A Thinking Reed

"Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature, but he is a thinking reed" – Blaise Pascal

Religious distinctivism?

In talking about the claims made by the world’s religions, this is the familiar typology used to map the possible positions:

Exclusivism: the view that only one religion is true and/or salvific.

Inclusivism: the view that one religion is maximally true and/or salvific, but that adherents of other religions (or none) can potentially be saved.

Pluralism: the view that all religions (or sometimes, the “major” or “classic” religions) are equally true and/or salvific.

It should be clear by my use of the phrase “true and/or salvific” that there are a variety of possible combinations of these positions. For instance, one could hold that Christianity gets more of the truth right, but that adherents of other religions can have salvation mediated to them by their traditions. Alternatively, you could say that only the church mediates salvation, but that other religions contain insights about the truth.

Each position has its weaknesses. Exclusivism seems intolerant and, well, exclusivist, not to mention lacking in humility. Inclusivism is more generous, but can seem patronizing since it still ranks one religion above all others. Pluralism, ostensibly the most generous position, flattens important differences between religions and pretends to a superior “God’s eye” perspective from which it judges that all religions are essentially saying the same thing.

Recently I’ve been reading a book by Jay McDaniel called With Roots and Wings: Christianity in an Age of Ecology and Dialogue. As the title suggests, McDaniel is concerned both with the way religion addresses (or fails to address) ecological problems and with interreligious dialogue. While I don’t agree with McDaniel’s entire perspective (which is that of process theology), the book contains a lot of valuable insights.

McDaniel introduces the concept of religious distinctivism as an alternative to the three positions sketched above. Distinctivism rejects exclusivism in denying that only one religion can mediate truth and salvation; it rejects inclusivism in denying that any one tradition has the full truth; and it rejects pluralism in denying that all religions are saying essentially the same thing.

Instead, McDaniel proposes, each religion reveals a distinctive aspect of both the truth about reality and about human salvation or fulfillment. Instead of being different ways of saying the same thing, religions each contribute to a composite picture, while emphasizing particular parts of the truth:

Each religion has its strength, its distincitve insights, that help humans to become whole. This means that, as Christians, we can recognize that Christianity itself has unique fruits to share with the rest of the world, even as other religions have fruits to share with us.

But we must also recognize that our fruits are not exclusive or final; they do not exclude other fruits from other trees, that is, other truths from other religions. They are not final because there is always more to God than is ever seen in any of the truths of any of the religions. (p. 147)

So, for instance, a distinctive emphasis of Christianity is that the nature of God is characterized by limitless mercy and compassion and that this nature has been disclosed in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. But are Christians committed to saying that this is all the truth about God there is? Or do other traditions contain truths that could supplement what Christians believe? McDaniel would say that other traditions provide additional emphases, and even corrections, to what Christians believe. Religions don’t need to surrender their distinctiveness; in fact, it’s in their very distinctiveness that they can enrich each other.

I think this view has some promise. Too many Christians, even those who don’t adhere to the harsher exclusivist forms of their faith, assume that they don’t have anything to learn from other traditions. And, in fact, throughout its history Christianity has borrowed freely from other traditions.

One question that presents itself, though, is how a distinctivist position would deal with apparent contradictions between traditions. Even if traditions are presenting different and specific aspects of the truth, what happens when their insights conflict?

This worry can be softened a bit by pointing out that many apparent contradictions turn out not to be actual contradictions upon closer inspection. For example, it may seem as though traditions with an impersonal concept of the divine are irreconcilable with theistic traditions that emphasize the personal nature of God. However, theistic traditions also teach that God transcends our understanding and that, even if there is a personal aspect to God, there is also an impersonal (or maybe better supra-personal) aspect to the divine. Other traditions can provide a helpful corrective here to an excessive anthropomorphism.

Still, we will sometimes be faced with irreconcilable differences, cases where, at most, one religion gets it right. In such cases, we will often end up making exclusivistic claims for one tradition or another. The only other way I can see to salvage a truly distinctivist position would be to push it in a more radically relativist direction and suggest that the various religious traditions are incommensurable modes of discourse or language games or what have you. But this just seems implausible. If religion is dealing with ultimate reality and ultimate human fulfillment in some sense, then all religions are trying to talk about the same thing, even if using different conceptual and linguistic tools to do it. Not only that, but if the traditions are truly incommensurable, then how can they enrich each other?

Distincitivism, it seems to me, ultimately reduces to a (perhaps modified) form of inclusivism. It allows that we can learn from other traditions, that their adherents are not outside the scope of salvation (and indeed that those other traditions can be paths of salvation for their adherents), and that no one tradition contains all the truth. However, unless we’re willing to embrace complete religious relativism (or some form of non-cognitivism), we can’t avoid affirming the superiority of some truth-claims over others.

