Comparative Theology and Interreligious Solidarity Ethic: A Critical Appraisal of Weber

Abstract

Religion is not a separate activity apart from thought and practice of life in human cultures. But it is eminently social in influencing and conditioning human life in its entirety. This chapter seeks a sociological inquiry of comparative theology in an analysis of the elective affinity between Christianity and Buddhism. Critically exploring Weber’s approach to the Protestant ethic and Buddhist rationality, this chapter scrutinizes and renews the limitation of Weber through retrieving Buddhist ideas of economic justice as well as Luther’s. This approach develops a sociological framing of comparative theology in reference to a theological and phenomenological hermeneutic for elaborating a notion of multiple horizons and a project of immanent critique of modern cultural pathologies for transmodernity. Buddhist construal of phenomenological sociology comes into focus to overcome Weber’s thesis and I shall introduce a critical and constructive import of Husserl’s phenomenology.