Without Buddha I Could Not Be a Christian.(Book review)

WITHOUT BUDDHA I COULD NOT BE A CHRISTIAN. By Paul F. Knitter. Oxford: Oneworld, 2009. xvii + 240 pp.

Paul Knitter's contributions to interfaith dialogue and Christian theologies of religions are well known and widely appreciated. Even critics of Christian theories of pluralism, most prominently Pope Benedict XVI, have acknowledged the significance of Knitter's strategic integration of perspectives from liberation theology into what is sometimes an overly abstract field of inquiry. Colleagues active in Buddhist-Christian studies hold Knitter in especially high esteem as a writer, teacher, translator, editor, self-described interreligious theologian, and unapologetic person of faith. This book, his first major publication since accepting the Paul Tillich chair at Union Theological Seminary, offers a uniquely first-person reflection on the spiritual fruits of a career profoundly and provocatively shaped by two religious traditions.

Written for a popular audience, the book, the author says, has been in the works "for the past forty years" (p. xv). The reader gains valuable insight into the professional and private life of a remarkable "dialogical theologian" (p. xv), whose experience includes a rather conventional upbringing in working-class Midwestern Catholicism, some twenty years of service as a seminarian and missionary priest with the Society of the Divine Word, graduate education in Europe with the likes of Bernard Lonergan (1904-1984) and Karl Rahner (1904-1984) during the revolutionary years of the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965), and nearly four decades of pioneering work as a productive scholar-activist in mainstream academic theology. At times Knitter even quotes from his unpublished journals in an effort to document fully his unscripted intellectual and …