Some Thoughts on Religious Exclusivism

In my last post I explored the religious pluralism endorsed by, among others, the theologian John Hick and my mother. Both see the various religions of the world as historically and culturally situated responses to a transcendent reality. But this transcendent reality is infinite, and our grasp of it is only partial (what “part” we see being a function of what our cultural ideas and presuppositions enable us to see). Furthermore, this transcendent reality defies literal description in terms of ordinary human concepts. As such, Hick and my mother see all religious belief systems as literally false. These systems of belief need to be understood as metaphors, as gestures towards a mystery that defies our understanding. As metaphors, their worth is measured pragmatically—by how well they help us to attune ourselves with this transcendent reality, and so live our lives in harmony with it. Insofar as different religious traditions succeed in achieving this goal, they are all pathways to “salvation” in the broadest sense, and they all have a share in “truth” in some non-literal, pragmatic sense.


Now there is much about this picture of religion that I admire and think is on the right track. Clearly, there is much religious language and narrative that is best understood as metaphorical—and that loses its value when treated in essentially literal terms (the first two chapters of Genesis come to mind). But this does not entail that all religious doctrines and narratives are purely metaphorical, that there is nothing implied by a statement like “God is good” that could qualify as literally correct. Respecting religious diversity doesn’t require denying this possibility. Nor does admitting this possibility undermine the pluralistic interpretation of religious diversity. The hypothesis that the diversity of religions is consistent with a common inspiration, that this diversity springs from the same well of divine revelation, doesn’t depend on the nothing-but-metaphor hypothesis.

Recall again the Hindu parable of the blind men who encounter an elephant. If the man who grasps the trunk says, “It’s a snake,” that will be literally false but metaphorically useful. But if the same man says, “It’s flexible,” that is not a metaphor. And when the blind man who grasps the tusk says, “It’s hard,” that is not a metaphor either. In this case, the diversity arises because, even though they are using literal language to correctly describe what they've encountered, they are in contact with different parts of the beast.

But whatever we think of the issue of just how much religious language is metaphorical (and this issue here is not one of all-or-nothing), the idea that divine revelation is limited to one faith tradition—and that there are no insights into ultimate reality that can be gleaned from serious attention to other worldviews, other traditions—is deeply troubling. We might call this view “extreme doctrinal exclusivism”: the view that divine revelation has only been poured into your faith tradition, and that all other traditions are mere lies and human invention.

(Notice that someone like PZ Myers, on this definition, qualifies as a certain kind of extreme doctrinal exclusivist, insofar as he regards all supernatural religious traditions as nothing but lies and human invention. This may help explain why, when religious fundamentalists give up their faith, they are more likely to become atheists in Dawkins’ or Myers’ mold than they are to become pluralists. From the starting point of “They’re all made up except one,” it’s a shorter step to “They’re all made up” than to “They’re all finite, partial, and fallible responses to the same underlying transcendent reality.”)

Much of my aversion to extreme doctrinal exclusivism is pragmatic. First of all, if different religious traditions do have insights to share with one another, and wisdom to gain through such sharing, then the idea that one’s own tradition has exclusive access to all the truths that matter would block the open-mindedness which is a prerequisite for such mutual learning. This seems a bad pragmatic bet.

Furthermore, this extreme exclusivism seems a pathway to a kind of ideological division, a cultural bifurcation of the world into “us” (those who have been enlightened) and “them” (all others, who’ve been left in the dark). If human history has taught us anything, it is that such divisions are a source of intractable conflict and violence. No good has ever come of them.

These pragmatic considerations can be supplemented with theological ones. If there is a God anything like what the Judeo-Christian tradition affirms, it would seem strange indeed that this God would limit divine self-disclosure to one small corner of the world, leaving the rest of humanity in the dark about the existence and presence of a caring creator until such a time as unsubstantiated testimonies should wend there way across the globe. And if there is some other sort of transcendent reality which has in some fashion impressed itself upon the consciousness of people in one cultural and historical context, it would seem strange that it wouldn’t happen in other cultural and historical contexts, given that it is the same human nature that exists everywhere.

None of this, however, implies that one religion won’t have insights that other religions lack, or that one religion won’t have been the only vessel into which some distinctive truth of great importance has fallen. In fact, the possibility of religious traditions learning from one another seems to presuppose that each religious tradition at least potentially carries insights that are unique—insights into the divine that are left out, underappreciated, or mistakenly rejected by the others.

Not only does it seem important not to deny this possibility when considering traditions other than one’s own. It seems important not to deny this possibility when it comes to one’s own faith tradition. In other words, it is consistent with this model of interreligious respect to believe that your own faith tradition has something important to contribute to the conversation, some insight into the truth that other religions might not have.

And if you do believe this--perhpas with respect to most central and distinctive teachings of your faith tradition--aren’t you then being an exclusivist about those teachings? Clearly, you’re not being a soteriological exclusivist—that is, you’re not ascribing to the view that salvation only comes through your faith, and that adherents to rival religious traditions are damned. Nor are you an extreme doctrinal exclusivist.

