Faith and Freedom: Contexts, Choices, and Crises in Religious Commitments (Routledge New Critical Thinking in Religion, Theology and Biblical Studies) 9781138607774, 9780429467011, 1138607770

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Faith and Freedom

It is sometimes thought that individual religious faith should be firmly fixed in the traditions of the past. That once it is established in someone’s life, it should remain steadfast and unchanging throughout personal, cultural, or any other changes. This book subverts that idea by showing how it is actually ongoing inquiry, examination, and indeed change, requiring similarly ongoing acts of informed and responsible freedom, that will produce a dynamic and meaningful faith. Contending that religious faith should readily encompass deliberate and ongoing acts of personal freedom, the text outlines various ways in which these dual aspects are more ally than enemy. It also demonstrates how the ongoing free choices that are required for genuine faith are not absolute, but are in fact contextualized and conditioned by genetic makeup, environmental conditioning, and present character traits produced in part by a person’s past choices. Despite this caveat, personal freedom is presented as genuine and real, with a vitally important role to play in a person’s religiosity. The book concludes with some observations of this process in practice in the author’s own journey from a Christian theist worldview to that of a religious naturalist. This is a fascinating treatise on the role of personal freedom in religious faith. It will, therefore, be of significant interest to scholars of religion, theology, philosophy of religion, and religious naturalism. Donald A. Crosby is Professor of Philosophy Emeritus, Colorado State University, USA.

Routledge New Critical Thinking in Religion, Theology and Biblical Studies

The Routledge New Critical Thinking in Religion, Theology and Biblical Studies series brings high quality research monograph publishing back into focus for authors, international libraries, and student, academic and research readers. This open-ended monograph series presents cutting-edge research from both established and new authors in the field. With specialist focus yet clear contextual presentation of contemporary research, books in the series take research into important new directions and open the field to new critical debate within the discipline, in areas of related study, and in key areas for contemporary society. The Church, Authority and Foucault Imagining the Church as an Open Space of Freedom Steven G. Ogden Israel, the Church, and Millenarianism A Way Beyond Replacement Theology Steven D. Aguzzi The Liquidation of the Church Kees de Groot Myth and Solidarity in the Modern World Beyond Religious and Political Division Timothy Stacey Pacifism and Pentecostals in South Africa A New Hermeneutic for Nonviolence Marius Nel Faith and Freedom Contexts, Choices, and Crises in Religious Commitments Donald A. Crosby For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/ religion/series/RCRITREL

Faith and Freedom Contexts, Choices, and Crises in Religious Commitments Donald A. Crosby

First published 2018 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2018 Donald A. Crosby The right of Donald A. Crosby to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Crosby, Donald A., author. Title: Faith and freedom : contexts, choices, and crises in religious commitments / Donald A. Crosby. Description: New York : Routledge, 2018. | Series: Routledge new critical thinking in religion, theology, and biblical studies | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018008437 | ISBN 9781138607774 (hardback : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780429467011 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Faith. | Liberty—Religious aspects. | Change (Psychology)—Religious aspects. | Spiritual formation. Classification: LCC BL626.3 .C76 2018 | DDC 202/.2—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018008437 ISBN: 978-1-138-60777-4 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-46701-1 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by Apex CoVantage, LLC

In Memory of Paul L. Lehmann Champion of Contextual Discernment, Proponent of Situational Freedom, and Revered Teacher

Contents

ContentsContents

Prefaceix 1 Contextual freedom, religious beliefs, and stances of faith Contextual freedom and religious beliefs  2 Contextual freedom and stances of faith  3 Two kinds of truth and two ways of expressing truth  7 Responsible freedom and the life of faith  9 Faith, freedom, and weakness of will  11 Conclusion 13

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2 Functions of religious ultimates Role-functional analysis  19 Uniqueness 21 Primacy 21 Pervasiveness 23 Rightness 26 Permanence 30 Hiddenness 33 Secular faith  34 Conclusion 36

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3 A range of choices Monotheism 41 Polytheism 43 Contemplative monism  44 Religious naturalism  45 Approaches to religious diversity  47 Conclusion 53

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viii  Contents 4 Ways of being religious Way of knowledge  58 Way of devotion  61 Way of works  63 Way of mystical experience  65 Pluralism and the four ways of being religious  68 Conclusion 70

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5 Why religious faith is important Positive side of personal religious faith  74 Positive side of communal religious faith  78 Negative side of personal religious faith  79 Negative side of communal religious faith  83 Positive side of religion for the earth and its nonhuman creatures  87 Negative side of religion for the earth and its nonhuman creatures  90 Conclusion 91

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6 Points of departure God 98 Atonement and apotheosis  100 Nature-human dualism  104 Belief in an afterlife  107 Scriptural authority  111 Conclusion 113

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7 Points of arrival Importance of religion  118 Wisdom of the Hebrew Bible and the Christian New Testament  119 Seriousness of moral evil  120 Goodness of nature  122 Pivotal role of mystery  125 Religion’s intimate relation with the natural sciences  129 A vast and ever-changing universe  130 Evolutionary and ecological interdependencies on earth  133 Radical incarnation  135 Conclusion 140

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Index143

Preface

PrefacePreface

This book is about the interrelation of freedom and destiny as freedom faces toward the future. More specifically, it is about this intimate relationship as it bears on religious beliefs and religious stances of faith.1 Human freedom is real, but it is always a freedom conditioned and deeply influenced by a past made up of three basic factors in a person’s character or makeup at any given time: the person’s genotype, his or her environmental background and influences, and the habits, character, and opportunities created by the person’s previous choices. These three factors constitute the destiny or formed self of that person at that time. This destiny is not the same thing as fate because it does not determine, explain, or account for present choices in all their relevant respects. In the words of theologian Paul Tillich, “Destiny is not a strange power which determines what shall happen to me. It is myself as given, formed by nature, history, and myself. My destiny is the basis of my freedom; my freedom participates in shaping my destiny” (1951: 185). Thus destiny poses ranges of opportunities for the future and does not just impose restrictions or determinations from the past. It is not something settled or fixed, but is being continuously refashioned. And it is the basis, brought forward from the distant as well as the proximal and immediate past, for continuing new acts and choices of the present and the future. The relationship of destiny and freedom is particularly crucial in the domain of religion. I maintain throughout this book that all change is transformation of something available for change prior to the process by which it undergoes change. In other words, there is no such thing as sheer, de novo, contextless change. Similarly, all acts of freedom are acts of transformation of something given to the present by the past. This something given includes the opportunities for choice present in a given situation of choice. But it also consists of the aforementioned three factors in the person’s makeup at the time of the choice: the person’s genotype – or what each person uniquely is as a biological organism and distinctive being – and the range of choices it makes possible, the environmental conditioning that helped to shape the person in the past, and the character of the person formed to a significant extent by the person’s earlier choices.

x  Preface In the case of religion, a person’s religious upbringing, if there is such, or at least the religious options made available to the person as part of the heritage of the past, will have an important role to play in the religious choices specifically or concretely available to the person at any given time. A religious upbringing and/or other religious aspects of a person’s cultural context pose possibilities for choice and the consequent development of character in the ongoing religious life of the person. The person’s choices will be transformations of that religious upbringing, if any, and of aspects of the religious heritage taken into account by the person. These transformations then become part of the person’s developing destiny. Because both destiny and freedom face to the future, both are active and dynamic. The life of religious faith is authentic only if it continues to be a focused venture into the future, accepting the risks and uncertainties, as well as the prospects and hopes, of that future. If religious faith ever becomes static, solely oriented toward the past, or fixed in the past, it ceases to be anything more than a token profession and is therefore no longer the central focus of a person’s life. Life does not stand still, nor do the cultures and times in which life is lived. A viable, relevant faith is not nostalgic or backward looking. It is always a venture into the unknown, with a willingness and readiness to make the decisions necessary for constantly putting one’s stance of faith to the test of ongoing experience. These decisions can often be trying and uncertain, demanding much of the person of faith. They require not only acts of the will but also an active and inquiring mind, and resolute emotional commitments as well. A so-called faith in which no persistent choices, probing inquiries, or firm commitments are involved is a bogus or pretended faith, not an actual or authentic one. Such merely professed or pretended religious faith is not truly that, because it does not involve the whole person. Faith is by definition an act of the whole person – heart, mind, and will – not something tangential to the person or an occasional, fleeting interest of the person. Faith as an act of the whole person, steeped in the flow of time and in constant need for response to changes required by the flow of time, is like those species of shark that were reportedly able to stay alive only when they were vigorously swimming. This was said to be the case because the sharks could intake the oxygen of the water only by obligate ram ventilation – that is, by forcing the water over their gills by continual forward movement through it. The report is now known to be not altogether true, even though it is still largely so (Hunter 2017). But the idea implicit in it is an excellent metaphor for the life of faith. Authentic faith must always be in motion. It can never stop or stand still. A faith that ceases actively, deliberately, and thoughtfully to choose and thereby to develop and adapt to change – not only to the inevitable changes in a person’s life but also to the ongoing changes of the cultural and surrounding world – is a dying or dead faith. Responsible faith and active

Preface xi freedom go necessarily together. This is the central thesis defended in this book. I develop the thesis analytically in the first five chapters and autobiographically in the last two. But of course the analytical part also reflects in many ways the choices and experiences of my lifelong personal journey of faith. It is informed, that is to say, by my ever-changing personal destiny as it has continued to find expression in developments over the years leading up to my present religious beliefs and stance of faith. In the first chapter of this book, I develop further the relationship of freedom and destiny, and show how crucial this relationship is to the life of authentic religious faith. I do so under the rubric of “contextual freedom,” showing how the involvement of freedom in the life of religious faith is a continual process of consciously working to transform what is brought forward from its past so as to respond actively to the challenges and needs of the present. Time does not stand still, and neither should the life of faith. In this chapter, I explain the crucial distinction between truths of religious belief, on the one hand, and the nature of existential truth, on the other, and I show how the latter figures fundamentally in stances of religious faith. I also address the issue of weakness of will and discuss its bearing on the topic of faith and freedom. The second chapter is devoted to the task of providing a general theory of religion that can help to guide the discussions of subsequent chapters. This theory works with earlier versions of the theory presented in two previous books (Crosby 1981 and 2002). It analyzes the nature of religion in terms of six role-functional concepts, showing how these concepts can be applied to the religions of the world. I argue that such a theory can take into account six principal roles played by religious ultimates such as God, gods, goddesses, nirvana, Dao, the Mandate of Heaven, Brahman, nature, and the like, while allowing for the many quite different attributes among those ultimates. I also explore relations and tensions of these role-functions with one another as one way of interpreting and understanding such relations and tensions in religious systems. Chapter 3 provides discussion and analysis of four major options of choice available to the seekers and practitioners of religious faith: monotheism, polytheism, contemplative monism, and religious naturalism. This is, among other things, a reminder to people of the West that traditional forms of theism are not identical with religion as a whole; that is, religion does not consist only in belief in and devotion to God. It follows that secularism need not be thought to consist solely in rejection of belief in God. In other words, persons or traditions can be intensely religious, even when they do not focus on God as the religious ultimate. Atheists are thus not automatically secular or non-religious, and there are religious ultimates beyond traditional notions of God. These are commonplace points, of course, but they tend often to be forgotten in Western culture. And the freedom so essential to the life of faith should not succumb to the mistake of thinking that there is only the binary option of faith in God or no religious faith. The other

xii  Preface three options discussed in this chapter should also be kept constantly in mind as ways of responding to the assurances, demands, and empowerments – as well as the ultimate, ineliminable mysteries – of religious thought and religious life. Keeping such options constantly in mind and recognizing them as wholehearted responses to the towering mysteries of religious faith informs the pluralistic outlook I argue for in this chapter and elsewhere. This outlook is not only one of respectful toleration of religious differences but also one of active investigation into alternative religious views so as to learn from these views and from their adherents how to critique, inform, and enhance one’s own ever-developing life of faith. This pluralistic spirit is carried forward into Chapter 4 in which I discuss four ways of practicing the religious life: the ways of knowledge, devotion, works, and mystical experience. I provide instructive examples of each of these ways, showing how each of them ties into an essential aspect of religion and how each of them affects and interfuses the others. These are modes of emphasis in religious life, not exclusionary options, but they provide ways of being religious that do justice to the differences of interest, need, personality, and gift among people of religious faith. The chapter concludes with discussion of the religious outlook of pluralism in its relation to the four ways of being religious. In Chapter 5, I bring into focus the singular importance of religion in the history, cultures, institutions, and societies of humans, as well as in the lives of individual human beings. This importance has both positive and negative sides, and I discuss examples of each on both the level of individual lives and the level of communal life. Religion has done much good in the world, but it has also been intimately involved in much evil. Its importance can be readily seen in both of these respects, and we need to be as cognizant as possible of why this is so. Dismissal of religion is dismissal of a powerful force for good. And overlooking its importance is overlooking the dangers it poses today and has always posed for the health and integrity of individual lives, and for the prosperity, peace, and justice of human societies. I provide examples of both tendencies of religion, on both the individual and the communal levels. The latter part of the chapter extends this analysis of the positive and negative potentialities of religious faith and religious institutions into examination of the effects of religious outlooks on human attitudes toward and treatments of the natural environment. Religious faith and religious institutions have extremely important roles to play in the area of ecology as well, and they have done so and will continue to do so for good or evil. To maximize their potentials for good and to minimize their evil effects on the ecological systems of earth – systems on which all of us, human and nonhuman creatures alike, absolutely depend – is a matter of grave and urgent importance, and another way to understand and to take fully into account the continuing importance of religion.

Preface xiii As I mentioned earlier, Chapters 6 and 7 are largely autobiographical, but they also provide arguments that have been convincing to me in the developments of my personal religious faith over the years. In Chapter 6, I describe five aspects of my previous faith, which I have been persuaded, after careful thought and reflection, to leave behind. In Chapter 7, I describe five aspects of my previous faith I have carried forward into my present stance of faith, and I explain the reasons for my continuing to adhere to them. In the last part of this final chapter, I present, discuss, and defend four other fundamental features of my present religious faith – features I have added to its earlier versions. I intend the two concluding chapters of this book to be an illustration of how one person has brought his freedom to bear on an ever-developing life of religious faith. Others will have different stories to tell. But in all cases, I contend that freedom has an essential role to play as it reflects on and continues to make the choices required in an active life of faith. There is an indissoluble relation between viable faith and responsible freedom. This book is dedicated to the memory of one of my favorite teachers Paul L. Lehmann. He taught me the importance of contextual discernment in the face of complex ethical issues and the crucial need for the exercise of responsible freedom of choice guided by that discernment. I have moved beyond Lehmann’s personal Christian convictions and the profound influence they had on his ethical thought, but his memorable teaching has stayed with me and helped to provide a basis for the contextual development of my religious choices and changes of outlook over the years. I am grateful for the courteous help and support of the religion editor of the Routledge Press, Joshua Wells, and for the critical comments and support of two anonymous reviewers of parts of an earlier version this book. My wife, Pamela Crosby, has read and discussed with me drafts of each of the book’s chapters and made pertinent and valuable indications of ways in which the conciseness, clarity, and cogency of its assertions and arguments could be improved. She is a gifted dialogue partner and much-loved companion.

Note 1 This is not a book in which scholarly claims and counterclaims are constantly exchanged with highly regarded contemporary academic writers. I develop a position that relates to a variety of interreligious claims, positions, and arguments, and I do so as articulation and defense of a point of view at which I have arrived at over long years of thought. But I make no attempt to respond in detail to a variety of contemporary academic opinions, positions, and arguments relating to this book’s theme. There certainly is a place for an in-house, dialogical, disputational book of that sort, but it would likely be of interest mainly to scholars in such academic fields as philosophy and religious studies. This is not the kind of book I have sought to write here. Nevertheless, I hope that this book will be of interest to such scholars as well as to a wider reading public.

xiv  Preface

References Crosby, Donald A. 1981. Interpretive Theories of Religion. The Hague: Mouton. _______. 2002. A Religion of Nature. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Hunter, Jeff. 2017. “Will a Shark Drown If It Stops Moving?” http://www.discovery. com/tv-shows/shark-week/about-this-show/can-sharks-drown/

1 Contextual freedom, religious beliefs, and stances of faith Contextual freedom, religious beliefsContextual freedom, religious beliefs

Every free choice . . . is the initiation of a “value experiment” whose justification lies in the future and is not fully explained by the past. It says, in effect, “Let’s try this. It is not required by my past, but it is consistent with my past and is one branching pathway my life could now meaningfully take. I’m willing to take responsibility for it one way or the other.” . . . I will be aware that it was my doing and my own self-making either way – guided by my past, but not determined by it. – Robert Kane (1998: 145)

There is no such thing as absolute freedom. All acts of genuine freedom are performed in contexts that limit in various ways and in varying degrees the choices that are practically available to the person doing the choosing. Among these limiting factors are such things as genetic makeups; familial, social, cultural, and institutional influences; prospects and restrictions of particular situations of choice; and present habits, dispositions, and beliefs of persons shaped to a significant extent by their past decisions in particular situations. Such causal factors play an important role. They not only limit the alternatives available to a person in a given situation. They also limit a person’s ability or willingness to take all of the alternatives fully into account at any given time when making choices at that time. The person’s freedom is therefore a freedom conditioned by causes, even though it is not entirely determined by them. It is also important to take note of the fact that a world of predictable, highly probable, law-like, cause-effect relations is an essential component of genuine freedom, because in its absence, there would be no possibility of anticipating or having any reasonable control over the consequences of one’s actions. But this world must also pose the possibility of alternate choices; otherwise, those choices could not be genuinely free. And it must allow for persons being the ultimate principal causes of their actions, even though those actions are performed in limiting as well as enabling causal contexts. Causality and freedom work in tandem. While causality does not determine

2  Contextual freedom, religious beliefs freedom, it contextualizes it and contributes in indispensable ways to its exercise.1

Contextual freedom and religious beliefs The “branching pathways” of which philosopher Robert Kane speaks in this chapter’s epigraph define the scope and extent of freedom available to a person in specific contexts. The possibilities for choice posed by these pathways pertain to beliefs as well as to actions, and they can have a formidable role to play not only for a person’s particular religious beliefs but also for the character of that person’s fundamental stance of faith. Religious faith undergirds and guides people’s religious beliefs, as well as a number of their other beliefs. And their faith, in its turn, is profoundly influenced by the place in which they are born, the time in which they live, the family by whom they are reared, the primary language they learn to speak and write, the country and culture of which they are a part, the education they receive, the institutions in which they participate, the people with whom they associate, the habits they form, and so on. Their faith is also significantly influenced by their experiences, attitudes, and beliefs in areas of life other than the religious one – for example, by the regnant scientific, political, legal, or moral outlooks of their days. Many of these influences are so subtle and deep-rooted that people have little awareness of their effects on present acts of choice. But they contribute immeasurably to the character of one’s general perspective on life and to one’s faith – the faith that channels and constrains a person’s beliefs in ways of which he or she is often not fully aware. It is extremely unlikely, in other words, that a person can choose his or her faith stances outright by carefully considering a range of equally explicit, readily available, and initially neutral options. Faith stances provide necessary contexts for sincere religious beliefs and actions, but faith stances also nest in their own conditioning contexts. Faiths too can change, of course, but changes of faith are much slower, resistant, and infrequent than are specific beliefs and actions relating to faith. For example, it is much easier for a faithful theist to change a specific part of his or her beliefs about the nature of God than it is for him or her to abandon altogether faith in God as the ultimate focus or raison d’etre of religious thought and life, and of the universe as a whole. One might be willing to give up belief in God’s omnipotence and role as absolute creator of the universe and everything in it – in order to save God’s justice and mercy as well as the relative autonomy and genuine responsibility of God’s human creatures – while continuing to have firm faith in God’s existence and in many other assumed aspects of God’s nature and relations to the world. Proponents of philosopher Alfred North Whitehead’s conception of God as coeval with the world, needing the world as much as the world needs God, interacting with the novel possibilities posed by the world, and being

Contextual freedom, religious beliefs 3 a “fellow sufferer who understands” (Whitehead 1978: 351) exemplify this option of religious belief (see 342–51). Much the same thing could be said of psychologist/philosopher William James’s defense of belief in a finite God in the face of the traditional notion of a God possessed of infinite attributes and having no necessary relations with, dependency on, or limitations imposed by a world external to God (James 1996: 111, 124–26, 294–95). Thus faith in God can remain firmly planted even when particular beliefs about the character and role of God are subjected to significant changes of choice. Another example of the truth of this statement is the Protestant theologian Paul Tillich’s insistence on God being conceived, not as a personal being but as the power of being-itself, the latter viewed by him as “the God above God” (Tillich 1952: 182–90). I will have more to say about the role of freedom of choice in relation to stances of faith – as contrasted with specific religious beliefs – in the next section. But it is important to note that belief and faith are not synonymous. Beliefs can help to give expression to faith, but if beliefs are genuinely religious in character, they will grow out of and rest on faith. Worldviews are aspects of faith, but faith also has other crucial aspects such as devotion, trust, hope, courage, and humility in the face of what is so religiously momentous and mysterious as not, finally, to admit of completely clear, accurate, or definitive expression in the form of stated beliefs (see Crosby 2011: 13–35). An analogy can help to clarify the distinction between belief and faith that I have in mind. Based on the evidence available to me, I firmly believe that a properly designed parachute can allow a human being to descend safely to the earth from an airplane at an altitude of 10,000 feet. But I do not trust it enough, nor do I presently have courage, determination, or need enough, to choose to jump out of an airplane and thus to be willing to put this belief to the test firsthand. In similar fashion, religious faith is not just about beliefs, although it includes beliefs. It is a matter of having the courage, resolve, devotion, trust, and profoundly felt need to commit one’s life to a particular religious ultimate or focus of ultimate concern. I also note here an essential point to be made clear later in this book – namely, that there are secular forms of faith as well as religious ones, and most of what I will have to say about the contextual character and role of choices of religious beliefs and faiths applies to them as well. But let us look now at some relations of freedom of choice to stances of faith.

Contextual freedom and stances of faith Stances of faith often tend to be taken for granted and assumed without question. They are the inertial part of religion – namely, that part that is most resistant to movement or change of direction. They are more like sources or bases of reasons than continuing subjects or targets of reasons. Still, faiths can become subject to change in those relatively rare situations

4  Contextual freedom, religious beliefs where radical conversion from one stance of faith to another occurs – either slowly over a long time or within a relatively brief period of time. In this event, searching questions are raised with increasing urgency at the deepest levels of one’s life and orientation to the world. This situation requires contemplations, responses, choices, and answers regarding the very character of one’s faith. Here the deepest questions are not as much about what merely to believe as about what finally to trust, what is entitled to one’s deepest devotion and love, what is the basis of hope, what is the ultimate source of strength and courage, and what lays out a path for meaningful and fulfilling life. Beliefs have a role to play in experiences of conversion from one faith stance to another, but the conversion is to a new way of life, not just to a new way of thinking. And the acts of freedom involved are more than conceptual or intellectual in their character. These acts involve the whole person in every aspect of his or her makeup as a person – feeling and willing, venturing and hoping, experiencing and committing, not just believing. They also continue to involve, as they did in the earlier type of faith, all the resources, habituations, conventions, and motivations of one’s acculturation, for these too figure prominently in what is available, inhibitory, or attractive to one in the way of freedom of thought, feeling, and action. As cultures change, the possibility of new ways of thinking about the character of one’s faith is posed. The scientific revolution, for example, can affect one’s beliefs concerning the universe in such a profound way as to raise questions about a faith couched and expressed in the context and manner of an ancient, now outmoded, cosmology. We can draw on the resources of the past in our religious faith and in the beliefs accompanying that faith, but a faith mired in the past with no thought given to the need for appropriate adaptations to the present culture can become increasingly inadequate and irrelevant. We cannot go back to the past or live in the past; we can only live in the present as it faces toward the future. Another way in which cultural changes can affect religious beliefs and the faiths lying behind them is the challenge to faith posed by increasing cultural diversity in a given society, accompanied by regular exposure to different kinds of actively lived religious faith. In this case, options are posed for belief and faith that were not available before or that were not as evidently or urgently impressed upon persons of religious faith. What may have been assumed without doubt earlier is now subjected to active questioning in light of new alternatives for choice and possible new ways of thinking, believing, and living connected with the alternatives. At the very least, there must be searches for common ground among the people of the previous culture and those of the different cultures immigrating into a society if all of them are to live peacefully, productively, and justly together. These searches give impetus for dialogue and questioning of beliefs and forms of faith that were not necessary before. Changes of belief can challenge and help to bring about important modifications of faith or even to bring about crises of faith that lead to new forms of faith.

Contextual freedom, religious beliefs 5 The 17th-century philosopher Blaise Pascal mused in his Pensées, a collection of thoughts on religion and other subjects, that “[t]he heart has its reasons, which reason does not know. We feel it in a thousand things.” A little further on he explains, “This, then, is faith” (Pascal 1941: Pensées [“Thoughts”] 277 and 278, p. 95). I think that his statements help us to understand the difference between beliefs and stances of faith by reminding us that faith is not just a matter of beliefs or of beliefs defended or rejected on the basis of explicit, well-formulated reasons. Faith is far more complex and deep-lying than that. For Pascal himself, faith is “a gift of God,” not a gift of reason, and it is “felt by the heart” (95). We do not have to accept his particular theological analysis of the source of faith to accept his psychological one. Faith is more deeply felt in the heart than simply affirmed by the intellect on the basis of a purely rational analysis. It lies more in the core of a person’s being than on the surface of a person’s particular beliefs. It is the stimulus, source, and support of religious beliefs instead of just being a type of belief or collection of beliefs. Of course, some religious beliefs are more deeply entrenched than others, but they incline in this way toward their ultimate basis in stances of faith. Beliefs flow from faith and reflect on faith, but they are not identical with faith. Faiths can in some sense and on some occasions be chosen, but the choice of a new faith, when it occurs, runs up against far greater amounts of resistance and uncertainty than the choice of religious beliefs, which can take place more easily through the course of an individual’s life. The felt need for changes of faith usually begins more unconsciously than consciously, emerging into explicit awareness over stretches of time and increasingly requiring basic decisions about the direction of one’s life and one’s view of the world. And even when there is conversion from one form of faith to another – accompanied by the requisite choices of new beliefs and practices, the conversion experience underwrites and inspires – not everything is or must be left behind. The old faith is usually radically transformed or refigured by the new faith rather than being replaced in toto or created ex nihilo. Philosopher of science, sociologist, and political economist Otto Neurath assists the clarification of this last point with an illuminating image – one to which he refers frequently in his writings. I want now to edit and adopt the image. Here is what he says about the image in one place: There is no way to establish fully secured, neat protocol statements as starting points of the sciences. There is no tabula rasa. We are like sailors who have to rebuild their ship on the open sea, without ever being able to dismantle it in dry-dock and reconstruct it from its best components. (Neurath 1983: 92) The “protocol statements” to which Neurath refers are supposed indubitable, independent, freestanding bases of knowledge or belief. He rightly insists that there are no such things. His statement is an attack on epistemic

6  Contextual freedom, religious beliefs foundationalism. It is also a reminder that particular beliefs are invariably related to other beliefs in networks of belief. They do not exist in complete isolation from one another. Three points of Neurath’s image for our purposes are, first, that there is no absolute base or indubitable starting point in decisions about faith. There are always elements of risk and uncertainty in matters of faith and in choices of faith stances. The second point is that we can rebuild parts of a ship at sea by replacing them one by one – in this case, particular beliefs (or more accurately, following Neurath, specific clusters of belief) with which we articulate the meaning of a faith – without having to replace the faith itself. The third point is that even if we experience shipwreck on the rocks of a shore or fundamental loss of one faith and eventual conversion to another, there are aspects of the previous faith that can be employed in the building of a new one. So there is transformation in all three of these cases, not de novo change, even though the depth and degree of change differ. It is important to remember in this regard all of the acculturating factors of time, place, and situation that help to make a person what he or she is and that are carried over into and persist in the new form of faith. One may in one sense be a “new person” as a result of being converted into a new stance of faith, but in another sense, one is the same person with a new faith, embarked on a deeply significant but not entirely new way of life. Many things of varying importance may be left behind, but not all. Some materials for the construction of the new faith are provided by the old faith, just as a new ship can be constructed, at least in part, from materials gathered from an old ship’s wreckage on rocks close to shore. Now if we think of specific beliefs or sets of beliefs as planks that can be replaced one by one, but not all at once, while a particular ship of faith is still afloat, we can understand how changes of belief – even very basic beliefs – can take place without destroying the fundamental faith that underlies them and which they endeavor to explicate and defend. There is considerable range for freedom of choice in this event. Old beliefs can sometimes be modified rather than abandoned. But when shipwreck occurs and radical conversion to a new faith is required, some or many of the old planks of belief may not serve to give appropriate shape to the new faith. In this case, new beliefs must be found, formulated, and chosen. But the new beliefs or sets of beliefs, like the old ones, do not stand alone. They refer beyond themselves to and rest upon something deeper and more secure, something far more resistant to change, although not wholly immune to change – namely, the new form of faith itself. Religious beliefs are parasitical on religious faith, in other words. If we change the nautical image a bit, we can view faith as the ballast deep in the hull of a ship without which it could not maintain proper balance, sail a steady course, or even remain afloat when the fierce storms of life assault it – as they inevitably will. If shipwreck occurs, new ballast will be needed, but some of the old ballast can be salvaged and transferred into the new ship’s

Contextual freedom, religious beliefs 7 hull. Faith is the ballast of one’s life and orientation to the world, while beliefs are more akin to the superstructure of a ship. Both are required for smooth sailing and general utility, but the ballast is literally foundational. It is foundational while still needing to be changed on the rare occasion or occasions when it is no longer adequate to serve its purpose. Here freedom of choice can play a critical role, even as it more routinely does on the level of explicit beliefs. But the choice of a new faith is not an act of absolute freedom. Like changes of religious belief, it too is contextual – interacting with and conditioned by causal factors of a personal, social, cultural, and historical kind.

Two kinds of truth and two ways of expressing truth Another way of approaching the roles of contexts and choices in matters of faith and belief is to think in terms of the crucial distinction between propositional and existential truths. Propositions or truth-statements are the forms in which religious beliefs are typically set forth. Creedal and doctrinal statements are of this form, as are assertions about the character and aspects of one’s faith that admit to being rendered in statement form. Here explicit and well-formulated reasons can be brought into play, and great religious systems can be developed and set forth. The musings of the Hindu Shankara (8th century ce), the Muslim Al-Ghazzali (11th to 12th centuries ce), the Jew Maimonides (12th to 13th centuries ce), and the Christian Thomas Aquinas (13th century ce) are cases in point. But in order to be truly religious and deeply meaningful, such creeds, statements, systems, and reasons must be undergirded and guided by robust stances of faith. And these stances of faith are existential rather than creedal or propositional in character. Here Pascal’s “reasons” of the heart play a pivotal role and not reasons of the intellect. The former bear witness to a different kind of truth, one that marks a whole way of life and lies at the core of one’s existence as a human being. Existential truth has more to do with orienting, sustaining, coping trust and commitment than with a distinctive set of beliefs. It is like the trust and courage I described earlier that are required if someone is to step out of the door of an airplane with hope that the parachute will open fully and allow him or her to float gently and safely to the earth. We sometimes tend to underestimate how much the factors of trust, courage, hope, and commitment play in each and every person’s life – to say nothing of their crucial roles in each and every society. Without them, there is shipwreck, dissolution, and disaster. Their complete absence is nothing other than existential nihilism or despair of life itself. Since most of us do not suffer continuously or disastrously from such despair, even though we experience its threats in various ways, we can be said to live by existential faiths and commitments of varying sorts, whether religious or secular. The absence of existential truth is the absence of meaningful, hopeful, purposeful life.

8  Contextual freedom, religious beliefs If we look at the matter in this way, we can clearly see why faith is the gravitas, ballast, or bedrock of life and why statements of belief lie more on its surface. It is not that beliefs are unimportant. They give witness to the necessary roles of the thoughtful mind in a person’s or community’s commitments. But beliefs alone or statements of belief by themselves are insufficient as guides and enablements for the whole of life. When they are honest and sincere, they point beyond themselves to a deeper kind of truth, the truth that gives focus, direction, and ground for every aspect of life. Just as there is a crucial distinction between propositional and existential truth, there is also a profoundly important difference between propositional and existential doubt. To doubt a statement of faith or a set of such statements is not the same thing as doubting the faith itself. The former is more conceptual and intellectual, the latter deeply existential. It is the doubt of threatening despair rather than the doubt of belief. The doubt of gnawing emptiness and aimlessness can lead, if we are fortunate, to the haven of a new form of faith. The new form of faith can grow out of shattering, life-changing experiences and not just out of doubts and misgivings about particular religious beliefs. The Buddha’s legendary encounter with the Four Passing Sights is an example of such a shocking experience, and we can discern its role in the anguished confession of weakness of will and near-despair expressed by Paul in the Christian New Testament when he exclaims, “I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do. . . . Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?” (Romans 7: 18, 24 [RSV]2). Such experiences can set courses of life toward new kinds of faith. The Passing Sights of an old man, a sick man, a corpse, and an ascetic – and their deeply disturbing effects on him – set Buddha off on six years of intense meditation and searching that led finally to his enlightenment under the Bodhi Tree. He had consciously to choose the new path and leave most of his former way of life behind, but its direction and destination were initially murky and unknown. Central to the new path was the search for transformative experiences that could guide his subsequent choices and actions. What may have started out just as a reforming of some basic features of the no longer adequate or sustaining Hindu faith of Buddha’s youth was eventually transformed into a resolute new faith after agonizing search and struggle. Still, aspects of his Hindu upbringing were carried over into his new faith stance. The Apostle Paul’s mounting despair of redemption through unwavering observance of the details of Jewish Law was jolted into a confident new key by faith in the redemptive message and work of Christ. Choices were required of Paul too, but the choices were given effectiveness and power through his newfound faith. Much of the gracious spirit of the Jewish Law – in contrast with what for him had now become the burdensome and unnecessary detail of the whole of its specific practices and requirements – was carried over into the new faith. His earlier ardent Pharisaism was radically

Contextual freedom, religious beliefs 9 transformed but not entirely left behind. Paul courageously carried his new faith into his missionary journeys throughout much of the Mediterranean world. Our choices have roles to play in both propositional and existential doubt, as we have already seen. But the kinds of choice, while intimately related to one another, are different. Faith provides the existential grounding for choices of belief, while choices of belief may either help to lead to the strengthening and enriching of a stance of faith or to its eventual change into a new, more challenging, fulfilling kind of faith. The role of choice in the transformation of one faith into another is much more difficult, demanding, and far-reaching than its role in changes of belief. We can characterize the latter kind of radical choice and reorientation as existential, in contrast with the intellectual factors and choices that may have helped to precipitate and make it necessary.

