In his most recent volume, David Cheetham draws together long-standing interests in interreligious relations and philosophy to offer a constructive Christian theology of religions rooted in the doctrine of creation ex nihilo. Eschewing the exclusivism, inclusivism, pluralism paradigm that has often characterised interreligious encounters, Cheetham offers a creaturely approach to interreligious relations that respects other religions by neither assuming they pursue the same salvation-oriented goals as Christianity, nor treating them as some sort of anonymous Christianity. Instead, Cheetham suggests that in interreligious encounters, Christians should set aside doctrinal questions about ultimate reality in order to focus on the practices and experiences of religious people. He is not arguing for Christians to adopt a relativistic view of ultimate questions, but is rather seeking a productive way for Christians to engage other faith traditions ‘confessionally rather than concessionally’ (p. 57). Developing a Christian doctrine of creation that treats the fact that human beings are created beings as something of theological significance, Cheetham argues that interreligious encounter and a Christian theology of religions should both be rooted in the material, quotidian, creaturely existence that human beings of all faiths share.
The first chapter develops this theme by examining the concept of ineffability in conversation with the work of John Hick and Jean-Luc Marion. Contrasting analytic understandings of the ineffable as indicative only of epistemological limits, ‘a formal second order philosophical postulate that cannot be experienced’, with phenomenological treatments of the transcendent as an excess of experience in a ‘saturated phenomena’, Cheetham argues that the latter more accurately captures how religious practitioners use ineffability and transcendence to describe their experience of the divine (p. 20). Interreligious encounters are saturated events, which resist cognitive explanations not because they are beyond human experiences but because they exceed any particular perspective. For Cheetham, the ineffable, or the transcategorial phenomenon, is not a placeholder for some mysterious solution that will resolve the tensions between competing religious claims. It is, rather, the excess generated by interreligious encounters, an excess that changes those involved in the encounters. Because of the experiential component of the ineffable, Cheetham opts for a phenomenological, rather than analytic, approach to exploring interreligious encounters.
The second chapter develops a Christian argument for focusing on the finite, material experiences of created human beings in developing a theology of religions. Cheetham develops a theological anthropology that justifies this focus based on two fundamental tenets of creation ex nihilo: that human beings are creatures, and that as creatures there is a non-contrastive distinction between human beings and the ultimate reality of the divine. According to Cheetham, this should lead Christians to find their hope not in transcending this world, but within an embrace of creaturely finitude (p. 40). This creaturely finitude characterises not just Christians, but all of creation, and therefore authorises Christians to encounter other faiths in their lived particularity as part of the goodness of creation.
Cheetham develops his understanding of interreligious encounter focused on the quotidian lived experiences of people of different religions in conversation with Christian understanding of work and sabbath (Chapter 4), wisdom and the incarnation (Chapter 5), and sacrament and liturgy (Chapter 6). In Chapters 7 and 8, he examines how Christian understandings of the giftedness of creation and the saturated phenomena of interreligious encounters can shape Christian engagement in both interreligious ritual and political spaces. Portions of the book draw from previously published essays, and the chief drawback is that their role in Cheetham's current argument is not always clear. For example, Chapter 8 reworks material from two earlier articles, and while it provides an interesting examination of representation, giftedness, and politics, its connection to this project is not immediately evident. Taken together, however, this volume offers a Christian understanding of created finitude as a good gift that authorises giving serious theological attention to the ways in which human beings of all faiths live out their lives in the penultimate of this material existence.
Creation and Religious Pluralism offers a compelling understanding of human creatureliness as a secure foundation for Christians to engage people of other faiths in the particularities of their everyday lives. It removes the anxiety that accompanies efforts to find the universalisable truth behind all religions, or to defend the truth of one's own tradition, or to shed the particularities that bring that tradition into conflict with others. Cheetham offers a thoroughly Christian approach to interreligious encounter that views religious difference as an already-good part of the givenness of creation.
