Christianity and the Religions: From Confrontation to Dialogue

 

Christianity and the Religions: From Confrontation to Dialogue by Jacques Dupuis

I came across this one quite by accident.  There’s a priest whose blog I follow who mentioned some favorable things about this author.  I took a chance and bought one of the author’s books on Amazon.  This one, it seems, was his last before he passed away in the early 2000s. Needless to say, I didn’t really find the book a very enrichening experience.  This book was quite a scholarly piece of work and it was mostly over my head.  This book reminded me of one of those volumes that I had to buy back in my college days for a particular course.  Although the students were supposed to read a book such as this in our college class, most of us never did.  The reason?  Well, it was just too hard to understand or really pique much interest.

Having said all that, I think it’s unfair to state that this was a “bad” book.  Just because it was over my head, doesn’t mean that it warrants such criticism.  This book seems to be written by the learned for the learned.  Since I’m not in that category, who am I to judge?  Maybe if you have an advance degree in theology you would get more out of this book than I did.  The book is only about 225 pages.  But they’re dense pages. They’re detailed pages.  I forced myself to read a minimum of ten pages per day, and even that was a chore. Had I not set such a goal, I doubt I would have ever finished. It took some serious effort.

Now, the ironic thing is that the thesis that the author is trying to prove is not at all difficult to comprehend. It just seems that he goes on and on and devotes an incredible amount of pages to his topic, and I couldn’t help wonder if it was really necessary.  The author is essentially making a comparison between Christianity and the other major religions.  He has a Catholic background, and for centuries there has been a mantra stated by the church: “No Salvation Outside the Church”.  Well, what this author (and most other Catholics) have had to explain over and over again, is that this sentiment doesn’t mean that one has to be Catholic in order to be saved, nor even a Christian.  Instead, it essentially means that the “Church” is essentially the home of Jesus Christ, and Jesus dying and being resurrected is the only path to salvation.

But how does this work if you’re a Moslem?  Or a Buddhist? Or Athiest?  Well, essentially the author argues that it essentially doesn’t matter.  As long as one is serving what they “think” is God, then they’re basically o.k.  Again, from my knowledge, this is essentially the teaching of the church.  So, yes, Jesus Christ is the Son of God, but, no, one doesn’t have to be explicitly a Christian to partake in the rewards.  Jesus, the author argues, is much too big to put into any small religious box.

So the problem with this book for me is the author seems to state this fact over and over again.  He manages to uncover all sorts of analogies, comparisons, research notes, religious writings, religious opinions, etc. to prove his point.  It was just too much – even if only slightly longer than a couple hundred pages.

So as an analogy: let’s say an author was to state something like “The boy went to the store to buy an apple”. Well, imagine if the author feels compelled to spend 50 pages talking about the origins and different variations of the word “boy”, another 50 pages telling you about all of the origins and uses of the word “store”, and then goes into 50 more pages of detail talking about all of the different kind of apples there are and why they’re all essentially the same.  I mean, yes, it’s impressive that all of this detail goes into the work, but for my less-educated brain, it just seemed repetitive, unnecessary, and tedious.

Well, I guess it’s safe to say that I don’t think this book was ever a hot seller. And as mentioned earlier, it wasn’t really written with the layman in mind anyway.  The chances are pretty slim that you might even come across such a work.  Unless you’re a scholar in the subject matter, I would advise you to pass.  It was just too much detail that really didn’t seem warranted.