Responsible freedom and the life of faith We have seen up to this point that there is no such thing as absolute freedom of choice of a faith any more than there is absolute freedom in matters of belief that grow out of and give expression to the meanings of a faith. But there is significant freedom for us to explore ways of enriching, deepening, and even radically changing at some point our stances of faith so as to make them more challenging and fulfilling, and more caring, compassionate, and effective in our relations to others – including the others of the nonhuman world. My earlier discussions in this chapter have been primarily descriptive of the natures and relations of religious beliefs and faith. In this section, I shall shift into a more normative key by stressing the idea that we are not only able to engage in active choices respecting belief and faith but also have the pressing responsibility to do so. There is much for us to learn, for example, by actively exploring the faiths of others and seeking to weave aspects of those faiths, when appropriate, into the fabric of our own faith, or learning how aspects of our own faith can be complemented and illuminated by the faiths of others. Much can also be learned by working with people of other faiths in shared tasks such as providing help for the needy, supporting just political policies and programs, and attending to the wellbeing of the natural environment. Differences in belief need not interfere with finding ways to do things together and learning thereby to understand and respect one another. Moreover, forms of faith that originated in an earlier place and time should be revised and updated in response to the findings, experiences, outlooks, and conditions of the present day. It is religiously irresponsible simply to hunker down stubbornly, nostalgically, and mindlessly into an “old-time religion.” There is nothing sacrosanct about simply being old, and the wisdom of an older time needs constantly to be translated into the needs and outlooks of later ones. Failure to strive to do so is to settle for outmoded

10  Contextual freedom, religious beliefs religious beliefs and a rigid, unbending stance of faith. A faith cannot be static if it is to be the faith that effectively guides and directs one’s life. It must be allowed to grow and change in appropriate and meaningful ways if it is to keep pace with the changes in one’s life and the world. If a faith is not kept resilient and responsive to change, it soon becomes mere pretense or posing instead of an honest, thoughtful outlook and commitment. Who of us today can take seriously the cozy earth-centered cosmos of ancient times or set aside the modern concept of biological evolution over vast eras of the past in favor of the special creation of each and every one of the earth’s millions of biological species a mere 6,000 years ago? Our faith should not extract such a price from us. It should not cut us off from the world in which we live but play a decisive role in giving integration and wholeness to our lives in all of their dimensions. Thus we are not only free to criticize and develop our stances of faith throughout our lives, even as they continue to provide the necessary and constraining contexts within which approaches to faith can take place. We are also obligated to do so. This is a necessary part of responsible commitment in a stance of faith. It is even possible, as we have seen, that an old stance of faith may at some point need to be set resolutely aside in favor of a newer, more adequate one. But these changes should not and actually cannot result from acts of arbitrary or hasty choice. Instead, they must grow out of compelling new convictions whose origins may lie in the old faith despite their eventual departure from that faith or from central aspects of that faith. Choice and conviction work together in serious-minded faith and belief. Neither effective religious choice nor sustaining religious conviction is possible without the other. Let me use an analogy to illustrate this fact. Alpine skiers bend their knees and lean into their skis before planting a pole and abruptly arising from the skis in order to make their turns. Their downhill runs are a rhythm of sinking and rising as they speed down the hill. The sinking can be regarded as the gravitas, pull, or profound influence of faith. Without this, there would be no progress toward more clarifying beliefs and no opening of the way toward a possibly more meaningful form of faith. The gravitas of faith is the necessary context for growth in belief and continual examination of the adequacy of one’s faith. The skier’s pole plantings, risings, and changes of direction are analogous to the ongoing questionings, searchings, and reassessments of dynamic faith. The gravitas of faith makes these attitudes possible by giving them context and support, and they, in turn, help to guide, strengthen, and direct the life of faith – even toward that rare outcome when the choice of a new kind of gravitas of faith might become evident and necessary. One is grounded in one’s faith in one sense, then, but in another sense is free and obligated to raise the level of one’s sight and resolve above that ground in order to critique, redirect, and alter it as needed. The leaders of faith communities have a critical role to play in helping members of these

Contextual freedom, religious beliefs 11 communities to approach, question, understand, reexamine, and practice their faith in this way. Where there is no readiness for needed choices – daunting and disturbing though these choices can sometimes be – there can be little serious religious commitment. Complacency and close-mindedness are enemies of authentic faith. Honesty and a receptive, exploratory spirit are its friends. This fact becomes especially evident when we contemplate the elusive, baffling mystery lying at the heart of any truly adequate focus of faith – a focus for which no suite of beliefs or stances of faith can do full or final justice. We should reject the common but pernicious notion that doubt is inimical to faith. Doubt can be an expression of humility and of a spirit of constant searching in the face of ineradicable mystery. It can be a spur to inquiry and a source of developing wisdom. A subtle, ever-shifting relationship of tenacity and tentativeness is essential to purposeful, fulfilling, and demanding religious faith. This is not to say that faiths or changes of faith are purely intellectual. They involve crucial elements of feeling, attitude, and will, not just operations of the rational mind. They are deeply influenced by the individual person’s capacity, temperament, interest, and need. They are positioned in dynamic political, institutional, cultural, and historical settings whose profound bearings on freedom of choice and action should not be overlooked or underestimated. Faith is not only affected by such social factors; it profoundly influences them as well, as we can tell by the whole course of human history. Persons with radically innovative religious faith and vision such as Moses, Lao Tzu, Buddha, Jesus, Mohammed, Gandhi, and Martin Luther King Jr. – to name only a few – have inspired fundamental changes in the outlooks, institutions, policies, and practices of their times. Each has inspired revolutionary ways of thinking about, reacting to, and putting into individual and social practice older ways of faith or establishing transformative new paths of faith, belief, and action.

Faith, freedom, and weakness of will As important as our capacity of choice is in the life of religious faith, we should not overlook the fact that making the needed and appropriate choices is rarely easy and sometimes inordinately difficult. And the difficulty is not just one of murky initial comprehension of the choices that need to be made. It is often a weakness of will when confronted with choices that we know should be made but that we also know shall demand much of us in the way of changes of behavior, altered perspectives, and reorientations of life. I noted earlier the Apostle Paul’s confession of his shameful tendency to do morally and religiously what he knew should not be done, and to refrain from doing what he knew should be done. We may frequently suffer from a similar reluctance to change our religious beliefs and other aspects of our

12  Contextual freedom, religious beliefs religious lives, or an unwillingness to confess, even to ourselves, the requirement for such changes if we are to be forthright and honest. Our resistance to needed choices in the realms of faith, belief, and practice can often lie in a desperate yearning for the familiarity and security of older outlooks and ways of life, and the lack of courage and resolution needed for exploration and implementation of newer ones. However, what Whitehead wisely says about God applies, I think, to all authentic religious ultimates, whether theistic or not: The power of God is the worship He inspires. That religion is strong which in its ritual and its modes of thought evokes an apprehension of the commanding vision. The worship of God is not a rule of safety – it is an adventure of the spirit, a flight after the unattainable. The death of religion comes with the repression of the high hope of adventure. (1967: 192) While true that assurance and safety are essential gifts and promises of religion, they are brought into balance, when religious faith is truly effective and transformative, with an unending spirit of risk and adventure – of venturing into the unknown with receptiveness, courage, and willingness to change or leave behind all that no longer serves the needs of vital faith, belief, and practice. Where is this courage and adventurous spirit to be found? There are two crucial signs of a worthy and sustaining faith to be kept in mind in thinking about this question. First, it not only sustains us in a fixed path of life but also continually challenges us to explore deeper meanings and ways of giving expression to these meanings. By expanding our horizons far beyond the reach of our present visions and practices, it refuses to allow us to rest in what we have already discovered, experienced, or achieved. It haunts us with the need to venture forth into unknown territories and will not let us become complacent or overly settled and secure where we already are. It inspires and, yes, commands us to choose adventure over safety. Second, a genuinely sustaining faith will somehow give us the courage and tenacity of will not to be too easily satisfied with where we have come at any given time. It will strengthen our wills and energize and transform our lives over their whole span. We will find in this faith what is needed to live toward the future and not in the past. And, if authentic, it will have the power to enable us to make the difficult, risky, essential choices required if our ship of faith is to sail steadily toward as yet unknown ports of call rather than being becalmed or moored by impotence and fear of the unknown. Such faith will help us to attain the strength of character to anticipate and to be prepared for storms of life that lie ahead and to meet them with confident, resourceful, effective choices when they occur. An adequate faith, when conscientiously aspired toward and practiced, will help us to build habits of heart and traits of character that equip us for this end.

Contextual freedom, religious beliefs 13 The experiences of the great leaders in the religions of the world testify to the power of faith to bestow these two kinds of insight, preparedness, and strength of will.3 These experiences exhibit the miracle and power of grace, the necessary complement to religious choice, effort, and resolve. Grace does not negate the importance or need of strenuous religious searching and aspiring, but it lies behind, bolsters, and helps to ensure their redemptive effects. Neither Buddha’s nor Paul’s struggles were in vain. They did not so much earn their final successes as find their way over time to appropriate and understand them as gifts. Buddha finally found what he had been searching for so intently and long, but his enlightenment came to him as a sudden, grace-bestowing awakening. The experience was not unbidden, but it was also not simply created by his extraordinary efforts of will. And Paul experienced the triumph of grace over futile, guilt-inducing laws operating by themselves alone, beginning with his startling vision of the Christ on the way to Damascus. Had Paul prepared for such an experience? I am convinced by the evidence available to us that he had done so by ardent searchings and struggles in the context of his previous Jewish faith. But he did not produce his Damascus revelation by an act of will or bring about single-handedly his experiences of the healing power of grace. So it is, I surmise, with all the genuinely transformative and truly saving religions of the world. Effort and grace, will and gift work together, each giving strength and direction to the other. A static faith is dead. A striving, effortful one, constantly open to and receptive of gifts of grace for heart, mind, and will, is vibrant with hope, exhibits a steady strengthening of will, and is capable of forward-moving – even if sometimes hampered, interrupted, or delayed – spiritual progress. Living with faith bestows the confidence of being on the right path, not of having arrived at some final destination. It is a faith of both assurance and demand, and of empowerment to meet its formidable demands. It is a faith, not of coddling safety, but of ever-beckoning adventure.

Conclusion In this chapter, I have sought to bring a number of important considerations into focus. First, I have shown that human freedom is not absolute. It takes place in a context of causes of various kinds that condition but do not determine its actions and outcomes. Second, this analysis of freedom applies to the role of choice in arriving at religious beliefs and at forms of faith that profoundly condition and affect the character of these beliefs. Third, religious beliefs constitute a significant part of religious faith but are by no means the whole meaning of faith. Fourth, choices of whole stances of faith are much more elusive, difficult, and far-reaching than choices of specific beliefs relating to faith. But beliefs and faiths work together, each influencing and conditioning the other.

14  Contextual freedom, religious beliefs Fifth, an instructive way of understanding the difference between stances of faith and beliefs that grow out of and give expression to these stances is to reflect on the difference between propositional truth and existential truth – the former relating most closely to religious beliefs and the latter to religious faith. Sixth, propositional doubt and existential doubt can be similarly related to doubts relating to religious beliefs, on the one hand, and those relating to stances of faith, on the other. Seventh, authentic faiths and their accompanying beliefs are dynamic rather than inert. They face toward the challenges and choices of the future rather than being mired within or principally oriented toward the past. Eighth, the perennial religious problem of struggles with weakness of resolution and will should be taken into account when pondering the extraordinarily demanding choices required by authentic faith and belief. Ninth, two features of wholehearted religious outlook and commitment are a ceaseless lure to ever-deepening levels of understanding and commitment, together with the gifts of grace and empowerment to rise above and successfully overcome inhibiting weakness of will. In these two ways, challenging, sustaining religious faith keeps alive the dynamic lure to religious adventure in the face of temptation to settle for sluggish complacency and static security. And tenth, a shipwreck or crisis of one form of faith need not be a route to despair or abandonment of every kind of religious hope. It can lead instead to the choosing and building of a new ship of faith, more seaworthy than the older one in weathering the storms of life, and more capable of inspiring and motivating wholehearted religious commitment. Moreover, the new faith does not need to leave every aspect of the old one behind. It can and will carry some, if not many, of those older aspects into a new way of living religiously in the world. The old faith can provide a transition to the new faith, meaning that one does not have to try to leap across a yawning chasm of discontinuity and total difference in choosing a new faith. To resort to a different way of envisioning the two ships of faith, it is possible to cross by a boatswain’s chair, as it were, from a sinking ship of faith to another riding high on the waves, rather than having first to fall into a fathomless, faithless sea between the two vessels. The boatswain’s chair symbolizes the beliefs, attitudes, feelings, choices, and commitments of the old faith that are carried over into the new one. Not all transitions from one faith to another will be smooth or easy, of course, and there may be deep senses of loss as well as of gain and of dark uncertainty as well as of bright hope – especially in the early stages of the transition. And the transition may take considerable lengths of time to become settled and clear. A spirit of adventure is required for those who choose to set out on new ships of faith for bracing and challenging new voyages into the future.4 My speaking of choosing to set out on new voyages of faith brings to mind the critical importance of freedom in the life of faith. Freedom is not faith’s whole story, of course. Deep convictions and commitments are not simply chosen from items in a list of options. One is seized, as it were, by

Contextual freedom, religious beliefs 15 the urgent need for these convictions and commitments, and is given at least some preliminary direction and guidance for the ports to which the new voyage of faith should steer. Anxious uncertainty and misgiving somehow begin to yield to a grace-bestowing and grateful spirit of anticipation and hope. But thoughtful conscious choices are required to take advantage of this fresh spirit and to begin to reorient one’s life, thoughts, dispositions, and practices in a substantially different manner. One’s heart and mind are profoundly involved, as well as one’s will. A course of faith is not arbitrarily chosen and could not merely be chosen. There is no plausible logic in the idea of being able simply to choose one’s faith, any more than one can simply choose to accept a particular claim to truth without a convincing basis or evidence leading one to accept it. One must be persuaded. But freedom of choice does play an active role in the outlooks, practices, and commitments of meaningful faith – a focus of faith that comes to be personally appropriated and owned in the depths of one’s being and to function like a North Star for sailing through stormy as well as relatively calm seas. Choice and faith work necessarily together, therefore, even though more than choice is involved in the dynamics of faith. And the two of them must continue to work intimately together in any authentic life of faith. These reflections on faith and freedom naturally give rise to further reflections on the character of religious faith and its relations to secular faith. In order to give the latter topic focus and direction, we now need to raise the questions, what exactly is religious faith, and how does it compare and contrast with secular faith? I turn our attention to these two challenging questions in the next chapter.

Notes 1 I defend the reality of human freedom and its rootage in nature in my book Consciousness and Freedom: The Inseparability of Thinking and Doing. I show how nature exhibits pervasive interrelations of causality and chance, and I argue that this view of nature is required in order for genuine human freedom to be possible. I contrast genuine freedom with a compatibilist view of freedom that tries to make freedom consistent with causal determinism, and I expose the inadequacy of arguments given in support of this view. I make this case in part by engaging some important contemporary neurophysiologists and philosophers of mind. 2 All of the biblical quotations contained in this book, unless otherwise noted, are taken from this Revised Standard Version of the Hebrew Bible and Christian New Testament. 3 Weakness of will with respect to religious outlook and practice is sometimes a psychological or medical problem rather than a strictly religious one, and it may require psychological counseling or medical attention and not just spiritual guidance and encouragement. Various kinds of addiction or obsession and imbalances in the brain or other parts of the body are examples of this kind of weakness of will. These need to be attended to when present, and they may require their recipient’s willingness to seek psychological or medical help. I do not discuss them here because they are more clinical than religious in their character. But religious

16  Contextual freedom, religious beliefs faith may help to motivate the person in need of such help to seek it out. Such afflictions count as another type of cause that needs to be taken into account as conditioning and in this case severely limiting the exercise of freedom of choice. 4 My uses of ship analogies here and elsewhere in this chapter can serve to remind us of the interesting fact that the main part of a church building is called the nave, a term based on the Latin word navis, meaning “vessel or ship.” The imagery of a ship of faith is old and well established in the West. It is also suggested by the epics of Odysseus and Aeneas in Greek and Latin literature. These legendary sailors are exemplars of indomitable faith. Their voyages over perilous seas and in the face of many other threats and dangers attest to their unshakeable confidence in the divine powers they trust to be guiding their destinies.

References Crosby, Donald A. 2011. Faith and Reason: Their Roles in Religious and Secular Life. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. James, Wllliam.1996. A Pluralistic Universe. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press. Kane, Robert. 1998. The Significance of Free Will. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. May, Herbert G. and Bruce M. Metzger, editors. 1962. Oxford Annotated Bible. New York: Oxford University Press. Neurath, Otto. 1983. Philosophical Papers 1913–1946: With a Bibliography of Neurath in English (Vienna Circle Collection), trans. Marie Neurath and Robert S. Cohen. Dordrecht, Netherlands: Reidel. Pascal, Blaise. 1941. Pensées and the Provincial Letters. New York: Random House. Tillich, Paul. 1952. The Courage to Be. New Haven, CN: Yale University Press. Whitehead, Alfred North. 1967. Science and the Modern World. New York, NY: Free Press. ———. 1978. Process and Reality: Corrected Edition, ed. David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne. New York, NY: Free Press.

2 Functions of religious ultimates Functions of religious ultimatesFunctions of religious ultimates

In most religious faiths salvation appears as a central idea. It is so exclusively religious as to defy any translation into nonreligious language. . . . The connotation of healing presupposes the existence of a state of sickness and estrangement from one’s true being. Yet this healing is conceived in as many different ways as the alienation which it overcomes. – (Louis Dupré 1972: 456)

The focus of religious faith is on what is trusted to give ultimate character, order, meaning, and value to one’s life and to the world in which one lives. It is the principal, all-encompassing focus of loyalty and commitment in the living of one’s personal life, whatever that focus may be, as well as what one regards as the most momentous reality and saving power within or beyond the universe as a whole. In the words of world religions scholar Huston Smith, the focus of religious faith is “that to which one gives oneself without reservation” (Smith 1991: 341). But this focus is genuinely religious only if one feels bound to give unconditional personal loyalty to it because of its superlative cosmic status, importance, and value, which make trustworthy and reliable its promise of saving power. Philosopher Louis Dupré calls attention in the epigraph of this chapter to the religious person’s yearning for rescue from such deep-rooted wounds and perils of finite human existence as aimlessness, alienation, anxiety, suffering, tragedy, guilt, and death. This yearning is for an unshakable foundation and source of succor, purpose, and direction for the living of one’s life. The need for salvific purpose and direction is not only individual or personal. It is profoundly social as well. Particular types of religious faith can bind societies together, giving their peoples and institutions a common focus of meaning, value, and commitment – and in that way undergirding all of their traditions, conventions, moral principles, and laws. Most people will have acquired their initial religious outlook from their communities, adapting it as best they can to their personal beliefs and practices, and to their relations with one another. Even the founders of the great world religions developed their distinctive forms of faith by starting out from, reacting to,

18  Functions of religious ultimates and reforming the religious traditions in which they were reared. Thus religious faith has its personal and social sides – as well as its singular perspectives on the cosmos – each influencing and affecting the other in countless ways. My focus in this chapter and throughout this book will be on the personal and cosmic sides of religious faith. The crucial part played by society in shaping the religious attitudes of individuals is a different issue, and I do not address it explicitly or at any length here. I also set aside the topic of the profound influences of religion on society. But I want at least to note in passing that attitudes, outlooks, and practices of individuals are deeply influenced by their acculturations and social roles and relationships, and that this obvious fact holds as much for their religious choices and commitments as it does for other aspects of their lives. There are important similarities of function in the religious ultimates of the great religions of the world, but there are considerable differences in the attributes of these respective ultimates. It is clearly not the case, for example, that all the religions of the world endorse a conception of the ultimate with traits such as those attributed to the traditional Western idea of God. Smith resorts to a confusing use of terms when he asserts, “Human allegiance belongs to God – this all religions (with allowance for terminology) will affirm” (Smith 1991: 359). Religions such as Daoism, Buddhism, and Confucianism, for example, do not center on God as their religious ultimate. What Smith has in mind, I think, is a common, all-inclusive religious function or set of functions that might be symbolized or suggested by the notion of God, but his “allowance for terminology” phrase is vague and obfuscating. It fails to do justice to the conspicuous differences among the religions of the world, especially as regards the specific characters of their respective ultimate focuses of faith. In his widely read writings on religion, Smith himself has done an immensely valuable service in helping to bring these patent and irreducible differences sharply into view. In two earlier books I offered a theory concerning the personal and cosmic role-functions of religious ultimates in the major religions of the world that I claim them all to exhibit, despite the many differences among the specific attributes or defining traits of their respective ultimates (Crosby 1981, Chapter 7 and 2002, Chapter 6). In the first section of this chapter, I revisit and explain once more the project of applying a role-functional analysis to something we are seeking to understand. In the subsequent six sections, I put the role-functional analysis to use in exploring each of what I take to be the common role-functions of religious ultimates and the relations of these ultimates with one another. In the final section before my concluding comments, I address the problem of distinguishing religious faiths from secular faiths. Increasingly important as secular faiths are in today’s world, this book is about religious outlooks and commitments, not about secular ones. But some insight is needed into what distinguishes the two forms of faith if we are to keep our focus on religious stances of faith.

Functions of religious ultimates 19

Role-functional analysis What is a role-functional analysis? It is investigation of the place, work, or activity of something or other within a context, setting, or system of some sort. A bookcase has the function of containing and displaying books, making them readily available to readers. An actress has a particular role in a play, or a person has a middle-management role in a business organization. An automobile, bus, donkey cart, airliner, train, or ship plays the role of transporting people and goods from place to place. Many different kinds of bookcases, actresses, businesspersons, and vehicles can play the same respective roles. There are large and small bookcases made of different materials, for example, and some are built-in while others can be moved about in a room. But they all serve the same basic function. Actresses of different talents, backgrounds, or levels of experience may be assigned a particular role in a play, and they will each interpret in different ways the character whose part they are acting. But all the actresses function in the context of the same play. The roles remain the same, while the things or persons filling them can have various attributes. It is true that the things or persons should be generally suited or qualified for the roles. Some bookcases are unattractive and poorly designed; some businesspeople fail to have the skills needed for their assigned roles in a company; some actresses are unimpressive interpreters and performers of their roles, and some vehicles are less suited to a transportation role than others in particular circumstances. The specified roles remain the same, whether or not they are realized or enacted well in those circumstances. The role of Brünnhilde in Richard Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen is the same, whether it is sung with soaring beauty or screeching ineptitude. The concept in issue here is not one of qualifications of candidates for the role but of indicating the natures of the roles themselves. Qualifications for playing the roles appropriately or well are implicit but are not given explicit attention in a role-functional analysis. The basic task of a role-functional analysis is therefore descriptive, not normative. It is one thing to designate the role played by something or someone in a context or system. It is another thing to evaluate the relative fitness of particular candidates for the role, or to show why the role itself or even the whole system of which the role is a part is desirable or needed. The difference between the two kinds of analysis is sometimes subtle, but it is important for our purposes here. I can be neutral about the question of evaluating the suitability of the different ultimates of different religious systems for filling the role-functions I describe, and I do not need to raise the question in the present context of whether, to what extent, or in what respects religion itself is a good or bad thing. It is useful in this connection to consider the distinction between a rolefunctional analysis of religious ultimates and a type of what I shall call a goal-functional analysis of religious systems and of aspects of these systems

20  Functions of religious ultimates that is sometimes used by anthropologists and sociologists. This second type of analysis draws a distinction between the latent and manifest goalfunctions of a religious system or of aspects of that system. The manifest goals are ones consciously envisioned, believed in, intended, or described by the adherents and practitioners of the system, while the latent goals are the ones anthropologists or sociologists may claim to be actually but unconsciously subserved by the system – goals such as giving stability and cohesion to a society through tacit but effective support to its leaders by the socially sanctioned faith of its followers and to its political, legal, and moral outlooks and practices. The significance of the religious aspect of a social system in this type of analysis consists in the latent goal or goals it serves, not in its manifest or consciously intended ones. And anthropologists and social scientists can claim to be in a position, by virtue of their scientific methods and training, to be able to discern and convincingly show this to be the case.1 I assume, in contrast with this type of goal-functional view, that the ultimates functioning within a given religious system are just that for those who believe in them and are committed to them. In my judgment, these ultimates deserve to be regarded as personally and cosmically ultimate for their adherents and to function as such in and for themselves, not as unconscious means to some ulterior or more ultimate end. My principal project in this chapter is to offer an analysis of what I take to be the common functions of these ultimates, whatever their kind, within religious systems, and to investigate some interrelations of these functions. It is not to make judgments about the existence or non-existence, adequacy or inadequacy, cogency or unconvincingness of the ultimates for their roles. My task is intended to be descriptive – in other words, not prescriptive. What, then, are the common role-functions of religious ultimates that I have in mind? There are six of them, and each has both a personal and a cosmic side, as I shall proceed to explain. The personal and cosmic sides are two subcontexts that together make up the larger context of religious faith, and I want to bring both sides into view. The role-functions are uniqueness, primacy, pervasiveness, rightness, permanence, and hiddenness. Let us look at each of them in turn and reflect on some of their interrelations. As we do so, it is essential that we keep our focus on the distinction, discussed earlier, between the common roles of religious ultimates and the many different attributes of these ultimates as they are variously conceived in the religions of the world. Our concern here is with roles, not attributes. And it is with descriptions of the roles of religious ultimates and their interrelations as these are exhibited in religious systems, not with comparative evaluations of the fitness, adequacy, or success of the differently conceived ultimates in filling the roles. The interrelations of the roles sometimes involve tensions among them, as we shall see, but I make no attempt here to resolve these tensions. I want only to call attention to them and to the importance of taking them into account as we analyze the six role-functions of religious ultimates.

Functions of religious ultimates 21

Uniqueness A religious ultimate functions as a singular, incomparable, set apart object of belief, faith, and commitment. It is unlike anything else in a person’s life or vision of the world. On the personal side, it is what – in strong contrast with all else – gives fundamental integration, value, and purpose to the whole of a person’s life. Fillers of this distinctive role can be a single radically transcendent or a profoundly immanent deity with whom one can come into personal relationship or attunement; a whole class of powerful immortal deities existing in contrast with the puny, short-lived lives of mere mortals; a radically transformative and enlightening type of experience that is like no other; or, more generally, some kind of entity, class of entities, presence, principle, process, or power judged to be uniquely deserving of all-embracing and unreserved personal faith and commitment. On the cosmic side, focuses of religious faith are believed to have an unparalleled role in the cosmos itself. They are thought, for example, to lie at the heart of the cosmos as its creative, guiding, sustaining power; to be the reality to which all other realities in the universe are subordinate, from which they are derived, and to which they shall return; to be the power of being-itself in contrast with and supportive of all of the multiple beings of the world; to be the heart of reality or, in some cases, even the sole reality to which profound religious experiences of the appropriate sort point and lead; to be the supreme and solely existing divine person who creates and sustains the world; to be the class of deities presiding over particular aspects of the natural order such as wind, earth, sea, and sky; to be the matchless force or forces for good at work in the world; to be the awesome processes of nature – in contrast with all the events, creatures, and things that these cosmic processes unceasingly produce and support. Or to state the last example of cosmic uniqueness somewhat differently, to be the mysterious and inimitable Way of the world – its creations and destructions, its delights and dangers, its majesty and everlastingness – in distinction from the myriad transitory upsurges of the Way that come into being and pass out of being over the vastness of cosmic space and time.

Primacy Religious ultimates of various types not only exhibit the role of personal and cosmic uniqueness. They are also personally and cosmically primary for their adherents. So they not only contrast radically with all else but also take precedence over all else, both in the lives of the adherents and in their conceptions of the cosmos. On the personal level, these ultimates are objects of loyalty that rank above and beyond any other loyalties. They are the goals and ends of life itself, demanding the utmost level of trust and commitment. They are more important than anything else and more important than all else put together. That is, they are supremely important. They are

22  Functions of religious ultimates the underlying sources and focuses of all other kinds of personal purpose, meaning, and value. Of all the things that matter in personal life, these ultimates matter the most. Everything else, in the last analysis, is subordinate to the ultimates of particular forms of faith, however differently the actual characters and traits of these ultimates may be conceived. And this subordination is not one of mere incremental or gradual ascendency such as the rising rungs of a ladder, but one of radical difference between what subordinates and what is subordinate – that is, between the religious ultimate and the individual human lives it is thought to be entitled to nurture, guide, and rule. On the cosmic side, religious ultimates are primary in the sense of being the principle power or basis from which all else in the world derives and on which all else depends. While everything else is contingent on them, they are non-contingent, self-contained, and self-sufficient. They lie either at the core of reality, being what it finally comes down to and solely is, or they are the origin and support of all that is. Nothing is more powerful, meaningful, sacred, or deserving of unstinting religious commitment than the religious ultimate, however it may be conceived. This conviction holds for religious persons because they see the religious ultimate as cosmically primary both in its awesomely predominant presence or mode of being and in its supreme, overriding value and transformative power. Hence not only is nothing else like the religious ultimate (uniqueness), but also it is the case that all else in a person’s life and in his or her view of the cosmos is subordinate to it (primacy). This is true at least in principle at the personal level, and religious persons are convinced that it is true for the cosmos or reality as a whole. The primacy of a religious ultimate entails its uniqueness because nothing else is accorded the status and significance it has in the lives of committed religious people or in their outlooks on the world. It belongs to a class of its own in this regard. But something might be unique and primary in various respects without having the uniqueness and primacy required if it is to be a focus of religious faith. Thomas Hardy’s “dreaming, dark, dumb Thing/ That turns the handle of this idle Show”2 is cosmically unique and primary but hardly an appropriate focus of religious devotion or the yearned-for goal in the search for religious salvation. Such a focus of religious faith must in some way be finally benign, healing, and redemptive – not hurtful, evil, or irrelevant to the sufferings of the world – as I shall make clear when discussing the fourth role of rightness later. Primacy is therefore a kind of uniqueness, but not the only religiously relevant kind. Uniqueness as some sort of unparalleled rightness is also of crucial importance, as is primacy of the relevant kind. Thus the two alone do not connote in every satisfactory way the kind of uniqueness and primacy exemplified in religious ultimates of various sorts. The two are needed for adequate descriptions of the personal and cosmic roles played by the ultimates of religion, but more than the two functions are required, as we shall see in discussions of the other four roles that are to follow. The six

Functions of religious ultimates 23 roles check and qualify one another in various ways. They set up tensional and paradoxical relationships with one another that are needed for insightful interpretations and understandings of how religious ultimates function. There is a tension between uniqueness and primacy themselves, which I should note. If the uniqueness of the religious ultimate is too extreme – that is, if it is totally other – then it would not have any intelligible relation to the world, in which case, it could not coherently be claimed to have either personal or cosmic primacy. Its uniqueness in this event would entail its complete detachment from all else and consequent irrelevance either to personal religious faith or to the world as a whole. And the alleged religious ultimate would be completely unknowable because it is so utterly unique and separate from any aspect of ordinary thought and experience as to allow no meaningful statements or beliefs regarding it. In fact, it would make no sense to posit such a religious ultimate in the first place – given its radical contrast with all that can possibly be said or known – to say nothing of being able to affirm its primacy over self and world. The point of this paragraph holds true for all putative religious ultimates of whatever different characters or descriptions. And it has similar implications for the category of hiddenness, the sixth role-functional category to be discussed later in this chapter. Total hiddenness or complete mysteriousness of the religious ultimate would mean its total inaccessibility to religious persons and the total unavailability of meaningful claims about it in relation to the cosmos.

Pervasiveness The third role-function, pervasiveness, directs attention to the fact that religious ultimates relate unrestrictively in principle to every aspect of a religious person’s life and do so in a profoundly intimate fashion, giving overarching integration, order, and wholeness to all the aspects of a person’s outlook and experience. Thus a person’s self-conception, emotions, beliefs, choices, sense of loyalty, family life, relations to others, institutional affiliations, vocation, outlook on the past, hope for the future, attitude toward suffering and death, and the like are deeply affected by that person’s religious faith. This is not to say that religious orientations and commitments dictate what is thought, chosen, or practiced at every moment of an individual’s life or in every fine detail. But it is to say that these commitments influence, suffuse, color, and order them in important ways. Religious persons also conceive of the religious ultimate as permeating and ordering the cosmos or as giving the cosmos its final and definitive character. It may be conceived as the personal presence, power, and guidance by which everything in the universe is sustained, moment by moment, for example. This ultimate could be conceived as a single God or Goddess, or as a class of gods and/or goddesses. It could also be regarded as some kind of all-pervading, impersonal cosmic process, energy, or path. The conception

24  Functions of religious ultimates of the religious ultimate in the cases indicated provides the perspective from which all else in the cosmos is to be viewed. This perspective allows for affirmation of the existence of the world and everything in it (including oneself) as genuinely real and as having a significant degree of integrity and autonomy, even though the world is finally derived from and radically dependent on the religious ultimate. The sense of derivation from and dependence on the pervasive presence of the religious ultimate is a large part of the meaning of saving knowledge and awareness in such perspectives. This sense also lies behind the perception of oneself, the world, and the world’s creatures as inherently sacred or suffused with some sort of divine presence or sustaining power. In contrast, the religious perspective requires in other cases denial of the world’s existence altogether in favor of the view that only the religious ultimate itself is real and that the stubborn conviction of the world as real in its own right is a sweeping and distorting misperception. This misperception and all the aspects of the imagined world it touches, however, are seen to flow from the religious ultimate; to be somehow informed, pervaded, and undergirded by it in every detail; and, finally, to point beyond itself to the religious ultimate’s all-encompassing, exclusive reality. According to this religious stance, the ultimate and its sole reality can be awakened into conscious awareness by rigorous spiritual preparation and discipline affecting every aspect of a person’s life. The consummate awakening and realization, with its complete dissolution of any degree or kind of separation between oneself or the world, on the one hand, and the religious ultimate, on the other, constitutes the meaning of liberation or salvation in such a religious perspective on the cosmos. The religious ultimate is so completely and thoroughly pervasive or allsuffusing as to make the cosmos itself a fleeting cloud of misapprehension on which the dazzling light of its sole reality is projected. When its true nature is realized, the cloud – which includes, among other things, the distinction of the human self from the ultimate – vanishes. The seeming many become the single and all-inclusive one. And that one is the religious ultimate itself. As all-pervading and in some religious outlooks solely real, the religious ultimate certainly qualifies for the category of uniqueness. Nothing else plays such a role in the religious person’s consciousness and vision of the cosmos. But if the uniqueness is too absolute or extreme, it would preclude the religious ultimate’s having anything to do with the world. It would be so radically other as to occupy an entirely separate and incommensurable realm of reality or even, as shown in the previous two paragraphs, to admit of no such contrast, meaning that it alone is real and there is finally nothing for it to pervade. The response to this observation could perhaps be that there is still the misperceived world, mysteriously underlain by or emergent from the ultimate. But this kind of response provides no explanation of how the misperception could have arisen in the first place or why it is so deep-rooted and

Functions of religious ultimates 25 prevalent, especially if the alleged misperceivers themselves do not really exist. This line of reflection suggests a tension between the roles of uniqueness and pervasiveness in the religions of the world. If it is to be seen as pervasive, the religious ultimate cannot be completely unique or set apart. At any rate, the alleged sole existence of the religious ultimate counts as a kind of uniqueness in that it can be contrasted with each and every aspect of the misperceived, finally non-existent world. And we can acknowledge that it pervades the world in the sense of being what the world’s each and every aspect points to and is dissolvable into. This interpretation of the role of pervasiveness is somewhat analogous to a physicist’s claiming that all of the distinct forms of matter in the universe should be understood as different forms of energy and that only energy truly exists. Thus energy could be said to pervade the universe in this sense. Conversely, if the uniqueness of a religious ultimate is too softened or qualified in favor of its pervasiveness, then its ultimacy could be threatened from that quarter. For example, gods or goddesses that are too worldly and too much like humans, for all of their touted uniqueness in other respects, would perhaps not be worthy of worship or praise. This is especially true if their characters and practices turn out not to be uniquely moral, exemplary, or holy. Their rule may pervade the world or various aspects of the world, but their storied disreputable attitudes and behaviors may finally disqualify them as fit objects of religious faith. Plato levels this accusation against the Greek gods in Book II of his dialogue The Republic (Plato 1973: 605–30). This observation also helps us to understand how a mere incremental primacy (the gods are different, but not that different from us) stands in contrast with the radical primacy implicit in religious ultimacy. Such incremental primacy – that is, a difference of mere degree rather than of kind – may be subordinate to and put under judgment by more radically ultimate moral and sacred principles or constraints. For example, the day-to-day, humanlike deities of ordinary life are regarded in some religious cultures as subordinate to some sort of distant and mysterious High God. There is thus a tension among the three role-functions of uniqueness, primacy, and pervasiveness that religious systems have sought to address and resolve in various ways – and without denying or minimizing the essential role of any one of the three. This threefold tension, like others to be mentioned as our continuing analysis of the six role-functions of religious ultimates develops, calls attention to the indispensable place of paradoxes, stories, myths, and symbols in religious systems. Everything it is necessary to say or express religiously cannot be said or expressed in a straightforwardly logical, coherent, or doctrinal manner. Some important religious truths can only be alluded to or suggested, even if powerfully so, in the different manner of non-discursive expression. This realization shows how important the sixth category of hiddenness is bound to be for commanding religious faith. An alleged religious ultimate devoid of awesome, daunting – even terrifying – mystery or of

26  Functions of religious ultimates perplexing and unresolved tensions among its basic role-functions would be quite unlike the religious ultimates of the major religions of the world. Coherence is sometimes in tension with adequacy. Adequacy to the depths of religious experience and to the inexplicable wonders of the world may sometimes need to be given precedence over a demand for complete coherence. But coherence should be given up in religious thought only when it becomes impossible for the commendable striving toward coherence to capture all that is religiously meaningful, valuable, and important. Conflict between the two goods of coherence and adequacy, and sometimes opting for the second over the first, does not mean for a moment that the quest for coherence in the field of religion or elsewhere should cease to be regarded as a profoundly important enterprise. A genuine conflict of the two epistemic goods of coherence and adequacy should not be construed as the negation of one good by another. A presumed good it is necessary to override in some contexts or situations remains a good, and it may turn out to be the overriding good in other contexts or situations.

