Christ and Dionysus
October 9, 2010
I’m really loving my Greek and Roman Mythology class. On the one hand, it’s a 1000 level course, so the ‘difficulty’ is pretty minimal, but being a four credit class instead of a three means that we get a ton of reading in the original sources. Amongst other things, it has been very interesting for me to read these ‘myths’ and ‘see parallels’ in certain Scriptural images. As a friend of mine recently confirmed, it is hard to look at Noah the same after reading the Epic of Gilgamesh.
So I find myself confronted with how to understand these things. Of course I want to affirm the ‘uniqueness’ of Christ (and I do!) but it is intellectually irresponsible to apologetically argue that Christ, as represented in Scripture – that is, on a textual as compared to an ontological level – is a totally unique ‘apocalyptic event’ without precedence in other sacred literature. (I take this to be at least a part of what Hans Frei argues.)
A classic example is a confusion that sometimes happened as Christianity came into contact with its neighbors. Jesus was sometimes understood as a sort of Dionysus figure – Christ as Vine; as transforming life in the Eucharist; and as Harrower of Hell, were taken to be parallels to certain Dionysian myths.
There are two thinkers in particular who have been helping me, though in many ways they take radically different positions. Rowan Williams has a sort of take on this in an essay entitled “The Finality of Christ” in his astounding “On Christian Theology.” Williams wants to see Jesus “not dehistoricized or absolutized as an icon of significance, but neither [as] depicted as the teacher of one among several possible ways of salvation. He is presented as the revelation of God: as God’s question, no more, no less. Being a Christian is being held to that question in such a way that the world of religious discourse in general may hear it.” (105)
+Williams represents here a sort of chastened iconoclasm, trying to worm between the simplistic options of ‘exclusivism,’ ‘inclusivism’ and ‘pluralism’ as commonly conceived. I’m not totally convinced of this essay on all points, but his christological focus I think is indispensable in understanding other faiths and ‘myths’ in light of Christ.
On the other hand I’ve been ruminating on C.S. Lewis’ “Reflections of the Psalms.” Famously Lewis makes a (rather good) case for understanding certain myths as ‘pointing to’ Christ. He is most convincing when talking about Plato’s picture of the ‘Perfectly Just Man’ who is scorned by society as a disruptor of the peace and subsequently crucified. Lewis goes on to say “when I meditate on the Passion while reading Plato’s picture of the Righteous One, or on the Resurrection while reading about Adonis or Balder…there is a real connection between what Plato and the myth-makers most deeply were and mean and what I believe to be the truth. I know that connection and they do not…One can, without any absurdity, imagine Plato or the myth-makers if they learned the truth, saying, “I see…so that was what I was really talking about. Of course. That is what my words really meant, and I never new it.” And with his typical generosity he concludes “(Or may we more charitably speak, not of what Plato and Virgil and the myth-makers ‘would have said’ but of what they said? For we can pray with good hope that they now know and have long since welcomed the truth; ‘many shall come from the east and west and sit down in the kingdom’)”
As it stands I’m not looking for the mythic ‘middle’ or ‘third way’ between these two, but I’m feeding off both and trying to see the truth of what they’re saying; I’m looking for the Christ in Dionysus not because I want to cheapen the truth of Christ, who remains the Way, Truth and Life – but I’m looking for him because I believe that it is in him that all things cohere.
Is This “Real” Community
February 2, 2010
The following post was first written on July 19, 2009 by Jeremy who no longer writes for the blog. I found his post buried in the “Pages” section of wordpress and realized that no one has read it since we have no links there. It has a bit of our old flavor from before we became Anglophiles.
One of the topics most discussed in churches today is that of community. In fact, so prevalent is this topic in Christian circles that even the esteemed theophiliacs have broached the subject a time or two. Unfortunately, the topic of community rarely gets past elevated rhetoric or semantical digression. All too often the pragmatics of “real” Christian community get lost in the haze of koom by ya music and all to competative game nights. (or as in the case of theophiliacs disagreements on the etimological, epistomological, and theological understandings of community). So when I came across some people who were living out radical community in a very pragmatic way it caught my attention. So I submit for your scrutiny Maharishi Vedic City in, of all places, Iowa.
