Abstract
Religion has always supplied mankind with a way of aspiring toward the most profound possibilities of life. Starting from a deeply felt division between human limitations and God’s omnipotence and impelled by the desire to annul that division, religion attempts to form a bond between God and mankind which will bring them closer to each other. People know that they are finite and mortal yet they yearn for transcendence and infinitude, to eat from the trees of life and knowledge and be like the gods. The Nietzschean lament can still be heard upon the lips of the divinely intoxicated, that ‘if there were gods, how could I bear not to be one!’2 Perhaps Bertrand Russell said it best: ‘Every man would like to be God, if it were possible; some few find it difficult to admit the impossibility.’3
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Almost no theologian of stature, however, has yet evinced a serious awareness of, let alone has delineated intellectually, the Christian perspective as seen within the context of, and from the perspective of, other faith: human faith at large, in its polymorphic continuities. Now I am contending that this needs doing; but also that a doing of it will prove dramatically rewarding, enriching — will bring the human mind (including the Christian mind) closer to the truth.1
(Wilfred Cantwell Smith, Former Director, Centre for the Study of World Religions, Harvard University)
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Notes
Wilfred Cantwell Smith, ‘The Role of Asian Studies in the American University’, Plenary Address of the New York State Conference for Asian Studies, Colgate University, 10 Oct. 1975, p. 12.
Bertrand Russell, Power: a New Social Analysis (London: Allen & Unwin, 1938).
Franklin Edgerton, trans. The Bhagavad Gita (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1944) p. 23.
S. Radharishnan, The Bhagavadgita (New York: Harper & Row, 1948) pp. 153–4.
Juan Mascaro, The Bhagavad Gita (Baltimore, Md: Penguin Books, 1962) pp. 61–2.
Swami Jagadiswarananda, Kalki Comes in 1985 (Belur, India: Sri Ramakrishna Charmachakra, 1965) p. 114.
Swami Prabhavananda, The Spiritual Heritage of India (Hollywood, Calif.: Vedanta Press, 1963) p. 120.
Emil Brunner, The Mediator (London: Lutterworth, 1934).
Aldous Huxley, The Perennial Philosophy (New York: Harper & Row, 1944) pp. 49, 56.
Murry Titus, Islam in India and Pakistan (Calcutta: YMCA Publishing House, 1959), p. 107.
Frithjof Schuon, Understanding Islam (Baltimore, Md: Penguin Books, 1963) p. 91. However, Schuon acknowledges that this is to view Muhammad through Hindu, not Muslim eyes (p. 90).
Kirpal Singh, Godman. (Tilton, NH: The Sant Bani Press, 1974) pp. 150–1.
Rabindranath Tagore, ‘Crisis in Civilization’ in S. Ghose (ed.), Faith of a Poet: Selections from Rabindranath Tagore (Bombay: Bhavan’s Book University, 1964) p. 56.
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© 1987 Daniel E. Bassuk
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Bassuk, D.E. (1987). Introduction: Religions and Their God-Men. In: Incarnation in Hinduism and Christianity. Library of Philosophy and Religion. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-08642-9_1
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