But you would be an exclusivist in a broader sense, encompassed by the following definition of exclusivism offered by Alvin Plantinga: “the exclusivist holds that the tenets or some of the tenets of one religion—Christianity, let’s say—are in fact true; he adds, naturally enough, that any propositions, including other religious beliefs, that are incompatible with those tenets are false." (emphasis added)

Another point to keep in mind about religious exclusivism is that the Hickian pluralist is an exclusivist on a meta-level. While Hickian pluralists do not hold that one religion is true and others false, don’t they hold that their pluralistic take on religion is correct, and that other takes on religion are incorrect to the extent that they disagree? It seems so, and this is what leads Kevin Meeker, for example, to conclude, “The real debate is not whether we should exclude, but what type of exclusion is defensible… In short, there is no sharp dividing line between exclusivism and pluralism; so we are faced with a continuum of options.”

In fact, it is precisely because progressive religion does exclude, does reject some modes of religious expression (most notably fundamentalism), that it doesn’t fall prey to Sam Harris’s overgeneralized critique of moderate religion. Harris accuses moderate religion of teaching the “terrible dogma” that “every human being should be free to believe whatever he wants about God.”

But religious progressives don’t believe this terrible dogma. They reject the image of God as a vengeful tyrant, insisting that such an image is dangerously mistaken. That’s exclusion. They reject the notion that God has entrusted His revelation to only one faith in human history. That’s exclusion, too. They reject the idea that God chose to reveal His will inerrantly in a single holy book. That’s exclusion. They reject the notion that God planted fossils of creatures that never existed and created evidence of great age in a world that is only a few thousand years old, all in order to test the faith of those who might question His inerrant literal revelation in the aforementioned holy book. That, again, is exclusion.

Without some measure of exclusivism, religious believers would fall prey to Harris’s terrible dogma. And so I don’t want to treat exclusivism in every sense of the word as an evil. There are reasons to exclude—some based on a preponderance of empirical evidence, some based on morally pernicious implications, some based on logical coherence, some based on pragmatic fruits.

But sometimes we don’t have compelling reasons of any of these kinds. What then? Under those circumstances, should assuduously eschew exclusivism in any form?

Perhaps not. Allen Stairs, a philosopher at the University of Maryland, attempts to offer a portrait of a certain kind of religious exclusivism—what I’m tempted to call a friendly exclusivism—that might be legitimate even if you have no compelling reason to reject those who disagree with you.

Stairs explains what he has in mind by offering a kind of portrait of a certain sort of religious believer: one who doesn’t “settle for a vague, free-floating theism” but has more concrete religious beliefs that exceed what the weight of evidence can sustain. But her belief, he says, “is not a sham; she thinks they might really be true and that even if they aren’t fully true, they capture something important about the Ultimate. They also flesh out her sense of the Ultimate into something that can form the basis for a religious practice.” Stairs goes on to describe the view as follows:

…Plantinga takes religious belief at face value; Hick maintains that all specific religious belief is strictly speaking false. The view we’re considering isn’t like either of these. It agrees that, broadly speaking, the believer is entitled to trust her sense that the skeptic is wrong. It allows that perhaps some one religion captures The Truth, and perhaps the Ultimate is a Kantian noumenon, entirely beyond our cognitive grasp. At the level of practice, however, the view is more like exclusivism; the Hindu will believe as a Hindu does; the Christian will believe like a Christian. But behind the belief there will be a higher-level lightness; not an ironic attitude, but trust coupled with a deep sense of epistemic humility.”

In capturing this “higher-level lightness,” Stairs offers the example of Paul, a Roman Catholic who accepts the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation—that is, the belief that the bread and wine really become the body and blood of Christ in the Mass. “Nonetheless,” Stairs writes, “he knows that most people, including many Christians, believe otherwise. I think the following is perfectly possible: actively believing this is deeply important to Paul’s religious identity. At the same time, actively disbelieving contrary doctrines isn’t important to him at all.”

Paul, as portrayed by Stairs, feels no urgent need to persuade those who think otherwise. They are as entitled to their view as he is to his own. Even so, he remains deeply devoted to this doctrine to the exclusion of others that conflict with it. He believes this and not that. But if you believe that, it doesn’t bother him in the least. And, says Stairs, “he might not be willing to say that people with this Protestant view are making a mistake, and if asked whether he thinks they are wrong, he might reply that the question seems beside the point for him; saying ‘no’ would do a bad job of capturing his attitude, but so would saying ‘yes.’”

Stairs offers a careful look at what he takes to be the underlying rationale for this kind of attitude. I won’t go into the details, but the core of it is a balance between two things: first, the inescapable sense (which defines the person as a believer) that “there is something Ultimate and that it is to be trusted or even loved,” a sense that excludes “beliefs that make the Ultimate morally ugly”; second, an awareness that the specific elaboration of this sense which grounds our religious life does not rise to the level of knowledge, and as such could be mistaken. Not only that, but on crucial matters other religious traditions could, on matters where they disagree with us, be right, or partially right—or the nature of the divine could defy our grasp in such a way that the tension between our own views and those of rival faiths might do a better job of capturing the divine reality than any of those beliefs alone.

The kind of “friendly exclusivist” Stairs has in mind (which Stairs is inclined to call a “pluralist exclusivist”) holds to her religious beliefs in a manner that does not rule out these possibilities—that one’s beliefs are in error, that one has mistaked metaphors for literal descriptions, that one can gain genuine insight from listening to and engaging with those who have an opposing view.

So, is this kind of exclusivism something we should hold up as legitimate, as expressing a way of cleaving to religious faith that is (in language I use elsewhere) intellectually respectable and morally benign? I think more needs to be said before reaching any final conclusions, but it does seem right to me that we should resist the urge to too quickly label exclusivism as “bad” and pluralism as “good,” and treat the two as incommensurable opposites. The situation, as usual, is muddier and messier than that.