This community has embraced modern living while still structuring their city around the most ancient of religious doctrines. For instance they have their own modern hospital, elementary and secondary schools, government institutions, even hotels. Yet they also meditate twice a day as a community, only consume locally grown organic food, and have a local group of devotees who practice yogic flying for sake of cultivating world peace. In every way, both ancient and modern, they have incoporated vedic principles into the very fabric of life. So as someone who belongs to a religious tradition that is currently obsessed with communality, I ask if this is a model that could prove useful for further endeavors into “real” Christian communal living?
Division and Toleration
September 6, 2009
For the first 1500 years, the Church tolerated buckets of divisive crap.
The New Testament itself tells us of the varying factions attempting to coexist in the burgeoning Hebrew turned Gentile movement. The Church fathers exhorted the body of Christ to stick to its bishops as a primary instrument of unity. Eventually the five patriarchates developed, all with unique cultural contributions to the Christian experience, and all with a degree of tolerance for the others. This toleration was aided at least in part by ignorance. Without a railroad, a printing press or an interweb these churches were often unaware of what the others were doing—especially when Christianity began to spread more extensively in geography, custom and vernacular.
It took many generations for a big movement to develop that might threaten another corner of Christian Orthodoxy . Thus, certain factions would occasionally gain too much influence and the thundering decree of a church council would have to intervene. There was, of course, that slightly embarrassing schism bit in 1054 that resulted in two Catholic churches—divided. And admittedly, in the later medieval era, Rome’s teaching magisterium flexed rather too much authoritative muscle. But when compared to today’s modern smorgasbord of gooey, western protestant nonsense—such disagreements can be put in better perspective.
Luther, in spite of his original intentions, changed all this.
Old categories were re-imagined for determining what a Church did and who Christians were. If one (even just one person!) disagreed on how these categories were to be interpreted, they had every right to institute their own rival Church. Make no mistake, the Reformers still operated with this presupposition of a single, true Church. Zwingli, Luther, Rome—someone had to be right (one’s own side of course) while the others were definitely wrong. Faced with such blatant self-justification, the Church resorted to the logical end of its unavoidable division … War.
This didn’t work. So John Locke and other Empiricists came along to rescue the western Church from the bothersome necessity of killing each other. They explained how the truths of Christianity were discernible not just via revelation but by reason as well. Each individual could discern for themselves just what it was they found most preferable to believe.
The Christian Pluralist market was born! Like today’s browser wars, competition between faiths would only improve what faith had to offer to the modern society and the modern man. Never mind those bothersome Roman Catholics with their silly exclusivist claims—this was a reasonable society, an environment of independence and free will. Faith, just like anything else, was a voluntary choice—and each particular sect had to repackage itself as the best of these choices.
Come the turn of the century, with secularism in full swing, optimism for creating the perfect society reached its zenith. Empirical Science had sliced away the mythic husk surrounding Christian faith, revealing the golden nugget of truth at its center: (something like good morals, education and democracy). Meanwhile faith had spared Science from slipping too far into cold-hearted, inhumanity. With this double-edged, Enlightened sword, the western church marched into the wilderness, into the slums and into the very crevasses that once divided it—determined to spread this new gospel.
But the vision couldn’t last.
Two world wars shattered the enlightenment vision in Europe and by the later half of the twentieth-century this disillusionment had begun to spread to North America as well. The Gospel of Reason hadn’t met universal approval and liberalism had failed to free the world of the fundamentalism it had underestimated.
At the close of the century, the hopelessly idealistic Ecumenical Movement and its ilk have reached the end of their lowest-common denominator unity and face efforts at re-identification which are sure to exclude some. Fundamentalist Islam, no longer a glimmer at the horizon, stares the Church in the face and demands attention—though it speaks a completely different language.
In just three hundred years, voluntary churches have managed to assemble 30K Protestant denominations. What hope is there for a Christian who hopes to be truly catholic? What is Orthodoxy contextualized in a world where more Christians live South of the equator than North of it? At this point, I have no idea. The best answer I’ve found is buried in my BCP, in the collects for Various Occasions.
