COMPARATIVE
RELIGION ... 1
The need for ‘disengagement’ … 1
The search for ‘higher principles’ … 3
Five theoretical principles … 4
Internal coherence …
4
External
coherence … 6
The principle of unity … 6
Coherence
with reality … 7
The principle of right purpose … 7
The
need for principles of value … 7
Stephen Neill … 8
Hendrik Kraemer … 10
Albert Schweitzer … 11
Six
principles of value … 14
First principle … 14
Second principle … 14
Third
principle … 15
Fourth principle … 16
Fifth principle … 17
Sixth
principle … 18
THE
AIMS OF THIS STUDY … 19
Islamic ethos of this study … 20
A basis for dialogue … 21
NOTES
AND REFERENCES … 22
INTRODUCTION
COMPARATIVE RELIGION
The need for ‘disengagement’
Religion
is not made up of ‘scientific facts’ which we can examine objectively in the
way we might examine geological or biological samples. To a limited extent, the
rites, rituals and organized institutions of a religion, as well as their
development and history, can be studied in this way. So too, though to an even
more limited extent, can the formal doctrines of a religion, what it
‘officially’ believes. But all these are externals; they are not the real
substance of religion which is made up of lived experiences, so called
‘life-facts'. It is precisely these ‘life-facts' that a worthwhile essay in
comparative religion must try to describe and understand. But how?
It is possible by a strenuous effort of imagination.
To really know another religion and culture, we must, first, disengage from our
own beliefs. We must step out of our own presuppositions and values in order to
step into those of the religion we wish to study, What is needed is similar to
stepping out of one's shoes at the doorway of a sacred place into which we wish
to enter. Unless and until we are willing to be with and inside the
‘life-facts’ we are studying, they will not yield their meaning to us To
observe a scientific fact, it is right and proper that we remain outsiders and
keep a ‘cold’ distance; the fact too stays ‘cold’ and holds its distance, not offering
to touch us in any way. To gain insight into the ‘life-facts’ of a religion, on
the other hand, we must, in imagination, allow our understanding to be touched
and informed by them. The longer we can sustain this effort of imagination, the
deeper will be our experience of the other religion, and the deeper (and more
reliable) our insights into it.
Events or experiences whose meanings must be ‘lived’
in order to be known and understood, are the core of every religion, But in
Christianity such ‘life-facts’ have a special importance, a unique status. In
Christianity, the lived experience of its first adherents, continually relived
thereafter by all later adherents, is the very foundation of its understanding
of the nature of God (identified by Christians in Jesus Chris). The experience
from which Christianity began is not wholly or securely identified with the
texts which were eventually authorized
--pg1--
and
accepted as canonical, as Scripture, and its doctrines are not very securely
connected with that Scripture. It is therefore of particular importance to
reconstruct in one's mind the impact of the teachings of Jesus in their
historical context, and to trace with special care the development of the
religious doctrines of Christianity after him.
The limits of ‘disengagement’
Granted
that we must disengage from the values of our own religion, suspend our own
beliefs, how far must we do so and for how long?
Pessimists argue that no real ‘insight’ is possible to
outsiders at all. Outsiders can only see the facts of religion as ‘ordinary’
facts, they can never get at the meaning with which they are charged. Outsiders
see, as it were, ‘just’ bread and wine; they can never understand what the
ritual of bread and wine ‘really’ means. To really understand, they argue, you
have to become a believer; the disengagement from your own beliefs and values
must be for life. After all, is religion not life-time commitment to final
truth? On this view, no religion can be fruitfully studied except by its
adherents; nor criticized or evaluated except by its own principles and values.
But does this not make every religion a closed system,
a law unto itself? If we accept this position, are we not bound to allow the
same privilege to any and every system of values, to any and every group of
believers, whatever they believe? In other words, are we not bound to recognize
any closed system as a religion? How could we refuse? If we refuse a particular
claim, we are passing a judgement on it by reference to some ‘higher principle’
which, to our view, stands above it. But the claimants are sure to deny to us
the very privilege of truth we deny to their claim. They will simply say: ‘The
higher principle you applied is not recognized in our system of values. You do
not understand us. To you your truth; to us our truth.’
This position means in practice that dialogue on
substantial religious questions is only possible between adherents. The only
relationship adherents and non-adherents can have is to ignore or fight each
other. Furthermore, religions do not simply make propositions of the type,
‘This is true’; they also issue prescriptive statements of the type, ‘Do this;
avoid that.’ In short, if we accept that a religion and the lived meanings of
which it is made up is only accessible to its adherents, we must also accept
that any morality is as good (or as bad) as any other.
Where does that leave the discipline of comparative
religion? If disengagement is not worthwhile, if it does not get us far enough
into the meanings and mysteries of another religion, should we then give it up?
That would condemn us to the old style of Western comparative studies of
religion In these, the other religions of the world were treated as static
phenomena, interesting only as museum pieces or as a curiosity for (Western)
tourists, or as ‘enemy territory’ to be reconnoitered by an advance party of
scholars before missionaries moved in for
--pg2--
‘conquest’. It would be miserable indeed to
return to attitudes such as these.
No. ‘Disengagement’ from one’s own beliefs and values is
worthwhile; it does enable one to be sympathetic, to learn, to understand. But
such ‘disengagement’ cannot and ought not to be either total or permanent.
Rather, we must remain free to move back from (well as into) the beliefs,
values and meanings of the religion and culture we are studying. How otherwise
could we order the insights we have gained into a reasoned argument, then
criticize and evaluate them? Of course, that evaluation must be governed by
standards of reasoning and ‘higher principles’ which have authority independent
both of the religion and culture we are studying and of our own. But do such
standards and principle exist? As we have just noted, there is a view that no
independently authoritative ‘higher principles’ exist to which we can refer
when seekers critical judgements about the values and beliefs of others. But
the pessimists are wrong. To repudiate their position we can begin with the
everyday experience that different religions, while different, nevertheless
have some values in common. Beyond that, it is possible to set out, at least
provisionally, a body of ‘higher principles’ which, in practice, we do all
acknowledge.
The search for ‘higher principles’
We
need the ‘higher principles’ in order to compare and evaluate the meanings-the
cultural patterns, the moral values, the ethical doctrines-of the religion we
are studying. But why need we systematize, compare, evaluate? Why can't we
simply observe and record, and make no further comment? Because comparative
religion is not an academic exercise, at as itself an ethical endeavor. Given
the background of an emerging, single world community, it is urgent that we
both rid ourselves of communal prejudices and misunderstanding that divide us
needlessly; and also that we establish positively the great essentials, the
fundamentals, of our common humanity. And this field of inquiry, religion,
certainly contains the deepest and most important commitments of human life.
