A Thinking Reed

Category: Theology

  • An experiment in apologetics

    Camassia recently wrote a post following up on a discussion we were having here about religious pluralism, specifically with regard to Marjorie Suchocki’s book Divinity and Diversity (see my original post here). One of the issues that came up in the ensuing discussion was whether affirming religious pluralism means you’re excluded from contending for truth of your own views. Does it just mean affirming everyone in their okayness?

    This got me thinking about what apologetics would look like if it were conducted in a context that took full account of religious pluralism. A few months back, Christopher tipped me off to Krister Stendahls’ “rules” for interreligious dialogue:

    (1) When you are trying to understand another religion, you should ask the adherents of that religion and not its enemies.
    (2) Don’t compare your best to their worst.
    (3) Leave room for “holy envy.” (By this, Stendahl seems to have meant that we should be open to finidng attractive or truthful elements in other religions that aren’t necessarily present in our own.)

    These principles pose some seriously critical questions to much of what sails under the flag of Christian apologetics. It seems to me that apologetics has rarely–if ever–been undertaken in the spirit of Stendahl’s rules. It’s almost irresistible for the apologist to give short shrift to other traditions in order to make his case look stronger. But a truly responsible apologetics would have to enter into a deep and sympathetic understanding of other traditions, something along the lines of what Stendahl suggests.

    Doing this well would require the cultivation of certain virtues: charity, open-mindedness, empathy, intellectual honesty, and so on. It would require the apologist to actually talk to adherents of other religions, to ask them why they believe what they believe and do what they do. It would require being open to correction on one’s understanding of that tradition. But at this point it appears that something like inter-religious dialogue is actually a part of, or at least a prerequisite for doing honest apologetics.

    And I wonder if we can take this a step further. I wonder if the best form of apologetics for a world of religious pluralism is what we could call “imaginative apologetics.” That is, rather than trying to produce rationally coercive arguments, this form of apologetics would elaborate a “thick” description of Christian faith and life, one that would invite imaginative sympathy, i.e., one’s interlocutor would be invited to see the world through “Christian eyes.”

    As the name suggests, I’m inspired in this suggestion by C.S. Lewis, who as I noted the other day, has been called an “imaginative theologian.” This is bolstered by my recent reading of Lewis’s Experiment in Criticism, in which he argues that good literature invites the reader to experience the world from a new point of view:

    We want to see with other eyes, to imagine with other imaginations, to feel with other hearts, as well as with our own. We are not content to be Leibnitzian monads. We demand windows. Literature as Logos is a series of windows, even of doors. (Lewis, An Experiment in Criticism, pp. 137-8)

    Correlatively, then, good reading for Lewis is being receptive to entering into this new perspective. Analogously then, in the realm of inter-religious dialogue, we should be willing to provide an imaginative description of our own religious worldview and open to entering imaginatively into the worldview of others.

    Another thing to be said for this view is that it recognizes that general views of the world (whether religious or not) don’t admit of the kind of rational demonstration we might like, and they all have their own unresolved problems. So we shouldn’t expect to establish their truth in a straightforward way, whether deductively or inductively. It’s more a matter of imaginatively assuming or adopting a particular perspective, and looking at the world through it, to see the world in a new, and possibly more satisfying (intellectually, morally, aesthetically, etc.) way. (Although Lewis might have had a more rationalistic understanding of his own apologetic works, if one looks at the Lewis corpus as a whole, one sees that he was a master of just this kind of imaginative apologetics.)

    And it’s at just this point that the line between what I’m calling imaginative apologetics and dialogue starts to get fuzzy. Both involve articulating the deep wellsprings of our own faith and offering it to the other for her consideration. And both require, in turn, a receptiveness to the other’s perspective. We can’t predict in advance whether the outcome will be her adopting our perspective or us adopting hers, or possibly some kind of mutual modification of views. But this seems consistent with the Christian view that conversion is ultimately a mystery and a matter for the Holy Spirit.

