Circling the Elephant: A Comparative Theology of Religious Diversity by John Thatamanil (review)

This book is an intrepid contribution to not only comparative theology, as its subtitle suggests, but also to the wider impetus of understanding and defining religion. It is not only about sorting out what religious diversity means; it also seeks to ask and explicate to what obligations such diversity commits one. Instead of speaking about multiple religious belonging, the author prefers using the phrase "multiple religious participation"—and with good reason as will become clear to any reader who engages its pages.

The introduction uses the ancient allegory of the blind(folded) men and an elephant as a preparatory hook to detail five problems that will be addressed in the following seven chapters. The overall theme is to challenge the reader to view religious diversity as a promise rather than a problem. In the first chapter he indicates that he will weave three ideological projects into a coherent whole: comparative theology, constructive theology, and theology of religious diversity. The next two chapters assess some of the well-known options to anyone who is conversant with this subfield: exclusivism, inclusivism, and four varieties of pluralism: John Hick, Mark Heim, David Griffin/John Cobb, and the relational pluralism of Roland Faber and Catherine Keller.

Chapter 4 then wanders into the thorny issues involved in defining religion. This endeavor valiantly attempts both to explain and to avoid such problematic potholes that have arisen from the critiques of genealogies of religion as a Western colonial construction. He then puts forward his method of defining religion as comprehensive qualitative orientation, which requires both interpretive and therapeutic schemes accompanied by community-shaping practices that lead to personal comportment. Next, since Thatamanil has recently labored in Gandhi and King research, the reader reaps the rewards of his efforts in Chapter 6, which provides a convincing case for hospitality and interreligious receiving that is very akin to open inclusivism. The culmination comes in Chapter 7 where he delineates his argument for a trinitarian understanding of religious diversity whereby God can be interpreted as ground, singularity, and relation as the very fabric of reality.

There is a lot to like about this book. The overall theme is that the permeability of religious traditions leads to life. Ultimate reality, more specifically the idea of ultimacy as proffered by Tillich, can be known by specific practices that provide access to only those features of reality to which they are oriented. Thatamanil's work is buttressed by three main religious sources: Madhyamaka Buddhism, the Advaita Vedanta tradition in Hinduism, and his background in Mar Thoma Keralite Christianity from southern India. These present themselves at various places throughout the work, significantly making the case stronger for the idea that the structure of reality is such that one must engage the religious other. I enjoyed the fact that he prefers the use of "tradition" over other options as more precise clarification is often required, while the use of monolithic world religion categories such as "Islam" are too broad and overgeneralized. Also, the comparison between the categories of religion and race at several points in the book will be helpful to many readers in the current political climate. He is clearly a product of two of the giants in the field, Francis Clooney and especially Robert Neville. In comparison, this work is far more accessible to the average reader than Neville's philosophical theology trilogy, which is both considerably more exhaustive and additionally more expansive than this single volume.

On the critical side, there are a few things the reader should note. One question revolves around the concern of whether we really need another fault-finding assessment of exclusivism, inclusivism, and pluralism, especially of the Hickian variety. This has gone on for decades and is well-worn territory in interreligious literature. Granted, the next generation of Hick's followers are still around, so it is still somewhat current, but perhaps interreligious scholars need to be a little more creative and find...