Grasping Three Senses of the Notion "the Otherness of God" as the Grounds for Interreligious Toleration

On the issue of securing possible grounds for interreligious toleration, we are currently witnessing a prominent Christian view epitomized by the proposition that Christians should tolerate other religions because those religions are grounded in the otherness of God. For both Christians and non-Christians, employing the notion of God's otherness to manifest the proper reason for tolerating other religions is a momentous venture. Unlike its appearance, however, the notion of God's otherness envisaged and used in the context of interreligious toleration is liable to a serious predicament called the "toleration puzzle." As a means of providing the remedy for the puzzle, in this paper I appeal for disambiguating the term "the otherness of God" and suggest three senses of it: "interior," "exterior," and "mediatory." With this idea, I claim that when one employs the notion of God's otherness in the context of grounding interreligious toleration, one should adopt the notion not in the single, one-sided sense but in the unified, three senses, especially placing value on the exterior and mediatory senses of the term. This proposal makes the Christian view that other religions are grounded in the otherness of God more acceptable.