions; one that in the spirit of Levinas' philosophy obligates us to the other in a horizontal alterity and toward a transcendent Urground or vertical alterity. I believe this fourth stage is demonstrated in the sensibilities of such works as Peter Phan's Being Religious Interreligiously.Footnote 9 For Catholics, this shift is inaugurated by the declaration Nostra Aetate, regardless of the document's limitations. This book on friendship represents a further articulation of this zeitgeist, and I was particularly heartened when Mary Funk ended the book with a reference to Thomas Merton, who was a pioneer of interreligious friendship and so can serve as an example to follow.
Finally, as Professor Fredericks turns toward the twilight of his career I want to conclude my comments with an acknowledgment of my respect for his work, his candor in the academy, and his pioneering work in comparative theology. Even though I have gotten to know him only in recent years, I consider him to be a “sensei” and a friend.