Moreover, as explained above, the ‘facts’ of religion are not cold but, by
their very nature, affecting-they touch us, get hold of us, move us to do this
or that. When we strive to present them systematically and critically, we do
not capture them for cold storage in a professorial mind or a university
library or museum; rather, we strive to present their full force and appeal,
their authority and power to move. That cannot be done without evaluation of
the meanings which, through ‘disengagement’, we come to understand.
The ‘higher principles’ we are seeking fall Into two
kinds, the he first kind are theoretical principles which regulate the
ways in which we grasp, make sense of and put into order, the meanings that we
discover in the other religion. These principles are not, however, special to
the study of religion. On the contrary, they regulate our ways of understanding
data of any and every kind. They are the foundation of the
--pg3--
way
we come to know, the foundation of human knowledge in general. The second kind
are principles of value which are specialized to the matter of religion.
Like the theoretical principles, these too are axiomatic—we have to accept
them. They constitute the foundation of all religions and cultures. The
principles of value cannot replace or bypass the theoretical principles but, as
we shall see, they go beyond the theoretical principles and, when applied to
the beliefs and values of a religion, raises those beliefs and values to a new
order of relevance.
Five theoretical principles
Internal coherence
First
and foremost, the principle of internal coherence or non-contradiction. No
system of any kind makes any sense unless it observes this principle: the
elements of the system may not contradict each other. To deny this
principle is to deny that human thought and human discourse are possible. For,
what is the point of a statement which is as true as its own opposite?
The principle of internal coherence must apply to what
believers in it call divinely revealed truth. That does not mean that we
presume to assert a law for God and therefore, a limitation upon God. No; the
limitation is man’s. What we mean is only this: that man is so constituted that
he can hardly understand, certainly he cannot act upon, a statement which is
self-contradicting. For example, a command to do one thing, and a command to do
the exact opposite of that, cannot both make sense at the same time.
The principle of non-contradiction means—notably in
the case of Christian theology—that recourse to paradox will not do. It will
not do to say, in deference of something apparently self-contradictory; ‘Oh but
this is a religious paradox, a mystery’. Such a defense is tantamount to
claiming paradox as a principle of understanding above the principle of
non-contradiction, which is simply unacceptable. If the Christian theologians
insist that we accept it, they have taken themselves off the board around which
intelligent (and intelligible) conversation can take place. Which means that
they are content to live and converse in a world of their own. However, as we
implied earlier, such isolationism is not the direction in which the world is
moving. Moreover, there are increasing numbers of Christians deeply troubled
and frustrated by this recourse to paradox whenever particular doctrines appear
to contradict themselves or each other.
That said, we do need to admit the possibility that by
insisting on non-contradiction, by rejecting paradox, we may be shutting
ourselves off from some important truth. But there is a still greater danger in
accepting paradox as a principle of understanding higher than the requirement
of internal coherence. If we do that, we throw the door wide open to every sort
of nonsense and untruth we soon find ourselves
--pg4--
struggling
to defend one incoherent statement as a ‘divine truth’, while
insisting that another, equally incoherent statement be rejected as
‘falsehood'. We must not, therefore, repudiate the principle of
non-contradiction. What we can do with a paradox is to try and rescue it from
its incoherence and contradiction. Statements of belief and doctrine can
sometimes be loaded with esoteric and symbolic terms which give those
statements the appearance of being incoherent or contradictory. It may be
possible, at a higher level of explanation, to ‘translate’ the paradoxical
statement into a form that does make sense it the normal way. In short, when
dealing with a paradox, it is wise to begin by regarding it as a sort of
localized difficulty of language. Only if we fail to find sense behind or
beyond it by linking it to some higher principle of explanation, should we
categorize it as incoherent and therefore, probably, to be set aside.
Besides contradictory statements of belief and
doctrine, there may be larger elements within a religious tradition which are
contradictory. Some scholars have maintained that every religious system
contains contradictions and so ‘the task of the historian of religion is to try
to feel and understand the ‘adhesiveness’ of various aspects of historic
religions' (Kitagawa, l959, p.27). By ‘adhesiveness` in this context is meant:
the way that, in the belief of adherents, apparently contradictory elements of
the religion manage to co-exist, to hang together. But surely the task of the
historian of religions demands more than just noting that ‘this is so’ and
passing on. Lf, let us say, two contradictory elements X and Y `adhere’ within
a religion, then we must suppose that, first, X and Y really do belong in one
and the same religion, and that, second, there must be a higher principle which
holds X and Y together, enabling the believers to feel that they can believe
both X and Y. Our task surely is to try to work out what that higher principle
is. If we find it, it will no longer be correct to say that the two elements
are contradictory.
In reality, contradictions of this sort occur
everywhere, not just in religions. They arise whenever a question has not been
thought through to the proper level of explanation. Sometimes, however, we
shall find in a religious system elements whose contradictoriness cannot be
resolved. There is no ‘adhesiveness’ except in the insistence of believers, no
higher principle which can connect the contradictory elements and so remove the
contradiction. In this situation we may, as students of religion, simply shrug
and leave the field. Or we may choose one or other of the contradictory
elements and say, boldly and clearly, X fits the historical tradition of the
religion, Y does not. It hardly needs saying that the choice must be
established with sound evidence and sound argument If we are indeed able to do
this, we will have made a genuine contribution both to the history of the
particular religion and to the history of religions in general.
--pg5--
External coherence
The
principle of external coherence is a perhaps technical way of saying
that a statement (of belief or doctrine in the case of religion) must make
sense in the light of what we already know. Human knowledge has always been
‘departmentalized’ in its growth. Every new discovery or new idea is referred
first to the tradition of knowledge or discipline to which it belongs. The new
idea may be too new and radical to fit. If this happens, the idea gets referred
to other disciplines. The discoveries, for example, that the earth orbits the
sun, or that blood circulates round the body, ran counter to the established
traditions of their respective disciplines. The coherence of these discoveries
with other disciplines was then tried and the result was a thorough rebuilding
of the traditions of these disciplines. Some measure of coherence with the
larger body of knowledge is a necessity
for all disciplines, new discoveries and new ideas. This is true of physics and
philosophy, of philosophy and psychology, of Biblical knowledge and archaeology,
theology and biology, etc. It is not possible for a new idea to be, as it were,
in a bubble all to itself; it has to be shaped to existing knowledge and/or
existing knowledge has to be shaped to it.