My Mother's Religious Pluralism--Formalized by John Hick

On Monday I turned to the last topic of the semester in my philosophy of religion class: religious diversity. This is a topic that, in a way, strikes close to home—specifically, the home in which I was raised. Not, however, because my home was characterized by religious diversity.

As I think I’ve mentioned before, I am the son of two agnostic preachers’ kids. Growing up, I cannot recall my father ever talking about God or religion or anything supernatural. I think it was in college that he once told me about a time he found himself in church reciting the words of the Lutheran liturgy—only to realize that he was simply mouthing words that meant nothing to him (and which, when he reflected on their meaning, he didn't believe).

My mother, by contrast, was bitter about her fundamentalist upbringing and so spoke about it quite a bit. If she had a faith, it was in the worth and dignity of all people regardless of their religion. If she had a doctrine, it was this: If there is a God, that God wouldn’t give a damn what religion you are and certainly wouldn’t condemn you to hell for being raised in the wrong faith tradition...or for failing to convert to the right one when you encounter it (even though its being the right one is obvious only to those who happened to be raised in it).

I can’t count how many times my mother said to me growing up, “If I’d been raised a Jew, I’d be a Jew today. If I’d been raised a Hindu, I’d be a Hindu today.” And I’d snidely think to myself, “Then why aren’t you a fundamentalist Baptist today?”

Of course, her mantra was precisely intended to explain why she was no longer a fundamentalist Baptist: The faith of her childhood taught that those who had not explicitly accepted Jesus as their Lord and Savior would suffer eternal hell after death. My mother’s point was that which beliefs seem reasonable to you will be largely a matter of upbringing. Someone raised Muslim would be as likely to believe that salvation depends on accepting Jesus as Lord as someone raised Christian would be to embrace the Koran as the inerrant revelation of God.

On this basis, my mother came to the realization that if salvation does depend on explicitly accepting Jesus as Lord, whether you're saved will be largely a function of how you were raised. My mother—quite rightly—found this implication intolerable. When my grandfather, a baptist minister, relocated the family from Norway to California in pursuit of a vision of joining an American evangelist in leading a great religious awakening in the United States (didn't happen), my mother found herself in the vibrant artistic and intellectual climate of the Bay Area. Other faiths took on human faces, faces that my mother could not in good conscience condemn to hell. Nor could she work up any enthusiasm for trying to convert them to Christianity. After all, what reasons could she give that would sound any more convincing to them than an argument for converting to Islam would sound to her?

And so, instead, her natural curiosity and open-mindedness inspired her to respond to people of other faiths in a different way--by seeking to learn about their beliefs and traditions. And the more she learned, the more wonderful she found all of that diversity to be. She became appalled by any worldview that would cast a negative judgment on such diversity. She condemned all religious exclusivism. She became a respecter of all faith traditions...but a believer in none.

I remember, once, telling my mother that in order to have a rainbow, you need to have discrete bands of color. And in order to have religious diversity, you need people who are committed to a particular faith--that is, people who really believe what their religion teaches. And to the extent that one's religious teachings conflict with those of other faiths, to believe in one's own religious teachings is to believe that the opposed teachings are mistaken. "What you value," I told her, "depends on there being people who are exclusivists. Take that away, and it's like the kid who starts a painting with all the colors of the rainbow but keeps blending the colors together. Eventually it's all just a uniform brown."

When I got more philosophically sophisticated, I diagnosed my mother's error in terms of a distinction between soteriological exclusivism and what might be called doctrinal exclusivism. The former refers to the view that was rampant in the fundamentalist world of my mother's childhood: the view that salvation only comes through one particular faith. Fail to follow the path laid out by that religion...and you are doomed. The latter refers to the belief that one's own religion has a unique claim on the truth--that other religions, insofar as their teachings differ from one's own, are in error. The point I wanted to make was that while the existence of the religious diversity my mother so valued did not require soteriological exclusivism, it did require doctrinal exclusivism. Furthermore, my mother's objections to exclusivism were really targeting the soterliological kind, and didn't have any clear implications with respect to doctrinal exclusivism.

I don't think I ever tried to make this argument to my mother in such technical terms, but in whatever form I did make it, she wasn't impressed. What did impress her (far more than my kid-painting-a-rainbow analogy) was the Hindu parable of the blind men who encounter an elephant. One touches the elephant's side and declares, "It's like a wall!" One grasps the trunk and says, "No, it's like a snake!" Another takes hold of a leg and announces, "No, it's like a tree trunk." Still another grasps the tail and says, "It's like a rope."

(I have a cartoon clipping that used to hang on my office door, of four bindfolded men touching a strange construct--a wall standing on tree stumps, with a snake coiling over one end and a rope hanging from the other. All the men agree that it's an elephant.)

Now this parable captures, in a narrative way, not only my mother's view of religious diversity but also the religious pluralism of John Hick. In its briefest form, Hick sees world religions as culturally situated interpretations of  "the noumenal Real" that transcends our conceptual and empirical grasp. As Hick sees it, all religions, "at their experiential roots," are "in contact with the same ultimate reality, but that their differing experiences of that reality, interacting over the centuries with the different thought-forms of different cultures, have led to increasing differentiation and contrasting elaboration..."