Almighty Father, whose blessed Son before his passion prayed
for his disciples that they might be one, as you and he are one:
Grant that your Church, being bound together in love and
obedience to you, may be united in one body by the one Spirit,
that the world may believe in him whom you have sent, your
Son Jesus Christ our Lord; who lives and reigns with you, in
the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.
Interview with “The Pluralist”
July 26, 2009
This is Church of England radio, we’re here with famed blogger of infinite wit, “The Pluralist” and we’re talking about his fantastic wit. Welcome.
Pluralist – Thank you for having me and for recognizing just how good of a blogger I am.
CoER – Now we here were wanting to talk today about the recent General Convention of The Episcopal Church.
Pluralist – Yes well, we all know that Tom Wright is a dunce.
CoER – Right… well, uh I was more wanting to ask what you feel the reprocussions might be of D025 and C056?
Pluralist – I’m so glad you asked. You see us liberals, we like compromise, and that’s just what I think happened there. They looked at what was going on they said: “Right. Well, this seems as good a time as any to compromise” And, as a liberal, I can’t imagine anything being more grand than rejecting all this centralization and power mongering that the Archbishop is all on about. We need to keep power to ourselves see. Power in the hands of people like me. The problem is that power is with all these people who believe things.
CoER – So you’re saying you don’t believe things?
Pluralist – Of course I don’t believe in things! I have a master’s degree in “Modern-things-I-don’t-believe-in” I write it at the bottom of all my writings. I feel that with a degree in MTIDBI I can more readily write uncannily sarcastic and degrading blog posts. Now I have no problem with people believing in things, provided they are things that I believe in. And if they don’t that’s fine. I feel that by compromising and blog posts and by being liberal then I can make people feel small for believing in things.
CoER – Uhm, wait…now why are you in the Church of England if you don’t believe in things?
Pluralist – Well of course I believe in things. I believe that people are numbers. And if I group similar numbers together, box ‘em all up, and compare them, I find that all the boxes believe in something. I have another degree in “People-are-numbers” It’s the objective and liberal way to look at people. Well see, if all the boxes..
CoER – …you mean people?
Pluralist -…right, if all the numbers believe in Something, then that Something must be real right?
CoER – That doesn’t sound very analytical
Pluralist – The wonderful things about having a degree in “People-are-numbers” and in “Modern-things-I-don’t-believe-in” is that whereas the boxes believe in something, I get the real scoop. I know what the Something is, and it is nothing at all like they think. That’s why I’m in the Church of England.
CoER – Could you elaborate further?
Pluralist – Of course Graham King is a barmpot. I don’t see how I could be very much clearer. I believe in Something. And that something is Cultural see? And since Culture in England is in the Church of England, I figure this is as good a place as any to believe in nothing…
CoER – …you mean Something?
Pluralist – Well, the Church believes in something, and that’s alright for them, even though they don’t really know that they’re berks, in time, if I compromise enough they’ll come around; I figure I can piggy back on their belief, sully it with incredible wit, and really believe whatever I objectively choose to believe. Who doesn’t like dressing up in fancy clothes and talking from a podium? That’s why I joined. It’s cultural. If I dress up in the right clothes I get to be religious with them, even though what they believe is poxy. Virgin Births and bodily Resurrections…who ever heard of such silly things?
CoER – Well we in the Church of England tends to believe in those things.
Pluralist – And that’s fine. I want everybody to believe in what they want, until they believe in what I do. But it’s when people start going on about what’s on in Jimmy’s trousers that I get upset. I figure, if I want in Jimmy’s trousers what’s that to ya? That’s when I do get upset when people aren’t liberal enough.
CoER – Splendid. Do you mind if we take a call?
Pluralist – Not at all
CoER – Hello, Erika…you have a question?
Erika – Yes, I was wondering “Why do you avail yourself of the outer forms of worship if its core content is meaningless to you? What are you saying, when you guide us through the prayers of penitence, through the hymns, the readings…”
Pluralist - Erika, thank you for asking. I’ve always liked goodies. And if I connect the dots of all my favorite goodies, it points to something. You see, when you have a degree in “People-are-numbers” then it becomes plain that goodies point to something…
Erika – Like God?