In the matter of religion, the truths of revelation
are a special case but not an exceptional one. No revelation can be a law unto
itself. It must cohere with human knowledge in general and, in particular, it
must cohere with the accompanying human situation, the historical time and
place of revelation. This does not mean that divine truth is relative to
the human situation. Certainly it does not mean, as some materialists claim,
that such truths are ‘really’ a product of a social or political or ideological
context. It means that revealed truth is relational to the human
situation. How else could it be received and understood and acted upon? Each
revelation has a special relevance or meaning for the situation in which it was
revealed; we cannot otherwise speak of revelation as a message from God.
It makes no sense to imagine, for example, the Law revealed to Moses being
revealed to what evolutionists call Neanderthal man, or the Qur`an being
revealed to the pyramid builders of the twenty-sixth century BC. It is
important therefore to establish the context of revelation and the coherence between
it and the content of the revelation.
The principle of unity
This
principle can be derived from the principle of non-contradiction. All revealed
truths must cohere with the religious experience of man-kind, if they are
revealed truths. If God or Truth is, and He is the source of revelation, His
commands cannot contradict each other. Between one revelation and another,
there may be development or alternation but not outright contradiction, not an
outright change of
--pg6--
purpose.
We must test and interrogate the content of revelation in order to reveal—what
may have become hidden over time-the unity of its source, and the consistency
and coherence of the Divine Will.
Coherence with reality
This
is a specialized version of the principle of external coherence. The particular
‘truths’ which any religion claims must correspond with the reality we all
experience or know outside of those ‘truths’. Contradiction of reality
invalidates the ‘truths’. No theory or argument (whether religious or not) can be
opposed to reality without, sooner or later, separating itself from the thought
and life of mankind. To ignore reality is, sooner or later, to be ignored by
it. What a religion asks its adherents to believe must find corroboration in
reality. A religion that rests its doctrines or its morality or its explanation
of human history or of natural phenomena on assumptions which are contradicted
by our experience and knowledge of reality will—whether its officials and
theologians like it or not—have its ‘truths’ tested and revised in the light of
the realities it contradicts.
The principle of right purpose
Though
at first sight it seems otherwise, the principle of right purpose can also be
derived from the principle of non-contradiction. The right and proper use of,
for example, language, is to enable expression and communication. A system of
signs and sounds which does neither of these things may have some other
usefulness but it cannot be called a language. And if, within a language, there
are signs and sounds that neither express nor communicate, we should be right
to point them out as nonsense. The right and proper use of religion in this
sense is, somehow, to improve mankind to carry mankind upward and onward to
higher ethical value, ultimately to God. Particular religions may give this use
of religion a particular name, for example ‘salvation’, which others do not
adopt. But the general purpose cannot be absent from any system of
beliefs and values which claims the dignity of being not just a system but a religion.
If a system claims to be a religion but denies any motive to enable the ethical
improvement of mankind, the claim is self-contradicted or, at the least,
unintelligible—like the famous conundrum about the Cretan who says that ‘All
Cretans are liars.’
The need for principles of value
The
theoretical principles, if conscientiously applied, enable us to describe and
understand the beliefs and values of the religion we are studying, their
degrees of internal and external coherence and so on. Beyond this task of
understanding lies the task of critical evaluation of
--pg7--
what
has been understood. But, again, we may ask, why do we need to go on to make
value judgements? Why is it not sufficient to put religions side by side and
say: this is A, and this B, etc.?
Some historians of religion have insisted that that is
sufficient, because they are engaged in an academic discipline, an activity
supposed to be objective, non-involved, etc.1 ln the first place,
the reality is that the discipline has been very ‘involved’; the academics have
been bent upon using the knowledge they acquired of other religions to
propagate their own. Secondly, the ‘coldly academic’ approach (which really
belongs with outdated nineteenth-century Western attitudes towards non-Western
cultures and peoples) inevitably diminishes the beliefs and values of others to
the status of library or museum curiosities with no interest, no value,
for the scholar’s own system of beliefs and values. As we said above, religions
are not made up of ‘cold’ facts—they seek to affect us strongly, to move us one
way or another: the whole point of value is that it appeals to be made real.
A merely academic account (even supposing such a thing possible) misses out on
that appeal and, in doing so, diminishes the worth of the religion being
presented. The implication of the academic approach is that ‘their’ values have
no relevance for ‘us’.
The ‘coldly academic’ and the missionary approaches,
characteristic of the majority of Western studies of non-Christian religions,
are nowadays rightly condemned.2
They have resulted in establishing very deep prejudices in the minds of
Western peoples about the non-Christian religions, prejudices that may take
generations to eradicate. While it is gratifying to read many modern Western
historians of religion deploring and disowning the old style Western
scholarship, the problem remains of what to do about the likelihood that the
scholar's presuppositions will influence the presentation of the other
religion. Even if scholars, with correct and commendable honesty, forewarn
readers by declaring their presuppositions at the outset, their doing so does
not, of itself enable a sustained objective engagement with the values of the
religion being studied. Some examples will help to clarify the difficulty:
Stephen Neill
Bishop
Neill states that in the comparative study of religion, ‘the only method which
promises results is that of self-exposure, as complete as possible, to the
impact of a religion as a whole... engagement, personal involvement in
something which is of deep concern to us’ (Neill, 1961, p.4). He does not ask
what ‘personal involvement’ means but is sure that it implies ‘no indifference
to truth [n]or the abandonment of all objective criteria of judgement’ (p.5).
Neill then gives three principles which ‘set forth... the ground from which we
make our approach to the other faiths of the world’. These principles ‘are not
yet beliefs or doctrines; they lie behind all doctrines and make possible the
formulation of doctrines’. The first of them is the ‘principle of contingency’,
by which he means that ‘there is a beyond independence on which the
--pg8--
world
exists and man can find his freedom’. The second principle is that ‘human
beings... are creatures which can form purposes’ (p.7). He characterizes this
human purpose in the most human of terms—‘We are accustomed to working out our
own purposes slowly, patiently and by the use of materials that are always more
or less refractory’—but then extrapolates it to characterize God with the quite
obvious intention of justifying the dogma of HeiIsgeschichte.3
God`s purpose in the universe ‘emerges only slowly, through many setbacks and
apparent failures’. The distinction between principles which lie behind
doctrines and the doctrines themselves has already collapsed. Neill’s third
principle is that ‘the future is a world of glorious possibilities, influenced
indeed but not predetermined by the past’ (p.8). Had Neill elaborated these
principles rationally and critically, or even stopped there, he might have
carried his non-Christian readers forward into a meaningful dialogue. But he
has no sooner stated these principles of value than he launches, without
notice, into a dissertation in specifically Christian dogmatic theology. Then,
after laying out all the doctrines and paradoxes of the Church, without
evidence or argument, he asserts that ‘no other interpretation of the being of
God is possible’ (p. 12); that ‘Christian faith claims for itself that it is
the only form of faith for men, [thereby casting] the shadow of falsehood, or
at least of imperfect truth, on every other system’ (p.l6); that ‘in Jesus, the
one thing that needed to happen has happened in such a way that it need never
happen again... [The] permanent relationship between God and the whole human
race... has been established. ...For the human sickness there is one specific
remedy, and this is it [the Gospel]. There is no other... Why look for any
other?’ (p.17).