4 responses to “Religious distinctivism?”

  1. bighominid

    Yeah, distinctivism sounds as though it could be a variant of inclusivism, though it also has something in common with certain forms of pluralism (itself a label for many, many schools of thought). To wit: the idea that human knowledge is horizoned and that no single tradition encompasses the whole truth is actually an insight often associated with “convergent” religious pluralism, the type popularized by John Hick. This is the “blind men and the elephant” view, or the “many paths up the same mountain” view, which as you rightly note, assumes/presumes a god’s-eye perspective in order to make its claims about most or all religious traditions.

    Hick’s pluralism has been variously critiqued as crypto-inclusivism and crypto-exclusivism. The crypto-inclusivism charge was made by S. Mark Heim, who espouses an “orientational pluralism” that allows believers to affirm their own religious perspective while recognizing that others’ perspectives are formed by their own basic orientations (Salvations: Truth and Difference in Religion). The crypto-exclusivism charge comes from various angles (some such voices can be found in The Philosophical Challenge of Religious Diversity); in this case, Hick is accused of providing a model that, despite his efforts to the contrary, actually amounts to yet one more religious paradigm among others– to accept it is to be in the right, and to reject it is to be wrong/misguided/deluded, etc.

    The “divergent” pluralists, like Heim and Stephen Kaplan (Different Paths, Different Summits), see discrete religious paths as leading to discrete religious ends: heaven is not nirvana, God is not the Tao, etc. Personally, I find the metaphysics for this divergent pluralistic view unworkable, but it’s a prevalent school of thought and intuitively appeals to anyone with a “live and let live” worldview.

    Distinctivism, from your description of it, seems to have hints of Raimon Panikkar in it. In particular, the implication that, if each tradition represents only part of the truth, then all the traditions must needs establish and maintain dialogue as a form of mutual enrichment. Panikkar doesn’t actually subscribe to any models or paradigms, but he does believe in the necessity of dialogue and the potential complementarity of insights from various angles.

    Anyway, thanks for the post. I was happy to hear about this new angle on the age-old question of religious diversity.

    Kevin

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  2. bighominid

    Nuts– in rereading my comment, I realize that I should have elaborated on what Heim’s crypto-inclusivism charge was all about. Heim was saying that Hick, in creating a new paradigm into which all the other traditions would have to be funneled, was doing the same thing that inclusivists do when they funnel other traditions through their own (e.g., inclusivistic Buddhists who see Christians as more or less followers of the Buddhadharma, or inclusivistic Christians who view Hindus as “anonymous Christians,” doing Christlike works or exhibiting christic attributes).

    Hick posits the Real, and shapes his paradigm so that the major traditions are all, in their own way, Reality-centered and moving toward “salvation/liberation” (Hick’s soteriological term). This is what smacks of inclusivism to Heim.

    Kevin

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  3. Camassia

    Big Hominid said part of what I was going to say — this sounds a lot like the blind-men-feeling-the-elephant theory, and therefore not entirely new. I’d be interested to know, though, if McDaniel addresses the extent to which religious distinctives are formed in religions’ internecine arguments. You can’t really understand what Jesus and his followers were talking about without understanding Judaism and its contemporary debates; Islam hardly appeared ex nihilo either, being basically a rehabbed and modified version of the old Ebionite heresy. And that sort of dynamic has continued through history. I have read, for instance, that the elaborate development of iconography among the Eastern Orthodox was heavily shadowed by Islamic iconoclasm. One suspects that Protestant iconoclasm, along with such Islamoid traits as rejection of bishops and sacraments and a book-centered view of revelation, wouldn’t have developed so freely in such an environment.

    Given the fact that Christians, Jews, Muslims and their various offshoots make up almost half the world population today, it’s probably pretty hard for the rest of the world not to get caught up in these debates to some extent. Every religion and philosophy out there seems to feel the need to explain Jesus according to its worldview, whether it’s Hindus calling him an avatar or scientific materialists calling him a wingnut. He’s simply gotten too big to ignore. The continued penetration of Christianity and Islam into places like Africa and China can only encourage this.

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  4. Lee

    Thanks for the good comments.

    Kevin, I think what you’re calling “divergent pluralism” is similar to what I was trying to get at in my second-to-last paragraph – if you really want to push the distinctiveness angle you get a plurality of religious “truths,” and it’s just not clear how they relate to one another.

    I think there can be a value to particularism understood in the sense you attribute to Panikkar – that is, we should go in assuming we can learn from one another even if we may come to points of irresolvable disagreement. However, I think McDaniel is a bit too sanguine about the compatibility of the various traditions.

    Camassia, McDaniel doesn’t talk about that much, but I think it’s an important point to bring up. We might also mention the way Christian orthodoxy was formed in conversation with Greek philosophy, which formed its own kind of “wisdom tradition.”

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