Pluralist – God?! Are you barmy? No no no. It points to the possible uncertainty of buddhist, neo-platonic meness. On the field of transcendent goodies – to use my own theological language – there can be only dress up and games. And who dresses up like the Church of England? The way I see it, if I use someone else’s language to express my own transcendent meness, I feel like a better ape.
CoER – Thank you Erika, I think we have a better idea of the depth of the Pluralists ‘theology’ – One last question Adrian…Why do like writing about Anglicanism so much?
Pluralist – Really, I’m quite bored.
CoER – Thank you
A (brief) Vision of Religious Pluralism
March 20, 2009
Jeremy recently began a thread on Religious Pluralism, and his three posts are, as usual, well thought out and reasonably argued. In my own typical fashion (ie-loud), I responded to a strain – if not the strain – of Pluralism which takes as a foundation the “unbiased” research of the Social Sciences. I pointed to what I thought were inherent weaknesses in such an approach to constructing a Pluralism which seeks to actually mold a person spiritually or attempt to critique a religious tradition. Namely the problem of the
- “Meta-narrative in a history of religions position,”
- “The Secular in the Social Sciences (with the built in irony of a “secular” take on religions which purports to form a transcendent universal religion based on its own religious agnosticism),” and the
- “The irrelency of the Social Sciences broadly concieved” as critiqued by a truly post-modern epistomology
That is to say it was mostly a polemical piece which aimed at the center of the majority of Pluralistic discourse that I am accustomed to hearing.
But I did not put anything positive in it’s place, and this abscence might seem to imply that I think all other religous people are in complete error and/or going-to-burn in the fires of hell.
I do not believe that. And so I offer here what seems to me to be a few simple consequences which flow out of an creedaly orthodox and patristically influenced meditation on “other religions.” I pre-suppose a crucial theological position.
“Knowledge” of God can never be accomplished by human effort. Even “knowledge” which comes from nature or “natural law” is only possible by the self-revelation of a God who is by nature Love. This is the orthodox position on Revelation and there is something that flows out of this.
It will not do to simply say that we agree with other religions on some “moral” issues. This seems to me to be a weak and even prideful way of looking at common ground between faiths. No. If a Buddhist believes it is wrong to kill, then this is shared Revelation and not something which we just sort of simultaneously came to by looking at the world around us. If a Muslim says that “Allah is merciful,” whatever the influence of the Judeo-Christian religion on Islam, this is something which is deep and can be called nothing other than a revelation of the Character of God. We cannot portion anything specifically “Christian” off to one side and say that the things we have in common are but “moral” issues on some other side.
There are reasons that several of the Church fathers explicitly espoused a Universalist soteriology, and many others came real close. That is, to take the Atonement and Resurrection seriously demand that we think about the effects of the Incarnation on the whole Human race. Consider the reading today in the lectionary in Romans where Paul says that “since ALL died through the sin of the one man, so ALL are made alive because of the one Messiah“ I’m not saying that this “proves” my point, but that even as early as Paul, there was needed a reflection which showed the universal and ontological change which happened in humanity on account of the Gospel. One which is not merely acquired by choice but by the very nature of what has just happened.
And so, if as Paul said, the Gospel “has been preached to the whole world” (a strange thing to say since he obviously knew that that was not the actual case, unless he thought this meant something other than the easy reading) then it should not be a surprise that we should find the real Spirit of God at work in people other than those baptized. Early thought maintains that Christ is renewing the whole of Creation, not just the few elect.
So it seems to me that a religious pluralism, one that posits that yes some from different faiths may indeed find renewal by Christ at the end of the Age on account of their “faith” is an honest position to hold.
Christians do not “own” God, but we are stewards of the Mystery of Faith:
“Christ has died, Christ has risen, Christ will come again” Amen!
p.s. – Two great takes on this by C.S. Lewis can be found in his books “The Great Divorce” and the scene towards the end of “The Last Battle” in the Narnia series where “Aslan” and a “Colourman” have a conversation.
