Beyond the Impasse: Toward a Pneumatological Theology of Religions
By Amos Yong
Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Academic, 2003; 192 pp.; paper

It is fair to suggest that Christology has been the greatest evident thorn in the side of contemporary systematic interreligious conversation for the past quarter century. As many an interlocutor has discovered, talk of any potential saving efficacy in non-Christian religions leads directly to destabilizing questions about the uniqueness and necessity of Jesus the Christ in the divine economy. At the same time, traditional Christian scriptural and dogmatic formulations about Jesus labor under a growing plausibility strain in a time of radical consciousness of religious plurality and other-ness. Modern Enlightenment Christologies, including many of those inspired by Vatican II, have been chastened for the imperialistic religious epistemology now recognized to be embedded within them. Most paradigmatically for Roman Catholics, perhaps, Karl Rahner’s “anonymous Christianity” solution to the phenomenon of pluralism now occasions as many ambiguities in dialogue as it once seemed to ameliorate.

Sensitive to the cul-de-sacs of contemporary thinking about Christ and the religions, Amos Yong proposes a different way forward on appeal to pneumatology. In so doing, he is interested in moving beyond the several recent projects of “trinitarian” theologies of religion, such as Jacques Dupuis’ contentious 1997 study, Toward a Christian Theology of Religious Pluralism. While affirming of the move toward more rigorous attentiveness to Christianity’s own claims about the Trinity, Yong notes the historical tendency in theology to subordinate the economy of the Spirit to that of the Son. This leads ineluctably back to a Christocentric dead end in dialogue, and fails to take seriously the full implications of pneumatology. The traditional Latin creedal doctrine of Filioque, he states, is near to the heart of this instinct and is positively obstructive of an adequate theology of the Holy Spirit.

Many of the systematic issues taken up in this book will be familiar to Catholics attentive to the interreligious theological conversation. One senses that this terrain is less familiar and somewhat more perilous, however, in the Protestant evangelical context for which this work is primarily intended. Yong, himself a Malaysian-born Pentecostal, is deliberate in anticipating particular methodological and doctrinal sticking points attending any proposed Christian theology of religions. The thorny issues of textual interpretation, metaphorical God language, and post-foundational epistemology are addressed in a manner that suggests that his theses will labor for a sympathetic hearing in some quarters of the audience.

Yong’s proposal is at once ancient and surprisingly novel. Rooted in Irenaeus’s trinitarian language of the Father’s “two hands,” he wishes to ground theology of the religions with primary reference to God’s Spirit rather than to the Word. The immediate effect of this shift is to open up the whole of creation as the potential locus of the Spirit’s activity, including of course persons and traditions that are other. While acknowledging the risks of reductionism or tritheism that attend any pneumatological endeavor, Yong’s intent is to redress the equal and opposite historical error by which the Holy Spirit has been imprisoned within the walls of the Church as the consequence of Christology. Refreshing in this approach is the corollary recognition, too often passed over, that any particular theology must be appropriately humble in its categorical definitive claims of “Truth.” Because the Spirit lives and moves wherever God so wills, “no voices or perspectives can therefore be excluded in an a priori fashion from the conversation” (54). Yong describes his project as a theologia religionum in via, as indeed it must be.

Beyond the Impasse unfolds substantially in three movements. The first articulates the philosophical framework to which this pneumatological theology is tethered. Attention to foundational theology, Yong observes, has been a historical lacuna among Pentecostal-Charismatic (“PC”) Christians and has thus limited their intellectual standing at the tables of dialogue. Drawing extensively from the thought of the Jesuit Donald Gelpi, himself a revisionist Lonerganian, Yong calls for a more inclusive existential understanding of anthropology and epistemology. Less weighty in this view is any specific kind of religious experience (i.e., Lonergan’s “conversion”), and more important is the cumulative “complex integration of perception, mentality, affectivity and volitionality involved in the human being-in-the-world” (62). Such latitude allows Yong to affirm as an anthropological constant an intelligible, universal experience of God’s Spirit, albeit variously named. This claim is the stumbling block for Christian exclusivists and folly for the radical postmoderns. In advocating for a hermeneutical methodology of religious understanding, Yong is on ground that is quite familiar to contemporary Roman Catholic theology but is probably much less so to PCs.

