A Troubled Guest: Life and Death Stories, The Body and the Blood: The Holy Land's Christians at the Time of the New Millennium, Visual Faith: Art, Theology, and Worship in Dialogue and The One Light: Bede Griffiths's Principal Writings. - A Troubled Guest: Life and Death Stories - The Body and the Blood: The Holy Land's Christians at the Time of the New Millennium - Visual Faith: Art, Theology, and Worship in Dialogue - The One Light: Bede Griffiths's Principal Writings - book review

Commonweal, June 1, 2002 by Lawrence S. Cunningham

I am no expert in these matters and can't judge how successful Griffiths was in navigating them. He apparently worked more from a hermeneutics of trust than one of suspicion. He did not linger over what appear to be radical incommensurabilities between the Indian and Christian theological traditions. Hinduism seems to have a weak doctrine of creation, and to place little value on the historicity of revelation (which may explain why thinkers like Griffiths are more at home with images of Christ taken from the captivity epistles and the prologue of John than those derived from the synoptics).

I leave this to the province of experts at home with the traditions under discussion. What attracts me to Griffiths is the bravery with which such issues are confronted. In a global age, this kind of interreligious dialogue is not a luxury but a necessity. My own (conservative) instincts tend to favor more cautious thinkers, like Jacques Dupuis--badly treated by the Vatican not long ago--but I am fascinated by those who have lived in the way that Griffiths did, by exploring existentially these profound questions. I say this despite the fact that his later writings have a kind of mushy Jungian, New Age-ish, ring to them.

Bruno Barnhart has done us the signal service of assembling generous selections from Griffiths's writing (including some early Commonweal essays). His introduction gives an adequate biography of Griffiths and an outline of the evolution of his thought. The anthology has a useful bibliography of writings by and about Griffiths. This is a fine first look at a pioneering figure and is a nice companion to Shirley DuBoulay's 1998 Beyond the Darkness: A Biography of Bede Griffiths (Doubleday).

Lawrence S. Cunningham is the John A. O'Brien Professor of Theology at the University of Notre Dame.