For Hick, the divine, as infinite, "transcends the grasp of the human mind." As such, "the God whom our minds can penetrate and whom our thoughts can circumnavigate is merely a finite and partial image of God." Culture and historical setting influence what aspects of this infinite reality one can connect with. In Hick's words, encounters with the same divine reality "from different historical and cultural standpoints" will produce "differently focused awareness of the reality."

More significantly, the language we use to make sense of our encounters with the transcendent will be in terms of concepts and images that our culture makes available, and which are at best metaphors for the reality we are attempting to make sense of. As such, religious teachings--in the manner of metaphors--will only gesture towards truths that they cannot literally describe.

In sum, then, our cultural context provides us with mataphors for understanding and making sense of divine self-disclosures, and it also impacts which features of the manifold mystery of the divine that we are prepared to encounter and grasp (even in a finite, metaphorical way). Put in terms of the Hindu parable, our culture determines both what part of the elephant we are likely to touch and what metaphor we use to describe it.

If we can recognize our religious language as metaphorical--and if we can learn to understand the very different metaphors of alien cultures--then diverse religions can begin to appriate the insights offered by other religions, leading us towards a truer and more complete understanding of the divine. Put in terms of the Hindu parable, if the blind men come to see that "wall" and "snake" and "tree trunk" and "rope" are metaphors for something that is none of these things--and if they can realize that these metaphors may actually be about different aspects of the underlying reality they've come in contact with--then they can begin to construct a more complete picture of what they've eoncountered. At first, that picture may be a bit like the one in my cartoon: the metaphors mashed together into a strange construction. But, perhaps, if the metaphorical nature of the language is kept firmly in mind, a more elephant-like understanding will eventually emerge.

One of the things about this "Hickian" pluralism is that it does provide a framework for respecting and valuing religious diversity--a framework that does not require that adherents to various religions be exclusivists in any sense. In fact, exclusivism may actually block religious diversity from achieving the good that it is uniquely suited to achieve, namely, supplementing the limitations of each isolated religion. And so, in a sense, Hick's pluralism succeeds in undermining my kid-painting-a-rainbow analogy. My mother was right not to be impressed.

But, of course, much religion is explicitly exclusivist. Furthermore, much religion sees its teachings as more than just metaphorical. And so, if Hick is right about the nature of religion, then it is not the case that every religion deserves equal respect. Hick himself addresses the value of individual religions in pragmatic terms. In his view, the purpose of religion is to bring us into a kind of lived alignment with the ultimate reality, moving us out of a self-centered and towards a "Reality-centered" existence. That is, we live out lives with a sense of attunement and at-one-ness with the whole...what I am tempted to call a moral existence (and which is nicely captured in the quote from Simone Weil that serves as part of the header for this blog).

Not every religion bears such pragmatic fruits, and this provides Hick with a standard for critically assessing religion despite his embrace of diversity. Likewise, his commitment to the partial and metaphorical nature of every concrete religious understanding gives him a basis for critiquing religious communities that claim exclusive access to a satisfactory, non-metaphorical vision of the divine reality. Such communities are, in Hick's view, deluding themselves.

Now, my mother is clearly a Hickian pluralist. If she has a religion, that would be it. Am I a Hickian pluralist? Not quite. Instead, I think it's better say I'm a kind of Hegelian pluralist--a perspective which I sketch out, for example, in this post. And I'm not sold on Hick's tendency to view all religious language as metaphorical. I worry about the implications of casting too heavy a shroud of mystery over the divine, for reason I've gestured to here. And while I respect and admire many other faiths, I've preserved this much from my kid-painting-a-rainbow analogy: To have a rainbow, you need fields of different colors. If everyone were like my mother--a respecter of diverse religions but an adherent to none--there'd be no religions to respect.

And I love religion too much to stand outside the rainbow. To be part of the rainbow, you need to fall somewhere in the spectrum of colors. And Christianity sings to my soul.

What I Might Have Said

Last week I gave a luncheon talk for the interdenominational “Fellowship of Christian Faculty and Staff” at my university. I’d been invited to talk about my book, but it occurred to me that for a group such as this it might be more meaningful to talk about how the book fit into a broader personal, spiritual, and intellectual journey.

After all, this was bound to be a group of people who had in one way or another confronted questions about the intersections of the religious life and the life of the intellect. And my book, whatever else it may be, is a milestone in my own personal journey to answer questions raised by these intersections. And so I thought it might be valuable to talk about the personal journey that took me from a child of agnostic preacher’s kids to the author of a liberal religious critique of the new atheists.

It was not a prepared talk. Instead, I took the informal luncheon format as an opportunity to explore in conversation with others a question I wasn’t sure I knew all the answers to. At some point I might try to write up the lessons I gained from that exploration, but what I want to discuss here is something that came up at the very end of the luncheon, when at least half of those in attendance had already left. I want to talk about what I might have said had the conversation not been abruptly derailed.

The line of conversation we were pursuing at that time was started by a thoughtful question from the minister who strives to maintain and mediate the fellowship (no mean feat, I think). It was a sincere personal question about interfaith dialogue, about finding the balance between personal conviction and genuine openness towards and respect for other faiths. Having written about this issue in a recent blog post, I shared some what I’d said there.

My answer prompted one of the more theologically conservative persons in attendance to speak up (let’s call him Jim). Jim pointed out that in John 14:6, Jesus is purported to have said, “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father but through me.” After quoting this verse, Jim went on in something like the following terms: “When I am having conversations with people of other faiths, I must remain true to this foundation. And this means I have to let them know, as hard as it is to say and to hear, that unless they accept Christ as their Lord and savior, they won’t be saved.”