  • C.S. Lewis as imaginative theologian

    In the introduction to the Cambridge Companion to C.S. Lewis, editor Robert MacSwain considers whether a volume on Lewis even belongs in the Cambridge series on religion, rather than, say, literature, which was after all Lewis’s day job and primary area of expertise. Moreover, academic theologians have generally ignored, if not disdained, Lewis and his contributions to theology. MacSwain suggests that what might be needed is an expansion of our concept of theology beyond the familiar academic model:

    [I]t may … be the case that Lewis should rightly be considered in this particular series because he has, in fact, expanded the genre of theology to include the imaginative works for which he is so famous. Thus, instead of an amateur, dilettante theologian who cannot possibly be considered in the same league as, for example, Barth, Gutierrez or Moltmann, Lewis might rather be seen (a la Kierkegaard) as a deliberately ‘indirect’ theologian, as one who works by ‘thick description’ or evocative images, operating in multiple voices and genres, through which a single yet surprisingly subtle and complex vision emerges. Yes, of course it is ludicrous to compare Lewis’s Mere Christianity to Barth’s Church Dogmatics–but perhaps it is equally ludicrous to let Barth define the character of all theology. And when Lewis’s entire output is considered as a whole, the comparison might not be so ridiculous after all. Lewis cannot possibly count as a theologian on the Barthian model, but he may nevertheless offer a model of theological expression which needs to be appreciated on its own terms. (pp. 8-9)

    The books itself includes essays on all aspects of Lewis’s output (as scholar, thinker, and writer) from top-notch figures in various fields. Theology is represented by Kevin Vanhoozer, Paul Fiddes, and Stanley Hauerwas among others. And the volume as a whole certainly makes a persuasive case for taking Lewis seriously as a thinker (i.e., not someone to be uncritically venerated or dismissed).

  • The radical Lewis

    I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest that many C. S. Lewis fans–maybe especially his many evangelical admirers–don’t know that Lewis wrote a pamphlet for the British Anti-Vivisection Society. This essay, reprinted later in God in the Dock, anticipates some key arguments since made by philosophical proponents of animal rights.

    Lewis posits a dilemma for the defender of animal experimentation: either they hold that humans are metaphysically superior to (non-human) animals (he identifies this with the Christian view), or they believe that there is no inherent metaphysical difference between humans and other animals (he calls this the naturalistic or Darwinian view).

    If one takes the first view, Lewis argues, it by no means follows that humans are entitled to treat animals any way they wish. “We may find it difficult to formulate a human right of tormenting beasts in terms which would not equally imply an angelic right of tormenting men” (“Vivisection,” God in the Dock, reprinted in The Collected Works of C. S. Lewis, p. 452). Or, we might add, an extraterrestrial right of tormenting men. Further, “we may feel that though objective superiority is rightly claimed for man, yet that very superiority ought partly to consist in not behaving like a vivisector” (p. 452). This turns the superiority argument on its head; Andrew Linzey has also made much of this line of thinking (see his Animal Theology and Why Animal Suffering Matters, among other works).

    Of course, as Lewis notes, most of those who experiment on animals are not Christians with a belief in the metaphysical superiority of humanity, but Darwinian naturalists who see humans as just one species of animal among many (albeit one with certain unique characteristics). “We sacrifice other species to our own not because our own has any objective metaphysical privilege over others, but simply because it is ours” (pp. 452-3). But Lewis is quick to point out that if there is no great metaphysical gulf separating human from non-human animals, what reason is there to draw the line at the species barrier? If all that justifies our preference for our own species is sentiment, than wouldn’t sentiment also justify a preference for our own nation, class, or race? “Once the old Christan idea of a total difference in kind between man and beast has been abandoned, then no argument for experiments on animals can be found which is not also an argument for experiments on inferior men” (p. 453).

    This argument similar to the one known as the “argument from marginal cases”–i.e., many non-human animals have the same cognitive abilities as so-called marginal humans (e.g., the severely mentally handicapped), so why are we justified in, say, experimenting on animals but not in experimenting on “marginal case” humans?