Rightness The role-functional category of rightness calls attention to the distinctive and supremely important valuative aspect of the religious ultimate. This category is already implicit in the foregoing three role-functions of uniqueness, primacy, and pervasiveness. The religious ultimate is unique by virtue of its being incomparable in beauty, goodness, sacredness, and saving power. This is so from the standpoint of personal outlooks and experiences, and in religious conceptions of the cosmos as a whole. It is primary in that all other values reflect it, flow from it, and have it as their overarching basis and standard, both personally and cosmically. The religious ultimate is more important than all else, largely because it is finally more valuable than anything and everything else. And it is pervasive because it is experienced as the saving power that bears profoundly and intimately on every aspect of personal existence, and as the suffusive, sustaining, hope-bestowing power of goodness constantly at work in the world or the liberation from the ignorance and suffering produced by the seductive veil of the phenomenal world. Central to all kinds of religious faith is confidence in the idea that goodness and knowledge are more powerful than evil and ignorance, and that they can ultimately triumph over these obstacles to salvation. This conviction is the basic meaning of religious rightness, for it sanctions the hope of deliverance from evil and ignorance in all the fearful ways they insinuate themselves into the world – whether in the form of personal rootlessness, guilt, tragedy, anxiety, bewilderment, or despair, or in the predations, destructions, disasters, diseases, and losses that range across the world. “Deliver us from evil” is the mournful but trusting cry of all forms of religious faith, however they conceive of evil – whether, for example, as prideful sin, disgraceful impiety, rampant cruelty, all-consuming suffering, or blinding ignorance. And the

Functions of religious ultimates 27 cry is answered by the religious ultimate’s promise of salvation, meaning the victory of cosmically grounded, restorative rightness over all the forces of distortion, destruction, estrangement, and misery in the world. But if “salvation appears as the central idea” in religion, and if “it is so exclusively religious as to defy any translation into non-religious language,” as Dupré asserts in the epigraph of this chapter (and rightly so, in my judgment), then it would seem to follow that the forces of evil or ignorance of the means of deliverance from these forces, however they are religiously conceived, is the central problem in religion. The role-function of rightness is radically opposed, therefore, by personal and cosmic wrongness. There is some kind of fundamental flaw in human life and in the world as routinely encountered and experienced by religiously sensitive humans that can only be remedied by the unique and superior power of religious rightness. The struggle between rightness, thus conceived, and the wrongness it gives promise of wisdom and strength to overcome, is what religious faith in all of its forms finally comes down to. Religion has other kinds of business, of course, but this one is basic and above all. The alleged uniqueness, primacy, and pervasiveness of religious rightness can become problematic themselves, however, as can be seen by the history of religious systems and by thoughtful reflection. Rightness can be accorded such absolute uniqueness as to render it incomprehensible to human thought, having no intelligible connections with human life and experience of the world. We see this kind of uniqueness attributed to God in the Book of Job. God inflicts unbearable sufferings on Job, seemingly for no reason, but Job continues to trust in God’s justice. This is not a justice that has any discernible connection with human ideas or experiences of justice. It seems to be a justice of absolute might and authority, as though whatever God decides to do is made just simply by his deciding to do it for reasons of his own, whatever they may be, that are inaccessible to human inquiry or thought. Such putative justice or rightness is undeniably unique, but it chimes in with or has meaningful connection with no human conceptions of rightness. It is in fact a terrifying kind of supposed rightness, not one of comfort, reassurance, rescue, or bliss. In the language of Rudolf Otto, it is all mysterium tremendum with no accompanying and relieving fascinans (Otto 1958: 25–40). God’s actions may be entirely and uncontrovertibly right from God’s standpoint, but they may also sometimes, frequently, or always appear to be hideously wrong from the perspective of human life and experience. An absolutely unique but wholly ineffable rightness of the divine is in radical conflict with rightness as it must be viewed and understood by human beings. The Book of Job is reminder of the cloud of mystery that surrounds all religious ultimates and warns against humans pretending to understand everything about the natures or roles of such ultimates in human lives or in the world. The critical role-function of hiddenness, to be discussed later, safeguards against the arrogance and misperception of thinking that any

28  Functions of religious ultimates adequate religious ultimate can be entirely reduced to the limited proportions of human thought and experience. The function of uniqueness has this implicit importance as well. But utter, impenetrable, unqualified mystery would be of little use in the search for salvation. A conundrum about rightness similar to that posed by the Book of Job can also be connected with the idea of divine predestination, where God is thought to foreordain some people to paradise and others to perdition. God presumably has reasons for such seemingly arbitrary action, but the reasons are entirely opaque to human understanding. All attempts to make these reasons even partly clear are bound to fail. God looks like a tyrant but is still claimed to be just, merciful, and loving. Such justice, mercy, and love, if they are somehow to be accepted as that, are incomprehensible to human beings. The rightness of God as a specific religious ultimate is undeniably unique in such a portrayal, but so much so or to such a grave extent as to deprive the role-function of rightness of its intelligibility. It would seem, then, that the unique righteousness of God as source and ground of the universe in theistic belief needs to be connected with an intelligible and defensible conviction of God’s good and just nature, not just with arbitrary, unrestricted acts of God’s will. Mention of the term “unrestricted” brings up another possible tension between the categories of rightness and primacy because the primacy of God’s power might seem to be threatened by God’s unvarying obligation always to act righteously. Muslims and Christians have often quarreled over this tension, debating whether the primacy of the divine lies in the will or the intellect of God. If in the intellect, one side of the argument goes, an intellectually recognized and respected standard of rightness is incumbent even on God, thus seeming to have the hubristic effect of diluting and abridging God’s absolute power and unrestricted judgment over humans and the world. There is partial truth in the idea of predestination, but it is carried to an obscurantist extreme. The truth is that religion is not only about what we humans do or are capable of doing out of our own resources and strength. Resolution of such evils as those of sin, suffering, remorse, ignorance, and despair does not depend only or even primarily on us. Religiously speaking, this resolution is made possible by what is bestowed on us by the religious ultimate – a path of salvation and means of salvation that we did not invent but is already there for us to discover, respond to, and follow. A religious word for this primacy of gift over subsequent human response is grace. Grace is not something we humans can predict, manage, or create. Were it not already there for us to discover, dedicate ourselves to, and pursue, there would be no hope of salvation. We do not so much merit or control it as gratefully welcome it into our lives. And this redemptive path does not just have cultural, historical, or traditional origin and support. For religions persons, it has overarching cosmic status and support – and undeniable priority to human effort. This is the partial truth of the idea of predestination. This

Functions of religious ultimates 29 truth applies to non-theistic religions as well as theistic ones, for the path of salvation itself is given before it can be followed. And it is assisted by a power, possibility, and direction of redemptive rightness with cosmic status and import. Viewed in this manner, the idea of grace is an essential aspect of the category of rightness on both its personal and cosmic sides. The partial truth in the idea of predestination is therefore the undeserved, unearned, unmanageable divine gifts without which salvation would be impossible. A similar truth is implicit in the salvific truths and paths that were already there to be discovered by such figures as Lao Tzu, Confucius, and Gautama Buddha. But grace or the ready availability of salvific paths and bestowals of strength and wisdom, if they are to be effective, must work in concert with human dedication, effort, and resolve. The availability of the path of salvation is not the same thing as choosing to set out upon it. Human choice, effort, and resolve are required, and there may well be unresolved paradox and tension in seeking to comprehend the precise relations of grace or giftedness, on the one hand, and human effort and desert, on the other. But grace or the sheer givenness and anterior cosmic provision of the path of salvation, however it is religiously conceived, remains primary in the sense of being superior in principle to all the barriers that lie in the way. Its primacy of status, power, and support is the principal meaning of the function of rightness in religion, showing in one important way how the categories of rightness and primacy intersect and entwine. When we bring the relationship of rightness and pervasiveness under consideration, another kind tension is brought into view. For religious faith, rightness pervades human life and the world, and reassuring evidence of its presence and power can be found everywhere by those of a sensitive and discerning spirit. But if this is so, why is there so much sin, evil, suffering, misdirection, and ignorance as well? The latter seem to be a threat not only to the alleged pervasiveness of rightness but also to its claimed primacy as well. In polytheistic or monotheistic religions, either the gods or God is often portrayed as locked in a cosmic conflict between evil’s own ominous pervasiveness in the world and the pervasive presence and power of the divine. In such an outlook, the pervasiveness and primacy of the power of goodness are exhibited again and again to religious faith throughout the course of world history, beginning with a divine creation of order out of primordial chaos and continuing to point steadily toward the triumph over evil by the pervasive divine presence. The struggle between the power of rightness and the forces of wrongness is most clearly seen in Zoroastrianism, where the good God Ohrmazd is locked in cosmic battle with Ahriman, the sinister evil Demon who is bent on besmirching and destroying all of Ohrmazd’s good creation, including his human creatures. But with the help of these human creatures and their sturdy devotion to his cause, Ohrmazd holds forth the assurance and promise of his final triumph, and thus of manifestation of the cosmic primacy of

30  Functions of religious ultimates his goodness. The pervasiveness of evil that challenges the pervasiveness of goodness is only temporary, then, not a permanent feature of human life or of the world. The primacy of goodness over evil is assured (see Boyd and Crosby 1979). The principle of Dharma or the Buddha nature in Buddhism is also held to be both pervasive and primary, even though the plight of suffering and its attendant ignorance and craving are constant threats to its awakening and realization – threats Buddhism purports to set out the clearly marked and thoroughly reliable path for overcoming. This salvific path is seen in it most exemplary form in the life struggles and final awakening of the Buddha himself. The enlightenment he sought and finally found is available to and can be gained by all. Thus the pervasiveness and triumphant power of Buddhism’s own version of rightness is assured. I do not mean with any of the observations thus far to judge any particular religion’s success, or its relative success in relation to other religious traditions, in confronting, dealing with, or resolving the tensions I have brought under discussion. My purpose in this chapter, as I indicated earlier, is to provide a descriptive, not normative, analysis of the six role-functions I associate with religious faiths of different kinds. But this description requires discussion of the tensions set up between and among the six categories when we ponder their relationships with one another. Versions of these tensions are endemic to all the world religions, I contend, but it is not my intention here to resolve them. It is only to suggest them as ways of at least beginning to understand how these traditions work and the inherent paradoxes and anomalies with which each of them must struggle. The tensions cannot finally be eradicated, and attempts to smooth them all out would end up destroying much, if not most, of any given religious tradition’s soaring heights and probing depths. A completely tidy religious system would do no justice to the mysteries and complexities, creations and destructions, sublimities and terrors of the world. And a religion rid of sometimes achingly disquieting ambiguities would in virtue of that fact alone be radically insufficient as a guide through the challenges and perplexities, ecstasies and anguishes, assurances and tragedies of personal and communal human life. In saying these things, I have not meant to make evaluative judgments either of any particular religion over others or of religion as a whole, but only to describe what I take for granted to be the inherent intricacy and complexity of religion as the role-functions of its respective ultimates are reflected in the religions of the world.

Permanence Religious ultimates do not come into being or pass away. They are not subject to the ravages of time. They either lie outside time altogether as timeless or eternal, or they are everlasting, enduring through time but without beginning or ending. In the first case, time is held by the religious faithful to be

Functions of religious ultimates 31 only a this-worldly phenomenon, a finite, psychological, human misperception of the true nature of the reality in which the religious ultimates abide or which, in some religious systems, they alone constitute. In the second case, the religious ultimates, while involved in, affecting, and being affected by temporal changes in the world, are not in any way threatened by them. They are indestructible and immune to any kind of temporal alteration of their basic natures. An example of the first kind of religious ultimate is the Brahman without qualities that lies behind the veil of Maya in Advaita Vedanta Hinduism. Another example is the timeless God envisioned in the thought of the early medieval Christians Augustine of Hippo and Boethius. For Augustine, the flow of time is a psychological phenomenon, not a metaphysical fact (Augustine 1961), and for Boethius, events of time that unfold progressively and sequentially for humans are known instantaneously by God as an everpresent now (Boethius 1968). For both of these medieval thinkers, God and the world are distinct from one another and real, but time itself is ultimately an illusion. An example of the second kind of religious ultimate is Yahweh, the God of Judaism, who exists everlastingly but is vigorously active in his works of creation and in the events of human history as he seeks constantly to mold the latter to his purpose and will. He not only affects human history; he is affected by the responses of human beings to his guidance and direction. He is saddened by human sins and made jubilant by human obedience to his will. He is a God of patience and loving-kindness as he works to achieve his ends for his creation and for the human beings within it. These ends will finally prevail, but they prevail through prolonged interactions of God with recalcitrant humans who in many ways stubbornly resist his will. Ohrmazd, the good God of Zoroastrianism, has a similar nature and has similar relations to human beings and the world. He is everlasting and will ultimately conquer the forces of evil personified in Ahriman and resident in Ahriman’s creations. But in the meantime, he must struggle to win his way through an all-too-real time. And of course, the gods of polytheistic religions are believed to be immortal although capable of affecting and being affected by events in time. A timeless or everlasting religious ultimate is unique, contrasting either with a finally non-existent temporal world or with a world that has an absolute beginning and end, and in other ways exists in real time. In the case of belief in the world’s absolute beginning and end, the religious ultimate creating and presiding over such a world either exists in its own endless time or can be conceived, with Augustine and Boethius, as timeless. In all such cases, the religious ultimate is obviously unique, standing in stark contrast with all else that comes into being and passes out of being in ordinary time. The permanence of religious ultimates also entitles them to primacy. That which prevails over all time or is immune to the ravages of time has primacy in this manner over everything in the world that is subject to decay

32  Functions of religious ultimates and death. All else is subordinate to it as the supreme aim of life since it alone stands above the threats and uncertainties of a volatile, ever-changing world. The permanent also pervades the world, either as its everlasting and immanent ground and support, or as the reality behind the threatening and distorting facades of its phenomenal unfoldings. In either event, it is here, there, and everywhere, ceaselessly underlying all that transpires in personal life and in the world and ensuring that the corrosive effects of time are not the last word. The role-functions of permanence and rightness are closely associated, as can readily be seen in the fact that something that must be relied on for coping with the threats of suffering, evil, and death must be absolutely dependable as immune to these threats and as an ever-present source of renewal and strength. A cosmic or metaphysical permanence of fundamental values is also assured by the timelessness or everlastingness of the religious ultimate. These fundamental values of goodness, beauty, sacredness, peace, safety, and the like will never be jeopardized or shaken. They lie at the heart of the universe. In some religions, there is hope for personal immortality and in others the prospect of absorption into some kind of timeless state in this life and/or after one’s death. Modes of rightness at the personal level are rooted in proper understandings of the rightness of the cosmos, and the permanence of the religious ultimate is an essential part of this rightness. But as William James (James 1996), Alfred North Whitehead (Whitehead 1978), Charles Hartshorne (Hartshorne 1984), and others have pointed out, there is a problem of reconciling an alleged timelessness of God as religious ultimate with things that take place and decisions that are made in a temporal world. The gap between the non-temporal character of God, on the one hand, and the temporal world, on the other, would seem to be unbridgeable. How could a timeless God interact with a temporal world? Could events in that world have any importance for God? And could God have a meaning for temporal beings? What possible connection could there be between the two? And as I pointed out earlier, if time is an illusion, there would seem be no successful way of accounting for the ubiquitous presence and persistence of this illusion in human experiences of the world. In both of these cases, there seems to be a radical disconnect between the religious ultimate and the world that threatens the relevance of the ultimate to a changing world – and thus to the ultimate’s claim to primacy, pervasiveness, and rightness. The alleged everlastingness of the religious ultimate, for its part, raises the issue of why it takes so long to right the world’s wrongs and why this struggle continues unabated to this day. Would an everlasting and powerful God not by now have had sufficient time to achieve this purpose? If not, this raises questions regarding God’s primacy or perhaps even God’s rightness. Such questions expose a tension of the category of permanence with the role-functions of primacy and rightness. So once again, we are brought up against tensional relationships of the rule-functions when they are compared with one another. Various ways of dealing with such tensions cast

Functions of religious ultimates 33 appreciable light on the different forms and directions traditional religious systems have taken through the centuries, especially in the hands of careful and highly competent interpreters and defenders of these traditions.

Hiddenness Mystery shrouds all religious ultimates. Their natures and ways are finally secret and inexplicable, surpassing all human knowledge or means of finding out. They defy adequate comprehension and expression. There is an unreachable and inexhaustible “more” that lies beyond even the most articulate and evocative modes of expression. And there is the universal stark reminder of the puny, halting, stumbling character of even the best or most ingenious attempts to comprehend, describe, or even suggest what the ultimate focus of religious faith and commitment is truly like. “The way that can be followed/Is not the eternal way;/The name that can be named is not the eternal name” is the Tao Te Ching’s paradoxical way of speaking of the also unspeakable character of its religious ultimate (Smart and Hecht 1982: 292). And the Apostle Paul’s First Epistle to the Corinthians in the Christian New Testament declares that in this life “we see in a mirror dimly” and “know only in part” (13:12 [RSV]). Musings of this sort point to religious ultimates that are by nature so unique, so primary, so pervasive, so right, and so far beyond the boundaries of temporal experience and understanding as to be finally indescribable and inexpressible. Religious ultimates of all types in the great religions of the world are of this character. The taunting finger of “neither this nor that” (neti, neti) seals the lips of all who strive to express in any finally adequate manner the ineffable and unsurpassable majesty, mystery, and glory of these ultimates. What they reveal, they also conceal. What is made known of them can also only be partially and imperfectly kept in view. The ineradicable mysteriousness of religious ultimates is a sign of their uniqueness. Nothing is as mysterious as they are in all of the world and in all of human experience. Their aura of mystery is not incremental but radical, contrasting with every other kind of conundrum, puzzle, or uncertainty that confronts humans in their thinking and living. The mystery is also primary in the sense that it is part and parcel of what matters most in human life and an ineradicable character of the cosmos. It pervades human life and the cosmos, rendering both of them opaque in multiple ways to full and clear comprehension and awareness. And it renders the rightness of human life and the religious ultimate’s cosmic character often troubling and uncertain. Telling examples of this last fact are Job’s wretchedness or exiled Jews weeping their laments by the waters of Babylon in the Hebrew Bible – or Jesus’s mournful cry of dereliction while spiked to the cross in the New Testament. Modern examples are the folk of different religious persuasions around the world today subjected to heinous cruelty and injustice, wracked with agonizing physical or mental disorders and diseases, experiencing

34  Functions of religious ultimates desperate loneliness, or being brought face-to-face with threatening collapse of hope. For the faithful, rightness still reigns in the midst of indecipherable suffering and sorrow. The ways of the ultimate are not always clearly congruent with the ways of humans, and the two may sometimes seem to be implacably at odds – an indication of the ultimate’s hiddenness. Finally, the religious ultimate’s permanence is dependable and undeniable from the standpoint of religious systems and modes of thought. And this is so despite all seeming evidence to the contrary. It is so at least so far as finite creatures can be distinguished from their infinite source. When the distinction disappears with mystical absorption of the finite into the infinite, the mystery is not so much eradicated as having become something that need no longer be of concern. The knower becomes the known or finally realizes its oneness with the known, and the idea of mystery ceases to be pertinent because there is no gulf of separation between what were formerly experienced as two separate realms. The religious ultimate remains mysterious, however, in the sense that there is no way to describe, communicate, or explain the experience of its sole reality. Thus the concealedness and revealedness of religious life and of religious visions of the cosmos go hand in hand. The kindly light of the religious ultimate leads on in even the deepest darkness, and the religious person need not always have to have knowledge of its every pitfall, milestone, or turn or need to comprehend in fine detail where it will eventually lead. There is sufficient guidance and direction for staying on the saving path. Warranted trust rather than absolute clarity of knowledge and awareness is what is needed. The ultimate’s hiddenness or unimaginable and as yet unexperienced plenitude of gracious meaning and value is evidence in its own way of its power to point, direct, and sustain the faithful on their journeys of courage and commitment.

Secular faith Now that I have described the six functions of religious objects on both the personal and the cosmic levels, and proposed them as a way of understanding the nature of religious faith in broad and general terms, it is time to raise the question of how secular faith can be described and how it relates to religious faith. I contend that few people are devoid of faith of some kind. People devoid of faith of any kind are those bordering on despair – floundering, aimless, lonely, and without significant purpose or direction in the living of their lives. Secular people and their secular attitudes toward life are generally not at all like this. They reject religion, but their lives and outlooks on the world exhibit a different focus of hope, trust, and existential meaning than that to be found in religion. What does it mean to reject religion and to have a secular kind of faith? The easiest answer to this question is that secular people are not affiliated with and do not regularly participate in established religious institutions. A second

Functions of religious ultimates 35 one is that professed secular faiths in the West often simply mean rejection of theism and an unquestioning identification of religion with theism. Other kinds of religious faith are left out of account. A third possible answer is that the secular-minded do not endorse one or more of the role-functions I have associated with the ultimates of religious faith. There may, for example, be nothing for secular people that functions as a cosmic ultimate with saving power (rightness) – nothing like God, gods and goddesses, animating spirits, Buddha nature, nirvana, Dao, Mandate of Heaven, and so on. They claim to experience nothing like this and to believe in nothing like it. Moreover, on the strictly personal level, secular people may have nothing that functions as a singular, uniquely authoritative focus of ultimate concern, and nothing that orders and directs their lives in an all-encompassing, holistic manner (uniqueness, primacy, and pervasiveness). Their loyalties are many, and these loyalties are not subordinate to one ultimate principle, process, being, class of beings, or power – especially not to something of the kind of cosmic scope and status affirmed in religious faith. And whatever kind of rightness they are committed to, it tends by and large to be a purely ethical, and not a religious, kind of rightness. It may, for example, be conceived as a set of values necessary for social adaptation and survival, but not as rightness with the kind of cosmic sanction and support religious faith claims to provide. Marxism famously branded religion as the opiate of the people and in this way proclaimed itself as a secular vision of human life and the world. Its vision, which is admittedly eschatological and hopeful in its form of faith, is centered on putative laws of human history conducive to human social wellbeing, but not as much on need for the kind of radical transformations and reorientations of the course and quality of individual human lives in their every aspect promised by the salvific messages of religions. Marxism assumes that humans are inherently good and that evils arise from corrupt economic organizations and conditions of societies. Secular humanists place their faith in human beings rather than in some kind of cosmic source of redemption and renewal, and their faith is reinforced by confidence in scientific progress as the cherished route to human betterment. Their focus is not on the kind of role-functions I have associated with religious ultimates. Secular faiths typically do not have the sense of overwhelming, awesome, intractable mystery (hiddenness) we find in religious traditions. Their mysteries often tend to be more like puzzles that are amenable to scientific and technological solution – if not at present then down the road. The prospect of a “theory of everything” arrived at by stubborn human ingenuity in all domains haunts the minds of many secular thinkers. If such a prospect does not appeal to other secular thinkers, then they advise settling into the human condition and the state of the world as best as we humans can. There may be no ultimate salvific hope, but their view is that we can live with such hope as is available to us in our day-to-day lives. While human life may be all too human and fraught with unavoidable tragedy, it is enough.3

36  Functions of religious ultimates Thus so-called faith communities include those with secular as well as religious kinds of faith, and it is important to keep this fact in mind. Secular people have their own type of faith, assurance, and ways of sustaining a positive outlook on the present character and future prospects of human life. But their outlooks, while similar in some ways to those possessed of religious faith – given that both exhibit and are sustained by modes of faith or of what I called existential truths in Chapter 1 – are not the same. The two forms of faith overlap in some ways, but they do not coincide. Still, both are subject to freedom of choice, based on the sorts of evidence and capabilities of choosing that either lie ready at hand in the common resources of everyday human life or that are ready to be bestowed by some sort of religiously available presence, prospect, experience, path, or power. The choice of religious or secular faiths is one important kind of choice, and the choice among versions of either of them is necessarily associated with this choice. One cannot be a dilettante in matters of faith. Faith requires specific and sustained focus, effort, and commitment. Openness to such choices and readiness to confront and work with their uncertainties and risks is an essential characteristic of both kinds of authentic faith. Christian theologian Miroslav Volf sums up the current situation well when he writes, Courtesy of globalization . . . alternatives to religion are becoming live options for many and ‘natural’ for some. Gradually, many people are finding themselves in an open space, on a cusp, on which religious and a-religious winds push and pull from different directions. They must choose. (Volf 2015: 79; my italics)

Conclusion In this chapter, I laid out a case for viewing the ultimates of religious faith as having six basic roles or functions on their personal and cosmic sides. I explained the task of role-functional analysis and distinguished it from a type of what I call goal-functional analysis. I distinguished the roles of different religious ultimates from the attributes of these ultimates in different religious traditions, arguing that while the roles remain the same across these traditions, the attributes vary widely. And I stressed the fact that my interest in this chapter is in describing the roles exhibited by these ultimates, not in evaluating their individual or relative adequacy or success in doing so. I also examined some interrelations among these roles or role-functions that are implicit in their respective characters, showing how they give mutual support and clarifying qualification and meaning to one another, but also showing how they have necessary tensional or paradoxical relations to one another. Both of these kinds of relation among what I argue to be the common role-functions of religious ultimates in the religions of the world are important, I contend, for understanding the inner logic of religious outlooks

Functions of religious ultimates 37 in general and for interpreting some of the unmistakable and unavoidable, and yet often illuminating, tensions in their respective outlooks and conceptual schemes. Finally, I offered a brief analysis of some differences between religious and secular forms of faith. I argued that both, despite their significant differences, involve faith stances of different kinds, at least to the extent that they assume and affirm meaning and purpose – or a sustaining and empowering courage to be – in life. Both, in other words, are versions of what in Chapter 1 I described as existential truth. Secular persons and communities can aptly be regarded as persons and communities of faith, despite their not exhibiting in their thought, practice, and commitment a particular kind of religious faith. They have their need for and reliance on faith in common with, and despite their differences from, those of a religious persuasion. There are no doubt other kinds of commonality – for example, moral convictions, scientific beliefs, need for community, and requirements of life on a shared planet – that can bind them together and enable them to have meaningful dialogues and shared commitments and practices, in spite of their differences. People need faith in order to live with confidence, challenge, and hope. And there is room for different understandings of the orientations and focuses of that confidence, challenge, and hope – some of them among the many different religious traditions and options, others among various sorts of secular faith. As I shall show in the next chapter, I do not mean by this observation to give endorsement to a flaccid epistemological relativism or to an “anything goes” view of either religious or secular faiths. But I do want to explicate and defend the pluralistic approach to religious and secular differences of faith that I shall discuss in that chapter – an approach I call pluralism or convictional openness. And I am claiming throughout this book that humans with the gifts of freedom of thought and action have both the capability and responsibility of facing up to the formidable demands of discovering, affirming, and living with a genuinely meaningful and sustaining faith. Among these demands is finding ways of exploring and interacting in a spirit of mutual helpfulness, respect, and receptiveness with the many different forms of faith, both religious and secular, that must be acknowledged and taken with the utmost seriousness in a time of ever-increasing globalization.

Notes 1 In Crosby (1981: 37–40), I refer to sociologist Robert Bellah’s 1958 insightful essay “The Place of Religion in Human Action” as an example of the type of goal-functional analysis of religion I am describing. In doing so, I point to some merits of this kind of analysis but also warn against its being considered the only satisfactory approach or even the most fruitful or informative approach to the study of religious phenomena in modern or nonmodern societies. It is undoubtedly valuable as one approach, but it should not be regarded as the only reliable or revealing approach. Just as there are said to be many paths to the Buddha,

38  Functions of religious ultimates there are many paths to instructive analysis of religious faiths and religious systems. Each can make a distinctive contribution to the end of helping us to understand better religious faith in its many different forms. 2 Quoted from Hardy’s The Dynasts, 1919, I, 524, by Randall (1976: 592). 3 For a fuller discussion of the nature of secular faith with more detailed examples of it, see Crosby (2011: 93–105). In this book I also characterize faith in general, whether religious or secular, under the six headings of worldview, trust, devotion, hope, courage, and doubt. See pp. 13–35.

References Bellah, Robert. 1958. “The Place of Religion in Human Action.” Review of Religion, 22: 137–54. Boyd, James W. and Donald A. Crosby. 1979. “Is Zoroastrianism Monotheistic or Dualistic?” Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 47/4: 557–88. Crosby, Donald. 1981. Interpretive Theories of Religion. The Hague: Mouton. ———. 2002. A Religion of Nature. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. ———. 2011. Faith and Reason: Their Roles in Religious and Secular Life. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Dupré, Louis. 1972. The Other Dimension: A Search for the Meaning of Religious Attitudes. Garden City, NY: Doubleday. Hartshorne, Charles. 1984. Omnipotence and Other Theological Mistakes. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. James, William. 1996. A Pluralistic Universe. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press. Otto, Rudolf. 1958. The Idea of the Holy: An Inquiry into the Non-Rational Factor in the Idea of the Divine and Its Relation to the Rational, trans. John W. Harvey. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Plato. 1973. The Collected Dialogues of Plato, Including the Letters, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Randall, John Herman, Jr. 1976. The Making of the Modern Mind: Fiftieth Anniversary Edition. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Smart, Ninian and Hecht, Richard D. eds. 1982. Sacred Texts of the World: A Universal Anthology. New York, NY: Crossroads. Smith, Huston.1991. The World’s Religions. New York, NY: HarperCollins. Volf, Miroslav. 2015. Flourishing: Why We Need Religion in a Globalized World. New Haven, CN: Yale University Press. Whitehead, Alfred North. 1978. Process and Reality: Corrected Edition, ed. David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne, New York, NY: Free Press.