This comment prompted me to launch into a very brief overview of some of my thinking about Christianity and universalism. I began by distinguishing between two interpretations of John 14:6: the interpretation which takes the passage to say that no one comes to the Father unless they adopt the right beliefs about Jesus and/or make the right choices with regard to Him, and the interpretation which has it that no one comes to the Father except on account of the work that Jesus does on sinners’ behalf. While the former interpretation entails that only Christians who explicitly accept Jesus as savior are saved, the latter interpretation does not imply this at all.

I then confessed to being a universalist, at which point Jim promptly said, “That’s not biblical.” At that point I briefly sketched out what I took to be the explicit universalism of Paul, in Romans and elsewhere. And then I offered a metaphor that might be of some help in reconciling Paul’s universalism with the scriptural idea that it is Jesus alone through whom salvation comes. What I said, roughly, was something along these lines:

“Imagine that there are a number of people drowning in a lake, and a lifeguard—call him Chris—dives in and, one by one, rescues them all. Not everyone knows or acknowledges that it was Chris who saved them, but that doesn’t mean he didn’t save them. Their being saved doesn’t depend on these things. It certainly doesn’t depend on Chris leaving some to drown. If those who do recognize and acknowledge their savior have any advantage over those who don’t, it’s that they know whom to thank.”

There are serious limitations with this analogy as a basis for a comprehensive theology, but for the purposes that I was using it for—to show how it’s possible for salvation to come from one individual and yet to extend universally, even to those who know nothing about that individual—I thought it was pretty helpful. And it also expresses my Lutheran theological disposition that our salvation is rooted in something God does rather than in something we do. Our salvation is not on account of our works but on account of God’s work on our behalf—and believing the right things or explicitly “accepting Jesus as Lord and savior” clearly qualify as our works.

I want to take time to say something more about this “theology of grace.” In part I do so because it may help readers to understand my reaction to what happened next. But more significantly, I do so because what I have to say here is precisely what I might have said next, had the conversation not been derailed in the wake of a remark that led me to lose my composure.

One of the greatest fruits of a theology of grace is that it liberates us to think, to question, to doubt, to admit uncertainty, and to take challenges to our views seriously. If we believe that our salvation does not hinge on our getting it right, we become free to be humble, to admit our finitude, to admit our inability to get it right—in short, to be intellectually honest about the human condition. And as I see it, an absolutely crucial feature of the human condition is that the fundamental nature of reality is beyond our grasp. We can theorize and speculate in ways that are more or less in line with what reason and evidence reveal, but we cannot know.

Our enormous material universe might be catalogued, its structure and mechanisms and history described to the minutest detail, and we would still face the same fundamental questions: Is there more than this? Is this world of immediate sense experience, this world whose structures and patterns we can describe, just a surface appearance? Or is it just a small part of something far vaster that is beyond description? Or is it, instead, the whole story?

We cannot know. We can be moved by the voice in our heart that encounters a hopeful vision, the voice that says, “Yes! Yes! Yes!” We can treat its urgings as emerging out of the part of us that IS, rather than the part of us that experiences and knows—the self insofar as it is a part of reality, rather than the self that stands back from it in an attempt to understand reality. We can treat our deepest longings as if they are a homing beacon, and their YES as an instinct that immediately apprehends what the discursive intellect cannot grasp. Or we can be moved by the voice that says, “I’ll believe it when I see it”—knowing that this is something we can never, ever see.

We can be moved by longing or evidentialism, but we cannot know. And the theology of grace allows us to admit this. Paradoxically, if we are convinced of this theology, we are freed from the pathological need for certainty. And while such certainty may not be the root of all hostility and intractable conflict, it is one fundamental source of these things. When we can admit we do not know, we can come together and hear each other and be more fully open to each other’s humanness. And insofar as the theology of grace facilitates that, it bears pragmatic fruits that speak in its favor. We have pragmatic reason to live as if the theology of grace is true, as if our salvation doesn’t hinge on getting it right, because only then can we break free of the psychological forces that push us into trenches of false certainty.

All of this was lurking in the background of my thoughts as I laid out the metaphor of the lifeguard. And what Jim said next opened the door to elaborating on these ideas.

“But Christians,” he said, “have to choose their own lifeguard.”

I took him to mean that the lifeguard only swims out to rescue those who ask him for his help. I remembered a Lutheran pastor who strongly influenced me years ago, who tried to explain Lutheran theology by saying that, on the Lutheran view, if any of us have a right relationship with Christ it is because Christ has beaten down the walls around our hearts and seized hold of us from within. It is not by what we choose or believe that we become connected with the transcendent. That connection is forged because the transcendent loves us enough to reach through all our crud.

I'd found that message transformative in my own life. And so I said, “I disagree with that.”

And Jim replied, “Then you disagree with God.”

His facial expression as he said those words might, at a quick glance, have been viewed as smug. But I don’t think that’s right. Because I’ve felt that expression on my own face. It emerges when I’m containing something far more potent than smugness, something that’s surging up into my face in a tidal rush: The need to be right.

I’m no stranger to that need. In fact, I worry sometimes that it drives me more than it does most people. And that is one reason why I hold so fiercely to the theology of grace: as a ward against the more dangerous demons of my nature. (Again, I'm not blind to the paradox here).