The Evolution of Religion: Toward Religious Pluralism: Part 3
February 16, 2009
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Part 3: A Way Forward
In the first two posts of this series, I attempted to lay out a broad history and nuanced position toward the issues surrounding religious pluralism today. As has been pointed out many times before, such work is inherently arbitrary in that it seeks to limit such a broad position. None the less, I attempted this feat with one purpose in mind. My goal has been to show, as the title of my series relays, the evolution of religion. At this point, however, I feel the need, for humility’s sake, to take a step back.
In this final post of the series, I want to lay out a pragmatic approach for mankind in relation to the plurality of religion in our world today. This approach will be centered around the fostering of humility and relationship. This post will not be so focused on definitions or broad generalizations, as my first two. Concurrently, this post will be shorter than my previous two. I would like the reader to see my first two posts, as simply a doorway to step into the topic which I will attempt to breach in this post. For sure, there are many doorways one could travel through to reach this position. Some of which may be more effective than the one I have presented. I simply laid forth, as best I could, the path for which I took.
To say that religion is an ever evolving entity is by nature quite abstract and convoluted. The very term “evolution” carries with it much baggage that is inapplicable to the intent of my thesis. When one speaks of the evolution of religion, it must be understood what can and cannot be inferred in any authoritative way. First it must be fleshed out that the evolution for which I speak is in revelation of the uncontainable, not in any cultural or institutional sense. My goal is not to speak to the evolving of religious institutions, as such a task would be far beyond my abilities. Rather, it is to acknowledge the evolution of personal revelation within those who seek to understand and relate to transcendence. To be more clear, my goal is to acknowledge that mankind has always sought to better understand and relate to a God that is far beyond his reach. As such that God has continually given mankind glimpses of himself through divine sparks of revelation. It is only obvious then, that as the sum of those revelations grows, so too does the understanding man.
At this point I would like to dwell for a moment on our understanding of God. It is agreed on, in some form, by every religious tradition, that the divine experiences for which man has touched have originated from a source far above the grasp of mans conception. To put it more bluntly, every religious tradition affirms that we know very little of the infinitude that is God. In fact, I would go as far as to say that an inherent aspect of religious experience is an understanding of how minute the picture or revelation received really is. It has been said that an experience of the divine is like a drop of water in the desert. It is only meant to stir ones thirst for more. Concurrently, an experience of such, from such an undefinable source, can only itself remain undefinable. None the less, it is man’s nature to try.
This is where religion, in its institutional form, comes into play. The institution of religion places a linguistic framework around the experience to help man to define what has happened. It must be noted that this is not a negative function, but rather a necessity. Without a definition, in linguistic terms, it is quite impossible for man to form a relationship to the source of the experience. It must also be noted that religious experience is not an ever present reality. Each drop of experience relates more “truth” and must sustain the individual whom experienced it. It is the time between these experiences that one is compelled to plumb the depths of the revelation given.
The linguistic traditions, supplied by the religious institutions of man, aid the individual in their search for understanding and relationship. This distinction between religious experience and religious institutions is important. It is quite possible to make value judgments of the language for which the various religious institutions construct. Each linguistic tradition is formulated from the combined experiences of a localized group. As such, there are inherent strengths and weaknesses to each tradition. This is not to say that it is a simple task to evaluate the linguistic constructs of any religious institution. Any attempt to do so would require an in depth understanding of the people and culture for which each tradition is grounded. This is why, in my opinion, evaluation of these traditions is best left to be done from within, though there is certainly value in outside perspective.
This evaluation, however, must stop at the institutional level. To attempt to evaluate the personal religious experience of another is quite a different task. Such a task is dangerous, arrogant, and highly unproductive. It must always be remembered that the source of these experiences is far beyond the grasp of our intellectual understanding. What does this mean in a practical sense? It means that one can evaluate, for instance, the religious tradition that interpreted a divine experience as a call to violence. Via the constructs of human reasoning one can determine that such an interpretation must be an inferior linguistic traditional construct. One cannot, however, presume that the human beings that followed such a construct have received an inferior religious experience.
One might argue that this is only a semantic difference. This, however, is not the case. The pragmatic value in making this distinction is the continued realization of the inherent human vulnerability of ones own religious linguistic tradition. This is vital in the pluralistic world for which we live. It is only through humility that one can truly grasp the most of the divine.
