A Freckled Christian Theology - Article Example

A Freckled Christian Theology Introduction Our world today is morally and religiously pluralistic. In relation to one current reference volume, pluralism in religion is the “view that different, or even contradictory, forms of religious belief and behaviour could or even should coexist” (Mitchell 1994: 146). Religiously and culturally, the existence of diverse and multicoloured practices and interpretations is unquestionable. But recently, this fact has come to be viewed not only as one potential pattern of human collectivises, or as the way things are, but as a certain moral and religious good, an inherently important condition (Barker 2005). This judgment has resulted, quite unsurprisingly, to the placement of ‘multiculturalism’, ‘diversity’, and ‘pluralism’ as moral objectives to be knowingly addressed by different features of social policy (Perry 2001). Hence, it might be claimed that presently the pluralisation of life has occurred on both the apparent, commonplace intensity of human interactions and relationships, as well as within the private, mental dimension of values (Muck 2007). In the centre, value domain categorical claims are definitely disliked, and the concept of truth as ‘relational’ or ‘pluriform’ benefits from common authority across several disciplines, involving religious and philosophy studies (Muck 2007). The difficulty with pluralism in religion occurs when one specific tradition governs society, refuting the authenticity of other traditions and demoting them as sectarian occurrences. As argued by Samartha, “Pluralism does not relativise Truth. It relativises different responses to Truth which are conditioned by history and culture. It rejects the claim of any particular response to be absolute” (Aleaz 2008: 81). The recognition that nobody can have full possession of the truth is the fundamental premise of strong religious pluralism. Truth is dissimilar from our truth assertions (Barnes 2002). In a highly diverse world, those who adopt a specific standpoint should be informed about standpoints other than their own. Understanding and welcoming the plural certainty of truths and their momentous co-existence require significant intellectual endeavour. There are Islamic, Jewish, Buddhist, Confucian, Hindu, Taoist and Christian religious practices, expressions and experiences that enlighten particular truth awareness (Barnes 2002). This defies the fervour of ‘no other name’ (Acts 4:12) which for centuries has oriented Christian theology. It is a valuable and critical defiance. Christians believe in Jesus Christ. Nevertheless, there is a confusing plurality in Christian faith’s expression and experience. This plurality is alarmingly abundant and can be threateningly disruptive (Carson 2002). For a number of Christians, miracles are necessary, whilst for some Christians they are not. For some, the Bible’s principle of inerrancy fits in to the heart of the faith, whilst for others it is of modest importance. For some, rituals are at the core of the devotion experience, whilst for others they are unimportant (Carson 2002). For some, the Apostolic See or the papacy is a fundamental element of the religion, for others it embodies a massive hindrance to the doctrine (Carson 2002). The same testament has been brought into play for and against capital punishment, abortion and slavery (Haers & Merrigan 2000). That the programme for modern-day theology of religions is being founded by the self-styled pluralist thought, embodied by, among others, Wilfred Cantwell Smith, John Hick, and Paul Knitter, there can be little uncertainty (Muck 2007). Basically, the pluralist faith of religions is distinguished by the “move away from insistence on the superiority or finality of Christ and Christianity toward recognition of the independent validity of other ways” (Haers & Merrigan 2000: 62). Within the paradigm of pluralist premise, the concept ‘plurality’ does not symbolise anymore the simple reality of diversity or variety. It now incorporates the notion of ‘parity’, or in any case of coarse parity, specifically, the status or quality of being alike or equal (Haers & Merrigan 2000). Langdon Gilkey can put in writing that presently the recognition of religious plurality includes the, possibly hesitant, acknowledgment “that in some sense the efficacy or even superiority of Christianity are claims we can no longer make, or can make only with great discomfort” (Carson 2002: 145). Articulated confidently, the modern-day plurality experience entails the “recognition of the co-validity and the co-efficacy of other religions” (Merrigan & Haers 2000: 62). This acknowledgment is the common premise of pluralist theologians; it creates an accord among them that significantly overshadows any differences engendered by the inclination of a pluralist to give distinct importance in his/her theology (Race 1993). Religious Pluralism Usually pluralism is evaluated in relation to exclusivism and inclusivism. Exclusion and inclusion are integral to theological discussion. “For many are called, but few are chosen” (Matt 22:14). It is fundamental to individual experience. A pervasive existential inquiry for every individual is “Am I excluded or included?” Often, inclusion is more completely regarded than exclusion. People do not want to be excluded from, but included in, salvation, regardless