But one of the forces that’s most likely to trigger my need to be right is precisely the kind of comment that Jim uttered in this exchange, in precisely the tone in which he uttered it. Like begets like. When he said, in essence, “If you disagree with me you disagree with God,” I felt the schoolyard impulse to reply with, “I know you are, but what am I?”

But just then, one of my friends from another department spat out his indignation in something along the following lines: “That’s just the kind of arrogance that fuels Dawkins and these other new atheists, giving their accusations against religion credibility!”

I sputtered something about these sorts of utterances being “anti-evangelical.” Then I went on to say that such a statement is a conversation-stopper. I said something along the following lines:

When you say to me, “If you disagree with me you disagree with God,” what I
think is this: “Here’s someone who isn’t open to genuine conversation, someone
who’s just in it to try to impose his views on me rather than offering reasons
and arguments and ideas that I can consider and learn from. This is certainly
NOT someone who will listen openly to my reasons and arguments and ideas—so why
should I bother to listen to what HE has to say.” That’s what goes through my
head. And so productive dialogue ends.

Openness begets openness. Self-righteousness begets self-righteousness. Entering an interfaith conversation with the assumption that one has the truth and that the point of the exchange is to make the other person accept it—well, that begets a similar response. Instead of a conversation, one has a battle of wills. One has polarized confrontations that are more about grand-standing than about sharing, more about impressing those who are already on your side than about building bridges across rifts of difference.

In fact, the trumpeting arrogance of Dawkins and the other new atheists doesn’t come out of nowhere, but is a response to those who end conversations about Darwinian evolution by saying, “This is not in line with my religious beliefs. As such, it conflicts with God’s truth.”

I said something along these lines, but I might have said it more eloquently had I not been caught up in the moment, allowing my emotional response to be dictated by Jim’s invocation of divine authority on his behalf.

And then the exchange ended. And the luncheon ended. And what I might have said about the theology of grace—how I am a better person when I live as if it is true; how it affords me the space to pursue my intellectual curiosity, to speculate in ways that draw from both reason and hope; how it frees me from the fear that arriving at the wrong beliefs will be disastrous (a fear that is at work in different ways among both religious believers and atheists)—none of that was spoken.

And, ironically, the reason it wasn’t spoken was this: in that moment when Jim declared that I disagreed with God, the theology of grace eluded me.

What I Should Have Said

The other night I gave a talk at Tulsa University entitled “In Defense of Progressive Religion.” I thought about posting the text of it here, but I’ve decided against it for several reasons: First, it’s too long for a blog post, even relative to the long blog posts I’m prone to write. Second, most of the points I made in the talk are ones that should be familiar to readers of this blog or my book. Third, I think that a revised version of the lecture may be more appropriate for another venue where I’ve been invited to submit an article.

What I want to address in this post is a question I received during the question-and-answer period after the lecture. As I reflect back on my response, it seems to me to have been seriously inadequate. And since I cannot go back in time to offer a better reply, I want to post one here.

But first, we need a bit of context. Hence, even though I’m not going to post the text of my lecture, I need to talk about some elements of it which bear on the issue at hand.

In the course of my lecture, I advocated a roughly Hegelian view of how we should develop our beliefs so as to bring them more fully into alignment with reality (a method that Hegel developed in order to address what he saw to be the weaknesses with the enlightenment and the seemingly intractable difficulty surrounding what has come to be called “the problem of the criterion”—although I didn’t get into those details in my talk).

Instead of repeating what I said in my lecture (which is very close to what I have to say in a recent post), let me frame these ideas in more explicitly Hegelian terms. The essence of Hegel’s method for increasing our understanding of reality—a method I like to call “critical traditionalism”—is this: reality as it is in itself, while distinct from what we experience (which is always filtered through our worldview), impresses itself upon experience in ways that expose the inadequacies of our worldview. Thus, if we live out our worldview with a keen eye towards noticing the “contradictions” that arise within it as it crashes up against reality, we can modify it appropriately. But then the modified worldview has to be lived out in the same way. When worldviews are handed down from generation to generation, and appropriated by each new generation with an openness to revising them in the light of the fissures that living them out exposes—when that happens, the worldviews evolve towards an ever closer approximation of the “Absolute” that transcends all finite human perspectives and experiences.

The idea here is that the only non-question-begging way to uncover the weaknesses of a worldview is from within, by those who “try it on” and seek to live it out with an eye towards noticing when and where it doesn’t work. Those who offer an external critique of a worldview will, inevitably, do so in terms of their own worldview, which itself will inevitably be inadequate. Their focus will be on this other worldview and all the ways in which it fails to measure up to the criteria presupposed by their own worldview—but all the while, these criteria are being embraced dogmatically. Because worldviews are, in effect, the lenses through which we look at our world, they become as invisible to us as the glasses we wear—unless and until they distort what we see so much that we stumble. So, instead of railing against alternative worldviews, we should focus on critically refining our own by trying to become more fully aware of it and its presuppositions, and by noticing when we stumble and then trying to make adjustments so that we stumble less.

This is not to say that alternative worldviews should be ignored. What it means is that we’re just being dogmatic if all our energy is focused on pointing out how many inadequacies a different worldview has. When we create such a list of inadequacies, it will be in terms of certain standards of adequacy—and the standards of adequacy we employ will be those that flow out of our own worldview. To put the point in blunt and oversimplified terms, such critique amounts to saying, “On the assumption that my worldview is right and yours is wrong, we can demonstrate that your worldview is wrong.”