And yet, earlier, Neill was promising the reader that
his ‘approach will [not] be prejudiced’, that he will not ‘distort everything
we see by looking at it through our own spectacles’ (p.6). He remains convinced
that his approach is that of a person who ‘stand[s] within the truth’ and who
has ‘everything to gain and nothing to lose by exposing [himself] to
questioning’; who ‘must endeavor to meet them at their highest... [and] expose
himself to the full force of these other faiths in all that they have that is
most convincing and most alluring`; who ‘must put to school with them, in
readiness to believe that they may have something to teach him that he has not
yet learned’ (p.18). With little appearance of self-doubt, Neill feels able to
say that his ‘approach to the other faiths must be marked by the deepest
humility’. In reality, by collapsing back into dogma, he has left himself no
means of approaching, let alone experiencing, the other faiths he wants to
study. Indeed, the very aim of study is itself in some doubt: ‘For the human
sickness there is one remedy... There is no other... Therefore [sic] the
Gospel must be proclaimed to the ends of the earth and to the ends of time’
(p.17). It is hardly surprising then to find that, except for two quotations
from the Qur`an, Neill has no recourse to any original source-book of Islam or
any work written by a Muslim. On the contrary, every quotation about Islam or
about Muslims comes from non-
--p9--
Muslim,
often explicitly missionary, works by other Christians. It is already quite
improper for a scholar to rely on second- and third-hand materials, but for a
scholar of comparative religion to approach his subject armed with the dogmas
of his own religion and the prejudices of missionary treatises openly
antagonistic to the religion he is studying is surely unacceptable.
Hendrik Kraemer
In
contrast to Neill, Hendrik Kraemer is a systematic (that is, deliberate and
thoughtful) exponent of the view that comparative religion can only be a branch
of missionary studies. He does not believe that ‘disengagement’ is ever possible
because the impress of the investigator’s own situation is inescapable. That
situation, Kraemer holds, must affect understanding to the point of determining
it decisively according to whether the historian is for or against the religion
being studied (Kraemer, 1957, pp.45-8). Since ‘complete objectivity... is a
fiction [....] Every philosophy, every way of thinking, every way of research,
starts with a fundamental assumption and attitude about God, man and the world’
(p.46), Kraemer agrees with Péguy that ‘the true historian should not be désintéressé
but passioné’ (p.50). The only question then is of which presuppositions
the historian of religion should be committed and passionate about, and for
Kraemer the answer is, of course, ‘Christianity’.
But this is an excessive and unjust skepticism about
the possibility of ‘disengagement’. In reality, it is well possible to suspend,
at least in imagination, the impress of the situation from which the historian
sets out to study. After all, the human mind is capable of going outside itself
in order to study itself. If we need principles of value independent of
particular religious doctrines, it is not because objectivity is an
impossibility but because it is necessary (after we have exercised ‘disengagement’
and applied the theoretical principles of internal and external coherence) to
see how the religious notion we have described relates to human life, how it
influences human consciousness and human action. That need is, in practice, a
need to evaluate the particular religious notion. Kraemer’s error, it
seems to me, is to confuse the difficulty of doing the latter with the
difficulty of first, describing and understanding the religious notion. And the
reason for this error is that he misconstrues the purpose of comparative
religion. He asserts, without any substantiating argument, that: ‘The real
beginning and end of all understanding of religion is theological; that is...
it starts and ends with taking sides in the great question: What do you think
of God and Man? and l would add: which God do you choose?’ (p.52).
Kraemer founds his skepticism on the errors and
failures of various schools of Christian thought in their attempts to establish
a rational, coherent set of principles of value which can be universally
authoritative. Such principles, Kraemer insists, ‘cannot be cogently and
universally demonstrated’; a ‘valid concept of the ‘Essence of Religion' is
--pg10--
not
to be expected’ (p.60). He dismisses the efforts of Otto, of Harnack, of
Bousset and Hocking with the warning that ‘the Christian faith... stubbornly
refuses to be fitted into a general concept of religion, [or]... explained as a
special variety of the genus Religion’ (p.62). Kraemer speaks of the
‘intractability’ of the core of the Christian religion, that is, its
inexplicability by reason (pp.62-3). He himself lacks the charity to allow the
same privilege to other religions, but if that privilege is extended-and every
fiction, prejudice and illusion is liable to claim it—what remains of the
dialogue between religions? Is it all doomed to consist of either condemnation
or mission? Kraemer is explicitly against any such conclusion: ‘We are not
invoking the right of prejudice’, he tells us (p.52). But his argument leaves
no resort except to blind personal preference. His categorical denial of any
‘Essence of Religion’, of a ‘norm of religious truth’, precludes, in his own
words, any ‘talk about the superiority of one religion over another’, and rules
that such talk would ‘always’ and ‘logically’ amount to nothing more than ‘the
confident assertion of one's own religious Ego as the standard’ (p.83). Having
denied the foundations of any comparative religion, it is somewhat futile of
Kraemer to then lament that ‘as long as there is no universally acknowledged
norm of religious truth’, the only thing left to do is to ‘entertain the idea
of the Absolutheit [absoluteness]... of the revelation of Christ'
(pp.83, 67).
Albert Schweitzer
At
the opposite pole to Neill and Kraemer, another convinced Christian and
missionary is the world-renowned Albert Schweitzer. His opposition to them lies
not in their conclusions but in the methods they use to arrive at them. Where
Kraemer condemns the non-Christian religions and upholds Christianity by
‘decision’, the personal wager of the individual confronting God, Schweitzer
does so by ‘judgement’, that is, in the consciousness that Christianity is the
only true religion that fulfils what religion itself ought to be, and he
condemns the other religions of the world as falling short of this universal
religious norm and truth. He opened his lectures at Selly Oak College,
Birmingham, published as Christianity and the Religions of the World
(1951), with the question: ‘Why [is] this Gospel... for us the highest wisdom?’
(p.17). Schweitzer, a committed opponent of irrationalism, explicitly rejects
any defense of Christianity based on the assertion that it ‘contains truths
which are above all reasoning and which, therefore, do not have to enter into
contest with philosophy’ (p.18).