3 A range of choices

A range of choicesA range of choices

[T]he sort of examination which I conceive of as being part of the Critical Stance . . . requires, in particular, a considerable degree of openness to the possibility your antecedently held beliefs, along with their attendant rules for inquiry and so forth, may be mistaken in important respects as well as to the possibility that alleged sources of authority may need to be called into question. It requires an awareness of these possibilities: that one may not have the complete account of the relevant issues, that one may have much to learn from other groups, that even beliefs that seem obviously right actually may be wrong. – Robert McKim (2001:147)

The “Critical Stance” which philosopher Robert McKim recommends in the epigraph to this chapter, and the considerable amount of openness it requires, also entails the necessity of thoughtful exercises of freedom. It does so in religious matters as in all other areas of belief. McKim’s observation that we may need to call into question “alleged sources of authority” reminds us that, among other things, the deep-rooted stances of religious faith that lie behind particular religious beliefs also need continuously to be brought under critical scrutiny. In order to expose them to such scrutiny, we need to take seriously – as McKim reminds us – what we can learn and often need to learn from faith stances other than our own – whether religious or secular – and from the basic beliefs that may be integrally connected with these stances. The exercise of genuine freedom requires that there be available options for choice, and a challenging range of such options is provided for personal religious choices by the teachings of the diverse religions of the world as well as by secular outlooks on life in the world. To take these alternate stances of faith and these alternate beliefs seriously into account is to open one’s mind to the possibility of previously unrecognized and unexplored depths of insight and understanding. While it can be a threat to confidence and assurance on one level, active engagement with other ways of trusting and believing also introduces the possibility of not only deepening but also strengthening one’s own stance of faith and of providing a newfound confidence that arises from having

40  A range of choices in this way worked to make one’s faith truly one’s own and not just a customary, conventional, unreflective way of thinking. This statement holds true even if the eventual result turns out to be abandonment or at least radical reconstruction of a whole stance of faith in favor of a newly discovered and freshly affirmed stance that comes to be incorporated into one’s life. A stance of faith that is never opened to such risk of loss will also be closed to possible great gains that require accepting the possibility of considerable loss for the sake of their discovery. An active, developing, meaningful life of faith is one that faces expectantly to the future and allows its present assurances and understandings to be put at risk for the sake of more challenging and fulfilling commitments that future discoveries and future choices inspired and directed by those discoveries may bring about. There are three fundamental options available to us in the realm of religion: remaining within the religious tradition in which we have been reared and not actively questioning any of its basic tenets; living in a religious tradition with persistent questioning and analysis of one or more of its tenets in light of the different beliefs, practices, and faith stances of other persons and other traditions; or rejecting religion altogether in favor of some kind of secular faith. The first option denies the need for the kinds of choices indicated in the second one. It opts for safety rather than adventure and runs the risk of complacency – of allowing one’s faith to become arrested and fixed at an early stage of its development and not allowing it to grow and change throughout one’s life. In practice, the first choice poses the possibility – if not often the probability – of becoming a version of the third one, where one’s life is actually guided not so much by genuine and actively developing religious faith as by more deeply entrenched secular values and commitments. Religion in this case is an outer professed clothing for a life oriented around more basic secular goals. There are also secular faiths with their own kind of active searchings and questionings, of course, but that is different from a life of conventional religiosity that is in fact – even if only unconsciously – secular and non-religious at its core. I do not intend these comments to be taken as a critique of secular faith itself but only of professed religious outlooks that pose as one thing when in fact they are really another. A faith devoid of the kind of critical, questioning, inquiring spirit described by McKim is inadequate as a guide to life because it turns a blind eye to the serious questions inevitably posed by honest ongoing engagements with the world. This is especially true in the world of today, where so many contending faiths, both religious and secular, are being brought into unavoidable relations with one another. In my view, faith is as much a process as a stance (or maybe something more like a dance1), and it is a process activated by, unafraid of, and heartily welcoming pertinent, deeply probing questions and criticisms. Thus doubt is not the antithesis of faith, as it is often thought to be, but dynamic faith’s necessary cutting edge. Where there

A range of choices 41 are no questions, there is no growth of knowledge, awareness, and commitment. A faith devoid of active doubt is a static and potentially meaningless faith. This book is primarily about religious faith and the choices involved in and required by it. One of these choices is indicated by the third option indicated earlier – namely, the choice of secular faith. This option raises questions and takes positions from which religious faith has much to learn. The secular faith of others and the issues posed by it point serious-minded religious people toward the need for the second option if their faith is to continue to grow, be meaningful to them, and provide dependable sustenance for their lives. The lukewarmness and untenability of the first option, for its part, point to the need for the greater adequacy and resilience of the second one. The second option is the one I want us to keep in mind as this chapter unfolds. I shall endeavor to keep this option at the forefront of our attention by first making some selective comments about the range of alternative religious visions available to us for study, analysis, and choice, and in the latter part of the chapter by critically discussing some possible ways of reacting to such alternative visions. Religious faiths have many different forms. I sketched some of these forms in Chapter 2, where I showed how various kinds of religious ultimates, with the often quite different attributes or properties I made note of there, instantiate the six role-functions I argued to be exhibited by each and all of these ultimates on both their personal and cosmic sides. I want now to bring the salient differences in these forms of faith even more forcefully into view in order to make readily apparent some of the options they pose for religious consideration, analysis, and choice.

Monotheism The most familiar form of religious faith in the West has a monotheistic God as its religious ultimate. Many in the West continue to think of religion itself as faith in God, and in this way, they fail to take into account religious traditions of the world that do not focus on God or a single God. Also largely overlooked in traditional monotheism, whether Jewish, Christian, or Islamic, are the different ways of conceiving God and his2 relations to the world. The unquestioningly assumed view of God is that God has created the universe out of nothing; sustains it in its existence moment by moment; existed prior to its creation and has no essential need of or dependence on the universe for his existence; is a distinctive personal, conscious being similar in many ways to human beings; has provided definitive revelations of himself and of his purposes for human kind – sometimes with startling miracles or upsettings of the laws of nature – and saves both in this life and in an everlasting life to come to those who place their faith in him and his will. Humans, for their part in this religious outlook, are distinctive

42  A range of choices conscious persons like God and exist in the image of God – in contrast with other parts of nature. In their essential being, then, humans are like God in that they are spiritual beings, not just natural organisms, and in that they do not ultimately depend on the physical world for their existence, as is shown by their capability of attaining everlasting life. Just as God existed before the world, so will humans who have placed their faith in God continue to exist blessedly after death, and they will do so even if the natural world itself should cease to exist. A fundamental aspect of this religious outlook is mind-body or spirit-body dualism. God’s purely spiritual existence does not depend on the world’s existence, and the same is true of humans in their essential spiritual character. In fact, the world is often viewed largely as a transitory springboard toward the everlasting life with God that lies for the faithful beyond the grave. These are some outlines of traditional monotheism, then, and it is the outlook associated in the minds of most Westerners with religion itself. This tends strongly to be as true for those who reject this outlook as well as for those who accept it. Atheism is more often than not conflated with secularism or non-religion. But of course, monotheism need not be conceived in its every aspect as I have briefly described it earlier. For example, Judaism got along quite well up to the last two decades of the second millennium bce without belief in the resurrection of the dead into an afterlife. And I spoke in Chapter 1 of significant abridgments of the traditional notion of God argued for by Alfred North Whitehead and William James. Whitehead makes God an integral part of the world instead of being separate from it, and James argues that the most satisfactory view of God is to see God as dependent on the world in a manner similar in some respects to the world’s dependence on God. Whitehead’s monotheism, then, is a version of panentheism rather than traditional theism, and James’s finite God contrasts with the traditional God of infinite attributes and complete self-sufficiency. I also made mention in Chapter 1 of Protestant theologian Paul Tillich’s critique of traditional monotheism’s view of God as a separately existing personal being and his identification of God with being-itself or the ground of all particular beings. And yet, Whitehead, James, and Tillich all belong within the broad class of monotheists, despite their differences from the traditional monotheism I have described here. Finally, there is the mystical option that we find represented in all three of the monotheistic traditions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. In this option, there is only one reality and that is God. The goal of salvation is to pass beyond all the states or stages of finite being – or apparent finite being – toward the final, saving experience and realization that God alone is real. All else is mere appearance, including the misperception of the human self as separate from God. The Kabbalistic thinker of the 16th century, Isaac Luria, advocated a view similar to this one. The theology of the 13th to 14th

A range of choices 43 century Christian mystic Meister Eckhart also tends strongly in this direction, as does that of the 12th to 13th century Sufi thinker Ibn Arabi. So even while staying within the category of monotheism (and allowing for its sometimes mystical moves toward monism) as a way of conceiving of the religious ultimate, there are different options to be considered and weighed in balance. With the exception of the option of mysticism, the central symbol or model of the religious ultimate in monotheism is the human being. This is especially apparent in traditional Christianity, where Jesus came paradoxically to be regarded and affirmed as God in human flesh. The man Jesus and his life and ministry – whether he was apotheosized or not – also became the principal lens for human beings into the nature of God and remains such for Christians to this day. Christian New Testament scholar and theologian Marcus J. Borg, for example, calls Jesus “the decisive revelation of God for Christians” and “the norm of the Bible, the standard by which the rest of the Bible is to be understood” (Borg 2016: 99). Whitehead’s fascination with “the brief Galilean vision of humility” and with “the tender elements of the world which slowly and in quietness operate by love” (Whitehead 1978: 342–43) show how his philosophical view of God in his “primordial nature” as a God of patient, loving persuasion rather than of dictatorial force or power is deeply informed by the life and teachings of the Jesus of the Gospels. In contrast with a thinker like Stewart Guthrie (1993), I do not believe that all religions are at bottom incurably anthropomorphic – and Whitehead’s monotheistic God of his metaphysical system is far less so than some others – but I agree with Guthrie that many are, both in their origins and in their present forms.

Polytheism The monotheism of the three Abrahamic religions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam can be contrasted with the polytheism that is one main strand of the intricate tapestry of Hindu religious traditions. Three gods loom largest in this strand – namely, Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva – but there are numerous kinds of lesser deities, both male and female, and sometimes androgynous, in the Hindu pantheon to whom fealty, reverence, and devotion are given by the faithful. Some of these are incarnations or avatars of the high gods such as Ram and Krishna for Vishnu. Others are consorts of the main gods such as Durga, sometimes seen as a consort of Shiva but also as a major goddess in her own right and Kali, another of his consorts who represents the fearsome, destructive side of his nature and work. The three major gods as well as the less exalted gods and goddesses are usually assigned aspects of the world and of human affairs for which they have principal oversight and responsibility. Instead of a single focus of religious reverence and commitment, therefore, there can be multiple focuses in a person’s life – focuses that have to

44  A range of choices do with various aspects of one’s life and experience. The class of such deities is the general focus of ultimate concern and not a single deity to the exclusion of all others, as in monotheism. So polytheism, which continues to be active in India and many other places in the world today, especially in parts of China, Korea, and Japan, but also in aboriginal or non-modern cultures,3 is an alternative to monotheism in the religions of the world. It has the advantage of not only doing justice to the diverse aspects of life in the world and the different kinds of loyalty, reverence, and commitment these aspects require but also of giving options to the faithful for many distinctive targets and modes of religious devotion. Diverse kinds of religious ultimate can be readily accommodated and accepted in the contexts of polytheistic forms of religious faith, and in a more empathetic and tolerant manner than they are likely to be by monotheists. Moreover, in view of the enormous diversity of life-forms and other things on earth – to say nothing of the known and unknown diverse processes, entities, and possible life-forms throughout the vast universe – the idea of a class of diverse gods is not as strange as it might first appear to minds steeped in monotheistic religious traditions. As with traditional monotheism, the major symbol of the religious ultimates in polytheistic religions is either the human being or animals with notably human traits and behaviors. There is a nod toward quasi-polytheism (or what is typically regarded as such from the perspectives of Judaism and Islam) in the Christian doctrine of the Trinity. Veneration of the saints in Eastern Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism, and especially Saint Mary, the mother of Jesus, also tends in this direction, especially at the level of popular practice. The veneration of ancestors in places such as Africa, China, Taiwan, and Japan can also constitute or point toward a kind of practical, day-to-day polytheism. And gods and goddesses themselves often play an important role, at least on the level of popular religious practices, in these places. So polytheism of various sorts is among the options of choice for conceiving of the religious ultimate – that is, as a class of deities or quasideities – posed by the religions of the world. For many, it is a source of deeprooted faith and conviction.

Contemplative monism I have already mentioned the mysticism that has arisen out Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, and posed a challenge to their monotheistic, separately existing religious ultimate. But mysticism also deserves a place within a third major religious option, in addition to the already indicated ones of monotheism and polytheism. I call this option contemplative monism. One major manifestation of it in India is the thought of the Hindu religious philosopher Shankara (8th century ce), and it goes by the name of Advaita Vedanta (“Non-dualistic Vedanta”).4 A second major manifestation of this

A range of choices 45 third option is Buddhism in its various forms, as I indicate in discussing the Buddhist Nagarjuna in the next chapter. The contemplative monism of Advaita Vedanta views the religious ultimate as Nirguna Brahman or Brahman without qualities. This ultimate alone is real. It contrasts with the realm of maya or “misperception.” And this world is sometimes seen as the creation of Ishvara, or the Brahman with qualities (Saguna Brahman) – a being similar in some respects to the Western idea of God. But the Brahman with qualities also belongs to the realm of maya, meaning that such a personal God does not ultimately exist. The goal of the religious life in this vision of the ultimate is to search for realization in the depths of conscious awareness.5

Religious naturalism To the three major religious categories of monotheism, polytheism, and contemplative monism I add a fourth and final one to be noted here and that is religious naturalism. For religious naturalism, reality and nature are one and the same. In other words, all that is finally real is natural. There are no supernatural realms, beings, principles, powers, sources of knowledge, or paths of salvation. And the focus of salvific rightness is on this life, not on an everlasting life beyond this one. Aristotle was a proponent of a rich system of philosophical naturalism in the 4th century bce. The God, Active Intellect, or Unmoved Mover of his Metaphysics (Aristotle 1941: 689–926) is not a substantial entity. Instead, these terms name the form or character of the world as a whole, its entelecheia or actuality when viewed comprehensively as a complete system. They also name its ultimate end or telos – that toward which all subordinate telē tend and which they all exemplify, each in its own appropriate fashion. The cycles of day and night, the rhythms of the seasons, the coming into being and passing out of being of biological organisms, the motions of the heavenly bodies – these and all other natural processes, when taken together, exhaustively constitute all that is real. There is thus no God-world dualism in Aristotle, and there is no dualism of life and death, mind and body. Both life and mind are understood in his De Anima as functions of and entirely within the comprehensive reality of nature (Aristotle 1941: 535–603). There is nothing beyond nature or supernatural. Aristotle’s philosophy is not explicitly religious, but it provided fertile ground and context for later highly creative religious thinkers of the Western Middle Ages such as Averroes, Maimonides, and Thomas Aquinas – Muslim, Jewish, and Christian thinkers, respectively. Lucretius (1st century bce) and Spinoza (17th century ce) developed versions of an entirely naturalistic vision of reality. Lucretius’s vision, set forth in his On the Nature of Things (Lucretius 1921) was not so much religious as philosophical in its central thrust and character. Spinoza, in his Ethics (1951, vol. 2: 45–271), thought of nature as not only ultimately and

46  A range of choices exclusively real but also as having profound religious significance. He even spoke of it reverently and interchangeably as “Nature or God” (Deus sive Natura). Daoism and Confucianism in East Asia can be interpreted as types of religious naturalism, at least in their more conceptual forms of development. And there is a thread of philosophical and secular naturalism woven into ancient Indian thought that rejects traditional Hindu religious ideas and practices. The Carvaka sect (5th and 6th centuries bce) is a prominent example, and its founder Carvaka is referenced in the Ramayana as a dangerous enemy of orthodox Hindu thought (Riepe 1961: 53–54). Carvaka and his sect were avidly anti-religious, at least with regard to the religious outlook of their time in India (Riepe 1961: 76). Many of the ideas of ancient and modern philosophical naturalism can be incorporated into religious modes of thought, despite their critical differences from more traditional religious points of view. When naturalism becomes a form of religious faith, and not just a philosophical and secular outlook, nature itself or central aspects of nature are the avowed focus of ultimate commitment and concern. Dualisms of the natural and the supernatural, God and nature, body and spirit, or revealed and natural knowledge, are rejected, and the sacred is seen as wholly immanent within the natural world. In religious naturalism’s present forms, evolutionary emergentism is endorsed, as against eliminative materialism, meaning that later stages of evolutionary processes are real in their own right and not reducible to earlier stages. Humans are not seen as the apex or culmination of nature but as one of its innumerable emergent and integral creatures. Their responsibility to the other creatures of earth is strongly emphasized. Biological evolution and ecological science are thus integral parts of the contemporary religious naturalist’s outlook on the terrestrial world. And the awesome vastness of the sidereal world, as described by current natural science, is a fundamental part of the religious naturalist worldview. Religious naturalists are far from wanting to claim that nature is somehow all about us humans. We humans have a place and responsibility here on earth, and for that we can be grateful, but nature does not focus primarily on us. We can focus on it with deep and abiding faith and commitment as a magnificent system of which we are a small but still significant part. We are nurtured and sustained by nature throughout the course of our lives. It is our origin, our home, and the system to which we shall return when our days on earth are over. It is sacred ground. Nature so regarded can be shown to exemplify all six of the rolefunctions of religious ultimates and their interrelations I described in Chapter 2. I argue in detail for this being the case in A Religion of Nature (2002: 117–30). A strong new movement of religious naturalism began to come into prominence in the United States in the 20th century, and it continues to be developed and proclaimed in various forms today. I shall defend a version of it later in this book and explain why after years of reflection I have come to choose it as my own stance of faith and religious commitment.

A range of choices 47 I shall indicate what I have both carried over into and left behind from the traditional religious upbringing and thinking of my earlier days. I can also exhibit important overlaps – as well as differences – of my current stance of faith in relation to other religious outlooks. In the next section of the current chapter, however, I want to discuss some possible ways of reacting to the inescapable and provocative fact of substantial differences among the religions of the world today. How can we think and act with staunch conviction but also with welcoming openness in the face of these differences? I want to show how this is possible by navigating among the possible ways of responding to religious diversity. This diversity poses options for freedom of choice and places on each of us the burden and privilege of choosing among them as we strive to find a stance of faith and set of religious beliefs that can become truly our own. Christian theologian Miroslav Volk states a fundamental idea when he says, “By its very nature, faith is a free act; a coerced faith is no faith at all” (Volf 2015: 108). His insistence is a central theme of the present book. Deliberate acts of freedom are essential for authentic faith. I should emphasize, however, that we can choose only what is possible for us to choose, given our particular backgrounds, situations, makeups, temperaments, interests, abilities, needs, and the like. Our choices are conditioned choices; there is no such thing as absolute freedom, and we can only choose in the context of options that hold open the realistic possibility of persuading us with their promises of sustaining meaning and truth. But these undeniable conditions or constraints still allow considerable latitude for continuing inquiry and active choice. Philosopher Sterling Lamprecht wisely notes that while it is a mistake to view religion as “a matter of merely subjective taste” (a mistake to be discussed later in this chapter), it remains true “that as complex a being as man [sic] and as intricate a career as human life can hardly be supposed to have one single best way of being organized” (Lamprecht 1944: 38). We can add to his observation necessary acknowledgment of the complexity of the world itself, before which the complexity of any particular person’s life pales and in the face of which all religious outlooks, no matter how far-reaching and profound, come up against their inevitable measure and limitation. I have more to comment along this line in what is to follow.

Approaches to religious diversity If we think of possible responses to the fact of religious diversity, we can imagine a line, the ends of which are absolutism or exclusivism at the one end and secularism at the other. Absolutists consider their religious faith to be the one and only correct one and all other forms of faith – to the extent that they differ from it – to be subject to rejection as false and misleading. Secularists, for their part, reject all religious outlooks, viewing them as unconvincing and unnecessary – if not pernicious in their effects. Among

48  A range of choices these line segments, as we move from the absolutistic to the secularistic position, are, in this order, inclusivistic, syncretistic, pluralistic, and relativistic responses to religious diversity. The line looks like this: Absolutism – Inclusivism – Syncretism – Pluralism – Relativism – Secularism Let us look at these possible responses from one end of the imagined line to the other, including each intermediate segment of it. Absolutists are also exclusivists in the sense that they exclude from positive consideration any kind of religious faith other than their own. They typically do so on the ground that their faith is based either in some kind of definitive, final, entirely authoritative and trustworthy divine revelation or that it alone is warranted by some sort of extraordinarily and universally compelling type of experience or pattern of reasoning. The only interaction with persons of other religious outlooks that is needed, therefore, is attempts to persuade them of the sole truth of the absolutist’s position and to apprise them of the consequences of failure to incorporate this truth into their lives. Any discussion with people of different faiths, whether religious or secular, is for the sake of proselytization and conversion, not for the sake of shared discoveries or mutual growth and understanding. Thus what might at first appear to be an offer of two-sided dialogue is in reality more on the order of a one-sided lecture or reprimand. This response to religious diversity turns a deaf ear to Lamprecht’s observation about the complexity and variability of individual human lives quoted earlier, to say nothing of the complexities and mysteries of the world with which religious traditions have to deal. It confuses personal existential certainty or assurance with an alleged epistemic certainty of doctrinal claims. But the latter would require universal and unquestioning epistemic assent, which clearly is not the case, given the long-lived and continuing diversity of religious options. Moreover, there is an air of hubristic pride and pretense in absolutistic religious claims. They ignore human fallibility and proneness to error, as well as running up against the character of profound knowledge – especially knowledge in the field of religion – as a continuing quest accompanied by tentative rather than terminal resolutions. Absolutistic religious stances and claims are ultimately anti-social in their rejection of all but one of the many different religious traditions of the world and possible ways of living religiously in the world. As British philosopher and historian of ideas Isaiah Berlin points out, religious absolutism can have and historically has frequently had deplorable social consequences. Few things have done more harm than the belief on the part of individuals and groups (or tribes or states or nations or churches) that he or she or they are in sole possession of the truth: especially about how to live, what to be & do & that those who differ from them are not merely mistaken, but wicked or mad: & need restraining or suppressing. It is

A range of choices 49 a terrible and dangerous arrogance to believe that you alone are right: have a magical eye which sees the truth: & that others cannot be right if they disagree. This makes one certain that there is one goal and only one for one’s nation or church or the whole of humanity, & that it is worth any amount of suffering (particularly on the part of other people) if only the goal is attained. (Berlin 2002: 345; quoted in McKim 2012: 20, note 5) Religious absolutism hardly accords with the spirit of receptiveness to other points of view and to all that is yet to be learned and understood in the searching, questing, dialogical kind of responsible religious choices of faith and beliefs I have been endorsing and emphasizing in this book. Between absolutists and non-absolutists there can be little hope for useful, mutually helpful religious dialogue. This remark holds with a vengeance for two or more different kinds of avowed absolutists or for different kinds of dominating and unyielding absolutistic institutions in their religious relations to one another.6 The next position along our imagined line is what I label as religious inclusivism. According to this view of religious diversity, all that is actually true in other religions is already present in one’s own. So these other religions can be welcomed and accommodated as giving witness from other perspectives to these shared truths. But to the extent that the other religions fail to articulate and express the shared truths or to differ in any way from one’s own religious outlook, their claims should be rejected out of hand. Thus, properly understood, other religions offer nothing supplemental or new. Inclusivists welcome other religions only to the extent that they affirm what inclusivists are already committed to and believe. Inclusivists interpret other religious outlooks solely on the inclusivist’s own terms. Inclusivists are thus not very different from absolutists. Their religious views are assumed to be the unvarying standards by which all other religious commitments and claims should be judged. Inclusivists are open to exploration of commonalities with other religions, and to discussions and interactions with their proponents along this line, but they give no sympathetic consideration to differences from their particular religious outlook or to what might possibly be learned from serious positive inquiries into these differences. So once again, the kind of continual probing, dialogical, open-minded religious searching that takes differences as well as similarities seriously into account is set aside. This searching can either take the form of actual dialogue with persons of other faiths or of active investigations of available information concerning the teachings of such faiths. Ideally, it should incorporate both forms of inquiry. The next possible approach, as we move toward the opposite end of our imagined line, is syncretism. This approach contends that religious truth lies reliably and only in those areas where all the world religions are found to be in agreement. Differences, once again, should be left out of account, but

50  A range of choices now these are even to include whatever might be the differences of one’s own stance of faith from other stances. This means that everything which is particular and distinctive about religious traditions and stances of faith needs to be weeded out, including anything particular, distinctive, or special in one’s own religious outlook. Universal consensus is the criterion of truth. What is left by this approach is not only bound to be too abstract, bland, and lacking in richness of detail to be an adequate guide to life. We should also note that the syncretistic approach cavalierly rejects out of hand differences that may be of momentous importance to proponents of differing religious perspectives. For example, whether there is only one God or many gods, or whether the religious ultimate is radically transcendent or radically immanent might matter a great deal. Similarly, whether the ultimate is nature or nirvana would presumably have decisive significance for proponents of religious naturalism, on the one hand, or Buddhism, on the other. And there is a world of difference between a religious ultimate with discernible, persistent qualities and one claimed to be entirely devoid of them. Some sort of reconciliation of these differences might be possible, in presently unknown ways, at later stages of the investigation into them. But it would be foolish to deny their importance at the outset. The syncretistic approach is analogous in my mind to taking all of the great paintings throughout the history of the world and altering them in such a manner as to preserve only those respects which are common to them all – their striking differences of subject matter, color, form, style, and expression deliberately washed out in favor of some common denominator. What aesthetically sensitive person would favor such a ridiculous approach to works of art? And why should we think it appropriate as a response to great religious traditions and systems? The living breath and palpable excellence of different religions lie in their distinctive traditions, symbols, commitments, and visions, not just in their similarities to one another. And then there is the stubborn fact that one cannot be religious in general. The religious life is of necessity focused, grounded, and definite. The particularities of religious traditions and religious faiths are their muscle and sinew. They cannot be blithely dismissed in favor of some bare skeleton of abstract similarities and agreements. Religious faith is concrete, not a view from nowhere. It is impossible for choices of genuine stances of faith to be choices of nothing in particular. By being oblivious to such commonplace observations, syncretism fails to do justice to the nature of religious faith. Pluralism is the next response to religious differences. As I mentioned in Chapter 2, it can also be called convictional openness. Both sides of the latter term are essential. In pluralistic dialogue with someone of a different faith, or inquiry into the character of a particular form of faith, one does not suspend or lay aside one’s most basic convictions. Nor does one leave them out of account. In responses to the diversity of religious traditions and institutions, there should be continuing recognition of the stubbornly upheld, undeniably different, generally unwavering convictional cores of

A range of choices 51 these traditions and institutions and of persons committed to them. These convictional cores should not be regarded as looming and yet unacknowledged elephants in the room. A frank sharing of them and openness to their fundamental roles in the faith stances of others means being honest and upfront about these convictional differences and not sweeping them under the rug. It is actually pretty hard to sweep elephants under the rug! The focus of pluralistic interactions with those of different faiths is not on a hoped-for eventual consensus or a final setting aside of one set of basic convictions in favor of another. Instead, it is seeking to become as acutely aware as possible of the distinctive characters of contending different root convictions and of the sorts of experiences and reasons that lie behind them and could be offered in defense of them. It is also an attempt to gain appreciative understanding in this way of what lies behind the patent differences in more specific and more subordinate doctrines and practices among different religions. Interactions with members of different faith communities or proponents of different religious outlooks should also focus, of course, on discovering commonalities among these groups or persons. This is a necessary and important enterprise. It helps to bring to light the basic humanity and perennial human questions and needs reflected in refracted ways in the midst of these differences. Recognition of such commonalities provides a necessary context for beginning to comprehend the differences and for bringing meaningful discourse into play in analyzing them. Without discovery and acknowledgment of common ground there can be no real understanding of differences. A verbal acknowledgment of differences is not the same thing as seeking resolutely to understand them and the logic behind them. But honest, full-hearted, open-minded investigation or discussion of religious diversity cannot stop with unearthing commonalities among different religious faiths. It must also involve frank acknowledgment, investigation, and consideration of differences. In this way, it can sometimes lead to awareness, on all sides of the investigational process, of deeply rooted convictional stances that may not have been clearly seen prior to the investigational process. The process may also awaken challenges on both sides to examine purported or possible evidences and reasons for these stances. In consequence, each side of the process can learn something fundamental and previously unexplored about its own stance of faith. Attention to fundamental differences can add scope and depth to the outlooks of adherents of particular religious perspectives by opening them to possibilities of supplementation, revision, or enrichment in their respective perspectives of which they may have been previously unaware. An excellent example of such a pluralistic investigative process and outcome is the book by Christian philosopher John B. Cobb Jr. entitled Beyond Dialogue: Toward a Mutual Transformation of Christianity and Buddhism (1982). Cobb makes an intriguing and plausible case for showing how certain basic but different aspects of Christianity and Buddhism can be seen as complementing

52  A range of choices one another instead of standing in opposition to one another. Such insight would not be possible without in-depth, open-minded, pluralistic-spirited inquiry into the differences between the two faith stances. What may initially have looked like an impassible chasm can sometimes turn out to allow construction of a mutually informative bridge moored and suspended from both sides of the divide. There are five things pluralists strive to keep in mind as they approach religious differences. The first is respect for the dignity, integrity, and sincerity of those with different stances of faith and different religious beliefs. They have usually lived with their faiths and found profound solace and challenge in them for many years. They are people of “good faith” in the living out of their religious faith, and they are entitled to respect as such. The second thing is acknowledgment of the different ways all peoples have been conditioned and acculturated, and of the differences of temperament, attitude, interest, ability, need, and the like among them as fellow human beings. Their freedom to choose among alternative paths of faith is no more absolute or unconditioned than is one’s own. The third thing is the fact that what might seem strange and controversial, if not outright heretical, to one person involved in religious investigation or dialogue can seem obviously and incontrovertibly true to the proponent of another side. This fact needs constantly to be borne in mind. The fourth thing of which pluralists need to strive constantly to be aware is the difference between doctrinal and existential truth. What is the former for one participant in a discussion or for one side of an investigation may be more like the latter for the other side. It is far easier to be open to differences among specific doctrines, and the reasons and experiences adduced in their favor, than it is to sustain openness of mind from one existential stance to another. The latter strikes to the heart of a person, culture, tradition, or institution’s being in a way that the former does not or need not. This crucial and often unconscious difference needs to be borne in mind. The fifth thing of which pluralists need to be aware is that it takes two sides to have a productive and meaningful dialogue. And not every possible party to a discussion of differences is going to have the degree of openmindedness toward and respect for differences that is required. Absolutists are not going to have it at all, and inclusivists and syncretists are going to have it only in markedly restricted degrees. In these cases, a kind of conversion to the pluralist outlook itself is required if there is to be true openness to other religions and other religious points of view. One must be able to choose and live with a pluralistic outlook on religious matters before the kind of pluralistic investigations I am now describing can be accepted and practiced. I am convinced that a sufficiently high, exalted, and finally ineffable and surpassing religious ultimate – however its particular character may be conceived – makes inevitable the kind of humble, receptive, expectant attitude toward different religious traditions and their proponents I am both describing and now prescribing. An arrogant spirit of “I have it all figured out religiously and have no need to inquire into the faith of others” runs against

A range of choices 53 the grain of what I regard as a viable and authentic religious spirit and what I believe to be the attitude implicitly if not explicitly endorsed by all the great world religions. But here I bear witness to a central feature of my own religious faith – a faith whose journey and present outcomes I shall describe later in this book. The last approach to religious differences before that of a secularist rejection of religion altogether is relativism. For the relativist, religious faith is more a matter of the circumstances of one’s particular upbringing or of other contingent circumstances than something open to reasonable argument and debate. Either that, or it is a matter in the last analysis of arbitrary choice, since experience, reason, and reflection can give no reliable guide for religious outlooks, practices, or ways of life. “To each his (or her) own!” is the relativist’s platform and proclamation. But this approach to religious faith trivializes it and makes it sound innocuous and unimportant. It gives no credence to the groaning and travail that has entered into the questing religious spirit through all the ages – a groaning and travail that are an integral part of the uncertainties, agonies, and dreads of human life, along with this spirit’s ardent searches for what is best and truest, most hopeful and sustaining, most richly challenging and demanding, most worthy of ultimate reverence and commitment, in the realm of religious thought and life. The approach of radical relativism to religious differences seems to be to be a kind of tone-deafness to grave and momentous issues posed and addressed in religious thought and religious ways of life. It sees religion merely as a matter of differing emotional predilections and preferences and not as a matter of responsible choices growing out of lifelong careful reflections and heartfelt considerations. In this way, it joins with the Logical Positivists who relegated religion to the realm of emotion and denied to it any kind of cognitive significance. If the relativist’s approach to religious differences is deemed to be the correct one, then it would seem to follow that religion is not all that important and that we had best turn our attention to those things that are really of consequence. This approach, at least implicitly, is difficult to distinguish from an outright secularist dismissal of religious attitudes, beliefs, and practices as having little if any convincing or compelling merit or value. This comment brings us at last to the other end of the spectrum from that of the absolutist approach to religious differences – namely, the response of forthright rejection of religious faith in favor of some sort of allegedly more reasonable and sustaining secular faith. I made a few observations about the nature of secular faith and its differences from religious faith in Chapter 2.

Conclusion This chapter has been concerned with three classes of choice available to us in the area of religion. The first class contains three options. The first one is settling comfortably into the religious tradition in which one has been reared and not bothering to raise any critical questions regarding it or

54  A range of choices its relations to other forms of faith. This class’s second option is devoting oneself throughout one’s life to active investigating, questioning, and testing claims to religious truth and stances of religious faith, even as one continues on a particular path of faith or decides on a different path of faith in the course of one’s life. The third option of this class is rejecting religion at some point in one’s life and setting out upon a secular kind of faith. The second class of options is those posed by the great world religions or by significant philosophical versions of religious outlooks, with their respective doctrines, practices, commitments, and ultimate focuses of faith. I briefly characterized and discussed in this chapter four examples of such options – namely, monotheism, polytheism, contemplative monism, and religious naturalism. The third class of options for choice indicates different ways of responding to the diversity of the religions of the world. I listed and discussed in this set of options the approaches of absolutism (or exclusivism), inclusivism, syncretism, pluralism, relativism, and secularism, meaning the incorporation into one’s outlook and life some form of secular faith. The rejection of any form of either religious or secular faith, it will be recalled from my earlier discussion in Chapter 1, I interpret to be tantamount to a posture of aimlessness, hopelessness, and despair. I strongly favor the second option in the first class indicated earlier because I view religious faith as an ongoing process of continual questioning, analyzing, and inquiring rather than as a something forever fixed and unchanging. I am personally committed to the fourth option in the second class and will have more to say about my personal choice of a naturalistic stance in subsequent parts of this book. And I heartily recommend the pluralistic option in the third class – an option closely connected to, although not identical with, the second option of the first class. A significant way of continuing critically to inquire into the character and content of one’s own religious faith is to open oneself to engagement with the faiths of others, including those who opt for secular faith, and to the prospect of learning important lessons from their stances of faith. I do not think that any of the options available to us in the religions of the world or in secular outlooks on life contain the complete truth. We cannot eliminate the fallible human involvement in the development of religious traditions, systems, or outlooks. And even if a particular religious system did contain complete truth, we finite creatures would have no way of knowing this to be the case beyond all doubt. So we need to seek insight and inspiration in the faith stances of others and in religious traditions or secular outlooks different from our own – as important supplements to and critical perspectives on what we think we already understand and as ways of sharing with others what matters most to us and learning what is of equal importance to them. Authentic and meaningful religious faith can provide ample existential assurance, demand, and empowerment. It can do so in a variety of ways and in a variety of traditions and systems of thought. But such faith never lets us

A range of choices 55 forget that the ultimate focus of this assurance, demand, and empowerment is beyond complete understanding, and that we must continue to live in the face of ultimate mystery. Dogmatic arrogance and exclusivism are symptoms of weakness in faith, not signs of its strength. Conviction and openness go hand in hand. The cup of faith must always be seen as both half full and half empty – an appropriate combination of confidence and humility.

