The Core Assumption
Understanding across religions is possible, but it is always partial, situated, and open to correction.
The Four Assumptions
- Where meaning lives
- Meaning lives in the interpretive encounter between traditions, shaped by each side's history, language, and commitments.
- What the text is
- The text is a religious classic whose meaning is inseparable from the community that reads it as sacred.
- Who may interpret
- The scholar of religion and the theologian, working with the traditions' own self-understanding, may interpret.
- What counts as a good reading
- A good framework explains both understanding and misunderstanding, and states its own limits.
Genealogy
This method arose in the 20th c period (1980-present).
Key proponents: John J. Keenan, Marianne Moyaert, Catherine Cornille, Paul F. Knitter.
Key texts: The Meaning of Christ by John J. Keenan; Fragile Identities by Marianne Moyaert; The Impossibility of Interreligious Dialogue by Catherine Cornille.
The Procedure
These are the same steps The Workshop will walk you through.
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Name your own horizon
State your tradition, your questions, and the assumptions you bring to the other tradition.
Why this step matters: This step makes the interpreter visible instead of pretending to a view from nowhere.
How to do it: Name your community, your training, and the stakes of the question for you.
What goes wrong here: Describing the other tradition while leaving your own position unstated.
You record: Interpreter horizon statement. Done well when: A reader can see whose questions are driving the study.
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Study the other tradition's self-understanding
Record how the other tradition understands its own texts, doctrines, and practices, in its own terms.
Why this step matters: This step prevents the framework from replacing the tradition it claims to explain.
How to do it: Use primary texts and insider scholarship, and note where the tradition disagrees with itself.
What goes wrong here: Substituting a textbook summary for the tradition's own voice.
You record: Self-understanding notes. Done well when: The notes quote the tradition's own sources and report its internal disagreements.
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Test the framework against the case
Apply your hermeneutical framework to a specific case of interreligious understanding or misunderstanding, and record where it helps and where it fails.
Why this step matters: This step keeps theory answerable to practice.
How to do it: Choose a concrete case, such as a translation dispute or a shared text, and track what the framework clarifies.
What goes wrong here: Keeping the framework abstract so that no case can challenge it.
You record: Framework test. Done well when: The test names at least one point where the framework fell short.
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Revise and state the limits
Revise the framework in light of the case, and state plainly what it still cannot explain.
Why this step matters: This step makes the framework honest about its own reach.
How to do it: Write the revision as a change to a specific claim, not as a general appeal to complexity.
What goes wrong here: Adding exceptions until the framework explains everything and therefore nothing.
You record: Revised framework and limits. Done well when: The limits are specific enough that a future case could test them.
Inputs Required
- A specific interreligious case or text
- Primary sources from each tradition involved
- A hermeneutical framework to test, such as Gadamerian fusion of horizons or Ricoeurian narrative identity
Outputs Produced
- A stated interpreter horizon
- An account of each tradition's self-understanding
- A tested and revised framework with stated limits
Quality Criteria
Under this method, a good reading is one that meets these tests:
- The interpreter's own position is stated
- Each tradition is heard in its own terms
- The framework is revised by the case, not only applied to it
Common Errors
- Presenting a framework as neutral when it carries one tradition's assumptions
- Treating understanding as agreement
- Keeping theory so abstract that no case can falsify it
Strengths
- Gives interreligious study a disciplined theory instead of good intentions
- Explains misunderstanding as well as understanding
- Forces interpreters to state their own commitments
Weaknesses and Critics
- Frameworks can become self-referential, explaining the theory better than the traditions
- The method's generality can hide the particularity of each case
S. Mark Heim: Heim argued that different religions aim at genuinely different religious ends, so a framework that treats them as variant paths to one goal flattens what each tradition actually seeks. (Salvations (1995))
Joseph Ratzinger: Ratzinger argued that interreligious frameworks must not relativize truth claims, and that a theory of understanding that brackets the question of truth evades what religions themselves claim. (Truth and Tolerance (2003))
Internal Schools
Gadamerian interreligious hermeneutics: Treats understanding as a fusion of horizons in which both interpreter and tradition are changed.
Ricoeurian interreligious hermeneutics: Uses symbol, metaphor, and narrative to explain how religious meaning is mediated across traditions.
Cornillean conditions for dialogue: States the humility, commitment, and openness that genuine interreligious understanding requires.
Exemplar Readings
Keenan reads Mahayana emptiness beside Christology (The Heart Sutra and the Gospel of John): John Keenan uses Mahayana teaching on emptiness to re-read Christian claims about Christ, arguing that the Buddhist critique of substantialist language clarifies what Christian incarnation language can and cannot mean.
Moyaert on fragile identities in dialogue (Christian and Jewish readings of the Hebrew Bible): Marianne Moyaert shows how Christian and Jewish readers of shared texts bring fragile, historically wounded identities to the encounter, so that understanding requires attention to history and power as well as to texts.
What This Method Cannot Do
Interreligious hermeneutics cannot guarantee understanding, and it cannot decide which tradition's claims are true. It can explain how understanding happens, why it fails, and what conditions make it more likely, but the truth of a religious claim must be argued within theology, not by hermeneutical theory alone.
Site Stance
The site has not yet assigned its stance on this method. The stance assignments wait on the named reviewers, the same naming the Christian Assessment verdicts wait on. The method stands here in full in the meantime: a stance discloses the site's judgment, and it never filters what a reader may read or run. The stance values and their criteria stand on the criteria page.
Run This Method in the Workshop
Open this method on the bench →
Across the Site
This method belongs to the Comparative and Interfaith Approaches family. Its sources stand in the References register; its family stands among the site's tools; the positions it produces can be compared in the Diptych.
Primary Sources
- Primary texts from the traditions under study
- Accounts of actual interreligious encounters, dialogues, and disputes
Secondary Sources
- John J. Keenan, The Meaning of Christ (1989)
- Marianne Moyaert, Fragile Identities (2011)