Gavin D'Costa

Gavin D'Costa (born 1958) is the Emeritus Professor of Catholic Theology at the University of Bristol. His academic career at Bristol began in 1993. D'Costa was appointed a visiting professor of Inter-religious Dialogue at the Pontifical University of Saint Thomas Aquinas, Rome.

Biography D'Costa was born in Kenya and immigrated to Great Britain in 1968. He was educated at Goldington Junior School in Bedford, and afterwards at Bedford Modern School. He went on to study English & Theology at the University of Birmingham under the theologian John Hick. After graduating, he studied at the University of Cambridge before teaching at the West London Institute, Bristol University, and at the Pontifical University of Saint Thomas Aquinas, Rome. His research interests include systematic theology, theology of interreligious dialogue, Roman Catholic modern theology, the Second Vatican Council and Jewish-Catholic dialogue.

In 1998, he was a visiting professor at Rome's Gregorian University of the Jesuit Order.

Theological publications D’Costa’s first book, Theology and Religious Pluralism (1986) followed Alan Race and developed the threefold typology of pluralism, inclusivism, and exclusivism regarding the Christian theological approach to other religions. He examined the work of key representatives of each of these positions: John Hick as a pluralist, Karl Rahner as an inclusivist, and Hendrik Kraemer as an exclusivist. In his doctoral work, John Hick’s Theology of Religions (1987), he tried to show that Hick’s claim that all religions lead to the same divine reality was problematic on three counts. He argues that there is no such position as pluralism; pluralism is technically a disguised form of exclusivism, either religious (as in the case of the Dalai Lama, in his study of modern Tibetan Buddhism, or in the case of Sarvapelli Radhakrishnan, the modern proponent of Advaita neo-Hinduism), or a form of modernity (in the case of Hick and the Roman Catholic theologian Paul F. Knitter, and the Jewish theologian, Dan Cohn-Sherbok).

In Christianity and the World Religions: Disputed Questions in the Theology of Religions (2009), D'Costa addresses four disputed questions in the field of theology of religions. He argues for a form of "exclusivism", although he criticizes the categories of pluralism, inclusivism, and exclusivism. He defends the view that the documents are either novel, continuous, and reforming, but not discontinuous with previous doctrinal teachings. He establishes the Catholic Church's formal move away from supersessionism to a position that holds the covenant made by God with his people, Israel, is now viewed as valid and effective. The collection of essays, Contemporary Catholics Approaches to the People, Land and State of Israel (2022), reflects different Catholic positions, and presents a development of "minimal Catholic Zionism" for the first time. Here he engages with the thought of Luce Irigaray, a French feminist philosopher, to show how she both illuminates questions regarding the nature of the trinity while at the same time being called into question by Christian theology. His study on Vatican II has had two journal issues devoted to the book. The criticisms vary regarding D'Costa's theological approach to the debate about continuity and discontinuity regarding Council teachings and specific claims made about the Council teachings regarding Jews and Muslims.