NATIONAL RELIGIONS

Abstract

A Christian theologian, Hans Kueng writes: "My thesis... 'is: no world peace without peace among religions, no peace among religions without dialogue between religions, and no dialogue between religions without accurate knowledge of one another." It is in .this spirit the Journal of Dharma has taken up the topic National Religions for its present number.
We often hear of almost a dozen of World Religions. But, in fact; the number of movements and associations that deserve the name of 'religion' is much more higher. In the field of theological thinking the reductionist attitude, that is grouping religions into two major divisions, one's own religion and other religions, is very much operative. One of the pitfalls of this attitude is to fall into exclusivism (one's religion alone is 'the true' religion) or inclusivism (one's religion is 'the best' religion). Although in a sense every religious tradition is unique - namely that there is only one of it and that there is therefore nothing else exactly like it, the claim of 'uniqueness' in the christian theological discourse sometimes appearsto be intolerably assertive of the unique definitiveness, absoluteness, normativeness, and superiority of christianity in comparison with other religions of the world. It is certainly of far reaching consequences in the field of interreligious dialogue that the Christian theologians have now come forward to acknowledge that there is something 'mythical' about the claim of 'christian uniqueness."