Notes 1 See in this connection Karl E. Peters’s aptly entitled book Dancing with the Sacred (Peters 2001). Also relevant in this regard is Sam Keen’s book To a Dancing God (Keen 1970). Both Peters and Keen are influenced by the work of the famous Greek novelist Nikos Kazantzakis, who was influenced in his turn by the French process philosopher Henri Bergson. 2 God is traditionally conceived as male in the West. 3 For a splendid description of the polytheism and ancestor veneration of the Inuk peoples of the far north in Canada, see David Welky’s book A Wretched and Precarious Situation: In Search of the Last Arctic Frontier (2017: 367–8). The seven sisters of the Pleiades, for example, “are the spirits of our people,” says the Inuk Panippak, and he exclaims of the stars, “It is a wonderful world up there. We shall all be together with those we love.” Panippak regards the northern lights as the spirits of stillborn children dancing with their afterbirths, the moon as a lustful older brother endlessly and incestuously chasing his sister the sun across the sky, and Venus as an old harpooner who appears in the west with the approach of spring but stays low on the horizon to hear seals beneath the ice. 4 Vedanta means “the end (or concluding part) of the Vedas.” The Vedas are ancient Hindu scriptures. Vedanta includes the Upanishads and the traditional philosophical systems that reflect on major themes of the Upanishads. 5 For a discussion of the stages leading to transcendental consciousness, see Deutsch (1973: 55–65). 6 Miroslav Volk presents an interesting argument to the effect that contemporary religious exclusivists are often political pluralists rather than advocates of an exclusivist theocracy, partly on their own ground that it is wrong to think that faith can be imposed from without rather than having to be freely chosen from within, but also on the basis of their conviction that the exclusivist message about political issues is more likely to be heard when it is presented in a context of civil discourse that acknowledges and respects the sincerity of persons holding different political beliefs and advocating different political policies and programs. Such religious exclusivists, Volk argues, follow the example of the founder of Rhode Island Roger Williams, as over against early American proponents of theocracy and of harshly imposed politically and ecclesiastically mandated penalties for disobedience imposed by their beliefs and rules of behavior. Volk cites two examples of such theocrats – namely, John Winthrop, the first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony (from which Williams was expelled) – and noted Puritan clergyman John Cotton (Volk 2015: 150–9).

References Aristotle. 1941. The Basic Works of Aristotle, ed. Richard McKeon. New York, NY: Random House. Berlin, Isaiah. 2002. Liberty. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

56  A range of choices Borg, Marcus. 2016. Convictions: How I Learned What Matters Most. New York, NY: HarperCollins. Cobb, John B., Jr. 1982. Beyond Dialogue: Toward a Mutual Transformation of Christianity and Buddhism. Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press. Crosby, Donald A. 2002. A Religion of Nature. Albany, NY: State University Press of New York. Deutsch, Eliot. 1973. Advaita Vedanta: A Philosophical Reconstruction. Honolulu, HI: University Press of Hawaii. Guthrie, Steward Elliot. 1993. Faces in the Clouds: A New Theory of Religion. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Lamprecht, Sterling. 1944. “Naturalism and Religion,” in Naturalism and the Human Spirit, ed. Yervant H. Krikorian. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Lucretius. (Titus Lucretius Carus).1921. Lucretius on the Nature of Things, trans. Cyril Baily. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. McKim, Robert. 2001. Religious Ambiguity and Religious Diversity. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. ———. 2012. On Religious Diversity. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Riepe, Dale. 1961. The Naturalistic Tradition in Indian Thought. Westport, CN: Greenwood Press. Spinoza, Benedict de. 1951. The Works of Spinoza, trans. R. H. M. Elwes, 2 vols. New York, NY: Dover Volf, Miroslav. 2015. Flourishing: Why We Need Religion in a Globalized World. New Haven, CN: Yale University Press. Whitehead, Alfred North. 1978. Process and Reality: Corrected Edition, ed. David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne. New York, NY: Free Press.

4 Ways of being religious

Ways of being religiousWays of being religious

Philosophy and religion are intimately related [in Indian thought] because philosophy itself is regarded as a spiritual adventure, and also because the motivation both in philosophy and in religion concerns the spiritual way of life in the here-and-now and the eventual spiritual salvation of man in relation to the universe. – Radhakrishnan and Moore (1957: xxiii)

There has been a growing tendency in the West, especially since the dawn of the modern era, to draw a rather sharp line of separation between philosophy and religion. Contemporary Westerners are inclined to play down the usefulness of philosophical attitudes and queries in religion, on the one hand, and the need for addressing religious questions and concerns in philosophy, on the other. They are likely to view religion as a more settled way of life that is relatively uninterested in, if not finally opposed to, deeply questioning critical thought and to regard philosophy as a program of endless puzzling, analyzing, and reasoning that is at heart dismissive of religious issues and not particularly concerned with finding sources of the courage and wisdom required for facing up to the challenges of life. Religion and philosophy, and with them life and thought, are in this way often set in opposition to one another. Too much philosophy is bad for religion, or so the assumption goes, and too much religion is bad for philosophy. An entirely negative form of this supposed opposition is when religious people are viewed as hopelessly beguiled by credulous, outmoded beliefs despite their professed concern with the exigencies and demands of the contemporary world, and philosophers are seen as caught up in clouds of arcane, dreamy speculation that have little to do with anything down to earth or applicable to daily life. Traditional Indian thought takes strong issue with this way of looking at religion and philosophy, and at their relation to one another, as Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan and Charles A. Moore point out in the epigraph to this chapter. For it, religion and philosophy are intimately related to one another. Religion at its best requires deeply probing philosophical investigation, and

58  Ways of being religious philosophy must concern itself with the religious questions and concerns, both theoretical and practical, that have captured the attention of humankind from its earliest time. A religious outlook with no interest in philosophy – or, at worst, one that is threatened by philosophy’s questions rather than facing up to and welcoming them – is not worth its salt. The same is true of philosophy when it dismisses religious issues as having for it no relevance or importance. The two editors’ point is not that religion has to be philosophical at every turn, or that philosophy must confine itself to religious issues. Their point is rather that the two types of concern intersect at many important junctures, and that this intersection should be readily acknowledged because neither religion nor philosophy can be adequate for its task when the two are cut off from one another. These observations bring us to the central theme of this chapter. I want to focus here on ways of being religious and to emphasize the intersections of thought and practice in each of these ways. My guide will be the four yogas or ways of being “yoked” to the religious life, according to traditional Hinduism. It is interesting that the Latin word religare, which lies behind the English word religious, means “to bind back or fast.” This meaning is closely akin to the Sanskrit yoga or “yoke.”1 Religious commitment can be viewed as a binding or yoking of one’s life to a religious ultimate. The four ways of being religiously bound or yoked in Indian thought are the way of knowledge (jnana yoga), the way of devotion (bhakti yoga), the way of work (karma yoga), and the way of mystical experience (raja yoga). Indian thought is keenly aware that different persons have different needs, capacities, situations, interests, and the like, and the four yogas provide alternative paths for putting these differences into practice in the religious life. The four all serve the same basic purpose of guiding, developing, and expressing lives of faithfulness to a religious ultimate, but they allow for different ways of doing so – ways that acknowledge the significant differences among types of religious seeker. In this chapter, I reflect on each of the four ways in turn. I shall expand our reflections beyond their striking exemplifications in Indian thought while keeping the latter constantly in mind. Each of the four ways gives us an important angle of vision into the relations of philosophical and religious thought. Each of them also poses a significant choice of emphasis and commitment for persons searching for how most effectively to develop and express their religious faith in thought and practice, and to help others to do so as well. Thus each of the ways closely relates religious faith to freedom of choice in both thought and action. We begin our discussion with the way of knowledge.

Way of knowledge This way of being religious or type of emphasis in this regard is basically what we in the West would term religious philosophy or philosophical

Ways of being religious 59 inquiries into religious questions that propose and defend answers to these questions. The investigations, answers, and defenses are neither purely philosophical nor purely religious, but a combination of the two approaches. To state the point somewhat differently, philosophical investigation into religious questions is a basic type of religious practice and an indispensable part of religious faith when the character of such faith is clearly and comprehensively understood. The intellect must be yoked to the religious ultimate in authentic choices of stances of faith and in particular acts of faith, along with the equally necessary yokings of the emotions and will. Such choices and acts engage the whole person – not just a part of the person – when they are genuinely religious. In keeping with this observation, the Hindu tradition is replete with highly developed systems of philosophical thought. They do not always agree, but all of them are argued for and presented as ways of coming to understand the nature of the religious ultimate – however that may be conceived – and its intimate bearings on the problems of life. I mentioned one of these systems, Advaita Vedanta, in Chapter 3, and it richly illustrates not only the fundamental role of philosophical speculation (jnana yoga) in Indian religious thought but also the fourth way of mystical experience (raja yoga), to be discussed later. The connection of these two yogas with one another brings our attention to the fact that the four ways of being religious are not rigidly separate from one another but are linked together in various ways. In other words, the religious life involves aspects of all four, but to different extents and in different degrees, depending on the different types of religious seekers and practitioners. Philosophical reflections on religious traditions are explorations and critical assessments of the traditions that draw heavily on their resources in order to develop coherent, challenging, and convincing renderings of the traditions’ central themes and perspectives. These philosophical explorations and formulations are intended to bring into clear awareness the respective traditions’ depths of meaning and the relevance of these depths to the prospects and issues of everyday life. Philosophical reflections can pull together aspects of the traditions that might appear to be in conflict with or unrelated to one another, and they can show how this or that aspect, as well as the tradition as a whole, can be brought to bear on the conditions and times in which philosophers and their audiences are situated. Religious philosophers do not always agree, of course, and the outlooks and systems of thought that each of them develops provide alternative ways of conceiving a tradition as a whole, thus posing options for choice as well as stimulating further thought about how the differences might be reconciled in more inclusive ways of thinking. In sum, philosophical systems are guides for the faithful, ways of helping earnest adherents of a religious system to understand the teachings of that system – especially its more baffling and elusive teachings – in order for them to better appreciate and comprehend its depths, to face up to and deal with its conceptual challenges, and to put its teachings into practice in their lives.

60  Ways of being religious Some persons are best equipped by background, interest, sensitivity, and skill to commit themselves to the way of knowledge, and they play an indispensable role in the articulation, development, and effective communication of the diverse messages of the world’s religions. Philosophically minded persons will endeavor to follow their religious paths in other ways as well, but what I am describing here is really their choice of vocation, their principal way of contributing to and being committed to these interrelated paths. Their religious way of life is jnana yoga, the way of knowledge. Augustine of Hippo (4th to 5th centuries ce) and Paul Tillich (20th century ce), each in his own time, were outstanding expositors of Christianity possessed of outstanding philosophical acumen and ability – as well as acute awareness of the needs of their times. Al-Ghazzali and Maimonides exhibited similar genius in philosophically expounding versions of the Islamic and Jewish traditions, respectively. Shankara is an outstanding example from the Hindu religious tradition. And Thomas Aquinas is a similarly impressive figure from the Christian one. I mentioned these four thinkers in Chapter 1. Nagarjuna (ca. 2nd to 3rd centuries ce) was a prominent Buddhist thinker, and Lao Tzu (4th or 3rd centuries bce?) and others who contributed to the final version of the Tao Te Ching were such thinkers on the Daoist side. Mention should also be made of the genius of Confucius (6th to 5th centuries bce) in this regard. I will look at Nagarjuna’s religious philosophy and its mystical significance later in this chapter. I want to make more specific reference here to the thought of Paul Tillich, a 20th century religious philosopher who brought profoundly imaginative and creative skills to his philosophical exposition of Protestant thought (see especially 1951, 1957, 1963, 1952). Tillich was in close touch with the cultural currents of his time, including those of politics, psychology, and the arts. He was strongly versed in the history of Western philosophy and was especially influenced by the thought of German philosophers Friedrich Schelling of the 19th century and Martin Heidegger of the 20th. Tillich was deeply attuned to the existential angst of his day, with its exposure to two devastating World Wars, the horrors of the Holocaust, and the development, use, and imminent threat of further atomic warfare in the emerging Cold War. Tillich opened up new ways of thinking about traditional Christian conceptions of God, sin, justice, and redemption, as well as the basic goals of life that have deep moorings in older ways of thinking. He laid strong stress on the fundamental importance and special cognitive significance of religious symbols. His seminary and divinity school teaching, and his sermons, articles, and books have helped many thoughtful Christians to find fresh inspiration, relevance, and direction in their ancient religious tradition. His writings do so in a challenging and unabashedly philosophical manner. His concept of God as being-itself rather than as a distinct person has notable affinities with certain Indian philosophical views of the religious ultimate,

Ways of being religious 61 as well as with the mystical current in other religious traditions, including the Christian tradition. One does not find in Tillich’s work any note of hostility or alienation between religion and philosophy, but rather continuing emphasis on their intimate and mutually helpful partnership. He is an exemplary proponent of the way of knowledge and its indispensable contributions to the religious life. He provides evocative options for choice in the realm of religious thought that were not obvious before. And he has stimulated my own thought as a religious philosopher in a number of ways.

Way of devotion The way of devotion can also be termed the way of worship because it involves devotion to and worship of a personal deity or deities. The warrior Arjuna’s instruction in the worship of Vishnu and his avatar Krishna, as recounted in spectacular fashion by the Hindu epic Bhagavad Gita, is an impressive foregrounding of the way of devotion. Jewish worship of Yahweh, Christian worship of God as made known in Christ, and Muslim worship of Allah are others. In all such cases, both monotheistic and polytheistic, the deity or deities are believed to be distinct from the world and from human selves. They are conceived in a dualistic, rather than monistic, fashion. The religious goal is not absorption of persons or the world into the divine but proper relationship with the divine as a separate being or beings. Any suggestion of present or final unity with the divine is seen as idolatrous or hubristic. The line between humans and the world, on the one side, and the deity or deities, on the other, must not be and cannot be crossed. Humans are to be humble and obedient servants of the divine, doing its bidding in every possible way. This is the essence of the way of devotion. The beginning of the Protestant document entitled The Westminster Shorter Catechism (1647) states the idea succinctly and emphatically: “Man’s chief end is to glorify God and enjoy him forever.” And of course, the idea applies to women as well. The spirit of devotion to God is also beautifully expressed in the Hebrew Book of Psalms, as translated by English scholars in the same century when The Westminster Shorter Catechism was penned: Shew me thy ways, O Lord; teach me thy paths. Lead me in thy truth, and teach me: for thou art the God of my salvation; on thee do I wait all the day. (Psalm 25: 4–5 [King James Bible]) As the Psalm suggests, the way of devotion relies on the deity (or deities in polytheistic religions) for indispensable guidance and strength. The phrase

62  Ways of being religious “all the day” is crucial, because devotion is not regarded as an occasional or a sometime thing. Regularly scheduled ritualistic observances and devotional practices are important aspects of this way, but more basically it requires searchings out of the will and purpose of the deity (or deities) in a constant mood of prayerful praise, thanksgiving, confession, petition, and service. Attentiveness to the presence of God (or gods and goddesses) is meant to underlie every thought, decision, and action of persons committed to the way of devotion. Right personal relationship with a personal deity or deities is the salvific goal both in this life and in the life (or in subsequent reincarnational lives) to come. In a polytheistic culture like that of India, one may be expected in following the way of devotion to dedicate oneself principally to one deity but also to give appropriate and willing acknowledgment to other deities as well, to the extent that the latter are thought to reign over or have particular responsibility for various subsidiary aspects of life or to be various manifestations of a supreme and only God. The monotheisms of the West and elsewhere, and the polytheisms of other regions of the world are predominately committed to the way of devotion – in thought, attitude, and action. One seeks for close relationship with God (or the gods and goddesses), but is not to be conceived as ultimately one with God. The relationship is one of obedient and grateful servant to a demanding but loving master. The Indian thinker Madhva (13th century ce) was founder of the Dvaita or “dualistic” school of Vedanta philosophy. He took issue with Shankara’s monism and did so in part to preserve the primacy of the way of devotion – if not its sole suitability to the end of salvation – as the appropriate response to the lordship of the god Vishnu. His dualistic perspective allows for worship of Vishnu as a personal deity separate from human selves and the world. Madhva put his remarkable philosophical skills to work in showing that Vishnu is not ultimately devoid of qualities but is a distinct, personal being; that the world is real in its own right; and that the goal of faith is intimate relation with the divine, not absorption into it. Among other things, he rejected the notion of the human person (jiva) as Brahman-Atman and declared that the term Atman is properly and solely attributive to Vishnu (Madhva, in Radhakrishnan and Moore 1957: 555–72). Moksha or release from bondage comes as Vishnu’s gift, not by way of mystical union with Nirguna Brahman. Madhva writes, As the Supreme Being of His own accord shows Himself in consideration of the self’s devotion and bestows upon him final beatitude, devotion becomes the foremost of all the means, and consequently it is spoken of as the only means. (1957: 568) Note his strong emphasis on devotion as the route to salvation.

Ways of being religious 63 Madhva’s reasoning is sophisticated and impressive in its detailed explication of, critical response to, and final rejection of Advaita Vedanta’s mystical or meditational monism, but he is nevertheless able to retain much of the latter’s wisdom and many of its most insightful features. He brings philosophy to the rescue in preserving the monotheistic and, by extension, polytheistic motifs, commitments, and practices so dear to a large segment of Indian religious culture in his day and up to the present day. In this way, he subtly and masterfully interweaves the way of knowledge and the way of devotion while preserving the primacy of the way of devotion. In this fashion, he does justice to the fact that for large numbers of people throughout the world, the way of devotion is their fundamental way of being religious. We should also note that something much like the devotional attitude – that is, an attitude of humble, receptive, and reverent feeling and awareness – will also characterize adherents of the other three ways when these ways are properly understood and followed.

Way of works The temperament and aptitude of some persons fits them to be religious primarily in the manner of works – that is, of an active involvement in the practical affairs of the world such as political issues and strategies of governance, being responsible and caring persons in fields of business, laboring in farms or factories, ministering to the physical and mental health of others, working with the poor and needy and striving to alleviate conditions by which they are oppressed, administering legal systems and addressing legal issues, teaching and rearing the young, and the like. When one brings a lively spirit of religious commitment and direction to such enterprises, and does so as one’s principle mode of dedication and service to a religious ultimate, one is being religious in the way of works. One’s emphasis lies here, rather than in intellectual analysis of religious conceptions and their relationships, primary focus on devotional practices, or a life of highly disciplined meditation – although not to the point of personally ignoring or neglecting these other ways or dismissing their importance for religious life in general. When renowned Protestant theologian, concert organist, and musicologist Albert Schweitzer decided to study medicine, give up much of his life as teacher and scholar, and leave his European home in his late thirties to become a physician for needy patients in the jungle hospital of Lambaréné in French Equatorial Africa, he put aside his former career with its stress on the way of knowledge. He took up instead as his primary focus the religious way of works. He had already established a sterling reputation as a thoughtful Christian thinker, but he would become much more famous because of his decision to put his faith resolutely into practice as a medical doctor in what was then a remote region on behalf of people neglected and marginalized by most of the world. Schweitzer spent most of the rest of his days

64  Ways of being religious laboring in the heart of Africa, and he died at the age of 90 in the hospital in Lambaréné. In similar fashion, Mohandas Gandhi, who was well versed in legal theory and in the religious teachings of Hinduism, Jainism, and Christianity, as well as being a notable religious writer, committed the bulk of his life to protests, strategies, engagements, and practices designed to lift the burden of British rule from India and to do so by cleverly fashioned means consistent with the non-violent spirit of those three religious traditions, as he interpreted and wrote about them. Gandhi faithfully practiced the way of works despite frequent imprisonments for his activities and beliefs, first on behalf of his fellow Indians in Africa and then in India itself. He worked tirelessly in negotiations with the British and his fellow Indians to achieve India’s freedom. He continuously tried to negotiate peaceful relations and mutual understandings between contending Hindus and Muslims, sometimes with prolonged fasting that brought him close to death. He was bitterly disappointed with the decision to partition India and mourned the atrocities that accompanied the partition. Gandhi was finally the victim of assassination by a fellow Hindu. Both Gandhi and Schweitzer were first-rate religious thinkers who continued to reflect, contribute to religious awareness, and create substantial writings which are influential to this day. The ongoing processes of thought expressed in their writings had important bearings on their active involvements in practical problems and concerns. Furthermore, their writings and works testify to their intense devotion to their respective religious ultimates. But they took up the way of works as their main contribution to the world and their principal form of religious commitment. The Roman Catholic nun Mother Teresa put her faith to work by leaving her earlier assignment as a teacher of well-to-do students in Calcutta, undergoing intensive medical training, organizing a new religious order called the Missionaries of Charity, and working with the new group of nuns in a spirit of selfless love on behalf of sick and impoverished adults and children in the slums of Calcutta. The religious order she founded and that later included brothers as well as sisters provided service to the poor, needy, orphaned, and dying in many parts of the world. Mother Teresa was especially concerned throughout her life to find ways of dealing with debilitating diseases such as leprosy and AIDS. Beatified in 2003 after her death by the Roman Catholic Church and canonized as a saint in 2016, she gave her life to the way of works. But Mother Teresa was also a deeply spiritual person who struggled through much of her life with agonizing doubt and emptiness in her faith. Wrestles with unsettling and fearfully threatening aspects of the ways of knowledge and devotion accompanied her sustained commitment to religious works. These facts about her life are made apparent in a collection of her writings consisting primarily of correspondence between her and her confessors and superiors over 66 years that was published in 2007, edited by Brian

Ways of being religious 65 Kolodiejchuk, and entitled Come Be My Light. Mother Teresa’s spiritual struggles remind us of the similar struggles recounted by the 16th century Spanish Carmelite monk, poet, and mystic who was also canonized as a saint, John of the Cross. We should not make the mistake of thinking that the way of works reduces to ethics. It did not do so in the cases of Schweitzer, Gandhi, or Mother Teresa. Their lives of ethical commitment were profoundly informed by their respective types of religious faith. Schweitzer and Mother Teresa sought to put into practice the love for others they believed to be most compellingly exemplified in Jesus and through his teachings, ministry, and life to shine dazzling light on the unconditional love of God. Their fervent ethical outlook and practice expressed the religious faith that characterized their lives as a whole and that was embodied in the Christian tradition they shared. Similarly, Gandhi’s extraordinary religious faith and commitment was largely couched in the Hindu religious tradition and especially in the teachings of his beloved Bhagavad Gita. The ethics of these three exemplary figures grew out of and gave outward expression to their religious faith. It did not subordinate or substitute for their faith. Huston Smith makes the connection between religion and ethics clear when he remarks, “High religion always includes a summons to the upright life, but its eyes are not fixed primarily on that summons. Faith’s focal attention is on a vision of reality that sets morality in motion, often as a byproduct almost” (Smith 1991: 339–40). The way of works is not simply the way of ethics. Its focus on works of service to others is nourished by the inspirations and resources of staunch religious faith. Professed faith without works is dead, and works outside the context of religious faith are devoid of religious motivation and import. The lives of the three figures highlighted in this section make this necessary linkage abundantly clear.

Way of mystical experience I discussed in Chapter 3, Shankara’s Advaita Vedanta as an example of the fourth basic way of being religious – namely, the way of seeking consummatory mystical experience. This way is uncompromisingly monistic in its metaphysical outlook, regarding its religious ultimate as the sole reality and viewing everything else in seeming experience of the world or beliefs about the world as pervasive misperceptions, including the separate existence and distinct qualities of God, gods, or goddesses and the supposed existence of individual human selves. Nirguna Brahman alone is truly real for Advaita Vedanta, and the religious task is conceived primarily as an intense meditational quest for experience of the unity of the self with Brahman and for ultimate awareness of the indefinable Brahman as the one and only one reality. The other three ways can be important rungs in the ladder leading up to this fourth way, but once this level of experience and awareness is realized, the ladder can be pushed away.

66  Ways of being religious Something very similar to this view of the religious life and its ultimate goal stands out in the religious philosophy of the Buddhist thinker Nagarjuna. His too can be characterized as the way of mystical experience, but with its own distinctive Buddhist outlook and orientation. It is a way that is deeply informed by Nagarjuna’s brilliant if paradoxical philosophical analysis but that ultimately leaves philosophy behind for the sake of pure, unthinking, immediate experience. Devotion to the Buddha’s example and life can be a starting point for the experience Nagarjuna points to and enjoins, but the Buddha himself must be transcended as firsthand experience comes to the fore. Achievement of the goal of enlightenment can free the individual for effective deeds of service, just as the Buddha’s attainment of enlightenment freed and empowered him for a remaining lifetime of service in winning others to the Buddhist path and establishing orders of Buddhist monks and nuns. Thus the ways of knowledge, devotion, and works are subordinated to the way of mystical experience and the religious ultimate it envisions. Nagarjuna’s philosophy, and its insistent plea for eventually giving up all philosophical thought for the sake of direct experience of the religious ultimate of nirvana, is set out in his philosophical work the Madhyamikasastra. In it, he argues that there is no ens or non-ens, no beginning or ending, no difference between identity and non-identity, none between eternity and non-eternity, none between the finite and the infinite, and no way of knowing whether the Buddha exists or does not exist following upon his experience of nirvana. Most strikingly, Nagarjuna contends that there is no ultimate difference between samsara or the cycles of being and becoming, originating and ending, incarnation and reincarnation, on the one hand, and nirvana, on the other. Everything is relative, in his view, and this thoroughgoing relativity is a relativity of irreconcilable opposites. What this way of thinking anticipates and leads to is the bliss of nirvana as the religious ultimate. This bliss, he writes, “consists in the cessation of all thought . . . [and] the quiescence of plurality.” He forthrightly rejects the idea of nirvana as some kind of separate and conceivable reality (Nagarjuna, in Radhakrishnan and Moore 1957: 345; see 340–45). Nagarjuna’s mystical way arrives at a conclusion similar in one way to the realization of Brahman-Atman or the Brahman without qualities in Advaita Vedanta’s highest stage of mystical experience. But it is seemingly (or perhaps only superficially) different from it in another. The difference is Nagarjuna’s conclusion that nirvana is every bit as unreal as real – that it far outstrips this seeming distinction like all others. No language or set of concepts and distinctions can begin to do it justice. So we seem to have a fullness of reality (Nirguna Brahman) on the one hand and an emptying of reality (nirvana), on the other. But neither can be conceived. Radical apophasis characterizes both of these mystical paths, but Nagarjuna’s philosophical strategy for arriving at it is interestingly different from that of Shankara. In either case, however, Brahman and nirvana, like the Dao that cannot be spoken, are beyond the reach of conceptual distinctions and

Ways of being religious 67 descriptions. They can be finally encountered and realized only in indescribable experience – an experience that rejects all distinctions and affirms the collapse of all things, including the human self, into ultimate unity, mystery, and ineffability. Philosophy, devotion, and works as ways of responding to the religious ultimate should not be discounted by those who set out upon the mystical path. These ways of being religious have important roles in the fullness and ongoingness of each person’s religious life. But they must finally be seen through as insufficient in themselves and as providing only halting steps toward the ultimate goal. The religious life of the individual person must not only face up to ultimate mystery. Every aspect of life and of those who live it are ultimately inscrutable and beyond comprehension. The mystical way is perplexingly affirming as well as denying. It constructs a road leading to the destination of enlightenment even as it warns that there is no possible way to imagine or understand the destination or even the natures of the selves who yearn for it. With its every affirmation there is an equally important negation. But neither affirmation nor negation makes any kind of ultimate sense. Both presume what ought not to be presumed. The consummatory experience of blissful enlightenment is everything. All else, in the last analysis, is left out of account and left behind. The way of mystical experience is at root via negativa or a “negative way,” but this fact alone suggests to me the relevance of the other three ways. It does so because in its emphasis on the hiddenness of the religious ultimate it brings to mind the basic hiddenness of all of the ultimates in all of the religions of the world – and thus the last of the essential six rolefunctions of religious ultimates I discussed in Chapter 2. Outright rejection of any of the four ways of being religious would pretend, in my view, to more knowledge of the ultimate’s character or requirements than can in the nature of the case be made available. Not only does each person have the responsibility and right to choose how to conceive and respond to the religious ultimate, no one can help doing so if he or she is sincerely and wholeheartedly religious. Religious faith requires thoughtful, careful, sustained personal choices. Without them, there cannot be genuine acts of faith. I hammer at this theme throughout this book. The diversities of persons, the complexities of the world, the fallibilities of human beings, and the final ineffability or hiddenness of the religious ultimate make room for diverse ways of being religious and of conceiving the demands of religious life. None of the four ways of being religious discussed here should be dismissed, scorned, or minimized. And each of them presupposes and reflects important aspects of the others. No religious life is complete without continuing acknowledgment of the crucial need for the endless search for knowledge and understanding, for heartfelt devotion, for meaningful works of service, and for indescribable but blissful experiences of the ultimate’s saving power. There is an intimate connection between recognizing each of these four ways of being

68  Ways of being religious religious – as these find expression in particular lives – and adopting the pluralistic approach to the diversity of religions I recommended in the previous section of this chapter. We are not all the same, and the religious ultimate, if it is truly that, is surely commodious enough, magnificent enough, and elusive enough to encompass and enthrall us all with the four different but not entirely disconnected ways of interpreting and responding to it I have described in this section. In the next section, I want to reflect in a bit more detail on the relations of the pluralistic attitude, as I have characterized it, to the four ways of being religious as they are brought to expression within and among religious traditions.

Pluralism and the four ways of being religious The different emphases of the four ways already indicate a kind of plurality or diversity residing in the bosom of each great religious tradition, suggesting that there is no single one way of being religious in the tradition and that there should be respect for the sincerity and integrity of those whose ways of being committed to the tradition differ from one’s own. And there should be openness to what can be learned from those whose ways of being religious within a tradition are not the same as one’s own way. A pluralistic attitude and approach to the fact that there are four ways, and not only one, is entirely appropriate and commendable, therefore, within a single religious tradition. For example, the dedicated scholar will express her religious faith within a tradition differently than will the counsel for the defense in a busy downtown courtroom who adheres to the same tradition. There will be overlaps in their two main types of life commitment, of course, but there will be notable differences as well. The first follows primarily the way of knowledge, and the second, the way of works. Moreover, there will be notable differences of outlook and practice even within any one of the four ways of being religious in a single religious tradition, and these too call for an open-minded pluralistic approach that should be critical when appropriate but does not hasten to judge. Two politicians following the way of works may have quite different political outlooks and practices while being members of the same religious community. And there may be room in the same tradition for both theistic and mystical philosophies as species of the way of knowledge – we find this to be the case, for example, in Hinduism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. The kind of plurality and its call for a pluralistic response that I am describing so far is internal to a tradition and to its development over time. Things become much more complex and demanding when we consider variations within the four ways of being religious among the different religions of the world. So there is an intra-religious diversity and an interreligious diversity as well, and both can and should be responded to in a pluralistic spirit. The polytheistic way of devotion in Hinduism is notably different, for example, from the devotional way of the monotheist in Islam,

Ways of being religious 69 and their respective ways of knowledge will consequently be significantly different. While it would not make sense to say that their respective conceptions of the religious ultimate are equally true, given that they differ conceptually from one another in irreconcilable ways, it is in the pluralistic spirit to regard them both as only partially true, even though in varying degrees of cogency and convincingness depending on how they are regarded from different religious perspectives and in how they may be generally assessed. Recognition that all religious claims to truth, however apparent and convincing particular ones of them may seem to be to adherents of different religious faiths, are in the last analysis partial at best – and not absolute – is an essential part of the pluralistic spirit as I interpret it.2 A pluralist can take a similar approach to the diversity of religious practices manifest in the religions of the world. There is much to be learned religiously from monotheists, polytheists, mystics, and religious naturalists, and from their diverse implementations of the four ways of being religious. None of them can rightly claim to have comprehended or encompassed all that is religiously cogent, valuable, or important. A telling example of what can follow from thinking otherwise is the Thirty Years’ War in Europe in the first half of the 17th century. The war resulted in part from political conflicts churned up and brought to the fore by the Protestant Reformation of the 16th century, but it was also generated to a large extent by the religious differences the Reformation made glaringly apparent, including those between the newly emergent Protestant version of Christianity and its older Roman Catholic version, but also among various groups within Protestantism and Catholicism themselves. On many sides of the controversies fomented among these religious outlooks – Lutheran, Calvinist, Anglican, and Armenian for Protestants, for example, and Jesuit and Jansenist for Catholics, for their part – there was adamant insistence on determining once and for all the assumed absolute truths of particular interpretations of the Christian tradition and imposing acceptance of these putatively unquestionable truths on others. Within these religious subgroups, there were bitter quarrels and violent attempts to require unconditional acquiescence to particular religious pronouncements, creeds, practices, and institutions. The threat of eternal damnation was aimed at those who presumed to disagree with a particular group’s interpretations of Christian teachings. States and territories required their citizens to adhere to a particular version of Catholic or Protestant faith or at least to give outward evidence of doing so. I continue to point out and insist in this connection that authentic religious faith cannot be coerced but requires acts of personal choice. But separation of church and state was extremely rare in the politics and society of the Thirty Years’ War. Europe ran red with blood from the appalling battles fought over different religious commitments – battles that made gruesome use of newly developed weapons of war that were much more destructive than the weapons of earlier times. Whole villages were razed, and their peoples treated with

70  Ways of being religious stark brutality. So-called heretics were shamed, imprisoned, tortured, exiled, or burned at the stake. Experience of the ravages of the Thirty Years’ War was a compelling and far-reaching incentive for the rise of secularism in the West and for denouncement of all things religious by growing numbers of bold persons.3 The close tie between religious absolutism and religiously motivated violence should not be downplayed or overlooked. The atrocities that marked the partition of India in the middle of the 20th century into a Muslim Pakistan and a largely Hindu India in the 20th century is another case in point. The unbridled, indiscriminate violence of the ISIS (Islamic State in Iraq and Syria) movement in the 21st century, carried out in the name of absolutist and exclusivist interpretations of Sunni Islam is still another. The difference between absolutism and pluralism as approaches to religious differences is not a merely academic, armchair, or conceptual one. It can become, and often has become, the difference between life and death, peace and warfare. Religion can be unbearably demonic, as much of human history graphically shows. The attitude and outlook of religious pluralism is a desperately needed alternative to the chronic demonic tendency that often hides in the folds of religious absolutism. Absolutism may be a religious choice for some, but its forceful imposition on others takes away their freedom and, with that, their ability to choose their own religious path. As an enemy of the religious choice of those who dissent from it, an imposed absolutism is also the enemy of genuine religious faith. Recognition of this fact exposes the critical side of pluralism, its resolute refusal to embrace without question either an arrogantly condescending religious absolutism or a thoughtlessly bland “anything goes” relativistic attitude toward religious differences.

Conclusion In this chapter, I looked at four ways of being religious: the ways of knowledge, devotion, works, and mystical experience. I discussed and provided examples of each of the ways, as exhibited by adherents of various religions’ traditions. I stressed the ideas that the four ways are not entirely separate manifestations of religious faith but matters of particular emphasis among necessarily interrelated modes of religious life and that there can be considerable variations of expression within each of the ways. I also continued to call attention to the essential truth that expressions of religious faith cannot be demanded or imposed from without – meaning that faith by its very nature requires conscious acts of personal decision. Insistence on this truth is the basic theme of this book as a whole. In the last section of the chapter, I made reference to the close connection between the different ways of being religious and the pluralistic approach to religious differences I defended in Chapter 3. Insistence on only one of

Ways of being religious 71 the religious ways or on only one manner of expressing a particular way to the exclusion of all others would be a violation of the pluralistic spirit, as would the idea that any one religious outlook and way of life contains absolute religious truth and that this truth is the arbiter of clams to truth and falsity in all others. I argued instead that all religious claims can only be partial at best, even though the degrees of truth or falsity may vary from case to case. Thus not all such claims are necessarily equally true (relativism), nor is any one of them completely and unqualifiedly true (absolutism). At least, we fallible humans have no way of knowing them to be such with indubitable certainty. I laid special stress on the demonic tendencies of religious absolutism and illustrated activation of these tendencies with the atrocities of the Thirty Years’ War; the violence that accompanied the partition into Muslim Pakistan and largely Hindu India in the middle of the 20th century, and took some of its motivation from assumed religious absolutism; and the radical intolerance, deliberate cruelty, and rampant destructiveness practiced by the ISIS movement in the present-day Middle East. No country or people are without shame on this score; other illustrations could easily (and sadly) have been cited. The four optional ways are themselves indications of diversity within any given religious tradition, and the different exercises of any one of the ways in a tradition are also telling indications of such diversity. The scope of religious diversity is greatly expanded, moreover, when we look at the four ways and their diverse implementations in all of the religions of the world. Such inescapable and undeniable plurality invites a pluralistic response.4 The ineluctable mystery or hiddenness of the religious ultimate in all of the world’s religions sanctions the pluralistic response as well. Humility and pluralism go necessarily together, and are essential traits of authentic religious faith and responsible religious life.

