Why Interfaith Dialogue is Necessary but Dangerous: Raimon Panikkar’s Cosmotheandric Vision as a Case in Point

Abstract

With postcolonial sensibilities, increasing globalization, and intensifying worldwide religiosity, interfaith dialogue has become more important than ever. However, this imperative for dialogue inherently presents perils that the different approaches to dialogue hope to mitigate. The exclusivist approach seeks to assuage the danger of eroding one’s faith system, while the pluralist position seeks to allay the fear of one’s faith system unjustly dominating another. The inclusive approach, in mediating between the two seeming extremes, attempts to validate the dignity of various truth claims without pandering either to extreme rejection or to pedantic assimilation. Raimon Panikkar’s cosmotheandric pluralism, being a case in point, provokes both admiration, because of its creative synthesis, and alarm, because its consequential outcome could potentially be an unrecognizable mutation of the original worldviews it seeks to represent. The inevitable result of such endeavors is the erosion of classical theological categories.