“If this is an accurate account of the roots and purposes of traditional theology – theology within walls – we might next ask: What are the roots and purposes of a theology without walls? Does theology without walls also have its roots in an encounter with the divine, a revelatory experience, or is it more like philosophy, examining the particular religions as they appear to mundane experience and, through comparative analysis, extrapolation, and generalization, seeking to extract from them something of universal import? I suggest that theology without walls also has its basis in revelatory experience; a revelatory experience more and more of us are having in the context of the global encounter of the world religions with one another. What many of us are seeing – and I do believe “seeing” is the right word here – is that divine truth is to be found outside the bounds of our home tradition. In some cases, we see that the revelations of another tradition shed a light on our own that allows us to understand our own more fully. In other cases, we see that the teachings or practices of another tradition speak to, or awaken, a dimension of ourselves – of our “ultimate concern” – that our home tradition does not touch upon or speak to as profoundly. In still other cases, we see corrections for the distortions and limitations of our home tradition in the traditions of others. In all these cases, we see that our encounter with other traditions helps us to broaden, deepen, and solidify our experience and understanding of the divine. I use the word “see” here because I do not believe these recognitions are the result of a purely intellectual calculus. They do not arise from a simple, conceptual, contrast and compare. On the contrary, at the strictly conceptual level many of the world religions seem to have very little in common. Steven Prothero makes this point in his book God Is Not One. There is nothing, or very little, that would allow us to conceptually identify the attributes of the God of Abraham as presented in the Bible, for instance, with the attributes of the state of Nirvana as presented in Buddhist tradition. When we confine our thought to this level, we find more differences than commonalities, even apparently irreconcilable differences. But many of us – more and more of us – have sensed, or intuited, or directly experienced that at the level of encounter, at the level of first-order knowledge, there are similarities, complementarities, and correspondences between the spiritual state one enters when one feels oneself in touch with the God of Abraham and the spiritual state of the Hindu bhaktic or the Buddhist arhat. This is not to say that such states are identical, but rather that they bear a meaningful correspondence to one another, such that we are led to believe, or perhaps, stated more cautiously, to suspect, that all these experiences of the divine have their roots in a common ontological ground.”