In a comment to a recent book review post, Tripp Fuller asked me what my basic take was on religious pluralism, a theological question that drives much of his own theological reflections.? I answered briefly in a comment of my own, but I’ve been thinking about the question some more over the last several days, and I figured I might take a stab at a slightly longer (but still provisional–this blog is called Hardly the Last Word, after all) response.
Enlightenment Flavoring of the Category “Religion”
I have to start by saying that I get irritated more quickly than most when people start spouting slogans about Christianity’s being “a relationship, not a religion,” and I have no patience at all for people who say they’re “spiritual but not religious.”? So please don’t take this as an endorsement of that kind of sloppy thinking.? I will say, though, that many articulations of religious pluralism seem to assume as the metaphysical starting point for theories that there is a singular, ineffable transcendent reality and that the various religions are variously different expressions of, different vehicles for connection with, or different responses to that unified reality.
The problem with that theoretical starting point, as far as I can see, is that it sets up a meta-religion standing over against other religions, a narrative that situates other narratives and implies (even if it does not state) certain claims about “the divine,” mostly having to do with its ineffability and the inability of particular traditions to encompass it.? I’ve heard people use the illustration of the blind men and the elephant as well as the “many paths to the top of the same mountain” riff to talk about this view of the divine, and while those (simplistic) pictures do not sum up that view, they do give me something to grab hold of.? I note, for instance, that this theory at the very least implies that it knows, even as the particular views it encompasses do not, about the totality called “elephant” and that the same theory has the capacity to step away from “the mountain” to look at all the paths at a remove.? I realize that certain mystics have made such claims from visionary experiences, but this brand of pluralism, which seems much more Enlightenment than mystical, claims by power of reason (usually featuring analysis of various rituals in social-scientific terms) to speak of a category called “religion” that all of them partake of.
I note the shape of this starting point because, in its structure, I don’t see much difference between it and other historically contingent articulations of the relationships between traditions. ?(I’ll use that as my neutral term until I come up with something better.) ?To draw on one example that I’ve read every summer since 2002, Dante has a slightly more complex taxonomy of traditions but still relies on one meta-tradition to situate the rest of them. ?In the Comedy, then, those traditions that he calls “pagan” are related to the meta-tradition, namely the Catholic Church, as inadequate tries at reaching the meta-tradition, while the Hebrew tradition (I can’t remember, though I should be able to remember, whether he calls Abraham and Rachel Jews) stands as a precursor. ?Islam, by contrast, stands in a much harsher light because it deviated once the contours of the meta-tradition were already in place.
When I think of the relationships of traditions in Enlightenment-style pluralism, the structures remain in similar relationships. ?In writers as various as Locke and Hegel, full-bodied Judaism and Islam and Catholicism are the particularity-plagued traditions, analogous to Dante’s pagans. ?Protestantism, with its individualism and rejection of grounded particulars, almost gets there and paves the way for Enlightenment-style toleration. ?And although one must reach forward in the Enlightenment trajectory to get to these, ideologies like Fascism and Stalinism, with their radicalization of the Enlightenment, are the Enlightenment’s Mussel-men.
I realize that the analogies are not exact here, but I think my point still stands, namely that any articulation of human traditions that I can imagine places those traditions in some kind of hierarchical order. ?I’d be glad to read an articulation of the relationships between atheism and Christianity and Islam and Enlightenment liberalism that doesn’t do so, but such an intellectual feat is beyond me.
In my next post (I’ve got to get ready to teach Wednesday night Bible study for the teens right now), I’ll try to articulate a way for Christians to situate ourselves in relationship with Muslims and atheists and other such folks without conceding all that ground to the Enlightenment metanarrative. ?Until then, I’d be glad to read any help anyone has to offer as I try to articulate these difficult questions.
I like your framing of Meta-traditions. I think it starts with our relationship with Jewish tradition. If we look at ourselves as one part of a much longer history, then we can frame differences better. We aren’t the tree, we are just one part of the tree. The question then can be framed as “who else might get grafted into the tree?”
The problem is most people just quote that verse in John that says “Jesus is the only way” and the conversation is over. However, arguing against the supremacy of Christianity over Judaism gives us a different Meta-narrative, in which Christianity is seen as a special way to salvation. Israel is the meta-narrative and as Christians we are Johnny come lately’s in the story.
The problem I have with the elephant and mountain paths critique is it’s assumption that the parties never cross paths (pun intended) or are otherwise isolated from each other, unable to compare notes or never get to the point jointly to see more than they saw before (forgive the influence of the despotism of the eye wording). Yet this is how science often works. Either separate scientists at some point realize they are working on the same thing and gather their notes or scientists separated by time are able to compound their work to a greater understanding of a particular issue (take the planet Pluto for example).
In other words, with the mountain analogy, there is no reason to think that at some point a person is not able to look back down the mountain and see that there were other paths that paralleled or even merged with his. This is the methodology C. S. Lewis uses to describe a single source of morality in both Mere Christianity and Abolition of Man (I think that is the other book he makes that assessment). I disagree that the only way to get a greater view is by stepping back. We can consolidate experiences and assemble models. If our direction was down the mountain, we certainly would reach a point where we could peruse the whole mountain.
To be true to the idea of universals, at some point one should be able to find evidence of those universals. (At least, except in as much as the Enlightenment revived Greek thought, the problem of universals preceded the Enlightenment.) Otherwise, one has to conclude that everyone else has gotten it completely wrong. But if that is the case, how can one argue for a universal?
This is the precise difficulty many Modern Christians find themselves when trying to “proclaim the Gospel”. Christianity is the only process that has gotten it right. To start arguing from that point immediately alienates the other party. You have taken away their perspective to understand what you are trying to convey. Christianity becomes something so foreign as to not have any relevance to the other party. Is it any wonder why so many people today look at Christians as if we have two heads on our shoulders? Or worse, reject Christians or Christianity as readily as we have rejected them?
Something I hope you can address, as I’ve implied here, is that I don’t find Enlightenment thinking conducive to pluralism. I find the Enlightenment consumed by what “really is” (and that usually based on materialist presuppositions) and anything outside of that or otherwise veers from that is anathema. The idea of a unified theory is as much about deduction and reduction as induction, which is the position of at least most Evangelical Protestantism. I would think that a Christian’s aversion to pluralism is more influenced by the Enlightenment than the other way around. That said, I guess it kind of makes sense in that I find Modernity, with its one sided emphasis on the individual, more given to relativism than postmodernism. But you have read more of the Enlightenment thinkers than I have.
That’s my assessment. I look forward to reading more as you explain further.
Joe
Phil and Joe, thank you again for reading, and I apologize for not responding sooner–the last few days have been busier (but happier) than I anticipated, and I’m catching up today.
Phil, I agree that your account of Judaism is more adequate than Enlightenment-style pluralism, and I’ll be writing more about that in the next part of this post.
Joe, you’re anticipating some of the questions I’m trying to engage in part 2, so I’ll let it speak for itself and ask you to respond there where my account is still inadequate.
To address the last bit, I think that the Enlightenment taken broadly (there was, of course, no singular phenomenon called “the Enlightenment” any more than there is a singular “Postmodernism”) does militate against pluralism when it comes to material/empirical reality but, because of its methodological materialism, tends to reduce the particularities of “religious” traditions precisely to “religions.” That reduction, I’ll argue in the second part, constitutes a metanarrative that stands opposed to any particular tradition’s grand story and thus can only really encompass traditions that are themselves dead.
But I’ll get to that in the next post.
i’m religious but not spiritual.