Jon Stewart 
Institute of Philosophy,
Slovak Academy of Sciences. Slovakia,
813 64 Bratislava,Klemensova 19;
e-mail: js@jonstewart.dk

Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion played an important role in the developmentof the concept of world religions. Writing at the time of a great wave of interest in non-European cultures in the first half of the 19th century, Hegel was among the first to realizethereality of religious pluralism. He saw that a philosophy of religion that wanted to favor Christianity must at a minimum have some story to tell about the other religions oftheworld. Today scholars are rightly skeptical of Hegel’s attempt to establish a hierarchy ofworld religions and to tell a narrative of how the one religion replaces the other in a teleo-logical manner, with some religions occupying a higher stage of development than others.Ifwe reject Hegel’s teleology and evolutionary view, is there anything meaningful left thatwe can work with? While we want to resist the idea that one religion sublates the next inHegel’s sense, historians of religion are keen to suggest the many ways in which religioustraditions have developed. In many cases religions seem to have overlapped and borrowedideas from one another. If one focuses on these points of similarity among the world reli-gions, a new approach to plurality presents itself. In this paper I wish to explore this ap-proach, which has been designated as “Comparative Theology”.