But other worldviews besides our own can be very valuable. To the extent that we can put ourselves in the shoes of those operating out of alternative worldviews and see the world through their eyes, we can broaden the scope of human experience that we have to work with as we endeavor to refine our own worldview. To the extent that we can take note of tendencies towards convergence among alternative culturally and historically situated traditions, we can discover trajectories of development which may say something about the reality that all of these worldviews are responding to. And insofar as the project of living out a worldview produces some of its most glaring failures precisely where it encounters and engages with adherents to different worldviews, our engagement with alternative worldviews may be instrumental in forcing the kinds of changes that move us into closer alignment with a transcendent reality. In short, we may learn from one another, especially if we really pay attention to each other and resist the knee-jerk propensity to just critique other views in the light of our own presuppositions.

And while we are not well situated to critique the substance of alternative worldviews without dogmatically assuming the adequacy of our own criteria of criticism, we are well-situated to point out the dogmatism that such a thing involves, and hence to challenge communities which cry “heresy!” and pronounce anathemas against every alternative worldview (whether those communities be our own or others). We are well situated to point out how the path of critical traditionalism becomes stunted when adherents to a tradition refuse to be critical, even in the face of experiences which expose glaring weaknesses within the worldview. And we are well situated to point out that disdaining all traditions in the name of “thinking for yourself” really just amounts to starting a new tradition while failing to consider what progress other traditions may have made over the centuries.

From this Hegelian framework, a particular religious worldview might be viewed as having its origins in a culturally and historically situated interpretation of a reality that transcends human understanding. As succeeding generations live out the worldview, inadequacies are discovered, and (sometimes grudgingly) changes are made. If so, then the pathway to deepening our understanding of the “Absolute” calls for (a) allowing all of these traditions to evolve in just the way that Hegel recommends: adherents to a tradition appropriate a worldview from the preceding generation, live it out critically, and pass a revised version on for the next generation to do the same; (b) following this procedure with the tradition that we have inherited; and (c) challenging anyone who imposes various sorts of impediments to progress—such as refusing to critically assess their inherited worldview in the light of experience, or denouncing those who do so, or directing all of their critical energies on other worldviews rather than their own.

In any event, what I was doing in my lecture was sketching out what such a Hegelian approach to religious traditions entailed, both in terms of a willingness to critically assess the teachings of one’s own religion and a conditional respect for alternative religious traditions (conditional insofar as it does not extend respect to traditions that staunchly resist critical development or have no tolerance for other traditions than their own, etc.)

But the question that prompted my inadequate reply related to a point I made about convergence. If alternative religious traditions are evolving in the light of inadequacies exposed by the collision between an inherited worldview and a reality that transcends direct human experience, then all these traditions are being molded by the same transcendent reality. And if that is the case, then—barring various impediments to progress—we should expect a convergence of traditions, a gradual narrowing of the gap of difference between them. Of course, there are always impediments to progress, and so it is an open question whether the convergence will ever be significant enough to allow for these traditions to achieve full congruence within the lifetime of the human species.

In the face of this possibility of convergence, and the kind of respect for alternative religious traditions that it implies, one young man in the audience asked, in effect, “What about Jesus?”

More precisely, he pointed out that Christianity is “Christocentric,” that is, it is a religion that makes Christ central. The nature of reality is understood through the lens provided by the story of Jesus’ life and death. To be Christian is to stand in a certain relationship to Jesus—the relationship of a disciple. And it involves believing certain things about Jesus—that He was more than just an ordinary man or a wise prophet, that He was the messiah, the savior of the world, the incarnation of God, the divine Logos, one Person of the Trinitarian Godhead. Or something in that vicinity (there are narrower and broader definitions of Christianity which allow for more or less flexibility in precisely how Christ is to be viewed).

The young man didn’t say all of this. What he did was ask a question along the following lines: “Jews are never going to accept that Jesus is the Son of God. So how do you think that this convergence is going to happen? Are Christians going to have to give up on the divinity of Christ? Doesn’t convergence require, in effect, that Christians cease to be Christian?”

My reply was essentially this, although probably worded less elegantly: “I can’t read the future. I don’t know what a convergence will look like or even if it will fully happen. What I can say is that, according to this progressive model of religion, you should not give up on your belief in the divinity of Christ without a good reason to do so.”

But there is so much more I could have said and should have said. Two things in particular come to mind. First of all, either there really is a sense in which Jesus was divine, and the earliest Christians were recognizing and responding to this (in their own culturally situated terms) as they formed their religious communities and shared their stories and, eventually, wrote their seminal texts—or not. If not, then in the course of living out a worldview in which the divine is perceived to have expressed itself in and through Jesus in a special way, a contrary reality will gradually wear away at this belief until at last it has eroded away altogether. But if Jesus really was divine, then the divine reality that transcends our experience will ultimately reinforce and refine this doctrine. It won’t go away under the pressure of living out a Christian worldview, because whatever contradictions emerge in the course of doing so won’t ultimately call for abandoning this doctrine.

Versions of the doctrine may have to be abandoned, as will versions of Christianity which combine with the doctrine in ways that don’t work. But if, in the course of living out your life as a Christian, the divinity of Christ facilitates rather than inhibits your capacity to live with integrity and honesty in relation to your world, you may be justified in believing that this is one of the things that won’t erode. You will be like Schleiermacher, the father of progressive religion, who respected alternative religious paths, who thought that each had something of importance to share with others about the divine—and who believed that the thing of most importance which Christianity had to share was precisely its central doctrine that God acted in and through Jesus, a human who was also divine, to effect the redemption of the world. If you agree with Schleiermacher in this, then adopting the progressive approach to Christianity should not lead you to fear that Christ will be lost in the process of convergence.

