A Brief Review of Manfred Pirner’s Essay, “Relations to other Religions”
in T&T Clark Handbook of Public Theology (Chap. 12)
Veli-Matti Kärkkäinen
According to Manfred Pirner, there are two distinct, yet interrelated, tasks or perspectives on religions when it comes to public theology: first, (Christian) public theology’s take on other religions and, second, the role of public theology among other religions. In order to manage this vast task, the author makes two important limitations: first, he engages only those authors and movements in public theology which have the self-identification of belonging under that rubric. Second, he focuses case studies on two Abrahamic cousin faiths (Judaism and Islam) with some important remarks on two leading Asiatic faiths (Buddhism and Hinduism) as a part of a report on the Asian context in general.
The essay brings to light the marginal role of the discussion of religions in the development of public theology. This is evident clearly in his analysis of the IJPT issues from its inception to 2020. That said, this long period of publishing the journal has also seen the appearance of about 25 essays dealing with religions. Pirner divides these contributions thematically under three helpful categories:
- Essays focusing on public theology’s role in combatting conflicts and building peace
- Essays focusing on public theology’s capacity to work towards common good in the society
- Essays focusing on interfaith dialogue and engagement as constitutive for public theology particularly in the post-colonial perspective.
The first major part of the essay brings a number of great insights into the details of these three chosen categories by singling out leading advocates and subthemes. Rightly, the author highlights the great potential of the third category, namely lifting up the role and significance of religious engagement as “constitutive” to the discipline. What the implications of this bold statement might be, is a crucial task for the future by the ecumenical and international guild of scholars.
The second part investigates public theology’s significance, meaning, and appearance on the radar of Judaism and Islam. Importantly, the IJPT devoted a whole issue in 2011 on key topics of public theology in the former religion inviting Jewish contributors. Regarding Islam, Pirner highlights the rising interest among Muslims scholars and scholars working in the area of Christian-Muslim engagement in tackling public life from the perspective of religious texts and teachings. As a long-time member of the Building Bridges Muslim-Christian Seminar, I myself could easily add more examples, including books published by the Seminar, on topics such as freedom, inequality, power, science and religion, and so forth.
Very importantly, the essay shows evidence of the slowly increasing weight given to the engagement of religions in the discipline. In that light, the sheer existence of this important essay in the major handbook of public theology is a great contribution to the field. In other words, had there been a failure to assign at least one essay for public theology’s relation to other religions would have been a great statement—of omission! On top of this essay, the handbook in itself contains a few essays which touch occasionally on the theme of religions, for example the one on public theology in Asia by A. Chow.
All that said, the amount of space devoted to religions in a major international survey of the current state of public theology testifies to this topic’s still somewhat marginal and underrepresented role in the discipline. Just think of the vast continent of Asia housing almost 2/3 of the global population: aren’t diverse religions playing a huge, really huge role in guiding public life of people and communities in so many important areas, from peace and war, to family and child rearing, to political and societal choices, to environment and consumption, and so forth. In fact, a whole new installment of a handbook of public theology with the focus on religions and ideologies such as secularism and atheism would be needed in near future discussing religion and public theology relations both at the general level (e.g., Hinduism and Public Theology) and with regard to pertinent public issues such as, “Buddhism and War,” “Jainism and Environment,” “Judaism and Family,” “Chinese Atheism and Education,” and so forth.
Regarding methodology, I wonder if alongside the textual focus on scriptural and doctrinal as well as ethical issues the contributions from social scientific study of religions and phenomenology, to mention the most obvious complementary options, would also be employed in public theology’s engagement of religions. Paul Chung’s recent book-length essay on Comparative Theology Among Multiple Modernities. Cultivating Phenomenological Imagination would serve as a wonderful a resource for inspiration.
In terms of the scope of the engagement, I wonder if a monograph or a handbook-type survey would go beyond the current essay’s (in itself justified) limitation of looking only at contributors and contributions named under the nomenclature of public theology. For example, the late Lutheran Wolfhart Pannenberg’s theology, while not (self-)identified as public theology, clearly represents also that genre in aiming at a public statement of Christian truth and Christian vision of the world—including its anchorage in the history of religions and their competing truth claims. My recent Korean-American PhD graduate Jae Yang’s published dissertation (with Sebastian Kim as the second mentor) titled, Christianity Outside the Church: Pannenberg’s Public Theology in Dialogue with Max Stackhouse, considers Pannenberg’s theology through the lens of public theology (in dialogue with a prominent American public theologian John Stackhouse).
In sum: Manfred Pirner’s programmatic essay on public theology’s relation to religious diversity both informs and inspires future work in this critical area for the sake of the religiously pluralistic and (post-)secular world of the third millennium. It provides an up-to-date and carefully prepared overview of religions’ role in contemporary public theology. Even with its self-made limitations of the scope of the discussion, it serves well international and ecumenical scholarly guild. It deserves to be widely read and studied.