Материал: The Routledge Companion to the Study of Religion by John Hinnells
Chapter 25
Religious pluralism
Michael Barnes
In a purely descriptive sense, religious pluralism is synonymous with the phenomenon of religious diversity or plurality, what is ‘religiously other’ within a given social context. In the last few decades, however, the term has acquired a very particular connotation. More often than not, it is used in a normative sense to refer to a specific stance in philosophy and theology, that associated with the name of John Hick and the thinkers of what might be called the ‘Myth of Christian Uniqueness’ school (a project developed in Hick and Knitter 1987 with an important set of counter-proposals in D’Costa 1990a). In its simplest form the thesis states that all religions are equally valid paths to the same transcendent reality.
This is how I use the term in this chapter, the first part of which is given over to a brief account and critique. My aim here is to identify some of the presuppositions which have led to the paradigm shift proclaimed by the Myth school. Hick’s work is important because it raises many complex ethical and philosophical issues which attend the dialogue of religions. It is also extremely plausible, leading the reader away from what appears to be a narrow religious chauvinism to a more reasonable acceptance of the plurality of religions. It has, however, met with considerable opposition – not just because it sidelines the claims that religious traditions make to speak of truth but because it fails to address the crucial issue raised by the plurality of religions, namely the significance for religious faith of the engagement with ‘the other’. Thus the second part of the chapter considers some responses which, in the wake of the Myth debate, religious traditions have themselves made to ‘the other’. This will entail attention being given to a re-reading of the Christian theology of religions; the line developed here is in broad agreement with that espoused by Jacques Dupuis (1997, 2002), a position which Paul Griffiths (2001) refers to as ‘open inclusivism’. But the normative thesis has not just met with predictable critique from within the world of orthodox mainstream Christian theology. Theologians and philosophers from other traditions have also waded into the fray. I intend, therefore, to add a brief account of religious plurality from Islamic and Buddhist perspectives.
The main concern of this chapter is not to examine the intra-systemic philosophical questions which the process of interreligious dialogue raises, nor to analyse the empirical ‘results’ of dialogue, the changes and formations which it encourages. (For the philosophical, theological and practical/political questions which arise from the debate about religious pluralism in the broad sense the reader is directed to an ever-growing literature (e.g. Tracy 1994; Di Noia 1992; Byrne 1995; O’Leary 1996; D’Costa 2000; Griffiths 2001; Heim 2001; Barnes 2002; Kaplan 2002; Marty 2005; Griffith-Dickson 2005.) The aim here is more limited: to consider how communities of faith deal with the interreligious relationship itself. This, of course, is a theological agenda and raises the question why it should find a place
Religious pluralismâ 427â
in a book largely devoted to Religious Studies. My point is that, in the multi-faith world which confronts students of religion from all religious backgrounds and none, theological questions about the internal coherence of a tradition cannot be separated from the more objective or academic questions put by those who are, strictly speaking, outsiders. Nor is ‘theology’ to be regarded any longer as the preserve of a few Christian intellectuals – as the recent phenomenon of ‘Buddhist Theology’ demonstrates (Jackson and Makransky 2000). As David Tracy has argued (1981), theology addresses different social realities or ‘publics’
– church and academy and wider society (in which category I would want to place ‘other religions’). Theology is inter-disciplinary of its very nature – called to respond not just to the data which the academic study of religions raises but also to attend to the systems and strategies which communities of faith develop in responding to each other.
The growth of a hypothesis
Two major contributions to the growth of this normative hypothesis can be noted, if not completely distinguished. On the one hand, an awareness of the relativity of all religions invalidates claims to superiority and exclusiveness on the part of one. On the other, the greater contact between, and increasing knowledge of, particular traditions makes arguments for a common core or essence increasingly plausible. The growth of religious studies as an academic discipline committed to discerning the various dimensions of the world’s religions has clearly been influential in uniting the two (Smart 1989:12–21). These developments are treated at length in other chapters in this volume.
The same two themes run consistently through Hick’s work (Hick 1977, 1980a , 1980b, 1989). His version of the pluralist hypothesis builds on various considerations, especially the phenomenological ‘family resemblance’ argument, which rule out an a priori ‘Christianitycentred’ theology. One is an appreciation of the spiritual and moral values present in the world religions; the other an account of the destructive effect of Christian claims to superiority. Hick thus reads the history of theological accounts of the other as a move from intolerant ‘exclusivism’ through a more liberal ‘inclusivism’ to his own proposal, a ‘theological crossing of the Rubicon’ into what he considers the theologically more straightforward world of pluralism. Calling for a radical reconstruction or relativising of Christian claims, Hick argues persuasively that traditional christocentric and ecclesiocentric positions which have dominated the agenda for centuries need to be replaced by a theocentric position if theologians are to give an adequate account of the modern experience of the plurality of religions. According to Hick, the only appropriate way of understanding the plurality of religious beliefs and practices in today’s world must be based on a reflection on the total religious experience of humankind.