    Of course, it’s open to the naturalist to admit the force of the argument and accept that we aren’t justified in experimenting on “marginal” humans or non-human animals. (James Rachels takes such an approach in his book Created from Animals: The Moral Implications of Darwinism.) But this just concedes Lewis’s main point: once you do away with the “metaphysical” distinction between humans and animals, there is no rational ground for treating humans and non-human animals differently simply because they belong to different species.

  • Tillich on Barth

    I’ve been reading Langdon Gilkey’s Blue Twilight, a collection of essays on religion in America (broadly speaking) that covers topics like religious pluralism, the environmental crisis, creationism and evolution, and the rise of the Religious Right. Gilkey was a student of both Reinhold Niebuhr and Paul Tillich and was in many ways trying to carry on the spirit of their work. He also includes some interesting and at times amusing anecdotes about these theological giants. For example, here’s Tillich on Karl Barth (the two were arguably rival candidates for most important Protestant theologian of the 20th century):

    Tillich liked to invite a few special students to his apartment to what he called a privatissimum, a quiet theological conversation accompanied by some splendid Moselle wine. One time we asked him about Barth. He put down his glass carefully and said with immense seriousness: “Venn you fight a dictator and he has swallowed up all of culture, zenn you wish to have Barth on your side to defend you; he gives you the ground on which to stand. But I was right about theology and correlation; all theology, even Barth’s, reflects its culture, and so you had better think theologically about that. Also, I left Germany for the right reason: to protest the persecution of the Jews, and not to defend the Lutheran pulpit! Thirdly, he went home; I left home–and I left on an earlier train!” With that Tillich picked up his glass, smiled, and we resumed our conversation. (p. 100)

  • More theo-podcasts: Evolutionary Christianity

    Speaking of theology podcasts, readers might also be interested in this series: The Advent of Evolutionary Christianity. The series is a production of Michael Dowd, author of Thank God for Evolution, and the topic is integrating Christian faith with an evolutionary understanding of the world. Interviewees include Ian Barbour, John Cobb, Brian McLaren, and others. You can see the full schedule here.

  • Elizabeth Johnson on ecological Christology

    If you haven’t checked it out, the Homebrewed Christianity podcast series has some really good interviews with top-flight theologians. Today I listened to to this podcast with Catholic feminist theologian Elizabeth Johnson. It seems she’s working on a book on “ecological Christology”–a very interesting discussion ensued.

    I also loved how when at the end the interviewer asked Johnson to give the listeners a question to think about she replied that they should ask themselves if God cares radically for non-human animals and, if so, think about what they’re eating. Awesome!

    A short article by Johnson on an “earthy” Christology here.

    My posts on her book She Who Is: 1|2|3|4

  • Is Jesus God?

    Last night I finished reading James D. G. Dunn’s Did the First Christians Worship Jesus? Dunn, a professor at the University of Durham in England and noted scholar, looks specifically at the New Testament evidence to determine whether Jesus was worshipped by the early church. The question may seem like a no-brainer, but Dunn finds that the evidence warrants more than a simple yes or no answer.

    Dunn considers several strands of evidence. First, he looks at the various Greek words (e.g., proskynein) that can be translated as “worship”–as well as related terms, hymns, benedictions, and doxologies–and whether they are used in reference to Jesus. He also looks as various “cultic” practices associated with religion (sacred space, sacred time, sacrifice, cultic priesthood) and whether these practices were directed toward Jesus. Next, he considers the ways in which Hebrew biblical thought has characterized various “intermediaries” between God and the world (angels, spirit, wisdom, word, and exalted human beings) and how these qualified the Bible’s monotheism without lapsing into polytheism. Finally, Dunn considers Jesus’ own religious beliefs (to the extent they can be identified) and the early church’s confession of him as “Lord.”