Notes 1 Huston Smith notes, “The word yoga derives from the same root as does the English word yoke, and yoke carries a double connotation: to unite (yoke together), and to place under disciplined training (to bring under the yoke, or ‘take my yoke upon you’). Both connotations are present in the Sanskrit word” (1991: 27). 2 In Crosby (2018), I defend the thesis that all claims to truth about reality or aspects of reality – not just religious ones – are, at best, partial. I also discuss the status of the meta-claim asserted in this thesis. See especially the final chapter of this book. 3 For a comprehensive treatment of the Thirty Years’ War and its horrendous religious conflicts, see Carlos M. N. Eire’s book Reformations: The Early Modern World 1450–1650. 4 The useful distinction between plurality as a descriptive mode and pluralism as a normative mode of thought is drawn by scholar of religion Fenggang Yang (2014: 136).

72  Ways of being religious

References Crosby, Donald A. 2018. Partial Truths and Our Common Future: A Perspectival Theory of Truth and Value. Albany, NY: State University Press of New York. Eire, Carlos M. N. 2016. Reformations: The Early Modern World 1450–1650. New Haven, CN: Yale University Press. Radhakrishnan, Sarvepalli and Charles A. Moore. 1957. A Sourcebook in Indian Philosophy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Smith, Huston. 1991. The World’s Religions. New York, NY: HarperCollins. Teresa, Mother. 2007. Come Be My Light: The Private Writings of the Saint of Calcutta, ed. Brian Kolodiejchuk. New York: Doubleday. Tillich, Paul.1951, 1957, 1963. Systematic Theology, 3 vols. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. ———. 1952. The Courage to Be. New Haven, CN: Yale University Press. Yang, Fenggang. 2014. “Agency-Driven Secularization and Chinese Experiments in Multiple Modernities,” in The Many Altars of Modernity: Toward a Paradigm for Religion in a Pluralist Age, ed. Peter L. Berger. Berlin, DE and Boston, MA: Walter de Gruyter: 123–39.

5 Why religious faith is important Why religious faith is importantWhy religious faith is important

[W]e can’t compare faith flatly to reason and declare it intellectually inferior. Its territory is the drama of human life, where art is more precise than science, where ideas are lived and breathed. Our minds can be engaged in this realm as seriously as in the construction of argument or logic, but in a different way. We apprehend religious mystery and truth in words and as often, perhaps, beyond them: in the presence of beauty, in acts of kindness, in silence. – Krista Tippett (2007: 44–5)

Journalist and host of the weekly Public Radio program Speaking of Faith Krista Tippett speaks of religious faith as being concerned with “the drama of human life” and thus, at least implicitly, of what I termed earlier in this book existential truth. This kind of truth can also be called lived truth or truth as a whole way of life. It includes processes of reasoning and affirmations of belief about oneself and the world because these are essential parts of life, but it includes much more. Because religious faith includes so much more, it must also rely for its adequate development and expression on stratagems of poetry, symbol, myth, parable, koan, chronicle, and the like. It must do so because prosaic statements, arguments, and explanations – no matter how thoughtful, articulate, and well-reasoned – cannot do justice by themselves to the full range of religious aspiration and experience. Music, dance, painting, architecture, and other non-linguistic arts – as well as ritualistic blends of language and performance – also have their essential roles to play in expressing and inspiring religious faith. And as Tippett points out, appropriate choices, actions, and commitments are central to faith’s full development and expression. The range of religion extends over the whole of life. It is not just about what is thought or believed, but about what is deeply felt, passionately pursued, and actively lived. It is about choosing to align one’s life with ultimate ideals and being deeply concerned with adherence to those ideals. It is about being true to one’s religious professions and commitments. It is a stance of ceaseless gratitude for the gifts of life and of relying on or focusing on a religious ultimate as the source of transformative, life-saving power. More than

74  Why religious faith is important that, the religious form of existential truth points finally beyond all available means of articulation and expression – conceptual, emotional, volitional, behavioral, and practical – to the primal mysteries of life that forever challenge and lure but at last defy complete understanding or expression. The final response to these haunting mysteries, as Tippett indicates, must be reverently focused meditative silence – a centering on what Wallace Stevens calls in his evocative short poem “Mere Being” “the palm at the end of the mind” (1971: 398). The mysteries remain while the experiences that arouse them continue to give to people of religious faith steady guidance for everyday life and needed courage for times of desperate anxiety, unnerving perplexity, and tortuous need. Acknowledging unsearchable, unresolvable mystery as a pervasive feature of life is perhaps one of the things that distinguish, at least in-depth and degree, a religious from a secular form of faith. Genuine religious faith is suffused with an abiding sense of mystery and wonder that is humbly recognized, regularly attended to, and fervently celebrated in its existential, not just its conceptual, character. For the religious person, “the palm at the end of the mind” is none other than the religious ultimate, with something closely akin to the six rolefunctions I associated with it in Chapter 2. While the confidence of secular persons tends primarily to be placed in their personal resources and in those of manageable or potentially manageable aspects of the everyday world, the confidence of the religious person hovers warily above an abyss of mystery and is dependent on resources hidden within yet still somehow shining out from that abyss. Religious faith is a never-ending pas de deux of the concealed and the revealed, of receiving and striving, of joy for what is given and openness to what is yet to be received. It is unstinting search for and receptiveness to what can be experienced and made known from the depths of reality as these depths continue to relate to the trials and enigmas – but also to the gifts and opportunities – of life in the world. I want to devote the rest of this chapter to a discussion that will explore the importance of religious faith for human life and human society, as well as for the society of all of the creatures of earth. This importance has a positive but also a negative side, and these two sides pertain to religious faith in its personal and communal roles. So I will discuss positive sides of the personal and communal roles of such faith for humans and then proceed to address negative sides of these two roles. Finally, I will stress crucial positive and negative bearings of religious faith on the multitude of nonhuman creatures of the earth and their environments. I begin with the first of these six topics.

Positive side of personal religious faith Religious value is a species of value, along with epistemic, ethical, and aesthetic value. It incorporates each of these other three types of value, but it does so in its own manner. It does not usurp their roles but acknowledges

Why religious faith is important 75 and draws upon them in appropriate ways within its own context and with its distinctive type of valuative concern. What is this type of concern? We can approach it from at least five different directions. First, religion provides a captivating vision of what it would mean to be a fulfilled and flourishing person in every aspect of a person’s life. This vision sets forth goals and ideals that reach beyond the ordinary preoccupations of life in one sense, but that suffuse them with transcendent orientation and import in another. The religious vision is one of fulfillment and flourishing, wholeness and goodness within each person and in that person’s relations with others. At its best, religion enriches and ennobles human life in its unconditional concern for the overall value of each person’s life and in its constant inducements toward realization of the highest attainable values in every situation of life. The history of religions provides paradigmatic examples of what authentic and fully committed religious lives look like. These inspiring, uplifting examples are personifications of each religious tradition’s central goals and ideals. In setting forth what we may call ultimate ideals for human life, religion also brings forceful attention to the extent to which humans fall short of these ideals. Here we call attention to the second aspect of distinctively religious concern. All religions speak of something that is fundamentally amiss, defective, out of alignment, and in desperate need of radical remedy in human life. And this something, whether it is called sin, hubris, ignorance, suffering, faithlessness, indifference, aimlessness, despair, or something else is the central predicament to which religious teachings respond. The predicament is not just that of particular moral or other kinds of failing, important as these undoubtedly are. It is more fundamentally a defective state of being. In presenting its basic goals and ideals, religion thereby defines the grave extent to which all human beings fail to live up to these goals and ideals and to incorporate them into their lives. The ideals expose a yawning gap between what is and what religiously ought to be in each person’s life. In the perspective of religious faith, persons are rarely if ever all that they have the potential to become in the way of religiously defined ideals, meaning that the religious life is an endless process of striving for and groping toward these ideals. The ideals, when taken seriously, are extremely demanding – so much so that without the aid and resources provided by religions along with their strict demands, serious-minded religious persons would be susceptible to hopelessness and futility. This observation brings us to the third aspect of basic religious concern. And that is religion’s promise of empowerment for the struggle to realize its demands. This promise can take the form of a path of life with incremental steps, each preparing the way for the next steps to come and each step gradually helping toward further proper response to the demands. It can take the form of removing a veil of ignorance that stands between oneself and apprehending the route to realization of the demands. It can take the form of disclosing and making available the gracious love and saving power

76  Why religious faith is important of a deity or deities. It can avail persons of the saving resources of a redemptive community of some sort, and so on. In a word, religions point the way to salvation or liberation – a transformative power that enables one to move toward the realization of the ideals enshrined in a religious tradition. A socalled religion without the promise of such transformative power – whatever form it may take – would not be deserving of the name. To summarize the first three aspects of religious concern, then, religion provides a depiction of the ideal human life, calls forceful attention to the glaring extent to which humans fall short of this ideal, and gives promise of the necessary means for setting out on the path of striving toward and realizing – or at least further approximating – the ideal. And I should emphasize again that the religious ideal is transformation of the whole of a human life, not just some particular aspect of it. It is a transformation over time not only of deeds but also of character – of the entire focus and direction of a person’s life. Moral character is included in this transformation, but there is also transformation of every other part of a person’s being. The transformative process of religion is focused on the goal of becoming a new being. Here the role-function of rightness is paramount. The fourth aspect of religious concern is cultivation of acute sensitivity to the presence of the religious ultimate in all things – for example, becoming aware of manifestations of the mysterious power of being in all particular beings; awakening to the momentous in the mundane; being keenly alert to the Buddha nature in every sentient being; finding copious evidences of the sustaining power of the divine spirit in the depths of the human spirit; assenting to the binding and saving Mandate of Heaven as it relates to personal modes of attitude, performance, and behavior; or reverencing in all things the ebb and flow of the Dao. To be genuinely religious is to be filled with an ever-deepening sense of wonder and amazement in the details of everyday life and to experience these details as pointing beyond themselves to the ultimate – just as telescopes point to the stars. But the religious sensitivity I am trying to describe does not just point beyond but also deeply within one’s personal being and beneath or behind the seeming ordinariness of the world. Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh expresses this idea beautifully: Our true home is in the present moment. To live in the present moment is a miracle. The miracle is not to walk on water. The miracle is to walk on the green Earth in the present moment, to appreciate the peace and beauty that are available right now. Peace is all around us – in the world and in nature – and within us, in our bodies and our spirits. Once we learn to touch this peace, we will be healed and transformed. (2016: 131) This religious sense is thus as much like a microscope as a telescope. It discloses both heights and depths of miraculous presence and power, and in so doing imbues life with transcendent and transformative significance.

Why religious faith is important 77 In the fifth place, religion gives humans something to live for that is eminently worth living for. It gives meaning, purpose, and value to countless human lives. And it does so not only in the way of demand but also in the way of gift. The ship of religious faith bears up the soul in both the placid and stormy seas of life. It has an appointed destination and provides a reliable compass for steering steadily toward and coming ever nearer to that destination. It provides necessary fuel for the voyage – the fuel of muchneeded grace and empowerment. Countless human lives would experience perilous shipwreck and excruciating loss without the guidance and support of their religious faith. This fifth aspect of religious faith and the other four aspects I have cited here give ample evidence of the positive importance of religion on its personal side. There is acute, even if not always consciously acknowledged, thirst among millions of the peoples of the world for the refreshing waters of wisdom and strength offered to them by the religions of the world, and for the inspiration and example of religious persons who have drunk deeply from these waters in the course of their lives. The metaphor of thirst characterizing this yearning is I think especially appropriate. The Hebrew psalmist’s vivid depiction of the religious seeker holds true for all who eagerly if not desperately yearn for religious truth and for a saving relation with or realization of the particular type of religious ultimate that is the focus of their yearnings: As a hart longs for flowing streams, So longs my soul for thee, O God, My soul thirsts for God, for the living God. When shall I come and behold the face of God? (Psalm 42: 1–2 [RSV]) A crucial aspect of the positive importance and value of religious faith lies in the anxious aspiration of individual persons toward the lifelong experience of a religious ultimate and for this experience’s all-pervading direction, sustenance, and strength. When this experience becomes the center of such persons’ commitments, it makes a decisive difference in their lives – a difference without which their lives would be deprived of what matters most in the way of purpose and meaning. I do not mean to suggest with any of my observations in this section, however, that secular lives are not worth living. I pass no extended positive or negative judgment on such lives here, but I do want to acknowledge in passing the numerous positive contributions of many secular-minded persons to the flourishing of humanity and the wellbeing of the world. Religious persons hold no monopoly on deeds of helpfulness, mercy, and goodness. Secular persons often lead exemplary lives, assist and advance the

78  Why religious faith is important human condition, and develop ways of respecting and protecting the natural environment. I should also acknowledge the pertinence of justified secular critiques of religious ideas, practices, persons, and institutions. These critiques need to be taken to heart and seriously weighed by religious persons. The discussion in the third and fourth sections that follow of negative tendencies of religious faith and behavior on the personal and communal levels will help bring into focus some of the justified criticisms of religious persons and their ways of thinking and living that can be directed at them by secular persons and by thoughtful religious critics as well. My main intent in the present section has been to register my strongly held personal judgment that individual lives lived in accordance with the basic commitments and ideals of the religions of the world have had in the past, continue to do so in the present, and can have for the future abundant and abiding importance and worth. Let us look next at the positive side of the importance of communal religious outlooks and practices.

Positive side of communal religious faith Religion can be a formidable power for good in the world in its institutional and communal forms. Communities of faith give instruction, guidance, and support to their members, and to those who respond to their invitations to become part of these communities. The development of personal faith is nourished by religious communities of various sorts. These communities also inspire and empower individuals to work in their vocations, with their neighbors, and with the leaders of their civil societies for the ends of social harmony, safety, and just treatment of all citizens of the society. Religious institutions contribute to the development of equitable and fair social policies through their official pronouncements and other kinds of influence. They set up and maintain hospitals and schools, create settlement houses, provide food and shelter for the poor and homeless, establish safe houses for the domestically abused, offer counseling for those undergoing spiritual crises, and arrange help for persons suffering from physical addictions. By articulating and exemplifying basic moral outlooks and principles, religious communities help to give cohesion and common purpose to societies. They played an important and often central role in bringing about such profound social revolutions as the abolition of slavery and the reform of laws supporting racial discrimination and segregation in the United States. Perhaps most importantly, religious institutions uphold a transcendent perspective on the affairs of the world – a perspective appealing to principles of justice, mercy, and forgiveness that they believe to be binding on peoples everywhere and not simply derived from or restricted to the positive laws or practices of a particular social or political order. Religious institutions can call tyrants to account, as the Confessional Church did in the Nazi Third Reich. And they can be sources of motivation and hope for those pining

Why religious faith is important 79 for and working on behalf of morally based and desperately needed social change. Religious institutions gave support to the work of a Schweitzer, Gandhi, and Mother Teresa. They played an important role in bringing about reconciliation of opposing sides and in helping toward the ending of Apartheid in South Africa. We should also not forget that it was Christian institutions in the West that kept safe and available for continuing instruction and reflection treasures of culture stemming from ancient times, and that it was Islamic institutions that did so as well. Moreover, the painting, statuary, music, dance, poetry, architecture, literature, philosophy, political theory, and the like throughout the world and its history owe an incalculable debt to the inspiration and support of religious institutions. Without their support, we would have had no Bhagavad Gita, no Tao Te Ching, no Confucian Analects, no Pali Canon, no Qur’an, no Torah, and no Gospels available to us today. A large part of the world’s cultural wealth has been bequeathed to it by religious institutions of various kinds, and the inspiration of this cultural wealth on every aspect of human social life is beyond measure.

Negative side of personal religious faith Religious faith does not always have salutary effects on the lives of individual persons. Its effects can sometimes be regrettably and even deplorably negative. In this section, I want to cite some examples of this egregious tendency and fact. The term importance as I am using it in this chapter does not just have the implication of positive value. It can also have a negative import, indicating that we should not overlook the potential evil effects of purported or professed religious faith in personal thought and practice. These negative significances and effects figure prominently and sadly in some personal lives, and in the lives of those influenced and impacted by them. One way in which this statement holds true is in absolutistic interpretations of religious traditions and their teachings. Absolutism, whether on both or only on one side of relations between or among religious persons with different outlooks and commitments, is a barrier to those relations going any further than statements of irreconcilable disagreement. It separates persons of different religious persuasions from one another rather than bringing them together. It claims to have privileged access to a religious ultimate and its meanings for human life, and in this way makes little or no acknowledgment for the mystery or hiddenness of religious ultimates that is insisted on throughout the history of world religions – including in all likelihood the absolutist claimant’s own religious tradition. For such a claimant, it is all conviction and no openness to the different, deeply held fundamental religious convictions of others. As such, religious absolutism incites irreconcilable conflicts and disagreements – and sometimes violent confrontations – rather than paving the way to a process of two-sided learning and mutual understanding. It fuels

80  Why religious faith is important xenophobia rather than challenging and providing a needed alternative to it. It inhibits the search for common ground. This is an extremely dangerous negative influence, especially in our increasingly global world. It forgets that a truly adequate and transformative religious ultimate is by its very nature universal and thus is presumably ultimate for all peoples, not just for one select group. This means that it is implausible, arrogant, and impious for members of one group to claim the totality of religious understanding for their group alone, and to place other traditions and their peoples entirely outside the pale of acceptable religious commitment, belief, and practice. Unfortunately, such arrogance has not been in short supply among religious persons or in the histories of religious traditions. For example, people in the 16th and 17th centuries in the West who were charged with heresy by Protestants or Catholics were sometimes also accused of being witches or warlocks. They were tortured and executed in large numbers, and books were written exposing their alleged practices and how the practitioners could be detected. Hateful, divisive, and destructive arrogance stemming from religious absolutism continues to be a blot on religion and on the relations of religious persons with one another to this day. A second negative tendency and sometime feature of religion is setting faith in opposition to reason and regarding rational reflection, questioning, and analysis as the enemy of faith. This attitude is often accompanied, especially in religions such as Christianity and Islam that have given great emphasis to the importance of specific doctrines and beliefs, by an insistence on the infallibility of the scriptural texts of a religious tradition and insistence on literalistic interpretations of those texts. The literalistic interpretations, or so it is held, must be adhered to no matter how irrational or unconvincing they may sometimes seem. This view of religious faith leaves out of account the role of the rational mind in the life of the whole person. It places predominant emphasis on the will, as if genuine faith could result from simply willing to believe something without being persuaded to do so by its plausibility or reasonableness – a plausibility or reasonableness that is unafraid of, and in fact welcomes, ongoing questioning, investigation, and thought as routes to deeper conviction and understanding. Absent such openness to reason, a religious life can soon become a life of pretense and hypocrisy, of professing to believe things that one does not truly believe. It can be a life frozen in place rather than continuing to grow and develop over the course of time, as other aspects of one’s life must do. Instead of leading the way, faith is left behind. What English philosopher Victoria Welby writes about orthodoxy applies to a wooden, unbending, literalistic fixation on the wisdom of olden times, with no sense of the need for ongoing reinterpretations and reappropriations of that wisdom through the changing contexts of time: Now orthodoxy is of course a good thing in so far as it preserves tradition and order, and makes for reverence, dignity, and truth. But

Why religious faith is important 81 when . . . it is supposed to provide us with canons and limitations of permanent value – when throughout the prevalent system of training, no hint is given that language is a vital instrument in the same sense that the hand is, but in immeasurably higher degree – it must inevitably bring about the results upon thought which we see: the cutting off or nipping or starving of the buds of original power. (1903: 55) I am claiming in this book that genuine faith requires freedom of commitment and assent, and that these choices can be, as Welby claims, “buds of original power” that draw upon established and rightly respected traditions in imaginative and freshly relevant ways. I do not endorse the view that faith requires or could require decisions to believe and live by supposed commitments and assents that involve dogged, grit-your-teeth exertions of the will, insist on unquestioning assent to authority, and reject the relevance to faith of any and all rational or experiential issues and objections that might arise. Reason, will, and emotion work together in genuine faith. They are not opposed to one another. Choices of particular stances of faith and those within particular stances of faith are, I continue to insist, acts of the whole person. They are acts that take fully into account the circumstances and concerns of contemporary life, not just the situations and outlooks of ancient times. Religious faith requires us to build interpretive bridges between those earlier times and our own. The opposition of faith to reason also promotes dismissal of any need to look into the faith stances of others with an open mind – whether within a given tradition or among different traditions. The consequence of such opposition is deliberate ignorance and thoughtless rejection of other faith stances – a stereotyping of them instead of any attempt to understand them. The opposition bolsters a tendency to highlight and attend to all of the best aspects of one’s own faith stance and to point only to the assumedly worst aspects of other ones. This tendency is reinforced by unwillingness even to consider challenges to and possible enhancements of one’s faith that might result from rational, open-minded investigation of the full range of other religious points of view. A third negative danger to which personal faith is exposed is the tendency to regard the world as nothing but a vale of tears and a deplorable state of affairs from which one yearns as soon as possible to be released. Faith then becomes rejection of the world instead of a way to live fully and confidently within the world, and to continue to work with hope for its betterment. With this attitude toward the world, one no longer seeks to become ever more sensitive to the wonders of the world and to find within these wonders evidences of the pervasive presence, power, and goodness of the religious ultimate. I stressed the religious importance of such sensitivity earlier in this chapter. One forgets, for example, God’s pronouncement in the Book of Genesis that God’s creation is good and that it remains good even after the fall into

82  Why religious faith is important sin of Adam and Eve, and despite all of the perils of change and destruction that inevitably mark it as a creative, dynamic world whose processes are framed by natural laws. Or one thinks wrongly of nirvana as a goal of leaving life behind rather than living fully and engagingly – but without illusions and harmful attachments – in the midst of life. Religion as world-denial is what Friedrich Nietzsche in The Will to Power called “passive nihilism” (Nietzsche 1968: 17–18, 38), and he rejected it and all forms of religion, including Christianity and Buddhism, on this score.1 There is a point to his criticism, but I do not think that it applies to all forms of religious faith. Theologian Miroslav Volf, in discussing Nietzsche’s view of Christianity, argues that Christian faith, rightly understood, affirms the pleasures of the world when these pleasures are accompanied and informed by profound religious meanings that are the gifts of faith in God. He states succinctly that pleasure plus meaning equals joy and that it is a joy of life within this world, not just in a life to come after it (Volf 2015: 201, 206). I agree with Volf that healthy religion is affirmation of all that is good in the world and of earnestly working for all that can be made better. It is also affirmation of the numerous aspects of the world’s goodness that do not focus exclusively on oneself or even on humanity as a whole and that have to do with the full range of the religious ultimate’s relations to the world. I’ll say more about this matter in the fifth section of this chapter. Fourthly, and finally, I think that we should deplore the degeneration of religious faith into the kind of sentimentalism, magic, and inordinate selfcenteredness where the focus is not so much on the religious ultimate and its meanings and demands for life as on the individual’s desire for status, success, and prosperity. Religion then becomes a means to the end of personal satisfaction and contentment, an attempted manipulation of the religious ultimate to ensure one’s personal happiness and wellbeing. In this religious mode, one thinks that the religious ultimate will confer or produce gifts of prosperity, safety, status, power, and general wellbeing on a person only if that person continues to implore the ultimate to do so or to fulfill stated conditions for its doing so. Accordingly, those who do not implore or properly relate to the ultimate can be expected not to be treated with or to experience the same kind of respect, consideration, and reward from it as those who do. Such entreaties or relations can even be believed to have magical effects of altering the laws of nature and producing miraculous occurrences for the benefit of the faithful. One hears stories of an airplane crash where a person of faith is miraculously saved from death, while others who lack that faith are allowed to perish. I once had a student who told me that if I had a sufficient amount of the right kind of religious faith, I would never suffer from a cold. It becomes easy with such views to overlook the fact that persons of strong religious faith sometimes suffer grievously – persons such as the anguished Job of the Hebrew Bible or Mother Teresa in her anxious and sometimes almost despairing lifelong search for a close relationship with God. Lifelong

Why religious faith is important 83 religious virtue and easy living cannot be so easily conflated. The rains of suffering and disaster can fall on both the just and the unjust, and regardless of the extent of faith or faithlessness of either group. And, most importantly, the proper focus of religious faith is on the religious ultimate. It is not primarily on oneself. There is a thin line between the kind of religious outlook I am presently describing and manipulative magic and superstition. The line is equally thin between its promise of prosperity and success, on the one hand, and the temptation to outright self-centeredness, on the other. The religious ultimate has become the means to an end instead of the focus and end of life in its own right. An adequate religious ultimate has both primacy and rightness for the whole world, not just for a select few. It is universal in its scope and effects, not restricted and provincial. It enables us to cope with tragedy, suffering, and death, but not to think that they can be removed from the world or from the human condition. Genuine religious faith motivates us to care for the justice and prosperity of all, not just for those of one’s own religious persuasion, and especially not principally for one’s own personal prospects and interests. It takes us outside of ourselves rather than confining our attention to ourselves. Unfortunately, religious outlooks are sometimes “sold” almost exclusively on the basis of their claimed guarantees of individual prosperity and happiness. Such religion is closely akin to the tonics and elixirs ballyhooed by charlatans of older times. It overplays the benefits of religious faith and downplays its stringent demands. These demands relate not only to a person’s own life and close associates but also to all those who are affected by a person’s choices and actions – or by his or her failures to choose and act for the good of others when such choices and actions are called for. Superficial, prosperity-based, exclusively self-focused religion also pays little heed to life’s elusive perplexities and daunting mysteries. It shuts its heart against the tragedies and sufferings of the world. It skates on the surface of life without the felt need to plumb its depths. These attitudes and responses in the name of religion are not only serious but also fatal deficiencies. They are unmistakable signs of the absence of genuine religious faith.

Negative side of communal religious faith Missionary religions such as Christianity and Islam have often claimed the right to impose – violently if necessary – their religious faith and its cultural embodiments on so-called heathen or infidel peoples who espouse other forms of faith. And groups within a given religious tradition have gone to war over their respective religious differences. Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, and Protestant Christians have fought bitter wars with one another, as have Sunni and Shiite Muslims. Muslims and Hindus killed each other rampantly and cruelly during the Indian Partition, and Sinhalese Buddhists warred with Tamil Hindus in Sri Lanka. While it is true that political

84  Why religious faith is important and other factors have figured in such conflicts, as well as the religious one, needless tensions and contentions between different religious faiths have often had a prominent role in motivating and sanctioning the conflicts. This proneness to conflict and war between different religious groups is the first negative tendency of communal religions to which I want to call attention in this section. It is often given demonic aid and support by the absolutistic approach to religious differences I criticized and discussed earlier in this chapter, and in Chapters 3 and 4. A second major deficiency of communal religion is what might be called an enclave tendency – namely, the tendency to set itself radically apart from the culture of its time rather than seeking for ways to interact sympathetically and creatively with it. This is not to say that religious institutions have no critical or prophetic role to play in their relations with the cultures of their times. They should certainly decry cruelty and injustice, and work actively through cultural agencies as well as their own facilities for addressing the needs of the downtrodden, marginalized, needy, and poor. And they should have a role in influencing government policies and enactments of laws when doing so. But it is important that they keep abreast of cultural developments and make use of these whenever appropriate and available to help toward the integration of peoples with the cultural currents of their times, and not try to create an impassable gulf between culture and religious faith. Instead of trying to escape from culture, they should actively engage it and make constructive use of it. A prominent example of the tendency of religions to set themselves apart from culture is the relation of religion and science in the present-day world. If scientific theories are rejected on the grounds of their alleged conflicts with alleged religious beliefs – as when, for example, the scientifically argued position of the earth in the solar system and the universe as a whole, the age of the earth, or the evolution of biological species including human beings are denied on the basis of literalistic interpretations of scripture or longstanding traditional beliefs – then religion loses its credibility and applicability to its times. Religious faith is not equipped to determine the truth or falsity of strictly scientific theories, and it overextends its scope and authority when it claims to be able to do so. Galileo famously remarked in his Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina that the role of religion is to “teach us how one goes to Heaven, not how heaven goes” (quoted in Nelson 1975: 371, n11; see also 364). Religious institutions should rightly protest against tendencies to reduce all that is of importance and value to the domain of science, and this is an important role for them. But they should equally resist attempts to claim something similar with the domain of religion. Religion needs other aspects of culture, just as those other aspects need religion in the wholeness of life. Moreover, a religion that lends no keen ear to significant cultural currents of its time, including those that reveal the groping anguish, fearsome

Why religious faith is important 85 uncertainties, desperate cries for meaning, and flagrant evils in cultural expressions of the time – especially, although not exclusively, in the probings and searchings of its major art forms – shows itself incapable of dealing with the human condition as that condition continues to manifest itself in diverse cultural ways. Such enclave faith fails dismally to make wise and knowledgeable use of the emerging resources of culture in the formulation and proclamation of its message for humankind and the world. The title of Bob Dylan’s 1964 song and album “The Times, They Are a-Changin’ ” is always a fitting motto, and viable religious communities must change in appropriate ways with them. They must continue to explore routes by which their fundamental commitments can speak effectively to pressing problems of the contemporary world. What I am talking about means staying in close touch with the prevalent culture so as to assess and employ those areas sensitively where the combined resources of religion and culture can be brought most meaningfully into play. A religious community that sets itself defiantly and unsympathetically against salient aspects of contemporary culture exposes a grave deficiency of thought and action, and thereby dooms itself to irrelevance. It becomes a sideshow far removed from the main events of culture and their bearings on life. A third form of negative or inappropriate response to culture that religions are in danger of succumbing to – and have repeatedly in history succumbed to – is tacit or explicit support of, or failure to stand against, social injustice and corrupt political regimes. Paul L. Lehmann, a brilliant teacher of Christian ethics, used to announce to his seminary students that “God is a politician.” When the students recovered from their shock and asked what he could possibly mean by this statement, Lehmann replied, “I say this because God is concerned with the whole of life!” A central part of this whole is the political structures and practices of a given time, and the powers they wield for good or ill. He spoke as a committed Christian, but his statement applies, in my judgment, to all types of relevant and meaningful religious ultimates. Lehmann was a friend of famed theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and when the latter decided to return reluctantly but responsibly from Union Seminary in New York to his home in Germany in the 1930s, he soon put resolutely into practice this vision of God’s intimate relations to political affairs as an essential part of the wholeness of life by working and writing as part of the Confessing Church against the atrocities of the Nazi political system, aiding an aborted attempt to assassinate the genocidal tyrant Adolf Hitler, and being imprisoned and executed for his political actions by Nazi authorities near the end of the Second World War. Lehmann, for his part, was throughout his life devoted to putting Christian ethics into practice by active participation in civic causes and by pertinent theological teaching and writing on political issues. He stood against aspects of his culture that he

86  Why religious faith is important judged to be in need of protest and remediation, but he stood as an actively engaged part of culture rather than by placing himself outside of it. He urged and expected Christian institutions to do so as well. Religious institutions of all sorts should be in the forefront of opposition to corrupt political regimes and unjust political enactments and practices. None of what I am recommending here about the need to avoid enclave religion means simply becoming one with culture, because a significant amount of critical distance from or perspective on cultural developments is also required. The co-optation of religious teachings and traditions – to say nothing of religious organizations – by particular cultures and institutions of culture must be firmly resisted, and there is perennial danger of this occurring. A fourth negative aspect or deficiency of some if not many forms of communal religious faith is patriarchalism. God is traditionally viewed as male in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. The founders of the major world religions were men. Most of those who lead, write about, teach, and give other types of expression to religious traditions through the centuries have been men. Women have more often than not been expected to be subservient to men, and men are believed to be superior to women both in the home and in the affairs of the world. In the Wahhabis version of Sunni Islam in today’s Saudi Arabia, women are discouraged from doing such things as driving cars and are required to cover themselves extensively against the gazes of men. They can travel within or outside the country only when given permission to do so by a male guardian. Women can swim only in private pools restricted to women. Public pools are restricted to men. Separate entrances for men and women are common in schools, universities, and workplaces (Overmars 2017). In other words, women are regularly discriminated against in the name of a rigorous, and I would argue ruthlessly patriarchal, form of Islam. Women gained the right to vote and hold office in municipal elections in Saudi Arabia only in the second decade of the present century, but at least they have finally gained it. And other progress is being made to extend women’s rights in Saudi Arabia today, but it is being granted slowly and continues to be discouraged by religious leaders. Institutionally sanctioned and religiously motivated discriminations against women are carried over into the personal attitudes of Muslim men and into the acquiescing attitudes of Muslim women – not of all, but of far too many. On the other hand, Mohammed himself was married to an older and highly competent business woman, and the Qur’an and the Sharia in Islam allocate different roles to men and women but insist on their equality before Allah and on their essential roles as carrying out the will and purpose of Allah. They are first and foremost human beings and only secondarily men and women. Mohammed had a much more supportive attitude toward women than did most of the Arabian cultures of his day. Still, women are generally considered to be unsuited for roles of institutional religious leadership such as worship and prayer leadership. And Allah continues to be viewed as male.

Why religious faith is important 87 Only recently in Protestantism and not yet in Roman Catholicism are women allowed to be ordained as ministers, priests, or bishops. No consideration is yet given in Catholicism for the possibility of a female pope. There are differences of opinion on such matters, of course, but I see continuing patriarchal treatments and tendencies in religious persons as serious deficiencies in need of urgent remedy. I had a Roman Catholic colleague in the philosophy department of a state university who felt that he needed frequently to remind his students in a class on Western religions that “God does not have a penis!” His statement came to many of them as a disarming shock and a disclosure of previously overlooked assumptions. Nevertheless, the image of God as male, and as father rather than mother, instead of being far beyond such sexual designations, persists. This is one major way in which a kind of belittling and misleading anthropomorphism continues to affect conceptions of God as the religious ultimate.

