Материал: The Routledge Companion to the Study of Religion by John Hinnells
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or the sociology of Durkheim, can all be traced back to the Enlightenment desire to impose a structure of thought on the data of consciousness. But, like the blander versions of the modern normative thesis, they are all more or less reductionist.
At least in theory the Enlightenment view of rationality encourages pluralism. In practice it can be quite limiting, espousing not a plurality of equally plausible positions but a neutral vantage-point, a ‘view from nowhere’. A concept of truth defined largely in terms of abstract, timeless principles has little space for the broader uses to which human language is usually put – forms of rhetoric and poetics, for instance. Similarly the pluralist hypothesis ignores the diversity and richness of religious literature, obscuring the different purposes to which stories, parables and myths can be put, in favour of what D’Costa calls ‘an entirely instrumental use of religious language’ (D’Costa 1990b:532). All religion has but a single aim: to turn away from Self towards the Divine, or, in Hick’s Kantian language, the noumenal Real. It is not difficult to recognise here an example of what Foucault defined as the aim of modern Western philosophy: to ‘preserve, against all decenterings, the sovereignty of the subject’ (1972:12). This tendency to define human selfhood in terms of self-knowledge makes God one more, albeit the supreme, human value, begging the question about the origin, not to say the interpretation of such values. Still less does it take into account the extent to which ethical value is to be understood within the particularity of distinct historical and cultural forms. There is always a danger, as Milbank observes, of an ‘ascription to modern liberal Western values [which] does not acknowledge the traditional and continuing political substructures which perpetuate these values’ (1990:175). Despite a degree of support, not just from a growing number of Asian theologians but also from a few Jewish and Muslim thinkers which give the hypothesis a certain moral force and plausibility, it remains very much a product of Anglo-American empiricist rationality.
In summary, what the pluralist hypothesis misses is a critical sense of itself as part of the historical and cultural complexity which has formed not just the different religious communities through their fraught and often destructive relations with each other but, more significantly, the particular post-Enlightenment universalist mind-set which it has inherited. The desire to ‘stand above the action’, the drive to replace the diffuseness of local diversity with the neatness of a comprehensive system, is itself bound up with ill-defined cultural shifts of consciousness about that most ancient of philosophical questions, the relationship between same and other. Thus McGrane, in his anthropological survey of European accounts of the other, concludes that in the twentieth century, due to the modern experience of the great diversity of cultures, the other is regarded as ‘merely different’ – thus opening the way to a form of cultural relativism, ‘a great trivialization of the encounter with the Other’ which reaffirms ‘the Eurocentric idea of the progress of knowledge’ (1989:129). In other words, the pluralist hypothesis, Hick’s route across the Rubicon, is less a royal road cutting majestically through mountains of theological obfuscation than a short cut which misses the richness and variety of the landscape in its anxiety to get to the end of the journey. If McGrane is right, then it is clearly naive – not to say tautological – to regard the pluralist hypothesis as a solution to the ‘problem’ of pluralism.
Retrieving theological positions
In the first edition of this book what followed was a re-reading of a few aspects of the story of Christian relations with people of other faiths. My intention was to rescue the mainstream of the Christian theological tradition from being largely dismissed by pluralists as the outmoded
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‘Christianity-centred’ positions of so-called ‘exclusivism’ and ‘inclusivism’. I therefore argued for a retrieval of the more generous side of the Christian response to the other and for an account of the Christian tradition as genuinely ‘other-centred’, always charged with learning how to witness to what is discerned of God’s purposes in the world of a rich and perplexing diversity. Something of that agenda remains. Even – perhaps especially – in the world of liberal modernity which Hick addresses, it is important that Christianity be not reduced to a series of more or less triumphalist answers to troublesome outsiders.
