First an explanation of my long delay between posts: as a first-year teacher in Emmanuel College’s system, and for the first time teaching when my home life has no bedtime and no wake-up time, I planned poorly.? Midterms took more out of me (and out of the last two weeks) than I had anticipated by far, and I haven’t had time to read blogs, much less write ‘em.? I imagine that I’ll get more productive once waking up at 4:00 AM actually yields more hours to work (right now it just means waking up in time to take Miriam so that Mary can sleep a couple hours), but for now, I’ll try to articulate some kind of alternative to the Enlightenment-style metanarrative with what time I’ve got.
As I attempted to note last time, when I began my response to Tripp Fuller’s question, my main point of contention with Enlightenment-style accounts of “religious pluralism” have mainly to do with the category “religion” itself as imagined by folks like John Locke and Thomas Jefferson.? Where they decry grand systems like Dante’s (just to offer my own example) and claim to respect plurality, in fact what happens is not a replacement of the particular with the universal but a replacement of one particular system that explains other traditions (Dante’s Limbo for pagans, Malebolge for Muslims, and Paradise for the right sorts of Jews) with another particular system developed in the course of history (Paris for Dante, Scotland for Locke and Jefferson) and informed by its own anxieties and projects.? And given the choice between projects developed among Christian communities and those developed among communities dedicated to surpassing Christianity on the way to something else, I tend to prefer the former set.
Of course, as Joe noted in a comment to part one, Christians do share a world with people who do not confess Christ, and by definition, people not committed to that confession will not agree with my ways of articulating our relationship, and I will likely not agree with theirs.? As I noted before, what I call an Enlightenment approach to this impasse involves constructing a third way around the common denominator “religion” so that the most offensive particularities of both traditions can go by the wayside.? My own approach to other traditions, be they atheist traditions or deist traditions or Islamic traditions, tries to avoid erecting novel systems, remaining content with older articulations of grand schemata of relationships (a modified Augustine or Dante) for purposes of grand theories (when those are necessary, which I’ve found is not very often) but preferring ad-hoc, dialectical encounters when I actually engage folks in conversation.? When I’m not committed ahead of time to a singular theory of “pluralism” (which tends to treat the particulars of Christian confession as decoration if it treats them at all), I try to go into such encounters in the frame of mind that Clifford Geertz might call thick-description Christianity.
The main differences, as I see them, have to do with what vocabulary gets priority in saying what’s going on.? In an Enlightenment paradigm (at least the ones I’ve seen), exchanges between “religions” usually boil down to least common denominators, perhaps a common tendency to speak aloud words while looking away from other people and thinking about a transcendent Being or perhaps some sense that a superhuman intelligence wants people to be nice to one another.? I call this frame of mind Enlightenment not because I’d prefer to avoid further thought about the matter (as I sometimes suspect people do when they call something “modernistic”) but because I’ve seen precisely this pattern of thought in texts such as Hegel’s History of Philosophy and Tom Paine’s Age of Reason.? In those accounts of things, the Jews and the Catholics and the Protestants and the “Mohammedans” have in common (what I read as) a reductionist list of common thoughts about what happens after death, and whenever they happen to differ, that’s likely because of “historical” misunderstandings.
To venture an alternative to that reductionist pluralism (and to narrate the way that I tend to relate to Muslims and Atheists and Jews), I’m perfectly willing to compare notes with folks claimed by other traditions, but I try not to appeal to any least common denominator or list of qualities alien to? both traditions.? Instead I might note that certain Buddhist traditions of the Boddhisatva resonate with me not because of an invisible third-man but because it bears a striking resemblance to the condescension of Christ.? I might point to the systematic requirement of Alms in Islam and note that such practices actually ring truer to what the New Testament seems to be about than do consumer capitalist versions of “voluntary charity.”? And I might point to certain criticisms that Atheists have of Christian life and note that the roots of such criticisms travel in similar directions to the Old Testament prophets’ criticisms of idols.? And to be fair to those folks (this is where the dialectic comes in), I would expect them to note what’s best and worst in Christianity precisely in terms of their own traditions, whether that tradition be Hinduism, Agnosticism, or Enlightenment-style pluralism.? To sum up briefly, I’ve got little interest in proving that I and the Jew with whom I talk are actually two cosmetically different but essentially same parts of the same “religious” enterprise; I find encounters more interesting when I get to be really, really Christian and my Jewish friend gets to be really, really Jewish.
I find this account more adequate to the particulars of the Christian tradition because it allows for the possibility of conversion: because someone whose ideal of human life lies along Taoist lines is not already some sort of crypto-Christian, the possibility for renewing of the mind remains open.? (If you don’t know what book of the New Testament I’m quoting, Google “metanoia” before you close your web browser.)? Moreover, it resists Enlightenment-flavored tendencies to regard the radically particular bits of Christian theology (Jesus’s Jewishness, the emphasis on salvation rather than detachment or mindfulness, the eucharistic table as the real site of true humanity) as mere decoration and to separate practices from their narrative contexts (baptism as bland “initiation” rather than death-and-resurrection, the homily as mere “rhetoric” rather than proclamation of Christ’s victory over sin and death).
I understand why folks like Locke and Paine wanted to create new systems that encompassed and tamed the wildly different worlds of “religion:” in an age when human beings were shaking off the bad ideas of inherited hierarchies among human families (kings, nobles, knights, and the unwashed masses) and reeling from abuses of ecclesial power (one needn’t look much further than Unam Sanctam), certainly one could excuse a tendency to view the systems that governed how kings related to one another as itself troublesome and further to subjugate those systems, as Locke and Paine do, to the rationally-governed state.? But understandable and good are not the same thing, and as someone who considers himself a Christian who happens to have been born a citizen of a nation-state rather than an American who happens to have a “religion,” ultimately I think that a refusal of systems that claim to encompass all “religions” stands more faithful to the traditions that lay claim on me.
Let me see if I have this right.
In Enlightenment thinking, pluralism is many religious expressions trying to get the one universal religious expression right and largely contending that the differences are merely cosmetic, even disposable if they cause contention.
In your thinking, there is not a universal religion that all other religions aspire to or can be deduced from, but that they are directly trying to understand the relationship between the Divine/non-Divine (for the atheists) and humanity. The differences are important to the particular articulations and not only can be sustained, but should be sustained (any potential harmfulness not withstanding, i.e. no forceful mutilating of noncooperative people).
You are essentially removing middle management, so to speak. But not in a way to a reductive understanding of God, but more in an inductive understanding of God, i.e. don’t strip away the differences, but accumulate the differences. Find where the differences may be articulating similar ideas.
Joe
That’s how I read Tom Paine and other Enlightenment writers construing things, yes. And my insistence upon persistent particularity, strangely enough, has to do with a distaste for proselytizing–I’m not all that concerned with convincing my Deist friends that our differences are merely apparent, that we should start thinking of ourselves as subsets of a larger whole (the way that Paul does when he addresses Jews and Gentiles in Christ). As I noted in the post, I’m inclined (this is the Jonathan Edwards coming out) to think that conversion should be a spiritual rather than an educational moment.
And as far as differences go, yes, I’m content to see analogies between traditions and keep them analogical rather than reverting to a positivist account of the “real” common denominator between traditions.