Positive side of religion for the earth and its nonhuman creatures It is not only humans and their societies that will invariably be profoundly affected for good or ill by religious commitments, policies, beliefs, and practices. It is also the planetary ecosystem and the earthly environments of all creatures. In other words, it is supremely important for religious faith to exert effective positive influences on ecological issues – including those of ecological justice for the human creatures of earth – and to strive constantly to avoid any hint of negative ones. The failure of religious persons and institutions to attend to these issues in appropriate and life-saving ways – and the effects of their active deleterious influences on them – are matters of the utmost significance. Religion can be a powerful force for sanity or a deplorable source of folly when it comes to ecological problems and concerns. In this section, I discuss the vitally important positive resources of different religious traditions in this regard. In the next section, I indicate three perilously negative ways in which religious faith can affect the earthly biosphere and its inorganic contexts that are so critical to the health and wellbeing of us all, human and nonhuman alike. Because the religious ultimate has the role-functions of primacy, pervasiveness, and rightness I described in Chapter 2, its relations to ecological issues should be apparent, given that these roles apply to all the earth and all the creatures of earth. We find in all great religious traditions acknowledgment of this fact in one way or another. For example, the Jewish psalmist proclaims, The earth is the Lord’s, and the fulness thereof, The world and those who dwell therein,

88  Why religious faith is important for he has founded it upon the seas, and established it upon the rivers. (Psalm 24:1–2 [RSV]) The Jesus of the New Testament notes that the care of God is evident in the earth’s provision of dependable food for the sparrow and that the wild and colorful lilies of the field display in their own manner the glory of God (Matthew 6:26, 28–30; 10: 29). His parables of wheat and tares, mustard seed, fig tree, ravens, sowers, and the like frequently draw on images drawn from nature. For the psalmist as for Jesus, it is clear that God rules over the natural order and that God’s sustaining power and loving care pervade the world. The same is true for Islam, as this passage from the Qur’an makes evident: Lo! Your Lord is Allah Who created the heavens and the earth in six Days, then mounted He the Throne. He covereth the night with the day, which is in haste to follow it, and hath made the sun and the moon and the stars subservient by His command. His verily is all creation and commandment. Blessed be Allah, the Lord of the Worlds! (Qur’an VII: 54, in Pickthall 1963: 126) In the three Abrahamic religious traditions, God both transcends nature and is immanent within nature. Nature is sacred because it is created and upheld by God. In Mahayana Buddhism, the Buddha nature is immanent in all sentient creatures, and the compassion of the Bodhisattva extends to them all. This religious tradition also insists that compassion toward such creatures should be a central feature of Buddhist practice. The 13th-century Buddhist Eihei Dogen even states that every existent thing, and not just sentient beings, has the Buddha nature (O’Brian 2017). So the Buddha nature and the natural world, as properly understood, are intimately conjoined. The mysterious presence and power of the Dao, for its part, is manifest in the 10,000 things (that is, all aspects of the world) that emanate from it. And Daoist texts are full of references to ways in which every aspect of nature witnesses to the pervasive presence of the Dao. Here is a typical statement from the Tao Te Ching: There was something formless yet complete, That existed before heaven and earth; Without sound, without substance, Dependent on nothing, unchanging, All-pervading, unfailing. One may think of it as the mother of all things under heaven. Its true name, we do not know; “Way” [Dao] is the by-name that we give it. (Chapter XXV, in Waley 1958: 174)

Why religious faith is important 89 All earthly things and all earthly creatures are sacred, and they are always to be treated as such because they flow from and are permeated by the Dao. The kami, or gods, spirits, forces, or presences of nature that are the focus of religious piety and reverence in Shintoism also pervade the world and are especially to be revered in sacred shrines scattered all over Japan that are kept close to natural settings. Oceans, rivers, waterfalls, storms, mountains, and the like are kami or manifestations of kami, and they comprise together the religious ultimate of Shinto faith. Shinto rituals focus on kami and in this way express profound reverence and respect for nature and an acute sense of responsibility for its preservation and wellbeing. In similar fashion, Hindus see evidences of the gods and goddesses such as Vishnu, Shiva, or Durga in all aspects of nature, and one form of Hinduism reverences the unity of the individual self with all of nature and, finally, with Nirguna Brahman – the Brahman without quality or form that encompasses and constitutes all reality. Everywhere, every time, and everything – misperceptions as they finally are if mistakenly granted autonomy, separateness, or final reality – bear witness to the ultimacy and sole reality of Brahman in Advaita Vedanta. This non-dualistic or monistic outlook does not obviate the sacrality and wonder of the world but infinitely enhances it, because all is Nirguna Brahman – from supposedly individual human selves to every worldly creature and thing. Appropriately caring for oneself, for one’s fellow humans, for other creatures of the world, and for the whole of nature is to be in right relation with Brahman – or, more accurately, to revere the self and the whole of nature as one with Brahman. A similar reverence for nature is in the Bhakti Hindu tradition, which makes little distinction between human and nonhuman forms of the divine (for example, elephants or monkeys) and sees all aspects of nature as suffused with the saving presence and power of the divine. Indigenous religions, for their part, also have important roles to play in calling attention to the need to live closely and caringly with nature. In their book Wisdom of the Elders: Honoring Sacred Native Visions of Nature, David Suzuki and Peter Knudston write, “The Native Mind is imbued with a deep sense of reverence for nature.” They go on to observe that the native outlook sees spirit “as dispersed throughout the cosmos or as embodied in an inclusive, cosmos-sanctifying divine being.” As a consequence, the two authors note, “Native wisdom tends to assign human beings enormous responsibility for sustaining harmonious relations within the whole natural world rather than granting them unbridled license to follow personal or economic whim” (1992: 16). These are stated religious visions and ideals of indigenous traditions, of course, and they may not always be carried mindfully or completely into practice by every member of an indigenous community – any more than this is always the case for members of other religious communities. But the ideals are strikingly pertinent and well worth aspiring toward in our time of ecological crisis. So we should not overlook the tremendous resources religious traditions of many different kinds can provide for helping humans to

90  Why religious faith is important understand their proper place within the whole of nature, for inspiring their reverent and respectful responses to nature, and for guiding them toward ways of working individually and collectively for the wellbeing of nature. Ecological issues are not just scientific, political, economic, ethical, or prudential ones. They have profound religious import as well. And religions have much to offer in addressing them.

Negative side of religion for the earth and its nonhuman creatures However, religions can also have negative effects on the integrity and wellbeing of nature. In this section, I want to discuss these negative impacts in terms of three topics: separation, indifference, and artifacts. With the term separation, I make reference to the idea, sometimes associated with religious traditions, that humans are separate from nature rather than integral parts of it. They are sometimes seen as purely spiritual in their true nature and thus as not really part of nature. Nature is not their true home, or so it is believed. They belong in their essence to another realm, and the sooner they can get to this other realm, the better. Nature is full of tragedy, grief, and suffering, and to be religious is to hope for life in another fundamentally different world. Such religion is world-denying rather than world-affirming. At its worst, it can endorse scorn for the earth rather than reverence for it. Its fervent hope and expectation can be for a quick destruction of this earthly world and replacement of it with a world where all the contingencies, dangers, and uncertainties of life on earth are no more. Ecological problems may be of little concern for such an outlook. It can even regard the earth’s present ecological crises as signs of the workings of divine purpose and as preludes to the new, radically different world to come. As such, they are to be welcomed rather than resisted. A second negative and unhelpful religious outlook on nature, so far as concern for the wellbeing of nature is concerned, is indifference – and especially indifference to alleged dangers to the world’s climate, to its oceans and water courses, to nonhuman species, to their habitats, and to human civilization that are warned of by the natural sciences and with which increasing evidence throughout the world now seems to be confronting us. This indifference is sometimes informed by profound, religiously based distrust of scientists and the whole of secular culture. Since the evidence is only probabilistic at best and based primarily on complicated computer modeling, or so the argument goes, it can be safely ignored. In addition to the kind of indifference to ecological dangers that is guided by distrust of those who warn of these dangers – especially scientists, academics, and liberal politicians – there is an indifference of laziness – of refusal even to try to think deeply about ecological issues. Such laziness can be motivated by the idea that other things are much more important and that these other things are mandated by religious faith. The religious sense

Why religious faith is important 91 of radical separation from the world can inform such indifference, as can the notion that the religious ultimate’s primacy pervasiveness, and rightness – or its all-encompassing and controlling providence, in the language of some religious traditions – will ensure that no earth-wide ecological disaster will take place. We can see here how the three role-functions of religious ultimates can be adapted – wrongly, I believe – to favor a kind of laissezfaire attitude toward the natural world. The reported five massive extinction events of the past seemingly do not enter into this kind of religious indifference to threats to the ecological systems of the earth. Finally, there is an attitude concerning the relations of human beings to their natural environments that can be connected with human artifacts and their unconscious influence on this attitude. This attitude can dull awareness of how deeply humans depend on the natural environment and shore up the illusion that we are largely independent of its functions and fate. As I write these words, I tap them out on my laptop computer. I can print them out with ease on another cleverly contrived electronic machine. I sit in a comfortable chair in a well-lighted room. It is a hot summer in the center of Northern Florida, but my room is air-conditioned. If I am thirsty, I have only to step a short way to my refrigerator, which dispenses ice cubes and water from two levers. My food is readily available in grocery stores, and I can safely preserve the perishables in the refrigerator. My automobile awaits me outside to transport me wherever my wife or I wish to go. It is all too easy, especially for humans living in the prosperous West who are surrounded by such artifacts, to forget how integral a part of nature and how deeply dependent on its wellbeing they really are. And if they are not careful, they can also fail to acknowledge or understand how profound a bearing their religious traditions – rightly regarded – have on the urgent need to protect, preserve, and respect the natural environment on which human beings, like all other creatures, depend. The artifacts I have mentioned, and all others besides, are themselves entirely natural, in the sense that nature is the original source from which all of them are made and in the sense that those who make them are also natural beings. We are natural beings through and through, and we are never for a moment separate from, independent of, or outside of nature in our lives here on earth.

Conclusion In this chapter, I have basically tried to do two things. The first is to call attention to the great importance of religion, not only in the past but also in the present. This importance can be seen in the positive contributions of religion to personal and communal life, but also in its negative tendencies as these bear on the lives of individuals and on the societies and institutions of which individuals are a part. Religious traditions, institutions, and individuals have great potential for contributing to the harmony and flourishing

92  Why religious faith is important of human life, but they also have a proven capability of creating disruptive dissensions, riotous antagonisms, and ruinous warfare. The importance of religion, not only in its positive tendencies but also in its negative ones as well, is also readily apparent when we consider its bearings on individual attitudes regarding the natural environment and the roles of religious institutions in this regard. I suggested some positive and negative aspects of this relationship in both the personal and the communal or social realms. I argued that it would be a regrettable mistake to overlook the rich resources of religious traditions of various sorts for inspiring and enabling positive, hopeful, and effective responses to environmental issues such as global climate change; ocean acidification; pollution of earth, sea, and sky; endangerment of the species of earth; wreckage of natural habitats; and the like. I also contended that it would be a grievous error for religious people and religious institutions to view humans as separate from nature, to be indifferent to the health and wellbeing of nature, or to think that the built-world of technology and artifacts – present and future – gives assurance that humans are somehow free of the constraints of nature and have no urgent need to be overly concerned about the ecological crisis presently confronting the earth, its nonhuman creatures, and their natural environments. Religious faith and religious institutions are not something to be lightly regarded or brushed aside in the modern world. They are not quaint, irrelevant relics of the past. They have a crucial role to play on the level of human life and human culture, and on the foundational level of the earthly biosphere as a whole. If all of this is so, as I firmly believe it to be, then the relation of freedom to faith becomes critically important. This is the second basic idea I have stressed in this chapter and elsewhere in this book. I have argued here that there cannot be genuine acts of faith without explicit, deliberate, well thought-out acts of freedom. And these acts of freedom must be acts of the whole person. As such, they involve choices about what to weigh in balance and believe, what aspects of emotional awareness to cultivate and explore, and what courses of action to analyze and perform. Religious traditions present options for such choices, but these options must be mindfully and explicitly considered, and the choices concerning them incorporated into the whole of one’s life. No appeal to external authority can substitute for the continual exercise of freedom in religious life, because we must give careful consideration to many different claims to authority and truth, and choose those that seem most compelling and convincing. Doing so is not the work of one stage of our lives but continues to be the work of the totality of our lives. Doubts and questions are highly significant in ongoing religious life, because without the struggle to frame appropriate religious questions, there can be little progress in finding deeply satisfying and sufficiently demanding religious answers. There must also be an ongoing search for ways in which we can

Why religious faith is important 93 best put our religious faiths into practice so as to contribute in effective ways to the betterment of humankind and to a proper respect, reverence, and action for the whole of nature – both on a one-to-one individual basis and on social, political, economic, and community bases. Of course, a person may choose a secular path of life rather than a religious one, but this choice also needs to be well considered and well informed. A significant part of such consideration and search for understanding should be a careful taking into account of what the religions of the world have to offer with regard to visions of the fullness of life and of ways in which human beings can best work toward that fullness. A faith, whether religious or secular, needs constantly to be aware of relevant options for choice. The range of religious options should not be left unexplored, unappreciated, or underestimated. Most importantly, the rejection of a particular religious tradition or version of that tradition need not require the rejection of religion altogether. And aspects of various traditions can be woven together in the formation of a person’s own stance of faith. To stand within a tradition does not require being oblivious to the resources for faith offered by other traditions. Religion is a multifarious thing. It has diverse aspects and manifestations. At its best, it is forever in process of responsive adaptation and change. It is not fixed or static, but depends for its continuing vitality and relevance on the work of thoughtful, deeply concerned people who take it seriously enough to contribute to its developments and applications in more timely, more responsible, and more convincing directions. Critical appropriation of a religious way of life is different from mindless parroting of religious ideas with no earnest investigation or conviction behind it. Robust religious faith and active freedom go constantly together.

Note 1 Nietzsche contrasts such passive nihilism with what he calls active or ecstatic nihilism. The latter, as he describes it, crosses over from “the negation or No” of passive nihilism into “the opposite of this – to a Dionysian affirmation of the world as it is” (Nietzsche 1968: 536; see also 544). In what he claims to be a time of the death of God, this active nihilism requires us to find or create our own values rather than having them handed down to us from an alleged, but for Nietzsche illusory, God.

References Hanh, Thich Nhat. 2016. At Home in the World: Stories and Essential Teachings From a Monk’s Life. Berkeley, CA: Parallax Press. Nelson, Benjamin. 1975. “The Quest for Certitude and the Books of Scripture, Nature, and Conscience,” in The Nature of Scientific Discovery: A Symposium Commemorating the 500th Anniversary of the Birth of Nicolaus Copernicus, ed. Owen Gingrich. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press: 355–72.

94  Why religious faith is important Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1968. The Will to Power, ed. Walter Kaufmann, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingsdale. New York, NY: Vintage Books. O’Brian, Barbara. 2017. “Buddha Nature: The Fundamental Nature of All Beings.” www.thoughtco.com/buddha-nature-doctrine-450001. Overmars, Jane. 2017. “Saudi Women’s Rights in Saudi Arabia.” https://history.librar ies.wsu.edu/spring2017/2017/01/20/saudi-womens-right-to-vote-in-municipalpolls-means-right-to-choose/Spring2017. Pickthall, Mohammed Marmaduke. 1963. The Meaning of the Glorious Koran: An Explanatory Translation. New York, NY: Mentor Books. Stevens, Wallace. 1971. The Palm at the End of the Mind: Selected Poems and a Play, ed. Holly Stevens. New York, NY: Vintage. Suzuki, David and Peter Knudston. 1992. Wisdom of the Elders: Honoring Sacred Native Visions of Nature. New York, NY: Bantam Books. Tippett, Krista. 2007. Why Religion Matters – And How to Talk About It. New York, NY: Penguin Books. Volf, Miroslav. 2015. Flourishing: Why We Need Religion in a Globalized World. New Haven, CN: Yale University Press. Waley, Arthur, translator and editor. 1958. The Way and Its Power: Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching and Its Place in Chinese Thought. New York, NY: Grove Press. Welby, Victoria. 1903. What Is Meaning? Studies in the Development of Significance. London, UK: Macmillan.

6 Points of departure

Points of departurePoints of departure

Just as cognitive variety is not to be dismissed in the sciences, so too may religious variety be acceptable, natural, and valuable in a naturalistic perspective. The variety of ways of life may well be a rich resource and a colourful element in our own time. Variety is to be expected, since we deal with human experiences (of various kinds in a wide variety of contexts), and different forms of ritual behaviour and different guiding ideals of human flourishing may be entertained. However, no tradition is beyond dispute and beyond development. – Willem Drees (1998: 277)

My wife, Pam, and I took our pinhole pieces of paper out to watch a 90 percent solar eclipse from our backyard in Northern Florida on August 21, 2017. As we watched the image of the sun projected onto pieces of paper laid on the ground, we saw it slowly being shadowed by the circle of the moon. As the brightness of the summer day waned and we patiently waited, we became increasingly aware of all that was going on around us. Butterflies were flitting about. Bees buzzed by. Birds were darting to and from a feeder and in and out of a berry-laden bush nearby. Tiny insects began clambering around on the white pieces of paper we had placed on the ground to serve as screens for the sun’s shrinking image. An earthworm popped out of the soil. We could hear the honking of geese on a nearby pond. Frogs began to croak. Leaves rustled in the trees. I became keenly aware of how utterly dependent all living things are on the energy of the sun that bathes the earth every day. We human creatures are kept alive by the sun and are but one of myriad systems of life on earth nourished in countless ways by its energy. It is no wonder that many ancients saw the sun as a divine being and were gripped by fearful awe when solar eclipses occurred. What if the sun were permanently to disappear! The calamity would be unimaginable. The marvel of nature is made startlingly apparent by a solar eclipse, but it is also brought readily to mind by the incredible variety of life-forms that surround us humans on every hand and

96  Points of departure by the dependable laws of nature that make all life possible – human and nonhuman alike – moment by moment and day by day. Here is inexpressible wonder and mystery. But the daily rising and setting of the sun (at least as seen from our earth-centered perspective) can become so routine and familiar that we take it for granted. And yet it is astonishing to pause and reflect that we come from nature; we are sustained by nature; we have our remarkable human resourcefulness, ingenuity, and freedom as gifts of nature, and our bodies, having arisen from nature, shall return to it. The energy and heat of the sun are central to this process. The sun may not be divine for us moderns. It is neither the god Ra, as it was for the Egyptians, nor the god Apollo, as it was for the Greeks. For religious naturalists like myself, nature in and of itself exhibits the six rolefunctions I have ascribed to all religious ultimates. I shall spell out this claim in some detail in the present chapter and the one to follow. In this outlook, all of nature is sacred and the fitting focus of religious faith. In other words, my personal faith stance is now centered on nature. For it there is nothing beyond nature; all that is real is natural, including all of the manufactures, designs, and creations of human beings. I view nature’s own creativity as inexhaustible and its awesome mystery as fathomless. It gives profuse indications on earth of being pro-life. The traditional notion of a personal deity or deities is for me eclipsed by the majesty of nature. The former fades into the background as the stupendous reality of nature comes religiously to the fore. This reality includes personal beings but is not itself personal. Persons are offshoots of its creativity. Impersonal nature is the source of persons through its evolutionary processes. Neither they nor nature itself is created by or presided over by some kind of deity. Minds and spirits are functions of evolutionary matter, not something separable from matter. Nature has a dark and destructive side, as well as a bright and constructive one. Its creations and destructions go hand in hand. Its processes and laws can hurt as well as help. Any religious ultimate, if it be a convincing candidate for being that, must deal somehow with this unavoidable fact about life in the world. Religious naturalism is a contestable vision of religious faith, of course, especially for those accustomed to the monotheistic traditions of the West, to say nothing of polytheistic ones of ancient Europe and of areas further to the East. Many may find the naturalistic vision implausible, austere, and unfulfilling. But it is a vision I have worked on and subjected to personal choices over the years. I shall describe the choices I have made about religious matters and continue to make as my life unfolds. I offer the discussions of this and the final chapter as a recounting of my voyage of faith – of the ports of call where cargos judged to be no longer needed have been unloaded and new materials taken on board over the years that my ship of faith has navigated toward new ports of call. As I recount the stages of this voyage of faith to the present days of my ninth decade of life, I mean no disrespect to theists, pantheists, polytheists,

Points of departure 97 mystics, or those who are involved in different voyages. I shall confess, explain, and defend what seems to me at present to be the most compelling form of religious faith, but I do so as a convinced religious pluralist. This is to say, I do so as a person well aware of the partiality and final inadequacy of all claims to religious truth, including my own, and of all ways of striving to live religiously. It could not be otherwise, given the widely acknowledged final elusiveness, hiddenness, and mystery of any soundly adequate religious ultimate. When rational discourse has done its best to approach this holy mystery – when sacred texts have had their eloquent say and when koans, parables, songs, myths, rites, and symbols have played their essential roles – ample room remains for differing interpretations of religious meaning, truth, and value. But we should not regard all attempts in this direction and in this domain to be equally true. Some may come closer to truth than others, and some may veer more clearly toward falsehood than others. This is a matter not only for personal judgment and choice but also for shared interfaith inquiry. I am convinced that not one of us, finite and fallible humans that we are, has or could have absolute religious truth and that any announced claim to have such truth is misguided and hubristic. I certainly do not claim to possess or to be able to articulate or defend such absolute truth. But I do believe that there are more and less adequate affirmations and stances of religious truth concerning the human condition and its relations to the surrounding world, and that all of us have the right and obligation to search for the greater truths and to align our lives with them to the fullest possible extent. A pluralistic outlook on religious traditions, beliefs, and commitments of all kinds is an essential part of my own stance of faith. It is fully consonant with the wise words of philosopher Willem Drees quoted in the epigraph to this chapter. His pluralistic attitude toward and thoughtful perspective on religious differences is highly germane to the spirit of this book. But also crucially important for flourishing human lives is that they be engaged in lifelong, serious-minded quests for cogent, convincing, and challenging religious truth and commitment. A person’s stance of faith tells a great deal about who that person is and what he or she has the capacity to become. This chapter is devoted primarily to discussion of beliefs, attitudes, and commitments I have decided through a process of continuing inquiry to leave behind in my religious quest. I focus here on the topics of God, atonement and apotheosis, nature-human dualism, afterlife, and scriptural authority – all of them aspects of the Protestant Christian faith in which I was reared and to which I continued to be committed up to the fourth decade of my life. In the next chapter, I shall discuss what I have carried over from this earlier form of faith through the years and what I have added to it in the formation of a naturalistic religious faith. I turn now to discussion of the first aspect of my former faith that I have found it necessary to leave behind, and that is belief in God.

98  Points of departure

God There are two major ways of looking at the idea of God. The first one is dialogical and the second a God of omni-attributes. Neither, in my judgment, is satisfactory as a religious ultimate. The first makes God too anthropomorphic, and the second makes God too abstract, remote, and inaccessible. The virtue of the dialogical conception of God, to use the apt term of biblical theologian Walter Brueggemann in his book Disruptive Grace: Reflections on God, Scripture, and Church, is that it makes God religiously available and responsive to the prospects and perils of everyday human life. As Brueggemann observes, this God is described in the Hebrew Bible as a covenant-maker with a particular group of human beings and as such can be “inordinately demanding, crushing, and reprimanding,” as well as “graciously accepting, welcoming, and affirming.” The biblical God, as Brueggemann views him, “has a rich interior life” that “in freedom and in fidelity is always adjudicating, always exercising options, always living in freedom, always repositioning and reengaging afresh” (2011: 22). This God can repent of his previous decisions, change his mind in response to human argument, be angry with those who oppose him, wipe out most of the creatures of earth on account of their disobedience and impiety, bring down rampant destruction on Israel’s Egyptian captors, call for genocidal actions against those who occupy the land he has ordained for his chosen people, threaten and punish Israel itself with devastation and exile – but also be capable of endless patience, loving-kindness, and forgiveness in his relations with those of his people who continue to run counter to his holy will. This is also a God, according to Christian belief, who can even become a man and die on the cross to save humankind from its sins. This is a God who has needs, who is in process, who yearns for relations with others, who continually interacts with and responds to his human creatures. He is a God who enters into I-Thou, dialogical relationships with human beings, and who both affects and is affected by these relationships on an ongoing basis. He is responsive to petitionary prayer, acts with special favor toward those who seek out his help, works miracles that disrupt laws of the world he has created, and exercises special providences in his ongoing relations to the world. He is, as Brueggemann notes, a God of “unutterable holiness” (22) but at the same time a God very much like a human being in his attitudes, responses, and actions. I am fascinated by the biblical stories concerning this God, but I do not find them to be a convincing portrayal of a genuine religious ultimate. They seem to me to be too parochial and too set within the worldview of ancient times. This God is all too obviously, in my eyes, a projection of a humanlike figure onto the heavens accompanied by an implausible insertion of human beings on earth into the dominant place in a vast universe. This God seems to me too small to convincingly have such a role, too much like a tribal chief or feudal overlord. I do not doubt the holy,

Points of departure 99 saving mystery lying at the heart of the world. My symbolization of it is the experience of nature in its numinous presence, inexhaustible majesty, and wondrous gifts, not that of a distinct personal being. I do not see the universe as the creation of a fatherlike figure or as presided over by a single, all-too-human conscious being. This view for me is too much dilution of the awesome mystery of an adequate focus of religious faith. Paul Tillich’s notion of the “God above God” who is not a distinct being but the ground of all beings and basis of the human courage to be (Tillich 1952: 182–90) comes much closer to the religious ultimate I personally identify with nature. Of course, I speak for myself in making these judgments. But I have decided to leave behind in my process of religious inquiry the dialogical God of conventional theistic faith – a conception of God eloquently depicted but unconvincingly – at least to me – advocated by Brueggemann. Brueggemann also brings under discussion the second conception of God mentioned earlier – namely, the God of such omni-attributes as omnipotence, omniscience, and omnipresence. He is right, in my judgment, to reject this conception of God. This God is static and unavailable for human relationships. Its omniscience and omnipresence require that it transcend space and time, obviating them and making them ultimately unreal. It is sufficient to itself. It has no needs. It is devoid of ongoing process or relatedness. It is a God of absolute might and complete control, and is thus incapable of being affected by anything outside itself. Human beings are for it like puppets or pawns on a chessboard. They have no genuine personhood or freedom. This God’s omniscience precludes anything private in the experience of human beings, meaning that they have no genuine subjectivity. This is a police-state God who monitors every human experience and thought down to the finest detail. It is a God whose actions cannot be questioned because they could not have been otherwise. It is a God who inexorably wills every natural destruction and every human evil. This God is so radically distinct from the world as to make impossible any genuine relationships with the world or any kind of immanence in the world. It is a God incapable of compassion, sympathy, or suffering. Its supposed serene perfection of attributes makes it irrelevant to all that is finite, fallible, and imperfect. It is an abstract God of philosophical construction, in no way a God of living religion. I have given reasons here for rejecting both the dialogical and the omniattribute God. Neither is for me an appropriate object of religious faith or ultimate concern, whether viewed from a personal standpoint or from that of the universe as a whole. I have given careful attention to both of these conceptions in the course of my religious thinking and development, but I have finally found them both to be insufficient and wanting as characterizations of an adequate religious ultimate. At one time, I sought to rely on a dialogical God similar to that described by Brueggemann to give religious meaning and direction to my life, but as I continued to subject it to critical thought and the tests of my ongoing

100  Points of departure experience, I found it to be less and less credible, supportive, and fulfilling. The God of omni-attributes, for its part, has always seemed to me dubitable and implausible, remote and inaccessible, for philosophical as well as religious reasons. The more I try to reflect on it, the more it becomes the raising of human traits to an absolute and infinite degree that renders these traits and their supposed possessor unintelligible. Theologian Reinhold Niebuhr writes, Religious faith cannot be simply subordinated to reason or made to stand under its judgment. When this is done the reason which asks the question of whether the God of religious faith is plausible has already implied a negative answer in the question because it has made itself God and naturally cannot tolerate another. (1949: 165–66) This statement is in keeping with Niebuhr’s version of Christian faith in which he assumes beyond question or doubt the existence of God. But the reasoning of his statement strikes me as circular and unreliable – even as it denigrates the role of reasoning when it comes to the question of God’s existence. And it is strangely incongruous with the rest of his monumental treatise The Nature and Destiny of Man, where he puts his human reason so often to persuasive good use. Niebuhr assumes what needs to be reasonably argued for and made convincing if the existence and nature of God – as he conceives God – is to be the trustworthy guide of one’s life. Thoughtfully and responsibly questioning such a fundamental matter as this one is a necessary expression of religious piety, not a violation of it. Niebuhr’s statement sidetracks the importance of responsible choices concerning the ultimate focus of religious faith. It also implicitly slams the door to dialogue with proponents of other religious ultimates. I have to disagree with him strongly in this regard. Let me turn from the topic of God, then, to the second part of the Christian faith I have decided to leave behind: the interlinked ideas of atonement and apotheosis.

Atonement and apotheosis I join these two ideas together in this section because I see them as having essential relatedness to one another in traditional Christian faith. The idea of apotheosis applies to Jesus of Nazareth coming to be regarded by most of the Christian tradition as God incarnate or as God-man. The idea of the desperate need for cosmic atonement for the fallen state of human beings otherwise irrevocably corrupted by sin is closely connected with the necessity for a God-man to satisfy the demands of divine justice but also to express divine mercy by comprehensive forgiveness for and removal of that state of original sin – with a consequent empowering of humans to live lives of faithfulness and obedience to God.

Points of departure 101 In this way of thinking, the Jesus of the cross must literally be God in human flesh. Otherwise, there could be no reconciliation between sinful humanity and an awesomely righteous and holy God. God must satisfy his justice by committing his only Son – viewed as part of his Trinitarian nature – to death on the cross. So great is the magnitude of human sin that only God can redeem humans from it by subjecting the new, sinless Adam of himself as incarnate in Jesus to the punishment and death deserved by the pervasive guilt of the old Adam’s primordial sin – a state of sinful corruption profusely infecting all humankind. These ideas were made crystal clear by Saint Anselm of Canterbury in the 11th century, with his highly influential book Cur Deus Homo or “Why God Became Man” (Anselm 1954), but their general direction of thought was already present in the earlier centuries of Christianity. For example, the 4th-century Christian Athanasius, an advocate of the Doctrine of the Trinity that made Christ equal with God, penned a version of these ideas in his brief volume entitled On the Incarnation. He wrote that the Father God’s Mind “saw that corruption held us all the closer because it was the penalty for the Transgression” of Adam and Eve, and of all humans after them. God saw too, Athanasius continues, “how unthinkable it would be for the law to be repealed before it was fulfilled” (Athanasius 2011: 8). The severe demands of divine justice had to be fulfilled by the death of the blameless Christ who was truly God himself in human form, and the way was opened thereby to the merciful gift of newness of life for all humankind. I think that the apotheosis of Jesus began earlier on with his increasing identification with the ultimacy of God in his followers’ worship, praise, and prayer, and with the Christian need somehow to blend these two senses of ultimacy in a manner unthinkable for traditional Judaism. It may also have been influenced and made subtly credible by the fairly common idea of sexual unions of gods and humans in Hellenistic and Roman culture. But it was given special force and urgency when it was tied to the growing Christian conviction of universal fallenness into sin as the consequence of the primordial sins of Adam and Eve. So pervasive and intractable was this state of sin, or so it was believed, that only the outrageous penalty of God himself suffering on the cross in the stead of sinful humans could remove its curse from the whole of humanity. The apotheosis of Jesus now seems to me not only idolatrous but also meaningless. The notion of an actual God-man is to me incomprehensible, and I cannot bring myself any longer to try futilely to affirm something devoid of meaning. I would not know how to begin. And even if this idea were comprehensible, it would serve only to confirm my present belief that the notion of God – whether dialogical or omni-attributed – is too patently anthropomorphic, on the one hand, or too abstract, remote, and inaccessible, on the other. I can see, however, how the dialogical idea of God might be thought to be strongly communicated by such an exemplary life as that of the Jesus of

102  Points of departure the Gospels, but to identify Jesus with God, as did the 4th and 5th-century Church Councils of Nicea, Constantinople, and Chalcedon, skirts much too closely to anthropomorphism and idolatry. The Jesus of Mark’s gospel spoke wisely when he admonished a man who addressed him as “good teacher”: “Why do you call me good? No one is good but God alone” (Mark 10: 17–19 [RSV]). This was Jesus’s warning against the sin of idolatry. There have been many exemplifications of godly lives in the history of Christianity; the Apostle Paul in the 1st century and Saint Francis of Assisi in the Middle Ages are two such figures who come quickly to mind. But this tradition has wisely refrained from viewing any of them as incarnations of God. In the case of Jesus, however, traditional Christianity succumbed to the temptation of apotheosis. It did so largely, I am surmising here, because of its stern doctrine of original sin – a doctrine which required that God himself suffer and die in order to pay the penalty for that universal plight of humanity brought on by the sins of Adam and Eve in the distant past. But I do not countenance the idea of original sin – the idea that has given credence to the felt need for an apotheosized Christ suffering for the sins of the world. Adam and Eve are legendary figures, creatures of story rather than actual human beings, and even if they were actual persons, it would make little sense to think that their sin has somehow been transmuted through all the ages to every human being. It is true that all of us humans must struggle with the flaws and imperfections of a finite nature and that we often misuse our freedom to commit moral and spiritual iniquities of flesh and spirit. We are often arrogant, self-centered, and oblivious to the needs of our fellow humans. Our history is riddled with offenses against our fellow human beings, and we are becoming sensitive today to ways in which we have arrogantly exploited and devastated our earth and its nonhuman creatures. There is no question that most of us are in need of unrelenting progress toward higher attainments of character and action. As the Danish Christian Søren Kierkegaard interprets sin, “the individual himself posits it in himself as the individual” to a regrettable extent, and this is true in the life of every human being (1946: 51; see also 46). Immorality is not an irresistible legacy of Adam and Eve but the result, ultimately, of individual acts of freedom. Sin posits itself in each individual life, partly by the extent to which each of us awakens to how far he or she falls short of moral and spiritual ideals, but also by awareness of his or her personal responsibility for this falling short. Religion is not just about assurance. It is also about demand. And central to its demand is the call to responsible uses of our freedom. It promises us resources for meeting its stringent demands, but it does not let us off the hook of personal responsibility. The extent of such freely chosen sin can become disastrous, wreaking havoc on the lives of others, human and nonhuman alike. Tendencies toward it and exemplifications of it can work their way into human institutions, and these institutions can seduce individuals into evil outlooks and