That world, however, is fast disappearing. The problem, as Cheetham observes, is that ‘Hick’s religious pluralism goes against the grain by seeking to be comprehensive rather than tradition-specific’ (2003:168). It fits a liberal modern intellectual paradigm but is out of place in a more post-modern climate. In other words the normative hypothesis should be understood as a dimension of the history of inter-religious relations, but not as its explanation. Any work of critique is itself situated (including, of course, this one). In returning, therefore, to the question with which I began – about the significance of religious pluralism for people of faith – it is important not to repeat the fallacy of a magisterial view from nowhere. This does not, however, entail replacing theology with genealogical deconstruction. Surin’s acerbic attack on all forms of Christian theology of religions, on the ground that they serve up abstract unitary theories instead of identifying political and cultural self-interest, is surely a polemic too far (Surin 1990). Nor does a post-modern account of religious pluralism leave no alternative but to ‘out-narrate’ the babble of competing voices. Theological questions are rooted not in the defence of some ‘given’ tradition which promises to explain the totality of truth, but in an originating sense of wonder before a world regarded as, at once, familiar and strange, same and other. In some sense, that must be true of all religious traditions.
Thus in this second edition I take a different line, one more in keeping with the rich development of interreligious dialogue in recent years – and indeed of a cross-religious or ‘comparative’ theology, one pursued in dialogue with the other. What is at stake is not the position of Christianity as some sort of fulfillment of all the others, but the claims of any religious tradition to its own specificity and integrity. Religions manifest significant differences, believe different things about the nature of ultimate reality, and teach different ways of human perfection. These are not to be reduced to some lowest common denominator without doing violence to the complex fabric of belief and practice which supports their claims to inject meaning into people’s lives or diluting those claims by slipping into some kind of relativism. Increasingly, therefore, any theological response to ‘the other’ has had to take on board not just what Christianity has to say about other faith traditions but what other faith traditions have to say about their own ‘others’. All traditions have both theoretical and practical resources for speaking of the other and for re-reading their own tradition when faced with the phenomenon of religious pluralism. I suggested in the introduction that religious pluralism raises hermeneutical and ethical questions about the meaning of interreligious engagement. If that is correct, then the theological task is essentially a collaborative or dialogical exercise – speaking and listening to what the other has to say. It is at least arguable that a more theologically nuanced account of religious pluralism itself will give some intellectual credibility to the practical engagement of religious communities at a variety of levels.
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The significance of difference
Much more is at stake than the cogency of a supposedly comprehensive meta-theory of religious diversity (Cheetham 2003:168). Strangely, perhaps, Hick is still very much dominated by the Christian ‘salvation problematic’ – can the non-Christian be saved? But for neither Barth nor Rahner (the usual suspects made to represent so-called ‘exclusivism’ and ‘inclusivism’ respectively) is salvation the central issue. Strictly speaking, the question of who is or who is not saved lies with God, and, although issues like grace and human freedom are very much at the heart of Christian anthropology, the Church has never pronounced upon soteriology as such. The ultimate state of the righteous individual is known only to God and may not be second-guessed by others, not even by the Church. The more pressing question is not whether people from other faith traditions can be saved – they always remain within the gracious providence of God, as do all human beings – but how. What part is played by the religions themselves? Are people saved despite their traditional beliefs and practice or precisely through them? The fact that such questions can be asked at all is an indication of how much Catholic theology in particular – admittedly in response to the reality of religious difference and the challenge of the pluralist hypothesis – has retrieved from its own tradition. At least three dimensions of this renewal should be noted in passing (pursued at much greater length in the first edition of this chapter): the Patristic notion of the ‘seeds of the Word’ (Saldanha 1984) which has opened up a sense of the continuing operative ‘presence’ of Jesus Christ as the revealed Word of God in the history of salvation; the ecclesiology of Vatican II which has restored to the Church a sense of its own identity as constituted by the Missio Dei, involving a participation in the work of God’s Spirit sent into the world (Sullivan 1992; Burrows 1996); and finally the experience of dialogue itself which at a variety of levels has changed the way Christians think about mission and evangelisation (Panikkar 1978; Fitzgerald and Borelli 2006).