Behind the rejection of irrationalism stands the
assumption that doctrines and dogmas can be shown to rely on principles
independent of them. Religious truth is for Schweitzer, rational, necessary,
critical truth. He writes; ‘All religious truth must in the end be capable of
being grasped as something that stands to reason’, and Christianity must not
withdraw to the dark (but secure) realms of absolute, personal decision, but
‘confront all the religions of the world on the platform of
--p11--
objective
truth and public reason’ (p.18). This ‘platform’ consists not of what the
adherents of a religion have actually done in their history, but of the ideals
to which the religion calls mankind (p.19). These ideals are to be tested
against three non-doctrinal principles which Schweitzer proposes: these are optimism-pessimism,
monism-dualism and ethical character (p.35).
He defines optimism-pessimism as acceptance or
rejection of the principle that ‘the forces at work in the natural world have
their origin in a perfect primal force which leads all things towards
perfection through natural development’ (p.35). Upon this principle depends
whether man is to look for perfection and fulfilment in this world or in
another world beyond space and time. Schweitzer plainly assumes that
Christianity does satisfy this test of value. We shall examine subsequently
whether he is right in this judgement (below pp.137-157). But granting it for
the moment, it soon emerges that his reason for stating this principle is to
furnish a ground from which to reject the Indian religions. The principle does
not, in other words, stand clear of the scholar’s own commitment. Further, in
the form stated, the principle commits Schweitzer to finalistic determinism—by
agency of the primal originating force, all the processes in nature are, by
Schweitzer’s principle, committed to the achievement of a necessary perfection,
the end of the process for whose sake alone the process was initiated. But this
is plainly false: the processes of nature are by nature committed to no purpose
in particular and can be diverted to serve any, whether
God’s
or the devil’s. More serious yet, the implication that man, as a part of the
processes of nature, is also moved within the same necessary march of these
processes towards their predestined goal, denies the very ground of his moral
responsibility.
Schweitzer’s second principle, monism-dualism, is
defined as whether or not a religion ‘considers God to be the sum total of all
the forces at work in the universe’ and that a perfect knowledge of the latter
amounts to a perfect knowledge of the former (p.36). He does not contrast this
view with a strict dualism, that is, with an acceptance that the Transcendent
is wholly other and constrains the whole of nature and man to a
necessary obedience. He contrasts it, instead, with optimism as Christianity
understands it, that is, with the view that the Transcendent militates against
the forces of nature and the forces of nature militate back—the familiar notion
of God’s struggle with nature (p.36). Once more, the principle has been
deflected to serve a doctrine, in this case, the doctrine of the Fall—the
occasion from which the separation and struggle between God and nature
originate, according to the traditional Christian view. With bad conscience,
Schweitzer declares that this concept of God struggling with nature, with His
creation, must be maintained, ‘however great may be the difficulties which this
involves for human reasoning’ (p.36). In this way, he sacrifices the rational,
critical attitude with which he had set out. That then: is any sort of
militance against God in nature, is an idea that belongs to animism; it
makes no universally acceptable sense
--pg12--
to
claim that there is any defiance of God except on the part of human beings. The
reality that human beings do indeed defy God’s Will, instead of doing it, is no
basis for the claim that they do so on account of a primordial and necessary
‘fall’. Similarly constrained by a particular
religious view is the idea that God struggles against man’s nature; the
general intuition (of which this view is a particular form) is that God commands,
that the ‘ought’ is present in human consciousness but may, precisely because
it is a command (and not a necessity), be refused.
Schweitzer’s third and final principle for the
evaluation of a religion is the extent to which it engenders ‘permanent and
profound incentives to the inward perfecting of personality and to ethical
activity’ (p.37). The full legitimacy and rationality of this principle is
surely self-evident. A religion which does not mean to produce such ethical
incentives, in which God does not command the realization of values that ought
to be, is cynicism and so to speak, has no case to defend. This then is the
only true non-dogmatic, universal principle which Schweitzer puts forward. But
he does not elaborate it. Nor does he give concrete meanings to the ethical
ideal which is to serve as the measuring stick for all religions. Readers are
left to their own devices if they would know how, in such a religion, ethical
values are discerned and determined and how individual or society are motivated
to discern and determine them.
It will be clear from the examples we have briefly
surveyed that, unless we accept a Kraemer-like assertion of individual
religious preference and the ‘intractability’ of that preference to reasoned
explanation, principles of value must be elaborated to make comparative
religion a useful endeavor. The work of Neill and Schweitzer shows that while
they do not, in practice, have a genuinely plural concept of religious
experience and values, they have at least recognized the need (and the
possibility) of setting out principles of value which are independent of
particular religious doctrines. Because the religious experience of all human
beings is relevant to all of us, it is important to elaborate the principles of
value in a critical, and not dogmatic, manner. The purpose of doing so need not
(certainly, should not) be, as in Neill and Schweitzer, to re-phrase the dogmas
of a particular religion as a prelude to ‘introducing’ that religion to others.
The purpose should be, rather, to set out a common space which different
religions can inhabit and inhabit critically. This purpose assumes, in
direct contradiction to Kraemer, that the goal of comparative religion is not
to describe or debate the nature of God, but to discern (and then do) the Will
of God, to discern and do the ‘good’, to realize value in the world we all
share. l have accordingly set out in the paragraphs below, the six principles
of value which constitute, together with the theoretical principles given
above, the presuppositions of this study of Christian ethics. (Full exposition
of these principles is not relevant or necessary here.)
--pg13--
Six principles of value
First principle
We
can and do distinguish between something that is bare ‘matter of fact’ and the
‘value’ put upon it when we call it ‘big’ or ‘small’, ‘good’ or ‘bad’, or
whatever. The ‘fact’ and the ‘value’ are, at least in our understanding,
separable. Indeed, we cannot speak of ‘understanding’ at all unless there are
these two orders of being, ‘fact’ and ‘value’, the actual and the ideal. If it
were otherwise, everything would simply flow by us (or through us),
uninterrupted by any reflection or calculation or knowledge. When we say of
something that it ‘matters’ or is ‘important’ or ‘nice’, or even if we assign
to it a purely theoretical value, a number for example, we have made reference
to these two orders of being, the actual and the ideal. If there were less or
more than two orders of being, we could not differentiate, or structure, or
reflect upon, the flow of experience. It is even doubtful if we could claim to
have ‘experienced’ something, because saying even that much presupposes that we
can separate this something from that something else. To do even
that much requires that we have an idea of some sort, which could tell
us, for example, where this something ends and that something
begins. Cognition (knowing something the first time around) and recognition
(knowing that it is the same or a similar something the second time around) are
only possible because there are two orders of being. The first principle
therefore has to be that: there are only two orders of being, the actual
and the ideal.