The book’s second movement is a critical appraisal of recent efforts in Christian theologies of religion from across a representative ecumenical field. Particular focus is given to the way Christology has presented conceptual roadblocks to dialogue. Much of the persuasive power of Yong’s thesis turns on the question of how distinctly one understands the economies of Spirit and Word in mediating God’s presence in and to history. In this he is sympathetic to the theology of the Catholic Paul Knitter, but dissatisfied with the paucity of explicit pneumatological reflection to be found in his writing. The unhappy consequence is that Knitter, like the Orthodox Georg Khodr, the Protestant Stanley Samartha, and the Jesuit Jacques Dupuis, is forced to seek refuge in specific christological criteria when attempting to recognize the universal presence and action of God’s Spirit in the world. Such may be a venerable Christian instinct, but it tends toward subordinationism in the Trinity and an obliteration of that which is genuinely other than the Church in history. Against these dangers, Yong finds reason for hope in the theology of the evangelical Clark Pinnock, who appeals to the need for that most Ignatian of virtues: “discernment.”

Which brings the reader to the thesis of book, its third movement. Drawing upon the philosophy of Charles Sanders Peirce, Yong attempts the construction of a “hermeneutics of life” as the adequate ground for pneumatological discernment. Convinced that reality is constituted by both inner and outer moments, analogous to Spirit and Logos, discernment requires attentiveness both to concrete phenomena and to the “dynamic vectoral trajectories . . . that shape, guide, and in some way manifest and/or determine its phenomenal or concrete behavior” (130). Thus properly “spiritual” discernment involves not only probing a certain interiority of persons and traditions but also the use of human faculties of judgment and the evaluation of manifest data. The important implication for interreligious dialogue is the insistence upon an empirical moment in the process of discernment. Because there can be no radical dualism between Logos and Pneuma, space is created in the interreligious encounter for recognizing the activity of a common Holy Spirit.

Beyond the Impasse holds up an indispensable and oft-neglected facet of a properly Christian theology of religions, namely, pneumatology considered with proper rigor. As such it represents an important corrective and constructive contribution to a theological exchange that is still finding its way forward. One may nevertheless question whether Yong’s ambitions for the book have been fully realized, and he may be challenged to greater precision as the conversation continues.

With respect to the first of these issues, it is surprising to read in the concluding chapter that spiritual discernment in the religions “necessitates the application of christological criteria at some point in the process” (178), but without any suggestion as to what these criteria might be, how they could be employed, and at which point in the process they might rightfully be introduced. Having earlier devoted an entire chapter to naming the shortcomings of just this kind of christological criteriology, such a conclusion begs for elaboration.

As for the second issue, one might wish for greater clarity in the language invoked in Christian interreligious discourse. The categories of christological “inclusivism” and “pluralism,” for example, are notoriously imprecise and are variously understood among constituencies of the present theological conversation. Thus Yong’s holding out for an “ontological normativity of Christ for salvation” (27) is categorically incomprehensible to this reader, as is a “pluralism” which is necessarily synonymous with relativism (25) and in which both John Hick and Paul Knitter are accurately described (24 et al.).

And in considering Yong through a specifically Roman Catholic interpretive lens, occasional mis-impressions seem left unaddressed in the text. For example, Dupuis’ Toward a Christian Theology of Religious Pluralism is described as a “status quaestionis” at the turn of the millennium (102). That this book precipitated a formal investigation by the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, a resulting demand for doctrinal clarification, and the end of Dupuis’ teaching career in Rome suggests that far more than synthesis was perceived to be at issue, at least in some important quarters. A footnote to that effect would have been informative. In addition, the “axiomatic” universal salvific will of God (110) has been anything but self-evident through much of the course of Christian history, both in Catholicism and in Reformation Protestantism. An excursus on such a foundational premise would have been useful. Misleading statements include Vatican II’s alleged “repudiation” (111) of the dictum extra ecclesiam nulla salus (formally embraced by the fifteenth-century Council of Florence), as well as Rahner’s purported conclusion that “the religions are divinely appointed ways of salvation” (122). Finally, given the overwhelming movement toward a criteriology of praxis in contemporary Catholic liberation theologies (as in the work of interreligious scholars like Knitter, with whom Yong is quite familiar), the silence around—or even quick dismissal (120) of—such instincts is difficult to understand.

These are modest shortcomings, however, in an overall endeavor that is worthy of sustained attention and development from all Christian quarters.

J. Michael Byron
St. Paul Seminary School of Divinity, University of St. Thomas
St. Paul, Minnesota

Bulletin 72 • Index