Editorial: Religious Encounter in a Religiously Plural World

Abstract

Although by no means a reality in most of the nations of the world, religious pluralism is often associated with today's world and is seen by many as the wave of the future. Indeed, it has become almost commonplace to speak of this religiously plural world as if this description were of a recent phenomenon; but for many centuries, long before the emergence of the great world religions, this has been a religiously plural world. Until fairly recent history, religion served as the bond of unity within the tribe, the nation, or the empire. The world at large was a religiously plural one in which, then as now, no single religious tradition could be said to dominate. With the possible exception of China, where three religions (Taoism, Confucian ism, and Buddhism) came to function in a complementary way as virtually one national faith (San Chiao), religious pluralism was not characteristic of society in general and therefore was not a matter of personal encounter. In the West, the religion of a nation was for centuries determined by the principle cuius regio, eius re/igio, which, in effect, denied religious pluralism to the nation. While this has always been a religiously plural world, only in relatively recent history has religious pluralism become a fact of human experience for persons living in a given society or nation.