Second principle
Because,
without the ideal, we do not make any kind of sense of the actual, we can say
that, in order to be aware of itself, the actual needs the ideal. The ideal
stands as the ground of the actual, as its necessary condition. In that sense,
and only in that sense, the ideal can be said to ‘bring about’, to ‘cause’, the
actual. Because there is an ideal order of being we come to be, first, aware of
a ‘matter of fact’, that is, we come to ‘have’ the actual; and, separately, we
can put a value to that ‘fact’. Equally, however, there could be no point in
there being an ideal realm if that realm did not have a bearing upon the
actual: no point in having the value 'red’ if no sort of ‘red’ is ever actually
seen; no point in having the value ‘true’ if it can never be applied, if
anything is (or is not) as ‘true’ as anything else; no point in the value
‘good’ if ‘good’ never actually engages the actual world. The second principle
is simply the observation that: the two orders of being, the actual and
the ideal, are mutually relevant.
--pg14--
Third principle
It
is self-evident that value endures at least longer than the actual: when, for
example, something we valued ‘red’ has perished, the ‘red’ lingers in the world
as a memory or as a possibility. It is an aspect of the separateness of the
actual and the ideal that we find ourselves saying of something actual that it
is not ‘red’ enough or ‘true’ enough or
‘good’ enough, or that it is ‘not yet red’ or ‘not yet true’, and so on.
Especially when the ideal is specifically in the form of value, in the form of
that which is desirable, our awareness of the separation of the two orders of
being is experienced as more than a logical separateness: it is felt, instead,
as a longing, a direction, a quest. However, any particular value the actual
seeks is bound in a network of relationships with other, particular values,
each in tum implicated in the actual. For example, the ‘red’ of a red rose is
conditional upon (among many other circumstances) there being light in a
particular arrangement, the right soil and moisture, etc. The network of
relationships between particular values is hierarchical; the higher values are
conditional upon the lower values being realized first. Thus, for example,
there must be language before there can be poetry, light and color before there
can be painting, and so on. At the base of the hierarchy are elemental values
which are the least conditioned. Of these, the most unconditioned is existence
itself, the bare fact that life is.
The relevance of the ideal to the actual has the
quality of necessity or command when the particular ideal is purely theoretical
(e.g. true or false) or purely valuational (eg. good or bad, desirable or
undesirable). The theoretical ideals operate in the actual world with the
authority of natural law: an apple falls downwards because it is constrained to
do so by gravity operating upon its mass: it cannot do otherwise. A valuational
ideal on the other hand does not constrain; it is not necessary. It
nevertheless commands, but it is in the nature of a command (as distinct from
necessity) that it may or may not be obeyed (realized): the apple may or may
not be ‘beautiful’; a person may or may not be ‘good’. Especially for man, the
ideal is a command, a potent, persistent awareness of what ‘ought to be’ and
yet ‘is not’. Regardless of whether we obey the command or not, the ideal goes
on judging the actual situation as to whether it is or not as it ‘ought to be’.
Because the ‘ought to be’ persists, we can describe its command, especially as
it touches ourselves, as an appeal. Where the valuational ideals are in play,
the actual is not constrained to obey but asked to respond actively to an
appeal: if the response is not forthcoming, the ideal is not embodied and fails
to become real.
The argument that the ideal does not care either
way—that it neither constrains nor commands—is false. Equally false is the
assertion that value constrains the actual, that, in other words, we are bound
to be ‘good’ (or ‘bad’). Both arguments (one wholly cynical, the other wholly
fatalistic) are contradicted by the facts of ethical choice, the
--pg15--
feeling
of moral responsibility, the knowledge that we may act otherwise than we do.
The claim that such feelings are simply illusions or psychological complexes is
negated by their universality among all human beings, and by the actual
realization of value in the world: the ‘ought to be’ is experienced and
sometimes it ‘is’. If either argument were true, there would be not two realms
of being, the ideal and the actual, but only some undifferentiated mode of
being of which we know (and could know) nothing. The third principle is, in
other words, a corollary of the first and second: the ideal is relevant
to the actual as a command.
Fourth principle
As
we said above, at the base of the hierarchy of values, the most unconditioned,
the most ‘given’, is existence itself; the bare fact that life is. Itself
unconditioned, the value of being existent, of being real, conditions all other
values. The value of anything depends, first of all, on the idea that being
actual is in itself valuable. For, if it were not valuable to be real, it would
not be valuable for any value to be realized—but a value which it is not valuable
to realize is a contradiction. That actual being, real existence, is valuable
is therefore the condition of there being value at all. This principle cannot
be denied without also denying the possibility of all ethics. In ‘religious’
language, we are saying that this-world, the world of actual existence as such,
is valuable. To be sure, ‘religious life’ calls for many disciplines and
denials of this-world, but it does so only in order to realize higher value in
this-world. ‘Religious life’ is a commitment to contending in this-world for
the values that can be realized in this-world. A religion or world-view that
declares this-world to be fundamentally or essentially or wholly evil or
dis-valuable denies to itself the right to contend in what is valuable or not
valuable in our existence in this-world. What value can there ever be even in
merely `knowing’ whether this-world is or is not valuable if the value of there
being a this-world at all is itself negated? The will to knowledge is itself a
part of this-worldly existence; the effort for knowledge only makes sense on
the assumption that willing, that is, being in the actual realm, is better than
not-willing, better than non-existence. The alternative is to be (or wish to
be) dead to this-world while somehow surviving in an actionless, speechless
state: Schopenhauer, for example, who taught that to be real is an evil also
taught that death is the only end of that evil, that death is ‘the real aim of
life’, and then, with an inevitable consistency, advocated an ethic of death
through suffering, voluntary starvation.4
To assert that the actual as such is valuable does not
mean that it is perfect, that it has all the value it can hold. It means only
that existence as such is valuable, that no matter how much dis-value or ‘evil’
it holds, it can never hold so much that the desirability of existence as such
is negated. Indeed, the complaint that a life has lost its meaning, its value,
its reason for being, is precisely an acknowledgement of the
--p16--
value
of existence as such-for the complaint is that, in this particular instance,
the value is being prevented or wasted or somehow ‘lost’. Actual being is a
‘good’, imperfect but perfectible; its perfectibility is the condition of all
moral striving. The fourth principle is then an affirmation that the effort to
realize value is worthwhile because actual being is itself a value.
It is an affirmation that the relevance of the ideal to the actual is not
simply a good idea, but is a real, material possibility: the realm of actual
being can receive and embody values.
