Stereotyping Other Theologies

Abstract

Everybody who is concerned with interreligious relations knows how easy it is to become a prey to the laziness of stereotyping other people’s beliefs. It is not my aim here to go over the well-trodden path of enumerating the prejudices this has engendered, and of which still today it is hard for us to become truly free. What I wish to examine is rather the effect of such prejudiced misapprehension on the constructive theology of the one who misapprehends, rather than the one who is misapprehended. For the misapprehension usually arises in the first place out of an attempt at self-definition. A defines his religion as against B. For instance, early Christians defined themselves as against Jews by accusing Jews of excessive legalism (strictly speaking, the ‘charge’ formulated in this term dates only from Bishop Trench’s Commentary on the Epistles to the Seven Churches in Asia, London, 1861, p. 77 — see Bernard S. Jackson’s excellent paper ‘Legalism’ in the Journal of Jewish Studies, Spring 1979). But this in turn implies a particular theological stance in A — in this case, some sort of antinomian tendency. I am going to suggest that this sort of ‘theology by reaction’ has frequently created tendencies and tensions in the ‘defining’ religion which are at variance with values which it itself in fact espouses — we will see, for instance, that mainstream Christianity, notwithstanding this confused attempt to distinguish itself from Judaism, is fully positive in its attitude to law.