    The picture that emerges is a nuanced one. Dunn contends that evidence for the direct worship of Jesus in the New Testament is rare (though not nonexistent, e.g., Revelation). Instead, the texts generally indicate that the early Christians experienced Jesus as the one in whom and through whom they were able to worship the one God of Israel. Dunn puts considerable weight on Jesus understood as the embodiment or incarnation of the word or wisdom of God, which, he maintains, is importantly different from simply saying “Jesus is God.” In biblical Judaism (possibly influenced by Hellenism), the word or wisdom of God was understood as the aspect or manifestation of the divine that “faced toward” creation–these terms refer to God’s immanent presence among God’s creatures and as the ordering principle of creation. But God in Godself–the ultimate source and goal of all that is–remains “beyond” and inaccessible.

    What emerges consistently … is that the earliest Christians radically reinterpreted the language and imagery by which Israel’s sages and theologians spoke of God’s perceptible activity within human experience by filling it out by reference to Jesus. The creative energy of God, the moral character of the cosmos, the inspiration experienced by prophets, the saving purpose of God for his people all came to fuller/fullest expression in Christ. This did not mean that Jesus should be worshipped in himself, any more than the Word as such, divine Wisdom as such or the Spirit of God as such was or should have been worshipped. But it did mean that as the divine self-revelation, though Spirit, Wisdom and Word, more fully informed and enabled worship of the one God, the same was even more the case with Christ. As early as the first Christians, it was recognized that the one God should be worshipped as the God active in and through Jesus, indeed, in a real sense as Jesus–Jesus as the clearest self-revelation of the one God ever given to humankind. (p. 129)

    In Dunn’s view, New Testament Christianity remains a strongly monotheistic faith, but one that recognizes–in line with this tradition of Jewish/Hellenistic reflection–multiple aspects within the godhead that are not best understood as composing an undifferentiated, monistic unity. It is a faith that sees Jesus as the clearest self-revelation of the divine character and the one in whom Christians worship God. Jesus is both “God-with-us” and our heavenly mediator who intercedes for us before the Father. And he is our elder brother, into whose pattern we are conformed by God’s grace. What is distinctive of Christianity is not that it is “less monotheistic” than, say, Judaism or Islam, but that Christian worship of God is enabled by and revealed in and through Jesus (see p. 151).

    Christologies are often divided into “functional” (what Jesus does) and “ontic” (what Jesus is) varieties. Dunn sees the New Testament evidence pointing toward a Christology of “divine agency,” which seems to land more on the functional side. Jesus “embodied God’s immanence…he was the visible image of the invisible God..[and] as full an expression of God’s creative and redemptive concern and action as was possible in flesh” (p. 143). But, he concludes, the New Testament (generally) stops short of saying that “Jesus is God” in a straightforward sense.

    Dunn seems to suggest that this New Testament view is inconsistent–or at least in tension–with later Christian developments. He mentions, for example, that Christians often risk falling into “Jesus-olatry”–treating Jesus as an idol rather than as an icon through which we “see” God (see pp. 147-8). I would have liked to see him flesh this out a bit more. As it stands, I’m unclear just where (or if) he thinks a sophisticated orthodox trinitarian theology would diverge from the New Testament witness as he has articulated it.

  • From inclusivism to (soft) pluralism?

    In his contribution to the collection Abraham’s Children: Jews, Christians, and Muslims in Conversation, Keith Ward offers a sketch of three different kinds of Christian religious pluralism:

    Inclusive pluralism: The Wisdom of God that is embodied in Jesus is also available or present elsewhere. All humans participate in and can access this Wisdom, at least to some extent. “Jesus is the full embodiment of a truth dimly perceived by all since the beginning of history” (Abraham’s Children, p. 192). God wants everyone to be saved, and since many people have, through no fault of their own, not been made aware of the revelation of Jesus, there must be saving truth available outside the bounds of Christianity. Ward calls this “inclusive pluralism.” There are many paths to God leading to the possibility of eternal life, but the Christian path “shows most adequately what God is” (p. 193). What makes this a form of pluralism, rather than just inclusivism, I think, is that it allows for a positive role for other traditions (i.e., it doesn’t hold that all “good” adherents of other faiths are just “anonymous Christians”), even if it does give a certain priority to Christianity.