Fifth principle
To
realize value means to cause the actual to embody the form and content of the
ideal. Such value-reaIization must be possible because it is a nonsense to say
of something that it ‘ought to be’ and to say that it is impossible. An
impossibility cannot be an ‘ought’, it cannot be commanded at all. But how is
value-realization possible if, as we have said, the world is under the dominion
of the theoretical ideal whose commands compel compliance with the force of
natural law. As a part of nature, human beings are necessarily constrained by
the laws of nature which rule absolutely. Things do appear to happen expectedly:
that is, we can say of certain events that when particular determining conditions
or ‘determinants’ are present, those events happen. There are no ‘gaps’ or
‘voids’ in the world—what happens does so because the necessary determinants
were there to bring it about. However, things do also appear to happen unexpectedly;
that is, the necessary determinants are there to bring about an event x,
but another event y happens. This does not mean that the world has
failed to behave in an orderly fashion, or that, now and again, there are
‘gaps’ in its orderliness. It simply means that more (unexpected) determinants
entered in the particular situation with the result than instead of x, y
happened. In other word it is really possible that what actually is could be,
or could have been, otherwise than it is, on account of the ever-abundant availability
of more (i.e. unexpected) determinants. The causal potency of the world as it
actually is leads it on to a particular outcome. But this potency can be
deflected by the intervention of new, additional determinants towards some
other particular outcome. It is especially true of man that, both as regards
his own person and as regards his activity in nature, the availability of new,
additional determinants is real and powerfully felt. Especially under the
agency of man, the world, though governed by natural laws, can be directed and
shaped. The fifth principle is an acknowledgement of this dramatic quality of
the actual: the actual is malleable, susceptible to influence and
intervention.
--pg17--
Sixth principle
Natural
law commands the conformity to itself of the whole of the actual realm with the
single exception of man. Except for man, the whole realm of the actual moves
through successive states of determination, each fully determining the next.
While subject to the same natural law, man is capable of deflecting the course
of events to ends other than they would reach if left alone. This is because
man, uniquely, is subject not only to the command of natural law, the
theoretical ideal, but also to the command of the ‘ought to be’, the
valuational ideal. Man’s significance in creation is precisely this: he is the
bridge which values must cross if they are to enter the real. Man stands at the
line of transition between the two orders of being, the actual and the ideal,
the ‘is’ and the ‘ought to be’. It is uncertain whether, at the elemental level
of existence, at the level of mere nature (in landscapes, for example), there
are values independent of human consciousness. But it is certain that the
higher values, whether of goodness or beauty or usefulness, have existence
through the mediation of human consciousness and human activity.
The specifically religious expression, man is created
‘in the image of God’ is merely a poetic exaggeration except in reference to
the fact that, through man, the actual may be molded into the pattern of the
ideal. Man’s cosmic status, his purpose, is to bring about a likeness between
the actual and the ideal by deflecting the causal forces abundant in the world
towards ends which embody values. Because man is in the world, is a part of the
actual, he is both subject and object of this endeavor: he has himself to
perfect as well the world. The sixth principle is an affirmation of this
responsibility, within the constraints of the theoretical ideal, to answer the
appeal of the valuational ideal: perfection of the world is a
specifically human burden.
These six principles can be put in more pointedly
religious terms. First: to say that we cannot ‘have’ the realm of actual being
except by leave of the realm of ideal being, is more simply said by affirming
that ‘God is’. The absolute otherness of the ideal to the actual is then a
realization of the transcendence of God. Second: the relevance of the ideal to
the actual means that God is concerned for this world, He does not merely co-exist
with it. That is all that we know about His nature, just as all we know about
the realm of ideal being is that it presents a pattern which is desirable for
the actual to realize. Third: there being both a theoretical ideal and a
valuational ideal means that, in the realm of nature, God’s commands are as
necessary and inevitable as natural laws, but particularly as regards man these
commands are values which man may or may not realize. Fourth: actual existence
being ‘in itself good’ but imperfect means that God has created the actual for
a purpose, namely for its perfectibility by man, Man is not free to con-
--pg18--
demn
God’s creation, to seek an easy way out of it. Fifth: the malleability of the
actual is an affirmation that God’s commands can be obeyed, that the ethical
ideal can be real, that nature (including human nature) does not exist beyond
hope of perfection (felicity, salvation, paradise) but, on the contrary, the
possibility of perfection (felicity, etc.) is a real possibility. Sixth:
the perfectibility of the actual is a specifically human burden. This means
that the duty to obey God’s commands falls upon man only. Only man is a moral
being insofar as he subjects himself to God’s command, being able to refuse,
and only man is a moral agent insofar as only man can give to the value,
commanded by the ideal being, real existence.
THE AIMS OF THIS STUDY
The
aim of setting out in this introduction the presuppositions of the analysis of
Christian ethics which follows is to establish that that analysis is not
presented as an Islamic critique of Christian values, but as a critique
pure and simple. The principles of value set out in the previous section are
offered as rational, critical truths, not as dogmatic ones. They are of
course open to question, but whoever wishes to contend them should not do so
from the standpoint of dogma: a rational, critical claim can only be
legitimately refuted by another, better argued.
I hope therefore that a Christian reader will not
offer to brush aside this work as the opinion of a non-Christian, with
arguments like—‘Ah, but we Christians start from the position (or belief)
that...’ My aim has not been to show how Christian ethics are seen in Muslim
eyes, or to put forward anti-Christianity arguments which make up the kind of
objections which traditional Christianity traditionally arouses in the heart of
a Muslim. I have tried, setting out from only the barest presuppositions which
must be accepted if discourse is to be at all meaningful, to analyze the main ideas
of Christian ethics as such. The materials to which the theoretical and value
principles are applied in the course of the analysis, are drawn from the
Christian tradition. Here all sorts of empirical errors are possible, however
strongly I may hope that Christian readers will recognize these materials as
their own. The analysis can be valid only insofar as the materials it weighs
are indeed Christian. However, the possibility of error(s) in this respect do
not make the work a dogmatic treatise which Christian readers are then relieved
from taking seriously because they are Christian and I am not. Wherever an
error has taken place, it constitutes an argument against the point in which it
occurs, but not against the work as a whole.
