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1 1 Due to space I cannot here justify this claim fully, though even a cursory reading of most of the world religions’ founding texts shows regular references to a religiously plural context. Ancient theologians are also well aware of their pluralistic context. For instance Clement attributes to Xenophanes the view that the Thracians “gods are red haired and blue eyed, the Ethiopians’ black as apes” in the process of his argument that the “heathens made Gods like themselves, whence springs all superstition” Stromata VII, chapter 4.

2 2 I take this as a central thesis of J.Z. Smith’s famous characterization of religion in his Imagining Religion: From Babylon to Jonestown (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), xi.

3 3 I realize the irony of proposing a somewhat radical program to transform theology into something I point out it already exhibits. My argument is not that theology must become pluralistic in a way it never was, but rather that it should fully and thoroughly recover the vigor and creative potential of the pluralism out of which it was born.

4 4 See for instance Isaiah 55:8–9; Acts 17:24; 1 Kings 8:27; Job 38–42.

5 5 Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I.2.a.2; Augustine of Hippo Confessions 7.10.16. For a discussion of the roots of apophatic theology, see Andrew Louth, “Holiness and the Vision of God in the Eastern Fathers”, in Holiness: Past and Present, ed. Stephen C. Barton (London: T&T Clark, 2003), 217–239.

6 6 See Janet Martine Soskice’s Metaphor and Religious Language (Oxford: Clarendon, 1987).

7 7 Augustine, Sermons 117.3.5.

8 8 I suggest that analogy is a species of metaphorical predication however cannot develop this view fully here. It is worth distinguishing, at this point, polysemy with hybridity: the prior belonging to a term’s reception and the latter its semantic content.

9 9 George Lindbeck, The Nature of Doctrine: Theology in a Post-Liberal Age (Louisville: Westminster John Knox press, 1984), 33–34.

10 10 I follow Rorty’s development of a pragmatic theory of truth as found in his Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, 35th anniversary ed. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009) and elsewhere in his writing. While the pragmatic theory of truth he presents there has undergone much critique and development, I suggest the nub of his argument presented in this book remains compelling, particularly for the project of pluralistic theology. Correspondence theories of truth cannot simply apply to religious propositions since it would require an impossible Archimedean vantage point and coherence theories fail to break from the perhaps more serious threat of non-realism.

11 11 Søren Kierkegaard, The Journals of Kierkegaard, trans. A. Dru (London: Collins, 1958), 44.

12 12 Søren Kierkegaard, “Truth is Subjectivity,” in Concluding Unscientific Postscript, ed. A. Hannay (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 171.

13 13 In William James’s construal of pragmatic theories of truth, this test, negotiation and contestation is the verification treasured by proponents of correspondence theories of truth. See lecture IV in his Pragmatism where he states: “True ideas are those that we can assimilate, validate, corroborate, and verify. False ideas are those that we cannot”.

14 14 I use the term “poetic” to refer to poesis/poiesis, the Greek term for “making.” The poetic here signifies the movement from potentiality to actuality, a movement effected by a poet, or maker.

15 15 This is Janet Soskice’s definition, which while wholly in line with Ricoeur’s, is more succinctly expressed. See Soskice, Metaphor and Religions Language (Oxford: Clarendon, 1984) and Ricoeur The Rule of Metaphor (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977).

16 16 While metaphor is not limited to this dyadic structure, it is useful here to explain it in these terms.

17 17 This is an important point for those who fear that in a full-blooded pluralistic theology, Christian distinctiveness may be obfuscated. The dialectic at the heart of pluralistic theology must maintain the coherence and alterity of its sources.

18 18 There is some debate in the literature as to whether Voloshinov is a pen name for Mikhail Bhaktin.

19 19 Francis X. Clooney S.J., Theology after Vedanta: An Experiment in Comparative Theology (Albany NY: SUNY Press, 1993), 5.

20 20 It is not required that a pluralistic theology bring together analogous notions of prayer, ritual, etc. Such comparative exercises too often form the basis of illegitimate cultural appropriation. The dialectics of metaphor can be used to avoid such substitutionary appropriation. I focus on analogous notions of prayer here for illustrative purposes only.

21 21 I should note that Rorty would add within the concept of sufficiency, the call to solidarity with those who suffer.

22 22 Plato, Philebus, accessed April 20, 2020, https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1744, 278.

23 23 Plato, Gorgias, accessed April 20, 2020, http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/gorgias.html.

24 24 The biblical virtue of kenosis drives the authentic pluralistic theologian.

25 25 William McDonald, “Søren Kierkegaard,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta (Winter 2017), accessed February 4, 2020, https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2017/entries/kierkegaard, accessed 4 Feb 2020.

26 26 William James, The Will to Believe, a lecture first published in The New World Vol. 5 (1896): 327–347.

27 27 Alannis Morisette has a lot to answer for.

28 28 Kierkegaard The Concept of Irony with Continual Reference to Socrates (1841), 326.

29 29 Kierkegaard The Concept of Irony with Continual Reference to Socrates (1841), 262ff.

30 30 The absence of the subject as origin and context of all knowledge claims is a glaring and regrettable omission in our current scientific, philosophical and theological discourses; a point well made in Frank, Gleiser, and Thompson’s discussion of “the blind spot.” See: https://aeon.co/essays/the-blind-spot-of-science-is-the-neglect-of-lived-experience, last accessed May 2020.

31 31 Some readers may feel I am ducking the really significant philosophical issue. A thorough discussion and defense of a pragmatic approach to religious truth is, of course, far beyond the scope of this paper. However I suggest that the worry about getting at the Truth of religion is, to my mind, a holdover of an anachronistic epistemology as well as theologically unsustainable. The latter due to the commitment to divine transcendence at the heart of Semitic religion (which I discussed above) and the former the result of having ceded the rules of engagement while in the process of defending against the (now dubious) claims of nineteenth-century and twentieth-century positivism and scientism.

32 32 Hendrik Vroom, “Syncretism and Dialogue: A Philosophical Analysis,” in Dialogue and Syncretism: An Interdisciplinary Approach, ed. J.D. Gort, H. Vroom, R. Fernhout, and A. Wessels (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1989), 26.

33 33 Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (New York: Routledge, 1966), 45.

34 34 Rosalind Shaw and Charles Stuart in the introduction to their edited collection, Syncretism/Anti-Syncretism: The Politics of Religious Synthesis (London: Routledge, 1994), 3–6.

35 35 Of course many Biblical sources could be used here, not least the extended banquet story of Luke 14 and 15.

36 36 Some may aver that I have not considered certain kinds of thorny problems which may arise from pluralistic theology, namely that its practice may require us to endorse and recombine views, practices, and structures from which we are rightfully repelled. This is a difficult question and well beyond the scope of this essay. I have considered it in the context of the “reluctant dialogian,” that is, a person who not only rejects interreligious dialogue but considers us an enemy and means us harm. See “The Dialogue Party: Dialogue, Hybridity and the Reluctant Other,” in Theology and the Religions: A Dialogue, ed. Vigo Mortensen (Grand Rapids: Wm B. Erdmann’s), 235–248.