if temporal or perpetual. Frequently exclusion and inclusion are interpreted in relation to the law of negation (Perry 2001). To say that a person is a Muslim indicates the impossibility of him/her being a Buddhist. If being a heterosexual is virtuous, then any recognition of homosexuality should be prohibited. If Christianity is the genuine faith then Hinduism cannot be a genuine faith (exclusion) (Perry 2001). Within this perspective, pluralism arises as a third state, most probably surmounting the weaknesses of exclusion and inclusion (Field 2008). “Truth includes. Truth excludes. Truth is plural” (Field 2008: 34). Within pluralism, there are two distinct perspectives of the nature of truth: first is ‘hard pluralism’ which states that there are not single but diverse truths from the beginning; and second is ‘soft pluralism’ which states that truth is solitary but it emerges in numerous forms (Muck 2007: 7). The variation between the two is indistinct because the ‘truth’ itself is elusive (Muck 2007). Pluralism should recognise (1) some groundwork for mutual understanding on which the human race stands, devoid of which any diversity, exclusivism or inclusivism would be worthless (Barnes 2002); (2) the reality that the this truth can emerge in various religious practices through their particular representations and philosophies (Barnes 2002); and (3) no matter what is claimed about exclusivism, inclusivism, and pluralism, the religious life is all about devotion (Bowden 2005): “Christians are Christians because they hold Christianity to be true, and so are Muslims, and so on” (Bowden 2005: 872). Within the perspective of the third premise aforementioned, it is almost predictable that there would be incompatible assertions to ‘absolute truth’. However when those assertions are given, virtue is controlled and dishonoured (Muck 2007). Theology is genuine and valuable when it recognises that our understanding of the truth is not the same with the absolute truth itself. What is the absolute truth of the Jewish shekhinah, Buddhist dharma, or sexuality, capital punishment, war-and-peace, race? (Hofheinz & Lawrence 1998). People may have rigid perceptions on each of these. Are these rigid perceptions the same with absolute truth? As cautioned by Paul Tillich (1973: 13): Idolatry is the elevation of a preliminary concern to ultimacy. Something essentially conditioned is taken as unconditional, something essentially partial is boosted into universality, and something essentially finite is given infinite significance. There is no neutrally applicable absolute answer to the question concerning theological truth. The pursuit for ultimate impartial religious truth is a move towards hero worship. Pluralistic Religious Knowledge Theologians of pluralism are bonded in what may be depicted as a basically evolutionary or teleological image of the appearance of religious knowledge. This vision claims that the world’s religions are involved in collaborative effort, a collective effort to determine the forms of the religious symbol which unavoidably escapes us (Race 1993). Since it is not possible to discuss the thesis of all pluralist theologian to demonstrate these arguments, this paper will focus on two greatly representative scholars of pluralism, Wilfred Cantwell Smith and Paul Knitter. Knitter declared bluntly in 1985 that a pluralistic point of view on interreligious discussion is simply achievable within the paradigm of a new perspective of truth that obviously moves away from long-established ideas (Medley 2002). His epistemological idea lies on four foundations that may be summed up as ‘becoming, relatedness, reciprocity, and unity in diversity’ (Medley 2002: 108). Primarily, all that is drawn in a forceful mechanism of self-awareness; second, this mechanism of self-awareness is attained in and through a multifaceted system of interdependence (Knitter 2002); third, interconnectedness includes a thoughtful discourse among members, “an ever more pervasive concentration of the many in each other and thus in a greater whole” (Knitter 2002: 10); fourth, the purpose of this mechanism of cooperative becoming is a multifaceted agreement, a harmonious pluralism, that, nonetheless, does not weaken the uniqueness of its element parts. This harmonious pluralism opposes monistic or supreme singularity where diversity is prevailed over. This harmonious pluralism provides diverse ontological precedence (Knitter 2002). The four basic components of Knitter’s processive-relational perception of truth resurface in his evaluation of the present-day religious condition. He claims that the world’s religious faiths are being attracted by the imaginative appeal within all truth toward a new form of interaction with one another (Barnes 2002).The objective of this interaction is a more encompassing harmony among the world’s religions inside which each, whilst maintain its distinctive nature, builds and adopts new strengths (Barnes 2002). The repercussion of this basically teleological concept is that religious knowledge is consistently temporary, but is only temporarily complete when it embodies the collective ideas of all those involved with the purpose of religion (Carson 2002). A satisfactory account of such knowledge has been provided by Wilfred Cantwell Smith and is supported by Knitter (Muck 2007). As claimed by Smith (1981), “true