--pg19--
Islamic ethos of this study
That
said, l should still wish to claim that this work expresses an Islamic spirit
in that Islam welcomes the suspension of all dogmatic theology, including its
own, in the hope of achieving a just understanding between the religions and a
just peace between their claims. Certainly, Islam endorses the value principles
set out above—even in the form, as above, of philosophical propositions devoid
of theological language. It is very much a part of the ethos of Islam to
believe that whatever is repugnant to reason is on that ground repugnant to
Allah. In its fourteen centuries of history, Islam has well known tragic
failure in its relations with Judaism and Christianity (which could not
tolerate its ‘after-them’ appearance in the world) or with the religions of India
from which it gathered the larger number of its adherents. The failure arose
from contending theological assertions about the nature of God. It is in full
awareness of that failure, and of the reason for it, that Muslims as Muslims
can plead for a suspension of contention on theological issues. We plead
instead: ‘Let us drop the old arguments about the nature of God which have
brought nothing but deadlock. Let us, instead, turn to man, to his duties and
responsibilities in the world which are, in fact, none other than the doing of
God’s Will. Let God be Whom He may: is it not possible that we all agree to
establish Divine Will first?’
This appeal is explicitly and emphatically ethical.
It is life- and action-oriented. It transcends the strictly theological
positions without prejudice to any religious community. The real object and
goal is the Will of God, which is something in the discernment of which all
human beings (apart from the cynics) are one brotherhood. The discernment in question
is not one of theoretical truth, but of value. In the former, where the
comparative study of other religions has so far been deadlocked, the issue has
always been that of a ‘true’ discernment as against a ‘false’ one. Obviously,
whether dogmatically or otherwise, the true could not keep company with the
false, and mutual advance in the cause of humanity was impossible. All that was
possible was some form or other of ‘mission’ by which the majority of mankind
were declared ‘enemy territory’, open to conversion or subversion, an attitude
inevitably resisted with the maximum of combative defensiveness or
counter-attack.
It is otherwise when the goal is value, the Will of
God, the ‘ought’ arising from the ideal realm of being. Every person sees more
or less of the ought; but whoever sees less does not necessarily see falsehood.
Every consciousness of value is a consciousness of genuine value. But not
everybody is conscious, or equally conscious, of all the values present,
possible, in any given situation. There can certainly be vision of more or less
value, but not of ‘false’ value, for there is no such thing. Even between
opposing moral standpoints, the question is never one of ‘error’ in perception
which may then be ‘corrected’, but of a loss of
--pg20--
genuine
perception which can (ought to) be increased. A misdeed is not, most often, an
act committed in pursuit of a dis-value, but one committed in the pursuit of an
inferior value, usually pertaining to oneself or one’s immediate advantage,
when, in the given situation, a superior value, usually pertaining to others
and their advantage, constitutes the higher obligation. A misdeed is then an
occasion when the person contemplating or engaged in it has seen less than he
or she ought of the moral factors involved in the situation. What the person
does see is not necessarily ‘false’ but ‘less’. ‘False’ is a category of
judgement that belongs only to one dimension of being, the theoretical. But
‘more’ and ‘less’ are categories which belong to the other, the valuational,
dimension of being. The two are neither synonymous nor mutually exclusive. The
‘more’ and ‘less’ perception of value are both ‘true’. Both are perceptions of
genuine value, of the ideal realm of being; the deficiency of the ‘less’ can
only be supplied with ‘more’ value-discernment.
A basis for dialogue
We
believe that this is the only attitude that is genuinely compatible with human
brotherhood in practice. The brother who does not discern enough is offered
more to discern. Further, as the discernment of values consists primarily in
beholding values in actuality, in deeds—direct perception of the ideal realm of
being is ruled out by definition—the one who sees more can (and should)
therefore do more. For if as one claims, there is ‘more’ to see in the
ought of the ideal realm, it follows that one must do ‘more’ also, since
the done is the only evidence one can persuasively give of the ‘more` one
claims to have seen. This attitude is true to the deepest insights of
Christianity. Every Christian will grant that, in the ethical vision of Jesus,
the ‘sinner’, the one who sees ‘less’ of the ought, is nevertheless a person
worthy of love, and few will deny that the sinner is, in being so, more
worthy of love. If the default of such a person is a default in truth, namely
falsehood, nobody could sensibly ask that the sinner be loved as a sinner, that
is, that falsehood be accepted as such. Falsehood itself can only be rejected
as such. But where the sinner’s default is not one of truth but of value, rejection
cannot ever be absolute. Rather, it must bend to the higher strategy of the
appropriate good deed. It will surely not be denied that love of the sinner can
be translated only into a good deed done towards that individual—it cannot be
expressed as an argument, a theoretical refutation.
And now we may ask, will Christians accept an
invitation to communicate with Muslims, on this rational basis? Are Christians
prepared, in the interest of enabling God`s Will to become supreme in the
world, to suspend, in continuous ‘disengagement’, the teachings of their
dogmatic theology? Are they willing to join Muslims in an effort to found human
brotherhood under the moral law?
--pg21--
Notes and references
Notes
1 Thus,
for example, Kitagawa (l959, pp.28-9): ‘It must be kept in mind that the
historian of religions is engaged in the religio-scientific enquiry of
religions for the sake of ‘understanding’, and not for the service of
propagation of any particular faith... The object of a University is intellectual
and not moral, and... The significance of the teaching of the history of
religions must be intellectual and not ‘religious’ in the traditional sense of
the terms.’
2 For
discussion of an example, see the review article Fazlur-Rahman and Faruqi,
1961.
3 I.e. ‘salvation-history’. This
doctrine will be discussed below (pp.27ff.). All that is relevant here is the
general point that the doctrine has determined the form of a principle which
was supposed to be, and whose usefulness depends on being, independent of
doctrine.
4 See
Schopenhauer, 1948, vol.1, pp.516-20; vol.3, pp.460-8.
References
Fazlur-Rahman and Faruqi, lsma’il R. al-
(l961) ‘Christliches Verstandnis des Islam’, Kairos: Zeitschrift fur
Religionswissenschaft und Thealogie, Heft 3-4, pp.225-33. (Review of
Kenneth Cragg’s Call ofthe Minaret and Sandals at the Mosque.)
Kitagawa, Joseph M. (1959) ‘The history
of religions in America' in Kitagawa and Eliade (eds) 1959.
Kitigwa, Joseph M, and Eliade, Mircea
(eds) (1959) The History of Religions. Essays in Methodology, University
of Chicago Press.
Kraemer, Hendrik (1957) Religion and
the Christian Faith, The Westminister Press, Philadelphia.
Neill, Stephen (1961) Christian Faith
and Other Faiths. The Christian Dialogue with Other Religions, Oxford
University Press, London.
Schopenhauer, Arthur (1948) The World
as Will and Idea, trans. R.B. Haldane and J. Kemp, Routledge and Kegan
Paul, London.
Schweitzer, Albert (1951) Christianity
and the Religions of the World, trans, Johanna Powers, Macmillan, New York.
--pg22--
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