World Christianity Encounters World Religions is not, as its title might suggest, a descriptive survey of Christian interfaith dialogue around the world. Rather, it is a brief addressed to Christians, especially Catholics, for the importance of interfaith dialogue and the importance of the faiths of their dialogue partners for their understanding of their own faith. Written in a nontechnical style, it is accessible to its intended audience of undergraduate and graduate students in courses in interreligious dialogue and related subjects.

Chia, a Malaysian Catholic who teaches in Australia, divides his book into three parts. He opens by introducing Christianity, its history, and its divisions. “World Christianity” is not simply the spread of Christianity around the globe but “the appropriation of Christian faith” around the world, “often through local agencies and expressed in cultural forms and traditions more adapted to its local contexts” (22). He proceeds to give brief accounts of religion and the major religious traditions, the nature of and rationale for interfaith dialogue, and ways to enhance such dialogue.

The next four chapters explore the Christian tradition in relation to other faiths. A chapter on the Bible highlights “biblical texts that speak positively about the religious outsider” (71), while explaining away passages that seem to construe salvation exclusively in relation to Israel or to Jesus. Chia then surveys the history of Christian relations with other religions and follows with a short review of relevant Vatican documents from Nostra Aetate of Vatican II to the present. He concludes by returning to his home ground of Asia, surveying the history of Asian Christianity and examining the “triple dialogue” with the cultures, the religions, and the poor of Asia.

The third part, “Theologies and Praxes,” begins with a historical account of Christian ecumenism, which pays little attention to the church-dividing issues that make it necessary, either the long-standing disputes over the theology of grace and ecclesiology or the more recent questions of sexuality and gender. Chia next reviews theologies of religious pluralism, focusing mainly on pluralistic theories such as those of John Hick and Paul Knitter (a theology of religious pluralism attempts to make sense of why there are many religions; a pluralistic theology of religions holds Jesus to be one of many mediators of God's revelation and human salvation). He discusses promising methods of interfaith dialogue, such as interfaith discussions of scriptures from different traditions. A detailed and illuminating chapter on Christian-Muslim dialogue follows. This is the closest the book comes to a case study, but it is limited by couching the discussion in general terms (“Muslims say”), without references to arguments of specific Muslims and Christians. The concluding chapter considers challenges raised by interfaith dialogue to Christian self-understanding.

The strengths of this book are its breadth and its clarity of exposition. With the broad scope, however, come many errors in the book's sweeping historical surveys. A few examples are Chia's assertions that Mennonites are other than Anabaptists (14), the Council of Trent instituted the Inquisition (15), and Nestorius denied the divinity of Jesus (155). He mischaracterizes “superior general,” as used in religious congregations, as militaristic (100). A more serious problem comes with Chia's slightly hedged affirmation of a pluralistic theology of religions. “In the face of [the] new reality” of the encounter of world religions, “Christians have been almost forced to accept … that Christianity is but one among many competing religious traditions in the world,” not “the only true” or “most superior” of religions (107). He follows Knitter in treating exclusive New Testament statements, such as “I am the way, the truth, and the life” (John 14:6) as “love proclamations, … meaningful only within the Christian community” (85). It would be unreasonable to ask for a full theology of religions in a book of this sort, but if it is the case that people should participate in interreligious dialogue “without having to give up their religious identity” (50), more importance should be attached to the traditional Christian proclamation that “the one mission of God” (238) has Jesus at its center.