Philosophers of Nothingness by James W. Heisig

Undaunted, Heisig voices here his original religious philosophy, refusing to indulge the chronic plaint of missionaries at “the failure of a universal Christianity to be inculturated into the particular religious cultures of East Asia,” and seeking instead “to exculturate received images of God.” This means “to lay bare the attachments that excluded radically different conditions from giving rise to images and ideas of God that would seem as alien to the Christian West as their God seems to Japan.” But what kind of “attachments” does Heisig have in mind? Is the very idea of a personal God such an attachment? Or the idea of eternal life? The method pursued in the first three of the five chapters of his book is calculated to make the reader quite uneasy. He further laments the failure of interreligious dialogue to live up to its promise, having long since become confined to “a small caste of trained specialists in Christian academia and spiritual practice.”

He is disappointed at the dwindling concern among Japanese theologians with adjusting Western Christianity’s ideas and images of God to their own religious sensitivities and intellectual heritage. Heisig seeks to broaden theology in a comparable way. As translator, chronicler, and critic of the Kyoto School philosophers, as well as coordinator of the massive anthology Japanese Philosophy: A Sourcebook, Heisig has worked to broaden the definition of philosophy beyond its Western confines. He has been a major force in Japan since his arrival four decades ago, his name synonymous with the Nanzan Institute for Religion and Culture in Nagoya, where he has welcomed and encouraged many scholars, young and old, over the years.

JAMES HEISIG’S ARRESTING and rather unsettling Of Gods and Minds: In Search of a Theological Commons is the fifth volume of “Duffy Lectures in Global Christianity,” a series founded by the indefatigable Catherine Cornille at Boston College, and inspired by the late Stephen Duffy’s insight that “o the extent that Christianity opens itself to other traditions, it will become different.” James Heisig is the very incarnation of this difference.

Philosophers of Nothingness by James W. Heisig