This leads me to my final point. Religious scholar Diana Eck has said,
“Whoever knows only one religion is unlikely to understand what religion is about”
While I cannot speak to the entirety of her point, I do feel that she has tapped into an important practical aspect of religious pluralism. If the source of all human religious experience is far greater than the comprehension of mankind, then it only follows that the combined revelations of mankind holistically, paints a fuller picture than when seen through a dichotomy. In other words, we can only gain in our quest to understand and relate to the divine by seeking out and learning from the experiences of others who have touched its essence (I apologize for the constant vacillation of terms in relation to God. It is often difficult when speaking on this matter to confidently choose only one term.). If it is truly ones desire to understand and relate more fully to God, then it seems only natural to seek out others who are like-minded. I understand that this can sometimes be a tricky proposition. Each experience is couched in a religious linguistic tradition, and often those traditions are mutually exclusive. There is, however, a way to sort through the peculiars of each tradition and find the essence of revelation.
The way for this clarity to be found is through relationship. It is only when we commune with others, and our hearts become one, that we can find the essence of the revelation for which they have received. We will of course interpret that revelation through our own tradition, but we will have gained in our understanding of the one who is beyond comprehension.
This post, in many ways, has taken a step back from the ambitious generalizations of my previous ones. As I laid out previously, this was intentional. I have tried to avoid making value judgements on religious traditions. This is not to say that there is no value in doing so. I feel, however, that this is best left to others far more qualified than myself.
As I have taken this journey, being enriched by the experiences of others both within and outside of my tradition, I have often reevaluated the linguistic tradition that I have used to define experiences of God. This I believe is a natural outcome of gaining a further understanding of the God in whom I seek. Sometimes I have found it more difficult than others to understand the heart of religious experience. Specifically, a Buddhist friend comes to mind. It seems the linguistic mountain between us was larger than most. However, I have never been disappointed by the outcome no matter how difficult the journey. Each and every relationship has added a drop to my now ever growing lake of understanding of God. With each drop I am encouraged by the level of intimacy gained, while also humbled at the sheer depth of the impending ocean. My hope is that in sharing the journey that has brought me to where I am today I have better illuminated a path for others who wish to follow. I truly believe in the relevancy of my position for today. At no other time in history has such a great wealth of opportunity for cross religious investigation been prevelant. Because of the modern tools of information sharing, it is easier than ever to gain perspective from other’s experiences. This is not to dismiss the potential risk involved in such excursions, but rather to highlight the possibilities of growth.
Religious Pluralism & The Social Sciences
January 30, 2009
Rublev: Rowan Williams
“One day, God walked in, pale from the grey steppe,
slit-eyed against the wind, and stopped,
said, Colour me, breathe your blood into my mouth.I said, Here is the blood of all our people,
these are their bruises, blue and purple,
gold, brown, and pale green wash of death.These (god) are the chromatic pains of flesh,
I said, I trust, I make you blush,
O I shall stain you with the scars of birthFor ever. I shall root you in the wood,
under the sun shall bake you bread
of beechmast, never let you forthto the white desert, to the starving sand.
But we shall sit and speak around
one table, share one food, one earth.”
My mom recently commented that I do not post as much as I used to. That is because I’m back in school and have substantially more homework than I did last semester and over Christmas break. But I wanted to throw in my initial two cents in on Jeremy’s posts so far on religious pluralism.
Unfortunately it will not be quite as thorough as I should like it to be, but I will still attempt to (very) briefly demonstrate why I believe the foundations for his pluralist position is in fact the “out-of-date” or “not-relevant” system.
It is not insignificant that Jeremy has thus far begun and ended his system not at all based on any religion, or even his own personal religious experience; but rather on the backs of social scientists. He gives us a grand and sweeping account of the “history of religions” and then turns to religious scientists to determine the definition(s?!) of religion.
“The problem of Meta-narrative in the “history of religions”
The large and sweeping problem off the bat is that the account of the history of religions is itself a meta-narrative of history. It says, in essense that religious history is going somewhere - “First there was primitive religion, then the axial age, then Islam emphasised compassion, now pluralism, etc…” – and that is not where it is now nor is it where it has been.
