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Jakob Wirén, Hope and Otherness: Christian Eschatology and Interreligious Hospitality

Are people of other faiths ‘saved’ and, if so, how? Wirén works in the field of systematic theology at Lund University and is Research Fellow at the Church of Sweden Research Unit. He tackles this question from the perspectives of the Christian, Jewish and Muslim faiths, informed by detailed and extensive engagements with modern writers and commentators belonging to the respective traditions. This is a weighty and detailed volume and treatments of ‘hand-me-down’ assumptions or historical discourses feature only in the context of rigorous academic reappraisal. From the Christian side, the spotlight is on Ratzinger, Pannenberg, Moltmann and Hick; Muslim writers include Lari (a Shi’ite voice), Rahman and Chittick; while Wyschogrod, Schwarzschild and Gillman are taken to represent a range of contemporary Jewish academic perspectives. Wirén reminds us that studies in the field of theology of religions have rarely focused on eschatology. People of different faiths may have discussions about the matter of the hereafter (particularly with regard to the fate of the ‘religious other’) but the approach here is rigorously formal and informed, revealing subtle new questions and distinctions: the author suggests, for example, that some schemes are ‘soteriologically open’ but ‘eschatologically closed’, and he explores the implications of that. For many readers, the third chapter may be the most useful, as it is here that contemporary academic insights from the Muslim and Jewish sides are assembled and discussed. A possible challenge for readers who are already involved in interfaith engagement on the ground, and who are inspired by Wirén, is that in many instances local leaders and representatives of non-Christian faiths would be unlikely to engage with such high-level thinking within their own traditions, thinking with which they may not necessarily be in agreement. Eschatological speculation is not just about who is ‘saved’; rather, it involves ideas and images of the hereafter. Wirén ends his final chapter with a survey of the image of the heavenly banquet, both within and outside the Christian tradition, favouring it because it is associated with the idea of hospitality: God’s hospitality on the one hand, but also human hospitality on the other, which, characteristically, ‘is about being attentive to the desires and needs of the Other’ (p. 280).