    Hard pluralism: All religious paths (or all “great” religious paths) are equally true or valid ways of achieving salvation or approaching God. Because there is no conclusive evidence establishing the truth of any one tradition, all positions are equally justified and we cannot say that one is more “true” than the others. Ward associates this view with John Hick and also refers to it as “metaphysical pluralism.” Ward thinks that this view is basically incoherent because, as a matter of fact, different religions make contradictory truth-claims, and not just about peripheral matters. So, as a matter of logic, not all religions can be equally true. I think that it might be more accurate to say that, on Hick’s view, none of the claims of the various religions are literally true, or at least true in such a way as to actually contradict one another. This, however, leads to the familiar problem of whether one can say anything positive about “the Real” (as Hick refers to ultimate reality). Even symbolic or metaphorical truth is only true if it bears some appropriate relationship to that which it symbolizes.

    Soft pluralism: Not all religious paths are true (or equally true), but because we lack the kind of interpersonally available evidence that would convince any rational person that a particular religion is true (or more true than all the others), people of various faiths may all be justified in their different beliefs even if not all of those beliefs are (or can be) simultaneously true. Ward also calls this “epistemic pluralism” since it rejects the pluralism of truth, but accepts the pluralism of justification. Going further, Ward says that this soft (epistemic) pluralism, rather than being regrettable, may actually be a positive good. This is because it respects freedom of conscience (everyone should be free to make up their own mind about religious matters) and the fact that no one can claim a monopoly on truth, particularly when it comes to grasping the ineffable nature of the divine. (These are similar to some of the considerations J. S. Mill brings to bear in his argument for freedom of thought more generally in On Liberty.) Christian thought and experience can be enriched by the symbols and insights of other traditions because the infinity of God implies that there is more truth than what we see in Jesus, even if Jesus is (we think) the clearest embodiment of God’s Wisdom.

    While some Christians continue to be exclusivists–i.e., they hold that salvation and eternal life are only possible by a conscious relationship to Christianity (whether that is defined as belonging to a particular church or making some conscious act of explicit faith), Ward notes that the mainstream Christian tradition (including Catholicism) has moved toward some version of inclusive pluralism and that further considerations nudge us toward soft (epistemic) pluralism. (Soft pluralism actually seems to me to be compatible with inclusive pluralism; it doesn’t require Christians to give up the belief that Jesus is the fullest revelation of God’s Wisdom or that people outside the bounds of Christianity participate in that Wisdom.) The implications for mission, Ward says, are that Christians should focus on serving the well-being of others and witnessing to the love of God in Jesus, rather than worrying about getting everyone to convert to Christianity.

    I think Ward’s typology is helpful, and I think his considerations for affirming a modest epistemic pluralism are strong ones. Whether one could (or should) go beyond that to a “harder” form of pluralism is, I think, an open question. The move to hard pluralism always seems to risk metaphysical relativism or complete apophatic reticence in saying anything at all about God/ the Sacred. Interestingly, the practical implications Ward draws in terms of mission and dialogue are very similar to Suchocki’s, even though the latter seems to be a more thorough-going pluralist.

    UPDATE: See here and here for older posts making some similar points. I’m starting to wonder if I ever say anything I haven’t already said before.

  • Follow-up on Suchocki and pluralism

    Kevin Kim (a.k.a. the Big Hominid) has some thoughts and questions riffing on my post about Marjorie Suchocki’s Divinity and Diverstiy. I think Kevin pinpoints a certain ambiguity in Suchocki’s position, one that I wrestled with.

    It seems to me that Suchocki could either be characterized as a pluralist or as a modified inclusivist. This ambiguity is most pronounced, I think, in her treatment of the competing truth-claims of different religions. On the one hand, Suchocki affirms the existence of God and describes other religions as culturally conditioned responses to God’s call and presence in the world. This sounds like an inclusivist position, at least to the extent that it implies that the truth is more fully revealed in Christianity (or at least in theistic traditions generally) than in non-theistic traditions.