Part of deconstructing is attempting, insofar as it is possible and aparently truthful, to deconstruct even ones own presuppositions, and it is this tendency which has led me, though appreciating insights which have come of thinking in terms of the words “pre-, modern, and post-modern (even post-post-modern!)” to ultimately come to reject the notion that history is neatly divideable up into epochs where thought was broadly uniform and the presuppositions the same; whereby we are able to box people and ideas up for critique en masse. I have learned in reading some of the classic western philosophy lately, is that it is a myth to posit that it was only in the “Enlightenment” where “reason” became the base authority. A look at Socrates, Plato, and the many skeptics in our “history of thought” reveals that the same motivation for Socrates to reject the many gods of his native Athens is the same reason that led to “Enlightenment” thinkers to reject the authority of the Roman Catholic Church. Plato was just as convinced as Rousseau that reason as opposed to revelation could be counted on to give an objective, ontologically-true account of the (uni)versal reality apart from intervening spiritualities and deities to explain the unexplainable.
Which is why I think that it is simply inaccurate to speak in terms of what religions were doing or saying during specific “eras.” The very idea of “eras” is so frustrating since it is nothing but an interpretive tool on the page. The closest we might get to an accurate account of thought over time might be to speak of “schools” but not “eras.” Especially when said “eras” become a tool of oppressive violence to another’s belief system.
“The problem of the secular in the “history of religions”
As Shawn Wamsley just asserted commenting on Jeremy’s second post, narratives cannot be universalized to be demonstrably true outside of their own meta-narratives. The bare fact of the matter is that the assertions of accouts of the history of religions are done amongst the intellectual elite in the houses of learning still living under the mistaken assumption that they can give an objective account both of history and of “religions”; of what it is, of where it is going, what it means, and what we should do about it. It defines religion, (which it cannot do succinctly enough so it must resort to multiple definitions of religion), it defines the distinguishing marks of religion, it defines the “eternal core” of those religions, and it decides what we as a society must do about it. If there is one thing I learned in Cultural Anthropology and Environmental Science, it is not a lot about other cultures or about anthropogenic global warming, but about the idealogical core of the social sciences and their own meta-narratives.
(I hope this does not to sound too nasty)
At the end of the day, I believe modern-western religious pluralism is nothing but the bastard child of secularism and its exultation of “reason” over the rest of the world.
(Lest that seem to make me a fundamentalist, consider that Walter Brueggemann himself, no conservative by any estimation, consistently says that it is secularism which is at the heart of the decline in the Mainline.) What it is is an account of the history and truthfulness of religions as critiqued by its own presumption. Though some social scientists might recognize the reality of “the trancendent (as defined by them),” ultimately it says to the great faiths “Thanks for getting us this far, we’ll take it from here. Moreover, we will personally decide what it is which actually counts for something from your religion, and in time, if you attend enough of our Universities, you will come to see it our way.” It says what “god(s)” (as we define or don’t define the term) really wants. But, religious pluralism bases this not on a belief in the revealing work of “god” but its own “objective” accounts of the faiths.
“The irrelevency of the social sciences, broadly conceived”
Jeremy posited that given the nature of our knowing about the world and about religions; and given that we are in an unavoidable pluralistic context, “exclusivist” religion is “no longer relevant” This seems to be an important phrase for Jeremy since he will not assert that “exclusivist” faith is itself “wrong.” This allows him a greater shield against the critique often leveled against religious monists and pluralists alike that their own system is “exclusive in its own way.” Yet, the foundations for his pluralism is based on the violent exlusivism of the western social sciences.
Oddly enough, given the post-modern critique, and especially the “radical orthodox” critique continually developing in post-liberal anglo-catholicism (with which I continually find myself agreeing), it is Jeremy’s intellectual foundations which are “irrelevant” as they have been crumbling since at least the time of Derrida, Focoult, Rory and Gadamer among others.
Now all of this is not to say anything negative about Jeremy. Jeremy is actually one of the most compassionate and generous people I know (that is not an exageration); but as long as his reasoning for religious pluralism is dependent on the social sciences and not on the revealing love and activity of the Holy Trinity, then I am going to have to remain unconvinced.
Tony Hunt
jstambaugh
Shawn Wamsley
