Pragmatic Conditions for Jewish‐christian Theological Dialogue

How is Jewish-Christian theological dialogue possible today?Assuming that the possibility of dialogue is not something to be envisaged by any individual thinker a priori, I offer here a study of two examples of successful Jewish-Christian theological dialogue: George Lindbeck's dialogue with Jewish sources and Michael Wyschogrod's dialogue with Christian sources.To garner some general lessons from these examples, I try to reconstruct the general conditions of dialogue which they appear to share.Discovering that the two dialogues may share identical conditions of problem-solving, I label these "pragmatic" conditions, after Charles Peirce's definition of pragmatism as the claim that the purpose of rational inquiry is to solve the problems that stimulate it. 11 conclude that these are the conditions that may underlie theological dialogue among the specific group of Jewish and Christian theologians to which I believe Lindbeck and Wyschogrod belong.These conditions may underlie dialogues typical of other groups, too, but there is no way to know this a priori.In this study, I use the term "dialogue" to refer to a verbal exchange in which two parties expect that what each one believes may be modified by what it hears and, therefore, in which neither party prejudges the outcome of the dialogue.I do not assume that the parties must bring to the dialogue benevolent feelings toward each other; ethical emotivism (or the attempt to adopt what one believes to be morally correct feelings) may in fact interfere with dialogue by prejudging its conditions and results.I say two "parties," because this definition need not refer to two individual persons speaking

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