    On the other hand, Suchocki also argues that the conceptual articulations of the various religions are abstractions from and grow out of the soil of a more immediate experience of ultimate reality and that, when detached from that experience, it doesn’t really make sense to ask if one is “truer” than another. That sounds a lot like a “constructivist” position in the mold of John Hick, where ultimate reality is ineffable and the various religions are cultural responses to the Real. Ultimately, it’s not clear to me that these two tendencies are fully compatible.

  • Toward a Christian affirmation of religious pluralism

    Over the holiday weekend I read Marjorie Hewitt Suchocki’s Divinity and Diversity: A Christian Affirmation of Religious Pluralism. Though it only clocks in at about 120 pages, it’s one of the better books I’ve read on the subject.

    Suchocki, professor emerita of the Claremont School of Theology and a noted process and feminist theologian, takes an different approach than many pluralists by arguing that we find support for religious pluralism in certain core Christian convictions. These include God as creator, God as incarnate, humanity as created in the image of God, and the reign of God as the goal of earthly community.

    Using a process-relational model of creation, Suchocki argues that God creates the world by evoking a freely given response from creatures, not by unilaterally determining what happens. Because of this element of free play, creation displays great diversity. The diversity of religion–humanity’s response to the sacred–is one aspect of this. This same creator God is “radically incarnate” in creation: by presenting possibilities for creatures to realize, God allows them to incarnate an aspect of the divine, if only in a limited and partial way. The great religious traditions are instances of this kind of culturally conditioned response to an experience of God. While they may seem to conflict, or even to be incommensurable, at the level of conceptualizations, these concepts are abstractions from an experience of the God who is deeply present in the world.

    In contrast to much of the Christian tradition, Suchocki argues that the imago dei should be understood as a collective characteristic of the entire human race, as opposed to a more individualistic understanding. She bases this on the trinitarian nature of God as a community of irreducibly different persons. It is only by creating a community of diverse communities, not by erasing difference, that humanity fully images the divine. Similarly, the reign of God is the state of affairs characterized by transcending the preference for “our kind” and fostering the well-being for all, including the stranger. The stranger is welcomed as a stranger, not by being assimilated and required to sacrifice that which makes her different.

    All of these considerations, Suchocki maintains, point toward religious diversity as good and as part of God’s will for humanity. The great religions are free responses to the experience of the sacred, which are rooted in genuine experience of God. To live up to our calling to reflect the image of God, we should welcome and celebrate difference, including the religious “stranger,” rather than require everyone to profess the same faith.

    Suchocki considers the implications of affirming religious pluralism for two key issues: salvation and mission. Regarding the former, she contends that Jesus truly mediates saving grace, but that doesn’t mean that only Jesus does so. The divine presence manifests itself within and adapts itself to locally prevailing conditions. The questions that other people ask may not even necessarily be the ones that Christianity answers (she points out that some Eastern traditions are more concerned with eliminating suffering than sin, for instance). Jesus reveals God’s love and the life of humanity truly united to God, and the power of this grace-full event is amplified by the texts, traditions, and stories that have emerged in its wake. But this doesn’t mean that no other stories or traditions have the power to save.

    The implication for mission is that Christians should not seek to convert others (though conversions may still happen, of course). Instead, they should aim to form friendships with those of other faiths and to share what is most valuable in their tradition, as well as being prepared to learn from the religious other. This creates a very real possibility of mutual transformation. At the very least it should lead to deepened understanding and a willingness to work together for the common good.

    What I like about Suchocki’s position is that, unlike some pluralists, she doesn’t try to assume a “view from nowhere”, outside of any particular tradition. Too often, this results in a kind of lowest-common-denominator theology or a covert attempt to impose the standards of one tradition on others without acknowledging it. Instead, Suchocki is contending for religious pluralism on explicitly Christian grounds. More traditional Christians will take issue with some of her conclusions, particularly her apparent relativizing of the salvific importance of Jesus. And I think it’s fair to ask how we’re supposed to maintain that the Christian tradition is normative for us once we’ve made such relativizing moves. However, I think she makes a strong argument that the diversity of religions may be God’s will and that Christians should stop thinking that the ideal would be for all other faiths to vanish because everyone converted to Christianity.