This historical overview is backed up with a realist account of religious experience (Hick 1989:129–227). Rejecting both the sceptical view that religious experience is delusory and what he sees as a dogmatic view that it is delusory except for what is mediated through one’s own tradition, Hick develops a third view – that all major religions are different ways of experiencing the Divine or Real. Religions are alternative soteriological ‘spaces’ through which people find the way from self-centredness to ‘Reality-centredness’, different configurations of divine phenomena which are instantiated as myths or stories that change or direct people’s lives.
This thesis is developed on the basis of a distinction (noted in some form in all religions but as developed by Hick owing more to Kant) between the Real as such and the Real as humanly
428â Key topics in the study of religions
thought-and-experienced. Invoking Kant’s thesis that the mind contributes to the character of the perceived environment, Hick distinguishes between the phenomenal world of the religions and the noumenal world which exists independent of our perception of it. Like Kant he seeks to be both a ‘transcendental idealist’ and an ‘empirical realist’. But Hick goes beyond Kant – for whom God is postulated as the pre-supposition of moral obligation – by postulating the Absolute or the Real as the condition of possibility of all religious experience. Thus the Absolute in collaboration with the experiencing subject is responsible for the phenomenal world which religious persons experience. In Kantian terms, the Absolute or Real is the unknowable noumenon ‘behind’ the known phenomena. Faith affirms the Absolute – but only that it is, not what it is. The ‘content’ of the act of faith is derived from the particular language of a tradition – in Christianity the language which speaks of ‘God in Christ’, in Buddhism the language derived ultimately from the Buddha’s enlightenment experience. While various developments in Hick’s thought can be noted, particularly a nuancing of language about the Absolute, he adheres consistently to the terms of what he calls a ‘Copernican Revolution’ in the theology of religious pluralism (Hick 1973:120–132; D’Costa 1987). The same Absolute, however identified in personal or impersonal terms, is equivalently manifested in the various forms of human religiosity. Underlying all such forms is a common unthematised religious experience which the religions refer to in terms of the different languages of faith.
The plausibility of the hypothesis
There is no doubt about the attractiveness of a single hypothesis to explain the phenomenon of religious pluralism. But such a panoptic overview, however idealistic in its intentions, is by no means unproblematic. ‘Universal’ theologies and comprehensive theories generally raise the same questions about method and coherence as the ‘philosophia perennis’. (The classic account in its modern pluralist form is to be found in Schuon 1975; on ‘universal theology’ see the important collection in Swidler 1987). Whose ‘data’ are being considered? And from whose perspective? The very shift in meaning from a purely descriptive to a normative account of ‘the other’ raises political and ethical issues, about the nature of power and control in theological and philosophical discourse generally. Pluralists such as are represented by the ‘Myth school’ are right to draw attention to the innate chauvinism of much traditional Christian thinking; their call for respect, openness and understanding is the sine qua non of any theology of religions. There is, therefore, a strong ethical basis for some version of pluralism. But the extent to which the hypothesis can be made normative, that is to say can be held with philosophical consistency, let alone theological integrity, is open to doubt. Thanks in no small measure to the influence of Hick the topic of religious pluralism is now an important topic in the literature of philosophy of religion (e.g. Loughlin 1990; D’Costa 1996; Rowe 1999; Surin 1990; Wainwright 1999; Cheetham 2003; Cottingham 2005). Just a few of the more obvious points can be noted here.
In order to ensure that pluralism does not descend into some form of relativism it becomes necessary to abstract from the particularity of languages some sort of common ‘meta-language’. But it quickly becomes problematic to argue for a correspondence between religious phenomena – the concepts, symbols or stories – and the Absolute to which they supposedly point. How does one know there is a correspondence? Might not all be as equally false as equally true? The not-so-hidden assumption is that religious languages are equivalent, equally effective soteriologically, since they appear to perform the same function in their respective traditions in pointing the way to the same unknowable Absolute.
Religious pluralismâ 429â
But for this argument to work, the point of reference, the Absolute, must be capable of identification while yet remaining, by definition, the unknowable. It seems highly plausible to make different expressions of the Absolute identical; that is to say, to prescind from the particularity of the phenomenal names and to identify together the single noumenal reality to which they supposedly point. But the argument is invalid. One cannot make two ‘unknowables’ equivalent. As Keith Ward points out, ‘it is rather like saying, “I do not know what X is; and I do not know what Y is; therefore X must be the same as Y.” If I do not know what either is, I ipso facto do not know whether they are the same or different’ (1990:5). The most that can be said is that very different languages and concepts may be speaking of the same unknowable. But again they may not. There is, in short, an important point to be made in using the term religious pluralism in its purely descriptive sense to signify a phenomenon of contemporary experience. But it is illegitimate to turn the ‘given’ into a theory which somehow accounts for the given.
The point is that there is no vantage-point ‘above the action’, as it were, which is not itself historically or culturally conditioned. This is where the apparent strength of the pluralist case masks real weakness; the assumption of the moral high ground can quickly become ideological. While it is not the case that pluralists hold that all religions are talking in different ways about the same thing, there is, nevertheless, a tendency to a certain sort of reductionist universalism. This determination to search out common values and essences tends almost inevitably to short-circuit the highly complex ways in which people of faith seek to identify themselves. Such a universalism fails to take seriously the variety of religions and the differences between them and turns out to be covertly élitist. In fact, on closer inspection what purports to be an objective, neutral and universal perspective looks suspiciously like a contradiction in terms. On the one hand, each religion is given equal soteriological value; on the other, a privilege is assumed for the pluralist ‘system’ itself.
