Interreligious Hermeneutics and the Pursuit of Truth

By (author) J. R. Hustwit

Not available to order

Publication date:

04 April 2014

Length of book:

162 pages

Publisher

Lexington Books

ISBN-13: 9780739187395

Philosophical hermeneutics provides a model of interreligious dialogue that acknowledges the interpretive variability of truth claims while maintaining their relation to a preinterpretive reality. The dialectic and tensive structure of philosophical hermeneutics directly parallels the tension between the diversity of belief and the ultimacy of the sacred. By placing philosophers like Gadamer, Ricoeur, Peirce, and Whitehead in conversation, J. R. Hustwit describes religious truth claims as coconstituted by the planes of linguistic convention and uninterpreted otherness. Only when we recognize that religious claims emerge from a dalliance back and forth across the limits of the understanding can we appreciate the engagement between religions. In terms of dialogue, this approach treats religious truth claims as tentative hypotheses, but hypotheses that are frequently commensurable and rationally contestable. Interreligious dialogue goes beyond facilitating bonhomie or negotiating tolerance; dialogue can and should be a disciplined space for rationally adjudicating claims about what lies beyond the limits of human understanding.
Surely, when we believe something, we believe it to be true, yet the truth claims of religion are in crisis today. In Interreligious Hermeneutics and the Pursuit of Truth, Jeremy Hustwit deftly charts a path between those who wish to dispense with truth altogether and those who are all too sure that they alone possess the final truth. Neither too skeptical nor too restrictive, Hustwitt offers a powerful platform for the new multi-faith dialogue. After all, how can the religions engage one another if they cannot even acknowledge where their beliefs differ?