knowledge, in human affairs, is that knowledge that all intelligent men and women... can share, and can jointly verify, by observation and by participation” (p. 102). This understanding manifests in a global or shared self-awareness. To share this global awareness is to share a universalistic or post-conventional religious identity, or a religious world citizenship that, for Knitter, is the same with harmonious pluralism (Smith 1981). Apparently, religious world citizenship embodies an objective to be realised. The most evident key to this objective is the practice of discussion between pious women and men (Carson 2002). Thus, Knitter promotes John Dunne’s demand for devout from particular faiths to ignore the faiths of others, specifically, to engross themselves in the rituals and ethos of other traditions with an aim of experiencing personally something of the forceful that typifies the religious experience of those others (Field 2008). Knitter acknowledges that the accomplishment of this dual membership is exclusive for a minority, but it is a condition if discourse between religions is to succeed (Field 2008). The recognition that dual membership is merely likelihood for some, viewed together with the definition of Smith of knowledge, comprising religious knowledge, as the agreement among brilliant women and men, is fairly disturbing (Bae 2001). At the very least, it is quite remarkable that a scheme such as pluralism, which avoids exclusivism, must display such elitist inclinations (Haers & Merrigan 2000). It has already been mentioned that Knitter is overdrawn to the idea of Wilfred Cantwell Smith, the standing founder of pluralism. One of the core premises of Smith’s philosophy is the fundamental agreement of people’s religious past (Bae 2001). What is occurring in Christianity is also occurring in other religious streams, that is, the course of “God’s loving, creative, inspiring dealings with recalcitrant and sinful but not unresponsive men and women” (Smith 1981: 171). The effect of this is that any satisfactory description of “the objective pole in religious experience,” (Smith 1981: 186) the “reality greater than man [sic],” (p. 186) the “surpassingly great Other,” (Smith 1981: 186) should essentially consider the entire history of the involvement of the human race with the Transcendent. With respect to this, it is crucially significant not to limit oneself to the alleged founding occasions of any religious faith (Hofheinz & Lawrence 1998). Religious should not be evaluated based on their founding moments, what Smith unsympathetically refers to as “big-bang theory of [religious] origins” (Hofheinz & Lawrence 1998: 297), but based on their continuing role to the life of faith of the human race. To understand religious history sufficiently, one should perceive it as a mechanism of an unbroken creation, specifically, as a continuing effort on the part of pious women and men to give form to the religious experience (Baker 2005). This is what Smith implies when he asserts that “the truth that one seeks [is] to be found not in the history of religion but through it” (Smith 1981: 190). Thus Smith can portray all religious communities as communities in action, and assert that what “the religious systems of the world have in common... is dynamic and personalist, is historical; has to do with becoming more than with being” (Smith 1981: 192). They are involved in a concerted endeavour. Hereafter, the world’s religions are themselves to be not the object, but the subject, of religious studies. Smith imagines a “theology that emerges out of ‘all the religions of the world’ or... all the religious communities of the world, or better still (incipiently) all the religious sub-communities of the world human community” (Bae 2001: 232). This form of theology is currently being created (Bae 2001). A fresh theology requires a fresh language (Race 1993). Leonard Swidler maintains that, given the ‘deabsolutised’ interpretation of truth, Christians should “complement our constantly critiqued statements [of beliefs] with statements from different ‘standpoints’. That is, we need to engage in dialogue with those who have differing cultural, philosophical, social, religious viewpoints so as to strive toward an ever fuller—but never ending--- perception of the truth if the meaning of things” (Knitter 1996: 25-26). Swidler suggests that people create an intercultural language, or what he refers to an ‘ecumenical Esperanto’, to express those ideas accumulated from our collective experience of the magnificent (Knitter 1996: 25). Similar to the fundamentally evolutionary image of pluralism, Swidler further claims that “an ‘ecumenical Esperanto,’ and the ‘ecumenical consciousness’ and the ‘universal theology of religion-ideology’ that it expresses and helps to form, are all never-ending, never endable, projects that ineluctably draw human beings on—for human beings unendingly seek reality, even if it be in unendingly differing ways” (Knitter 1996: 26). Likewise, Hick (1993) hypothesises that, “now that the religious traditions are consciously interacting with each other in the one world of today, in mutual observation and dialogue, it is possible that their future development may be on gradually converging courses [our emphasis] (p. 146).” He furthers (Hick 1993: 146): For during the next few centuries they [the world’s religions] will