In an uncontroversial sense all Christian theology is concerned with pluralism, with the relationship of the Church to the other. In practice – and here the normative pluralist account of Christian theology does have a point – responses vary. Some theologians seek to maintain the integrity of the Church against non-Christians; others more openly affirm the identity of persons of faith and see them as representing at least the possibility that there exist outside the visible bounds of the Church ‘truths of religious significance’ (Griffiths 2001:63). The most influential advocate of post-Vatican II Catholic theology of religions, Jacques Dupuis, advocates the latter possibility. With his distinction between the religions as de iure rather than de facto (that is to say, having a proper role to play in the unfolding of the providential purposes of a beneficent God rather than being regarded as a purely contingent reality which will eventually be overcome) the ‘great question of the other’ is conceived no longer as a problem to be solved (which it remains within the terms of the normative pluralist hypothesis) but as a relationship to be explored (Dupuis 1997; 2002). The key issue is no longer about the salvation of the other; it is about the theological significance of otherness.
There is some irony in the fact that it is theology which, as the third millennium advances, is making the pluralist-dominated account of religious diversity look a little dog-eared. Even attempts to develop a ‘fourth paradigm’ (Ogden 1992; Di Noia 1992) seem way out of date. The reason for such dissatisfaction is to be sought not in nostalgia for the more comforting solutions of yester-year but in a growing awareness that modern ‘possessive individualism’ fails to address the political, and therefore theological, issues which are raised by the interaction of different communities of faith in modern society. A pluralism which has already
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accepted a version of ‘religion’ as marginal to the public realm can produce little more than well-intentioned exhortations to a bland tolerance. Only by careful attention to the role religious practice plays in the formation and growth of communities of faith, and therefore to the ways it both encourages and discourages engagement and dialogue with others, can the significance of difference and otherness be appreciated. These are theological issues not because they are ‘Christianity-centred’ in the narrow sense, but because they address the challenge which inter-faith dialogue makes to all claims to self-sufficiency. In short: other persons disclose something of the mystery of the Other, of God – a point made with some cogency by David Tracy (1994:73ff., 95ff.).
The point to be stressed is that a normative account of religious pluralism does not encourage dialogue because it fails in the end to take otherness seriously. Whatever else religions may be about, they clearly respond to the human need for meaning. At some point all human beings, whether followers of recognized religious traditions or not, seek some sort of coherence in their living, what MacIntyre calls ‘a life that can be conceived and evaluated as a whole’ (1985:205). Supporters of the normative paradigm are undoubtedly correct that some theory of meaning is necessary to the understanding of religious diversity. Where the hypothesis appears curiously dated is in seeking to surmount diversity by assuming some sort of Archimedean ‘place to stand’. My argument has been that there can be no such place which is not value and theory-laden. The question, therefore, is how to shift attention from particular theories, which tend almost inevitably to assume the position of all-encompassing master narratives, to the skills, dispositions and virtues which sustain persons in their pursuit of meaning. As MacIntyre has shown, where the practice of such virtues is learned is in the living out of the heritage which grounds and gives coherence to the faith of communities. This begins with the liturgical celebration of memories and the transmission and re-imaging of life-giving stories, which are passed from one generation to another. It continues with the various practices of faith – study and prayer as well as social exchange and dialogue with others – which they support and which give rise to a hermeneutical sensitivity to what in the Christian tradition have been referred to as ‘seeds of the Word’.
The three-fold paradigm, the heart of the normative pluralist mis-reading of theological history, subordinates the life-giving practice of religious faith to a single value or virtue of tolerance, openness or respect. Admirable in its intentions, it nevertheless begs the question of motivation. There is a value in each of the three positions of the paradigm but it is distinctly not the value of the neat hierarchy. Rather than link so-called ‘exclusivism’, ‘inclusivism’ and ‘pluralism’ together as carefully graduated theological positions, ranked according to their openness to the other, it makes better sense to understand them as each embodying a theological virtue or value essential to the understanding of the relationship between any faith community and those which it perceives as other. Exclusivism witnesses to that faith which speaks of what it knows through the specificity of tradition. Inclusivism looks forward in hope to the fulfilment of all authentically religious truth and value. Pluralism expresses that love which seeks always to affirm those values in the present (Mathewes 1998; Barnes 2002:182ff.).
