The Use of the Bible in Jacques Dupuis's Christian Theology of Religious Pluralism: An Examination According to Chapter III of the Pontifical Biblical Commission's

Abstract

This thesis examines how theologian Jacques Dupuis uses the sacred scriptures of the Catholic Church throughout his argumentation for a proposed “Christian theology of religious pluralism.” Its examination follows along the path of the four characteristics of Catholic biblical interpretation outlined in chap. III of the Pontifical Biblical Commission’s 1993 statement, “The Interpretation of the Bible in the Church.” This fourfold schema covers the following: the Bible’s interaction with its own data; the Bible’s use and interpretation within the church’s sacred tradition; the Bible’s interpretation according to the methodological conventions of “historico-critical” exegesis; and the Bible’s interaction with theology in general. Using these criteria, the thesis looks at whatever presuppositions may be lying behind Dupuis’s methodology and theory, and how these “preunderstandings” may have influenced his creative deployment of the biblical text. Five scriptural texts are abstracted from Dupuis’s writings which seem to have had a theological significance for him. Dupuis’s own interpretation of these scriptural texts is then analyzed according to the schema proposed above by the Pontifical Biblical Commission’s document. The thesis demonstrates that, while in some cases Jacques Dupuis’s appropriation of the Bible in his “Christian theology of religious pluralism” coincides with aspects of the commission’s fourfold schema above, in other cases it does not. Overall, he seems to have been more concerned with highlighting what he sees as continuities with his own argument for a positive appraisal of “pagan” religiosity. This leads him either to diminish or ignore what the biblical texts themselves say or how they have been interpreted in the sources he uses to support his theories.

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)