The second point I should have made in response to this young man's question was this: When we consider the claim that Jews are never going to accept the divinity of Christ, it may be worth asking why it seems so plausible to think this. And it does seem plausible. Although some Jews do convert to Christianity—my own brother-in-law, for example—it is hard to imagine a widespread transformation of this sort. This is true despite what I personally see as the intrinsic power of the core story of Christianity (which I sketch out, for example, here).

When I reflect on the narrative of Jesus’ life, I see a story of astonishing beauty that resonates with some of the deepest longings of my soul. But I know that most of my Jewish friends just won’t see it in these terms. There’s just too much ugliness that has been heaped over it—because the doctrine of Jesus’ divinity is intimately bound up with a history of persecution at the hands of Christians.

Consider it in these terms: What distinguishes Christianity from Judaism? Of course, there are numerous differences. But these differences trace back to one seminal difference, the thing that distinguished the Jesus sect from other Jewish sects in the earliest history of Christianity, despite their shared roots and overlapping Scriptures. And what is that difference? Obviously, it is a different understanding of who and what Jesus was and what His life meant.

But that one difference was sufficient to map out a history of social marginalization and oppression—a history that eventually set the stage for one of the greatest moral horrors in the history of the world. This is not to say that Christians perpetrated the Holocaust. The Nazis did that (although many Christians were quietly complicit as Jews were herded off to concentration camps, brutalized, and murdered). What it means is that the history of social marginalization within Christian Europe set the Jews apart in a way that Nazi ideology was able to exploit.

Anti-Semitism wasn’t born with Hitler and the Nazis. Its roots trace back to the earliest history of Christianity. As Karen Armstrong has noted in The Bible: A Biography, a vilification of the Pharisees became so potent in the earliest years of the Christian movement that it made it into the Gospels. Why? Armstrong puts it this way:

After the destruction of the temple the Christians had been the first to make a
concerted effort to become the authentic Jewish voice and initially they seemed
to have had no significant rivals. But by the 80s and 90s, Christians were
becoming uncomfortably aware that something extraordinary was happening: the
Pharisees were initiating an astonishing revival.

In effect, two Jewish sects survived the fall of the Temple in Jerusalem: the Christians and the Pharisees. And the Christians resented the efforts of the Pharisees to establish themselves as the true inheritors of Judaism. This fact was combined with another force that Armstrong notes in passing. In the efforts to reach out to the gentiles, the writers of the synoptic gospels “were too eager to absolve the Romans of their responsibility for Jesus’s execution and claimed, with increasing stridency, that the Jews must shoulder the blame.”

As Christianity distanced itself increasingly from its Jewish origins, the other surviving sect became identified with Judaism. But the old rivalry remained. And as the Christians became the empowered majority, that rivalry took on a new and more sinister shape. Fueled by the biblical passages which seemed to blame the Jews for Jesus’ crucifixion, the Jews were vilified and marginalized. The fact that they didn’t accept the divinity of Jesus was trotted out as a justification for social oppression. And so an anti-Semitic ideology was born.

And this history of oppression, culminating in the horror of the Holocaust, has shaped Jewish culture and identity in ways that would be hard to underestimate. To embrace the divinity of Jesus, given such a cultural history, could very naturally be seen as caving in to two millennia of social oppression and abuse. For many, it would symbolically represent selling out one’s cultural identity to the oppressor.

Now I don’t simply want to say here that this history of oppression provides powerful and understandable impediments to Jewish acceptance of Christ’s divinity, impediments that would interfere with such acceptance even if it is true that the doctrine of Christ’s divinity expresses a genuine insight into the divine. And I certainly don’t want to say that the prospects for convergence between Christian and Jewish worldviews depend upon Jews getting over their resentment so that they can come to see the beauty of Christian teachings. The point I want to make goes deeper than that, and follows the Hegelian spirit of directing criticism inward, towards one’s own worldview.

What I want to point to is a practical contradiction within the dominant Christian worldview, a contradiction that has made itself manifest in the course of a history in which generations of people have sought to live it out. The Christian worldview has from its beginnings urged evangelism, that is, sharing and promulgating the “good news.” But it has also laid down layers of crud that have made it essentially impossible for some people to hear this news, even if that news really is as good and beautiful as Christians claim (Christianity's more recent history in relation to gays and lesbians is also instructive on this point).

Such a contradiction demands internal criticism. If there are impediments to a convergent evolution between Judaism and Christianity here, I don’t think their main sources lie in Judaism. If the doctrine of Christ’s divinity has its source in a transcendent divine reality, then the capacity to appreciate this is blocked by crud. And it is Christian communities that, over the centuries, have been spewing out this crud.

As Christians, we need to turn our critical eye inward and ask why. And we need to transform our own worldview to repair this ugly fissure, out of which this ugliness has been allowed to pour into the world.

According to the Gospel of Matthew (7:5), Jesus offered up a saying about this kind of prioritization of self-criticism, one which strikes me as very wise: “First take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye.”

In any event, when the young man at the lecture asked, "What about Jesus?", that’s what I should have said.