no doubt continue to change, and it may be that they will grow closer together, and even that one day such names as ‘Christianity,’ ‘Buddhism,’ ‘Islam,’ ‘Hinduism,’ will no longer describe the current configurations of men’s religious experience and belief... The future I am thinking of is... one in which what we now call the different religions will constitute the past history of different emphases and variations within a global religious life. This image is characteristic of pluralist theology. For scholars of pluralist theology, religious knowledge is in due course the outgrowth of the human pursuit to grasp reality (Field 2008). This perspective enables us to do away with the idea of revelation, provided that by revelation we imply knowledge of the object of religion bestowed once for all beforehand or, in terms of Avery Dulles’s words, “true and divinely certified knowledge, especially of things beyond the normal range of human inquiry” (Dulles 1995: 398-399). Undoubtedly, Smith maintains that in our contemporary, global era the theologian is “being invited to use the conceptual category ‘revelation’ only, if at all, in a way that is intellectually appropriate to our new and enlarged awareness of what has in fact been going on” (Smith 1981: 128). Moreover, what has been continuing is the mechanism of unbroken creation where in “the transcendent, indeed infinite, truth (‘God’), beyond history and continuingly contemporaneous” (Haers & Merrigan 2000: 541) with it, has been taking part in pious women and men. Thus, Smith can argue that “all human history is a divine-human complex in motion, the process of humankind’s double involvement in a mundane and simultaneously a transcendent environment” (Haers & Merrigan 2000: 64). The contemporary period is encouraged to express this notion by the growth of a disciplined, decisive, and communal religious self-realisation that adopts its lead from current experiences with the transcendent, not from previous expressions of that experience (Perry 2001). The expression of the experience with the professed transcendent moves us to the next attribute of pluralist theology, the perspective that theology is culturally determined (Barnes 2002). Conclusions Humanity still calls for an inquiry. We have to transcend the ‘salvation’ question that has preoccupied the pursuit of theology of world’s religions, “who is saved?” and outside the philosophical inquiry of the Western world of the particular and the universal that has dominated the principle of religion pursuit, “how does a solitary be connected with the diverse?” We should not throw away these inquiries. But we require a grander question, a broader question, a more profound question, a question with which to involve all of humanity, not only our small piece of it. It is time to espouse the grandest, broadest, most profound inquiry of all, the question of harmony. The deepest desire of Jesus Christ, his genuine yearning, the one he articulated when confronting his demise, was “That they may be one” (John 17). Therefore, the inquiry for us is how we can turn this deepest wish into a reality. Christians all over the world are in a notable position right now. Christianity is the largest religious conviction in the world without a doubt. With the Internet and globalisation, Christian membership is becoming increasingly widespread. References Aleaz, K. (2008) Christian Thought through Advaita Vedanta, India: ISPCK. Bae, K.-W. (2001) Homo Fidei: A Critical Understanding of Faith in the Writings of Wilfred Cantwell Smith and its Implications for the Study of Religion, New York: Peter Lang Publishing. Barker, G. (2005) Jesus in the Worlds Faiths Scholars and Leaders from Five Religions Reflect on His Meaning, New York: Orbis. Barnes, M. (2002) Theology and the Dialogue of Religions, Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. Bowden, J. (2005) Encyclopedia of Christianity, UK: Oxford University Press. Carson, D. (2002) The Gagging of God, Michigan: Zondervan. Dulles, A. (1994) Religion and Revelation: A Theology of the Worlds Religions, Theology Today , 398-99. Field, H. (2008) Saving Truth from Paradox, UK: Oxford University Press. Haers, J. & Merrigan, T. (eds). (2000) The Myriad Christ: Plurality and the Quest for Unity in Contemporary Christology, Peeters Publishers. Hick, J. (1993) God and the Universe of Faiths, Oxford: Oneworld. Hofheinz, W.C. & Lawrence, K.T. (1998) Exploring Religious Meaning, New Jersey: Prentice Hall. Knitter, P. (2002) Introducting Theologies of Religions, New York: Orbis Books. Knitter, P. (1996) Jesus and the Other Names: Christian Mission and Global Responsibility, Maryknoll, NY: Orbis. Medley, M. (2002) Imago Trinitatis, University Press of America. Mitchell, S. (1994) Anatolia: Land, Men, and Gods in Asia Minor, Volume II: The Rise of the Church, USA: Oxford University Press. Muck, T. C. (2007) Theology of Religions after Knitter and Hick: Beyond the Paradigm. Interpretation, 7+. Perry, T. S. (2001) Radical Difference: A Defence of Hendrik Kraemers Theology of Religions, Waterloo, Ont.: Wilfrid Laurier University Press. Race, A. (1993) Christians and Religious Pluralism: Patterns in the Christian Theology of Religion, London: SCM. Smith, W. C. (1990) Towards a World Theology, New York: Orbis Books. Tillich, P. (1973) Systematic Theology, London: University of Chicago Press. Read More