기독교의 관용과 신비적 체험을 향한 영성 다원주의: 신중심의 종교다원주의를 넘어

Abstract

This writing critically illustrates Christianity’s history of intolerance to other religions, and it points out that it is almost impossible for intolerant Christianity to be tolerable to the others. Illustrating Western Christianity’s strict doctrinal exclusivism and Korean Methodist Church’s excommunication of liberal theologian Pyun Sun Hwan at 1992, this writing questions Christianity’s opening to other religions. Although religious intolerance dominates over Korean Christianity, there was some movements of religious inclusivism in the other side of it. Vatican II proclaimed religious inclusivism and World Council of Church responds this attitude. This environment influenced some groups of Korean Christians, and they have tried religious dialogue, produced indigenous theologies, and this stimulated the production of “God centered religious pluralism.” However, this writing points that there are two pivotal problems are hidden in God centered religious pluralism. First, the concept of ‘God’ is just a cultural category to explain mystical experience, and it cannot alternate the experience. In other words, the idea of God is the just a concept to explain the experience. Second, there are not only mystical experiences within religions but also, politics, business and power within them. Therefore, the expression of “religious pluralism” cannot be formulated, because religions have the essential tendency of staying alive. Placing mystical experience into the idea of God and spirituality, religion, this writing suggests “spiritual pluralism toward mystical experience.” Following this idea, this writing divides religion with spirituality or mystical experience. Within this field of mystical experience, this writing observes mystics’ naming of “Great Underground River,” “Burning Mountain,” “Bottomless Well,””Origin of being,” “Nothingness,” rather than God. That’s why God is not an established object but the subject of mystical and symmetrical experience. When Meister Eckhart expresses “Great Underground River,” it implies “spiritual pluralism toward mystical experience.” When religions approach closely mystical experience, it becomes open to other spiritual experience, and vice versa. In the final analysis, this writing argues that “spiritual pluralism toward mystical experience” must replace “God centered religious pluralism.”