Pluralists rightly draw attention to the way perceptions of specific religious traditions have been formed by Orientalist types of discourse; popular stereotypes, such as ‘mystic India’ or ‘primitive Africa’, not to mention reifications such as ‘Hinduism’ and ‘Buddhism’, have been largely constructed by eurocentric concerns. But a residual Orientalism, the tendency to project unexamined Western stereotypes on to what is properly ‘other’, is only too apparent in pluralist versions of the history of religions which seek to inscribe the plurality of creeds and culture within a single scheme.
There is an ambiguity here. This drive for theoretical mastery is quite at variance not just with the post-modern awareness of the historicity of all discourse about the other but with the much more diffuse and ill-defined practice of inter-faith relations. There can be little doubt about the influence of post-colonialist and post-Shoah discourse on the pluralist hypothesis; the challenge put to Western thought generally by the liberation movements of the past half-century has focussed attention on salvation and liberation themes as the single goal of all religions, thus giving rise to a more ethically nuanced approach to ‘common essence’ theories of religion. This ‘liberationist perspective within the Myth school is represented particularly by the work of Paul Knitter and Aloysius Pieris (Hick and Knitter 1987:178ff.; Knitter 1995; Pieris 1988; Swidler 1990:19ff.; May 1998:75ff.; and for critique of Pieris Ramachandra 1996:38ff.). At the same time, the context within which liberation themes have been developed has now shifted from socio-economic analysis to broader cultural considerations, often of a sharply local dimension. Thus, for example, Pieris’s more recent work places the familiar themes of the Buddhist-Christian dialogue within a more complex cultural-religious perspective (2004). Given that proponents of the normative
430â Key topics in the study of religions
hypothesis perceive the ‘problem’ of religious pluralism to lie with a ‘Christianity-centred’ view of reality and the false sense of superiority which it supposedly encourages, it is not altogether surprising that they have tended to ignore this dimension.
Identifying presuppositions
Two inter-related comments are in order here. The first is that there is nothing intrinsically dishonourable about the desire to mould others in one’s own image; the properly ethical question, as Talal Asad indicates, is about the exercise of power and the means which are used in developing relations with the other (1993:12). Second, while it is obviously true that appalling things have been done in the name of religion – the Crusades and the conquest of the Americas are usually mentioned – it is one thing to recognise the failure of religious practice, another to lay it at the door of inherent defects within theory or the system of belief. There are, of course, significant links to be discerned between them, but any attempt to critique or re-read a religious tradition begs complex hermeneutical questions about language and method. Methods of correlation, bringing the texts of tradition into some sort of creative engagement with the exigencies of situation, are never value-free. Indeed the whole concept of a value-free universalism is itself deeply problematic. Self-confessedly neutral positions usually turn out, on closer inspection, to be dominated by very specific ideas of what makes for the ‘humanum’, human fulfilment or even the very nature of human being itself (Surin 1990; Loughlin 1990; D’Costa 1996).
Perhaps the most important – because intractable – of the unexamined presuppositions lurking behind the normative hypothesis is the concept of ‘religion’ itself. The idea that there are a number of identifiable entities called ‘religions’, different species of a common genus, is itself a construction of the Enlightenment (Lash 1996 drawing on the historical studies of Harrison 1990 and Cantwell Smith 1978). During the Age of Reason ‘religion’ came to designate not the life of faith and the proper worship offered to God, but the external ‘system’ of practice, an object of scientific study with all the paraphernalia of diverse transcendent beings, myths, rituals and other data of the category ‘religion’. With the growth of knowledge of other continents the discovery of analogous systems of belief and practice created a religious geography – subsequently immortalised by Hick, using more astronomical terminology, as the ‘Universe of Faiths’. The model by which the discrete ‘religions’ were identified, however, was the rationalist deism which dominated the debate about the nature of Christian faith in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This, of course, gave a privileged place to a transcendent Absolute reality, the ultimate object of human understanding, and was rooted in what developed into an all-pervading dualism of sacred and profane. As God was set apart from the world, so the practices of religion came to be divorced from everyday living. The result has been, as Lash observes, that ‘the role of religion as a medium of truth has been privatised’ (1996:16).
The desire to map all forms of knowledge on to a single manipulable grid finds its most celebrated exponent in Descartes but runs through so much of modern culture (see especially Toulmin 1990; Pickstock 1998:47–61). The drive to develop a normative ‘religious pluralism’ shares in a similar foundationalism. Similar presuppositions are at work: that ‘religious’ phenomena can be distinguished and categorised, that all point toward a single overarching truth, and that a comprehensive theory of all religious phenomena is possible. Theories about what holds such phenomena together, whether emerging directly from a philosophical critique such as Feuerbach’s, or finding a more derivative form in the psychology of Freud