Jaarboek Thomas Instituut 1997 - Thomas Instituut te Utrecht

AQUINAS AND INTERRELIGIOUS DIALOGUE 27
religious issues: it is a treatment where it is necessary to have an
adversary in the discussion'?". If the discussion concerns a real
adversary, the contents and methods of kaläm are inescapably
contextual; they "vary according to the doctrine being defended or the
adversaries being opposed?". If, on the other hand, the adversary is
merely fictitious, kaläm may become fossilized and receive a bad
reputation, because it answers outdated questions. This has been the
case with kaläm from the fifteenth century onwards, and the same
could be said about the Christian apologetics in these centuries as
well.
- finally, this situation and this method implies that it is important to
be able to place oneself in the position of the adversary". It is of
course this last characteristic that makes the study of Christian
apologetics and Islamic kaläm interesting for those who are involved
in interreligious dialogue, because one can only defend one's faith
properly if one has thoroughly examined not only the objections
brought forward by one's adversary, but the mental attitude from
which these objections have arisen as well. In such a defensio fidei,
the truth can only be found by identifying oneself to a certain extent
with the position of the adversary. This 'dialogical' attitude is quite
common in theological procedures in the Middle Ages: the literary
genre of the quaestio disputata or the artificial quaestio in theological
textbooks like Aquinas' Summa theologiae goes back to a method of
explaining the Scriptures which bears some likeness to the Rabbinical
way of finding the truth by preserving the rejected opinion".
60 Abdel Haleem, a.c., p. 72 with reference to J. van Ess, Anfänge
Muslimischer Theologie, Beirut 1977.
61 Gardet in Er, 1146. Cp. p. 1149: "the subject-matter of a defensive
apologia for the faith is meaningful only so far as it relates to immediate
issues ... a defensive apology must be based on new themes". Cp. also Griffiths,
An Apology for Apologetics, p. 15 on the occasional and polemical
character of apologetic.
62 Nagel, Geschichte der islamischen Theologie, p. 87.
63 Cp. P. Valkenberg, "Op zoek naar een theologisch waarheidsbegrip:
Thomas van Aquino en de vrijheid van schriftuitleg", Breuklijnen: grenservaringen
en zoektochten. 14 essays voor Ted Schoof bij zijn afscheid van de
theologische faculteit Nijmegen, Baarn 1994, pp. 81-94, here pp. 82-84 with