This shift of attention – from consideration of the specific objects of theological study to the nature of the theological subject, the community of faith which exists by seeking to articulate its relationship with God – makes for a more ethically and theologically nuanced account of the rich complexity of inter-religious relations than is allowed by a theory of normative religious pluralism. It also suggests how interreligious dialogue is to be conducted
– with proper attention to those virtuous practices of faith which generate a community’s sense of identity and quest for meaning.
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Dialogue and the theology of religions
What has become known as theology of religions in recent years is less an attempt to work within or respond to the strictures laid down by the normative hypothesis, thus producing versions of a ‘fourth model’, than a reflection on the implications for Christian faith of the experience of being in dialogue. In his extraordinary and all too brief meditation on the Trinity Raimon Panikkar – described by Rowan Williams as an ‘uncomfortable ally’ for the pluralist case (2000:170) – has produced a remarkable exploration of human relationality spelt out in terms of certain interdependent and complementary spiritual attitudes (1973). More recently other writers have picked up the same theme (Heim 2001; Kärkkäinen 2004). The same sort of reflection on the dialogical experience is at work in Panikkar’s better-known essay ‘The Unknown Christ of Hinduism’ (1981). This is more than an exercise in fulfilment theology. Panikkar is not trying to show how Christians ‘know’ something which Hindus do not. Rather, Christ – or, in his terms, the ‘christic principle’ – always remains in an important sense a mystery to both Christians and Hindus. Both are searching for the meaning of that Divine Mystery which Christians name in faith as Christ. For Panikkar a theology which emerges from interreligious dialogue with Hindus is about ‘mutual fecundation’. It is not a matter of how Christians can go on defending ‘their’ name over against the names given by others, but of how together the name which Christians invoke can disclose to both parties what it has to say about the unnameable. Nor is such an approach to theology a purely Roman Catholic preserve. Kenneth Cragg’s struggle to bridge the gap between the ‘high prophetology’ of the Church with the much more self-effacing version of mainstream Islam is intended to keep open a conversation with Islam in which Christians can learn how to speak of a God revealed in obedient discipleship, submitting to God’s will and working for God’s justice, while at the same time learning how to find God in experiences of suffering and loss (2002; 2004).
Perhaps the most interesting development within the broad movement of interreligious dialogue is the work of Francis Clooney in developing ‘comparative theology’. This is spelled out in some detail as a practice of reading familiar Christian texts within a new context set by relatively unfamiliar non-Christian texts. Clooney argues that such an activity brings about a significant change in one’s Christian perspective on ‘the other’. A whole series of studies have juxtaposed Hindu devotional works and mainstream theology with familiar Christian texts, ranging from the Spiritual Exercises of St Ignatius of Loyola and the Treatise on the Love of God of St Francis de Sales to Rahner, von Balthasar and Richard Swinburne (1993; 2001; 2008). Meanwhile at a more inter-personal level the practice of Scriptural Reasoning builds on the experience, discernible at a variety of levels, of people of faith who exist in relationship with each other (Ford 2006). An extension of the shared study by Jews and Christians of Old and New Testaments to include the third of the Abrahamic religions, Scriptural Reasoning is intended to draw out the abundance of meaning from the ‘plain sense’ of the text, and introduce readers into the inherited ‘prudential wisdom’ of the tradition.
In other words, to pick up the distinction above, the focus is very much on theological subjects who act sometimes as host, sometimes as guest, sometimes taking the initiative, sometimes acting in a more responsive mode. This image of theological hospitality which involves thinkers and practitioners from across the religions is helpful in accounting for the shift away from a ‘theology for dialogue’ towards what might be called a ‘theology of dialogue’
– an exercise of responsible attention to the role which the other – what is ‘not-self’ – in all its forms, plays in the formation of faith. Although this dimension of Christian faith has always been present within the practice of the Church, it took the initiative of the Second