The Trinity And The Religious Experience Of Man

This book traces the Trinitarian thought of Raimon Panikkar in his attempt to bridge the gap between Christianity and the world religions. The viewpoints of the early and later Panikkar show continuity and shifts in his Trinitarian theology. The early Panikkar provides a Trinitarian theology and reaches the heart of the world religions, especially the Advaita Vedanta experience in Hinduism and the Nirvana experience of Buddhism. The later Panikkar, still using many of the probing concepts of his earlier thought, departs significantly from traditional Christian theology. His thoughts still continue the attempt at bridge-building between Christianity on the one hand and the world religions, and even the secular world, on the other. Although several dimensions of Panikkar's Trinitarian theology are open to severe criticism, nevertheless, it serves as an effective tool for furthering awareness of and dialogue between the world religions.

How does Christianity relate to other religions? Beginning with a consideration of the biblical perspective, Veli-Matti Kärkkäinen offers a detailed and comprehensive survey of the diverse explanations proposed by teachers of the church down through the ages. This indispensable guide is for anyone seeking to grasp Christianity?s relationship to world religions.

Blazing a pathway for recovering the unity of biblical studies and theological reflection, Kevin J. Vanhoozer addresses the challenges presented by the contemporary so-called postmodern situation, especially deconstructionism.

The Cosmotheandric Experience is not a Christian, or an Indic, or a Buddhist study, but an interdisciplinary study with a firm foundation. It aims at an integration of the whole of reality: We have to reconstruct the body of Prajapati, even if some of the parts feel unworthy, are shy or run away ... We have to think of all of the fragments of the present world in order to bring them together into a harmonious--though not monoliithic--whole. The Cosmotheandric principle, which the author advocates, could be formulated by saying that the divine, the human and the earthly are three irreducible dimensions which constitute the real.

Harvard psychologist and philosopher William James' The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature explores the nature of religion and, in James' observation, its divorce from science when studied academically. After publication in 1902 it quickly became a canonical text of philosophy and psychology, remaining in print through the entire century. "Scientific theories are organically conditioned just as much as religious emotions are; and if we only knew the facts intimately enough, we should doubtless see 'the liver' determining the dicta of the sturdy atheist as decisively as it does those of the Methodist under conviction anxious about his soul. When it alters in one way the blood that percolates it, we get the Methodist, when in another way, we get the atheist form of mind."