Points of departure 103 behaviors. Institutions can also fail to provide the instruction, help, and resources contributory to a flourishing life. But succumbing to sin is ultimately due to individual misuses of freedom, not to some kind of primordial human transgression. If this is so, as I believe it to be, then there is no requirement of a cosmicscale legal transaction brought about by the Jesus of the cross to forgive humankind for a primordial transgression and to pave the way away from sin. Furthermore, there is no need for the Jesus of the cross to be God in human form to accomplish such a result and to save us humans from a state consigned to us by the sins of Adam and Eve. Atonement and apotheosis stand or fall together by this reasoning, and for me, they have fallen together. Sources of moral and spiritual evils, and motivations for their commissions or omissions, are often perplexing and profound, but they are rooted in and come down finally to human choices and mis-choices. Violations of moral and spiritual norms are real, and some of them are horribly real. The egregious sins of a Hitler, Stalin, or Pol Pot, and of those who willingly followed their lead, are cases in point. But original sin as conceived in the Christian tradition is not real. The pervasive and deeply pernicious presence of sin in human history and to varying degrees in each human life is undeniably real, but the claimed Christian etiology of it – if taken literally – is false. Hence there is no need for cosmic atonement or apotheosis. The gifts of personhood and freedom carry with them the burdens of responsibility and guilt. In claiming that misuses of human freedom lie at the heart of moral evil and that each of us is ultimately responsible for his or her immoral actions or inactions, I do not mean to overlook the varying causal conditions that frame but do not entirely determine human choices. Someone in the grip of an addiction is not as free in present choices relating to the addiction as this same person might have been in the past, or as someone who is not addicted in this way. Similarly, persons in thrall to long-established habits of hurtful behavior toward themselves or others are not as presently free as others who are not bound by similar habits. Growing up in a healthy social or economic environment may make responsible freedom easier in many respects than it would be in the absence of such environments. Factors in a person’s upbringing or present circumstances can affect that person’s capacity for freedom of action in some circumstance in ways that do not pertain to others. But to say that the former persons are not as free as the latter does not mean that the former are completely unfree or entirely unresponsible for their present behavior. There is such a thing as shared guilt, and the free choices characterizing the guilt of others can produce situations where the freedom of particular individuals is unduly or even grievously constrained. Long-established human institutions can inhibit or misdirect the freedom of those employed or acting within them to significant degrees, as I noted earlier. But the root

104  Points of departure of human evil lies ultimately in the fact of human freedom and in misuses of this freedom that can bring cruelty, inequity, suffering, and disaster into the world. Still, we should not be so smug, insensitive, lacking in compassion, or unforgiving as to think that every person is equally free in every situation of moral and religious choice. Our freedom is not a blank slate. Its slate is at all times already written upon with the consequences of choices of the past and experiences of the past. We act in present situations as formed selves rather than featureless selves – formed in significant degrees by our genetics, past circumstances, and previous choices. Moreover, we are not isolated individuals but individuals in social relations of many different kinds, and the effects of these social relations, past and present, inscribe the slate of our present prospects for choice and responsibilities for choice in innumerable ways. But within such varying conditions of choice, the capacity for choice itself remains – however much it may vary from person to person, condition to condition, time to time. In this crucial human capacity lies the possibility of wrong choices and their sometimes dire if not disastrous consequences. Looming above the capacity, however, are norms of behavior stemming not only from social mores and social legislations but also – at least in the cases of persons of serious religious faith – from the rightness and inspiration to personal and social rightness provided by the religious ultimate to direct and empower the whole of life. For religious persons, moral principles and their demands on human freedom are not invented in a vacuum. They are partly derived from long and sometimes trying and hazardous human experiences of learning how to live together peacefully and prosperously, but they are also given content, motivation, and guidance by the religious ultimate, however that may be conceived. The Christian views of atonement and apotheosis can be left behind, but the utter seriousness of moral and spiritual evils these doctrines emphasize – and the fundamental challenge and threat the evils pose to personal and communal life – should not be minimized or ignored. The seriousness of this challenge and threat I carry forward into my own stance of faith, along with the uncompromising emphasis this seriousness places on responsive and responsible freedoms of thought, choice, and action.1

Nature-human dualism The third feature of traditional Christianity I have left behind is its picture of the relationship between humans and nature. God is of course central to the traditional Christian outlook, and God not only creates the whole of nature but also creates humans in his image. The key biblical passage supporting this second idea reads as follows: Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the

Points of departure 105 air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth.” (Genesis 1: 26 [RSV]) This and other similar passages in the Hebrew Bible and the Christian New Testament suggest that humans are in some important respect or respects similar to God, and that they are so in a way or ways that no other earthly creature is. Also implied is the idea that humans are given the unique task of ruling over the earth and its creatures as regents or representatives of God. Their delegated responsibility confers on them the divinely assigned mission of emulating and expressing the sovereignty of God’s rule in their relations with the world of God’s creation. A clear line of separation is set up, therefore, between humans and the rest of creation. Humans have traits similar to God that are possessed by no other creature, and they are in this way distinct from nature. Niebuhr states the idea in this way: To the essential nature of man belong, on the one hand, all his natural endowments, and determinations, his physical and social impulses, his sexual and racial differentiations, in short, as a creature imbedded in the natural order. On the other hand, his essential nature also includes the freedom of his spirit, his transcendence over natural process and finally his self-transcendence. (1949: 270; my italics) The distinction of humans from nature, therefore, is not just one of degree for Niebuhr. It is one of kind. Whether we view the idea of human dominion as mastery and control – that is, of unrestricted domination over nature, or as respectful and responsible stewardship, humans tend to be seen with this idea of their being created in the image of God as the focus and apex of nature, as standing apart from it rather than being immersed in it or being integral parts of it in the way that other natural beings are judged to be. The bodies of humans, in this traditional view, are akin to the bodies of nonhuman creatures. But their minds, souls, or spirits are akin to the purely spiritual nature of God. Humans are seen as suspended, therefore, between the divine realm of pure spirit and the earthly realm of fleshly embodiment. Their likeness to God consists in the radical transcendence over nature made possible by the spiritual aspect of their nature. This idea contributes to the further one that the fleshy embodiment of human beings is only a contingent feature of their true nature. This idea soon came to mean that humans are not and cannot be truly at home on this earth because their true home is with God in God’s heavenly realm. This idea entails belief in an everlasting afterlife as the goal of human life and is thought as further evidence of humans being created in the divine image. In contrast with all else in nature, humans alone have a destiny beyond the

106  Points of departure grave. I shall discuss this belief in the next section. But in the meantime, let us reflect further about this idea of the separation of humans from nature. We know that humans have capabilities that other life-forms do not, or at least not in nearly the same degree. And we know that this fact means that humans can act with pervasive planetary effects either in support of or against the flourishing of these other life-forms. We know that humans are able to respect and care for the natural environments of these creatures but also to threaten and destroy their habitats by such phenomena as worldwide human migrations and travels that spread sometimes destructive invasive species over the face of the earth, enormous unchecked expansions of human population, rampant hunting of the members of other species for no other reason than recreation and fun, heartless poaching of endangered species for profit, and reliance on fossil fuel industries that introduce deadly gasses into the atmosphere and ravage the earth’s land forms, mountainsides, and streams. With human distinctiveness comes great human responsibility. The passage from Genesis quoted earlier can be usefully interpreted as calling attention to these capabilities for good or ill. But are not human beings in their essential being entirely earthly, fleshy beings, and as such, integral parts of nature instead of standing over against it or suspended halfway above it? The natural sciences are not capable of resolving or even of adequately posing by themselves all of the issues important to religious faith. But their impressive findings imply that the distinctiveness of humankind need not be explained by some special creative act of God at the beginning of the world. And we do not need to see nature, as it often has been seen by Christians of the past – especially from the dawn of the modern era up to the mid-19th century and the age of Darwin – as something mechanical and inert, as lacking creative powers within itself in its own right, and as allowing within itself no place for genuine chance or freedom. When we view nature as continuously transcending itself in its inherent and unceasing evolutionary developments – not only developments of an astronomical and geological character but also ones that have produced, over vast spans of time, the innumerable biological species of earth, including the human species – then included in these natural changes and in no need of being externally superadded to them is the human capacity for freedom and self-transcendence referred to by Niebuhr. This capacity is indeed wondrous, but it needs no supernatural origin or status. It can be construed as the gift of nature itself. Thus the grave responsibilities of human freedom and self-transcendence need not be seen as somehow standing over against and outside of nature but as being located squarely within the natural order – and, as such, involving duties to that order in which humans are inseparable, if highly evolved, parts. If we care at all for our fellow creatures, human and nonhuman, what is added to our sense of responsibility by seeing ourselves as God’s specially appointed stewards of nature? Are we not naturally evolved citizens of the

Points of departure 107 commonwealth of nature and, as citizens, bound morally and spiritually to seek for ways to work effectively and continually for its – and ultimately our own – integrity and wellbeing? If we bring the idea of the image of God resolutely down to earth, it expresses what we already know on other grounds – the grounds of evolutionary and ecological science. The vivid theological expression may be of some rhetorical and symbolic use, but there is no compelling need to interpret it literally. The more literal meaning of imago Dei as Niebuhr and others have construed it can be left behind, and I choose to leave it behind. In my current religious outlook, we humans are not the creatures of a sovereign, all-controlling God, nor are we regents on earth of such a God. We are not distinct in kind but only in degree from the rest of nature and are bones of its bones and flesh of its flesh, as Adam rhapsodized about Eve when God fashioned her from a part of Adam’s body (Genesis 2: 23). We are evolved from the earth and are natural beings through and through. We do not transcend nature but are wholly immanent in it, and there is no distinct realm of the spirit disconnected from matter. All that exists is material or a function of matter. But profound spiritual inspiration, awareness, and commitment can arise from and guide the lives of the evolved and highly developed material organisms that we humans are. A supposed realm of pure spirit detached from earth, independent of earth, and in no need of earth’s resources is to my mind a dangerously misleading and potentially irresponsible supposition in our time of ecological crisis, whether it is applied to a supposed God or to human beings. We should not think ourselves as like a supposed God who created nature out of nothing, lords over it with impunity, and has no essential need of it for his own existence or wellbeing. I leave this idea of God behind and, with it, any suggestion of humans as literally created in such a God’s image. Contrary to Niebuhr’s and others’ way of thinking, there is no dichotomy of humans and nature, no separation of the natural aspect of human beings from some kind of supposed purely spiritual or non-natural aspect.

Belief in an afterlife If we humans are integral parts of nature, as I have argued us to be, then we, like all others of its creatures, come into being, live for a period of time, and then cease to exist. Our lives, in the words of Shakespeare’s Prospero, are “rounded by a sleep” (The Tempest, Act IV). We come from nature as conscious beings, and we return to it as no longer conscious ones. We are born, and we die, as do all of the other living creatures of the earth. We are not gods, nor do we share in a supposed divine eternity or everlastingness. We are material beings and have the mortality of all material forms of life. Christians, with their bright hope of eternal fellowship with a loving God, have often viewed death without the hope of immortality as an irremediable tragedy, the irrevocable loss of a conscious existence built up over many

108  Points of departure decades in the normal span of a human life. Such a life can leave traces of itself behind, but the distinctive intricacy and vitality of its immediate selfhood and awareness are blown into the wind. I once received a collection of books that had been previously owned by a man and wife who had lived a long life. Many of the books were liberally marked with marginal checks and comments, showing that they had been pondered carefully and at length by the man and his wife. These books of fiction, poetry, science, philosophy, theology, and the like had become part of their consciousness, with its distinctive memories, regrets, questions, reflections, struggles, hopes, and dreams. I could reflect on the books and gain some sense of their conscious lives from my outward perspective, but the full-flowing stream of their internal consciousness and all that it promised and contained is lost forever. Eventual and inevitable death is a great and undeniable loss, but it is preceded by the inestimable gain of consciousness itself. And with that great gain is the possibility of fellowship, work, accomplishment, and love among other conscious beings, the creation of human communities and cultures, and the privilege of being a conscious participant in the marvel of life on earth. The brevity of even the normal course of a human life does not make it meaningless. Its quality is made possible by its quantity, however brief the latter may be or seem to be. We are born only to die, but in the meantime, we live. The finite span of our lives can make them more precious and the choices within them more consequential and important than they would likely be if life were infinitely extended. This is not to ignore the fact that our earthly lives are subject to tragedy and sorrow, suffering and loss, struggle and disappointment, frustration and failure. There are deformed babies and there are deformations of life and spirit. There are premature deaths. There are ruinous diseases of mind and body. There are accidents that threaten and impair life and limb. There are victims of human cruelty and injustice. There are the ravages and destructions of war. And there are devastations and calamities of storms, wildfires, earthquakes, floods, droughts, volcanic eruptions, and the like of a sometimes unpredictable and unruly nature. All living beings are subject to such phenomena, and we humans are no exception. Rampant human cruelty and injustice, in the meantime, are the rotten fruits of misused and misguided human freedom. To instinctive animal predator-prey relations are added the predatory practices of human beings against humans and nonhumans alike – practices that are not inevitable but grow out of consciously chosen, and thus preventable, human choices. The standard Christian dream, and it is the one by which I was enthralled earlier in my life, is the hope of an afterlife of everlasting bliss when all the tragedies and sorrows of this life would be wiped away, and all of the sinful impulses and actions of humans would be no more. We would be resurrected after our deaths into a perfect world where nothing distressing, sorrowful, or evil could ever take place. And we would live there, in fellowship with God and his angels, forever.

Points of departure 109 The more I thought about this scenario over the years of my early life, the less plausible and appealing it became. It is another prominent feature of my previous stance of faith I have been persuaded to leave behind. In a perfect state of being such as eternal life in heaven has been envisioned to be, there would be no laws of nature that could hurt us in any way, and we would be constrained from and have no remaining inclination toward any actions that could be harmful to ourselves or others. But when I try to imagine a world with no constant, predictable, potentially hurtful laws, I come up with a blank. Natural laws as we experience them on earth have the potential of sometimes harming us rather than always helping us. Moreover, if there were such laws in an imagined heavenly realm, then they would have to be interrupted or suspended every time we chose (or tried to choose) to put them to use for evil purposes. But this would mean that genuine acts of freedom could no longer be possible. Not only could we not rely on such laws in the sense of being able to depend on expected consequences of our choices, but our choices could never have bad consequences, no matter how they might be intended. The problem of the absence of dependable and predictable laws in this heavenly realm is greatly compounded by the idea that we would be free only to do the good and never any amount of evil, however great or small. This is a strange sort of freedom. It contains no note of responsibility, because however we might choose, nothing harmful or untoward could happen. This so-called freedom looks more like automation than autonomy. Even more seriously, if everything is already perfect in the imagined afterlife of traditional Christian belief, then human actions become superfluous. There is nothing that needs to be planned for or achieved, and nothing that can go awry. Thus life becomes devoid of purpose at least if purpose means, among other things, having better or worse choices to make, choices that can affect human life and the world for good or ill. A life without struggle or purpose, a life with no possibility of mistake or bad choice, is not even imaginable for finite beings such as we are. And I do not think that after giving it sufficient thought any of us would regard it as desirable. It has neither the thrill of adventure nor the seriousness of mistake. The promise of such a heavenly afterlife seems to me like telling a seasoned mountain climber that he or she must now stay forever on the plains below, with the assurance of no longer being subject to the perils of the climb. “But this is my life!” such a person may protest. “I crave adventure over safety. I crave challenge and risk. I want my actions to have consequences for good or ill. And most importantly, I want the freedom to choose the course of my life from a range of genuinely available options.” We may think mountain climbers foolish to put their lives regularly to the high risk of scaling hazardous peaks, but we have to admire their adventurous and courageous spirits. By analogy, there would seem to be little to admire in persons fated forever to do only the good – with no prospect of deciding and

110  Points of departure no possibility of mis-choice or mistake, and residing in an already perfect world that has no need of their contributions or services. The imagined humans in a heavenly afterlife are no longer imaginable to me, nor do I think they ever were. Their world is unintelligibly portrayed. These supposedly resurrected human creatures are no longer human. They are not us. They are some kind of inconceivable, robotic them. Any connection between our earthly lives and these supposed heavenly lives is severed. I do not yearn for an infinite prolongation of my earthly life in a heavenly realm because I have no idea of what such a life would be like, and to the extent that I can begin to picture it, it soon loses its appeal. More than that, it becomes sinister and dehumanizing, a kind of heavenly hell. In my view, it is better to be human on earth with an admittedly mortal but free and responsible life than to be stripped of meaningful purpose and freedom in an afterlife of allegedly unalterable and endless bliss. What about all of the suffering and evil on earth? What about natural disasters, predators and prey, deformed children and diseased adults, premature deaths, hurtful accidents, humans’ cruelties toward and exploitations of one another, and so on? These are the marks of finite existence in a law-like world, signals of the irreconcilable dichotomy between a falsely imagined guaranteed perfection, on the one hand, and actual personhood, on the other. The sufferings and evils of this world are inescapably tragic and real, and I do not want for a minute to deny or downplay this fact. We are right to mourn them and should never let them out of our sight. However, we should also remember that with our intelligence, ingenuity, and freedom, we humans have the capability of mitigating at least some of these tragedies and evils – whether caused by nonhuman nature or by the acts of human beings – to a significant degree and, with our religious faith, of framing and finding how to cope with them in a manner that acknowledges their actualities and possibilities as part of what it means to be finite creatures in a finite world. In the perspective of religious naturalism, the faith to which I now adhere, we should not fail to rejoice in the actual and potential goods of our world – whether made possible by the wondrous workings of natural laws or responsible acts of human freedom – even as we reflect soberly and compassionately on the world’s tragedies and evils, and explore ways to do what we can to reduce or prevent them and to open the way as far as possible to outlooks and deeds of mercy, goodness, and hope. A defender of the hope of heaven might respond to my reasoning by exclaiming, “But we would be with God forever. And the unimaginable joy and serene flourishing of being in the presence of God would eliminate any desire or motivation to do evil. We would still be free but would not have the slightest inclination to do anything evil. Moreover, since God is not subject to natural disasters in the heavenly realm radically different from the finite universe God has created, so would we be removed from all such threats and dangers.” Perhaps so, and I respect and would be open to hearing the counter-arguments of those who think in this fashion. But I have

Points of departure 111 great trouble imagining either scenario – an alleged freedom only to do the good, and an alleged wholly spiritual realm devoid of potentially harmful natural laws. I have similar trouble trying to imagine either one of these ideas that I have in trying to understand – as I indicated earlier in this chapter – an alleged God of infinite attributes. What cannot be understood even in part cannot be meaningfully believed. What, then, about the sense of hiddenness or mystery I see as an essential role-function of religious ultimates? The mystery here is partial mystery, not total mystery. We push our understanding as far as it will go, and it does go to a significant degree – else there would be no religious ultimate to be affirmed and no religious path to be followed. Total mystery, in contrast, would leave us with nothing to be affirmed or followed. I have come to view the idea of an afterlife as I have portrayed it here as a total mystery (or unintelligibility) and for the reasons I have given.

Scriptural authority The last major feature of my earlier stance of faith that I have left behind is a certain view of the authority of the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament scriptures. According to this view, God has communicated truths about himself, humans, and the world that are recorded in these writings, and these writings are binding on all Christian thought. So binding are they believed to be, according to the founder of the Protestant Reformation, Martin Luther, that they are the sole reliable basis of Christian thought and commitment. Reason, experience, and tradition take a back seat to these writings. These writings are the divinely appointed norm of all modes of thought, outlook, and practice relating to religious faith. The absolutely authoritative ground of truth, then, is the Word of God made known through the words of the Holy scriptures. There are several problems with the idea of appealing in this way to these, or any other, body of scriptures. The first and most obvious one is that scriptures and their putative revelations are many. The Christian scriptures are different from the Jewish ones, for example, and these two differ from the Islamic Qur’an. These three differ from the Hindu Upanishads, and so on. This is so, not only among the religious traditions of the world but within the Christian tradition itself. So we first have to decide which of these scriptures are divinely inspired and authorized. If we say, “The Christian ones, of course,” then we have to justify this choice on some other basis than the circular one of appealing to the scriptures themselves. Those who selected certain writings to be a part of the biblical canon also had to make this kind of choice. The choice would require appeals to such things as reason, experience, and tradition. Even when this choice is made, there is the fact of different versions of the Christian scriptures. The Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic versions are not the same as the Protestant one. And all of the

112  Points of departure versions available to us date from ancient times but are only available in texts whose actual dates are different in many orders of temporal magnitude from the original ones. Scholars have had to make many decisions, based on extant fragments and available manuscripts, to determine what, in their judgments, the “established texts” can be determined to be. And then there is the problem of translation. Most of us have access to the holy texts of Christianity only by way of translations into our native languages. And these translations span many different times and reflect differing thought patterns, structures of meaning, and modes of communication of those times. The authority of scriptures inevitably involves the claims to authority of those who have selected, preserved, passed down, and translated the scriptures themselves. So even if we try to eliminate the fallibility of the human authors of these scriptures – which seems unlikely – we cannot eliminate the fallibility of those required to bring them down to us today. Finally, there is the issue of hermeneutics. The hermeneutical issue is the one of interpreting and trying to understand the meaning of sacred scriptures, not only for their own times but also for our times today. Included in the problem of assessing their meaning is that of assessing the priority of some aspects of the scriptures over others. The 66 texts of the Protestant scriptures, for example, present norms of belief and behavior that are not always congruent or consistent. They also present varying conceptions of God and of God’s will for human life and the world. And the fallible human hand in the making of these scriptures cannot be ignored. If these scriptures are to be the guides and norms of the religious life, then some parts of them have to be subordinated to other parts of them. The Jesus of the Gospels has served as the standard for interpreting the Bible for Christians, and that standard includes interpretations of the Hebrew scriptures. But even the Jesus of the Gospels is present to Christians in the form of four differing Gospels and in the interpretations of his significance by Paul and other writers of the New Testament. What do I personally make of all of this? I contend that the scriptures of the world religions are authoritative to the extent that they help us to author our lives in constructive and meaningful ways, to become effective forces for good in the world, and to build and maintain just institutions in society. This does not mean that we arrogantly claim that our personal reason, experience, and choice are the final standards of these scriptures’ worth. That would be preposterous, given the centuries or millennia in which these scriptures have inspired and guided human life. But it does mean that the scriptures become authoritative for us only to the extent that we judge them to be entitled to do so. These scriptures become truth for us when their teachings are woven into the warp and woof of our personal and social lives, when we make them truly our own. They are there to be interpreted, and our interpretations must always take them seriously as sources of instruction, guidance, and strength. But in the final analysis, each of us must do the interpreting and the incorporating of them into his or her life.

Points of departure 113 Their authority is not purely external, nor is it purely internal. It is the interaction of these two. No one person or persons and no text or combination of texts can tell us what to think, believe, or be committed to without our choosing to listen. Each of us must decide this issue of scriptural authority for himself or herself. We must choose among the many different claimants to religious truth, not only because they are different but also because without such personal choices, there can be no meanings of these claimed truths that are actually made a part of our lives. We can pretend to acquiesce in some kind of religious authority, but we really acquiesce only when we are persuaded to choose to incorporate it into the whole of our being. In other words, we are the final hermeneutes, the final judges of what is to be religiously authoritative for each of us. I have learned to combine an appropriate reverence for profound sacred texts, Christian and otherwise, with recognition of the kind of existentialist appropriation of their truths and continued searching out of their truths that I have outlined in this section and discussed in other parts of this book. The texts that most inspire and move me most deeply are those that combine affirmation with evocation, insight with circumspection, confidence with humility, so as to point beyond themselves to those lived truths that outreach easy statement and culminate in a suffusive sense of holy mystery.

Conclusion In this chapter and the following chapter I describe the transformation of one faith stance into another that has occurred over the course of my life. Such a transformation leaves some features of the old faith stance behind, carries others forward into the new faith stance, and adds new features as part of the new stance. Thus it is not a total break with the past but carries part of the past faith into the new one. To put the point another way, the past provides necessary context and resources for such meaningful transformation. Therefore, to try to reject it in toto would be ill advised and foolish, if not impossible. Our human freedom, as I continue to point out, is a conditioned freedom. This chapter has discussed five aspects of my earlier faith stance that I have chosen to leave behind: belief in a personal God, the need for cosmic atonement and a divine Jesus, a dualism of humans and nature, belief in a heavenly afterlife, and the idea of an absolutely and externally binding scriptural authority. I have given reasons for rejecting these ideas, reasons that make sense and are convincing to me in this present stage of my life. I do not expect that these reasons will be convincing to everyone. I am well aware that they will not. I am also aware that others have different cultural backgrounds, predilections, and experiences than my own. I would therefore not presume to offer the character of my particular religious faith today as normative for all others. This is not my intention.

114  Points of departure I hope that its merits will be seriously considered, but in this book, I mainly offer this account of my journey of faith as a personal example of what it can mean to subject a religious outlook to continuing examination and as an illustration of the need incumbent on us all to put our freedom to active and effective use in the process of making our faith stance truly our own. Questioning, examining, and choosing one’s faith is an essential part of the life of faith, and none of us can know in advance where this process will eventually lead. Faith is in great measure a venture into the unknown. But we should affirm the right to question and the freedom to follow through the implications and outcomes of such questioning. Refusal to do so would in all likelihood leave us with only a pale replica of authentic faith and deprive us of the richness and support of a mature and fully developed religious outlook on the world. It should by now be abundantly evident that this conviction is a fundamental part of my own stance of faith. And it is the central theme of this book.

Note 1 In this section, I have addressed the issue of moral or humanly caused evil. In Chapter 7, I will discuss the issue of what has traditionally been called natural evil, showing how I interpret the tragic, hurtful, destructive aspects of nature in the light of my naturalistic faith.

References Anselm.1954. Cur Deus Homo, in St. Anselm: Proslogium, Monologium, An Appendix in Behalf of the Fool by Gaunilon, and Cur Deus Homo, trans. Sidney Norton Deane. La Salle, IL: Open Court. Athanasius. 2011. “On the Incarnation,” in 25 Books Every Christian Should Read, ed. Julia L. Roller. New York, NY: HarperCollins: 1–14. Brueggemann, Walter. 2011. Disruptive Grace: Reflections on God, Scripture and the Church, ed. Carolyn J. Sharp. London, UK: SCM Press. Drees, Willem B. 1998. Religion, Science, and Naturalism. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Kierkegaard, Søren. 1946. The Concept of Dread, trans. Walter Lowrie. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Niebuhr, Reinhold. 1949. The Nature and Destiny of Man. New York, NY: Charles Scribner’s Sons. Tillich, Paul. 1952. The Courage to Be. New Haven, CN: Yale University Press.

7 Points of arrival

Points of arrivalPoints of arrival

[W]e have not yet faith enough in the transcendent power of mind to revolve with its own world round the sun of truth and reason. . . . [W]e have not yet learnt that the true advance is spiral, that is, must sweep back on itself to take up ancient things and set them in new light and on quests in new directions. – Victoria Welby (1903: 16)

I regard all change as transformation of something existing antecedently to the change itself. This means that there is no such thing as de novo change or creation out of nothing. This observation applies as much, if not more, to religious changes as it does to any other kinds of change. Responsible, thoughtful, needful changes of faith stances and their accompanying beliefs, feelings, and activities must take fully into account the resources of the religious past. An active faith chooses from among, and makes use of, these resources in every possible way in order to transform them into appropriate responses to the religious opportunities and demands of the present. In other words, people of religious faith need to look backward, not in the futile hope of living in the past, but in the spirit of learning from the past how effectively to face toward the future. This can be done in meaningful fashion only if the passage of time from the ancient past to the present is taken seriously enough to recognize that as cultures undergo change and new circumstances, and ways of thinking and ways of living emerge, appropriate adjustments and re-adaptations of older ways of responding to the world’s challenges and opportunities need to be reflected on and enacted as well. We cannot replicate the past in the present, despite the earnest and sometimes even violent efforts in this direction of some people of faith and their religiously informed institutions. But we should also avoid the opposite mistake of ignoring the past and all that it can offer us in the way of being instructed by its enduring lessons and continuing wisdom, on the one hand, and by being wary of its deficiencies and obsolescences, on the other. Victoria Welby’s “sun of truth and reason” lures us ever on in the life of religious faith just as it does in all other thoughtful endeavors, including her

116  Points of arrival own endeavor to deeply probe the topic of the development of language and the types and levels of linguistic and conceptual meaning. But she insightfully notes that, at its best, this “sun” lures us in a “spiral” fashion that “must sweep back on itself to take up ancient things and set them in new light and on quests in new directions.” The physical sun is of great interest to us because it is the center of our rightly named solar system, and because it supplies the energy necessary for life. The sun has given its essential support to life in the past, continues to do so in the present, and will probably do for an immensely extended future. Without its support in the past, there would have been no present or future. But the illumination and empowerment needed today is not that of our sun’s past nuclear fusions, even though without them there would be no present ones. What is in critical need of these fusions today is radically different from a time when few if any of the present forms of life existed. These new forms of life have had to make their own distinctive kinds of adjustment to the energy of the sun. Their respective metabolisms have adapted to this energy in myriad ways, and that is why they have continued to survive. Absence of ongoing adaptation and change results in extinction. Welby’s metaphorical sun of truth and reason is the essential focus of religious thought and aspiration, and the indispensable source of its energy. This is so, however, only if we place the emphasis on truth and do not interpret reason too narrowly. Emotions, volitions, and commitments are centrally involved in this truth as well as beliefs, and reason includes more than discursive argument and theoretical expression. Pascal’s reasons of the heart and the quests and yearnings of the human mind in all its dimensions must also be included. The essential roles of metaphor, myth, and symbol must be acknowledged. Religious people and their institutions have had to find new ways of making use of past traditions as they continue to spiral back to the past and then forward to the present and future. Religious truth and reason are dynamic rather than static, even as individual human lives are, particular cultures are, and the whole of history has been and will forever be. What does not continue to adapt and change religiously in constructive and visionary ways will soon lose its vitality and finally cease to exist. This is the way of the world, and it is the way of meaningful appropriations and transformations of religious faith. This brief excursus into vital and meaningful religious faith, as it spirals and relates necessarily to past, present, and future, sets the scene for discussion of my own transition from an earlier form of religious faith to its present form. In the previous chapter, I outlined some aspects of my past stance of faith that I have decided, in the light of what has functioned for me as persuasive experience and reason, to leave behind. In this final chapter, I want to describe some crucial features of that earlier faith stance I have carried forward into my present life of faith and to indicate some additional features that now characterize it.

Points of arrival 117 This book is basically about the necessary interrelations of faith and freedom, and in these two concluding chapters, I describe ways in which these relations have worked out in my own life. The book is in part an apologia pro vita sua or explication and defense of the faith journey of one person’s life. But I intend for its particularity in this respect to be illustrative of the book’s more general themes, all of them bearing finally on the central theme of faith and freedom. What I want most to emphasize is that no professed faith can be genuine or religiously meaningful without responsible thought, continuing inquiry, openness to honest doubt, humble responsiveness to the faith stances of others, and informed personal choices. A backburner, unquestioning, taken for granted, and prematurely arrested religious faith with no openness to change or felt need for further decision is in my judgment no faith at all. It is a static appendage to one’s life rather than its dynamic, ever-developing core. I have found this to be resoundingly true in my own life. As an advocate of religious naturalism, I am no longer a traditional Christian. But I firmly agree with Sharon Delgado when she says, from her own perspective as a minister of the United Methodist Church, “Instead of simply appropriating what other people tell us to believe, a mature faith requires us to develop and test our beliefs and come to our own understanding” (2017: 34). The courage and determination to face up faithfully to this task, and to do so in response to the needs and opportunities of the present while drawing on the resources of the past, can reinvigorate individual religious lives, give new vision to religious communities, and transform religious institutions. It can also equip religion to be a relevant and effective force for social justice and for the ecological justice that is Delgado’s focus in her challenging book about the imminent threats of global climate change. Having discussed in the sixth chapter aspects of my previous religious faith I have left behind, I now turn to some important themes of that previous faith that I have carried forward. After discussing these themes, I will indicate some crucial features of my present stance of faith that I have added to the older one. When these two tasks have been carried out, I will have provided a sketch of the version of religious naturalism I call Religion of Nature and laid out some basic reasons for my adoption and continuing development of it as my personal form of religious faith. As an advocate of Religion of Nature, I of course hope for consideration of its merits by my readers and for their reflections on its possible demerits. I do so in the spirit of interfaith dialogue I have recommended elsewhere in this volume. The central topics I have carried forward and will proceed to discuss are the importance of religion, the wisdom of the Hebrew Bible and Christian New Testament, the seriousness of moral evil, the goodness of nature, and the pivotal role of mystery. I begin with the first of these topics.

118  Points of arrival

Importance of religion I take religion too seriously to think that it should be dispensed with in favor of a secular view of life. I say this despite the destructive effects religion has all too often had on individuals, peoples, societies, and nature itself. Let me first recount the constructive aspects of religion; then I will call attention to its destructive potentials. Religion has been an essential part of human cultures from the earliest times. It fills the felt human need for ultimate purpose and meaning in life, constituting a center point around which the whole of life can be oriented. It addresses such threats to human existence as suffering and evil, guilt and self-condemnation, aimlessness and despair, alienation and loneliness, tragedy and death, and it provides ways to comprehend and cope with them. It offers a comprehensive vision of the world and of the place of humans in the world. It provides content and inspiration for profound artistic exploration and expression. Religious traditions express with perceptive metaphor, ritual, parable, paradox, and story truths that cannot be adequately expressed in the discourses of logic and argument – the truths of feeling and of the complexity, concreteness, and wholeness of life that lie beyond the abstract truths of reason. At its best, religion sets strenuous standards for moral life and involvement, and it urges compassionate care for those most in need. It demands confrontations of power with justice and with pleas for equitable distribution of resources. It creates communities of religiously inspired celebration, aspiration, helpfulness, and concern, and gives to these communities a common focus of belief and commitment. Religious traditions and people of religious faith can serve as powerful sources of guidance and judgment for the policies and actions of local and national governments, and for the relations of nations with one another. These traditions contain trenchant reminders of the grave dangers of arrogance, pride, and selfishness, and they have the capacity to motivate attitudes and practices of shared community, open-minded humility, and gracious other-directedness. At their best, religions shine light on the most deeply troubling issues of life and point the way toward their management or resolution. They encourage the best possible traits of humanity while passing necessary judgments on the worst ones. Their potential as sources for good in the world is inestimable. But the importance of religion can be gauged in another way as well. And that is by consideration of its dark and demonic side. Religions can be potent forces for good. They have served as such throughout history, and they continue to be capable of doing so. But they can also be degraded into forces for woeful tribalism, conflict, and violence. They can sink into sentimentality, platitude, and bathos. They can encourage blind credulity and discourage thoughtfulness and freedom. They can degenerate into avowed techniques for magical manipulation of the forces of nature and other kinds of superstition. They can arrest progress by failing to adapt to historical and cultural change. They can devote themselves to stubborn and harmful

Points of arrival 119 defense of outmoded beliefs. A particular religious tradition can foolishly arrogate to itself the whole of religious truth, losing sight of the need for complementary perspectives on this elusive truth and failing to acknowledge or come to terms with its ultimate mysteriousness or transcendence of all such perspectives. Religions have often bestowed blessings on humanity, but they have also often been its scourge. They have been a scourge to the natural world when they have sanctioned the idea that humans are separate from nature and entitled to treat it as nothing more than a collection of resources ripe for human use, enjoyment, and exploitation. It would be folly to think that everything about religion is detrimental and therefore disposable, even as it would be fallacious to think that everything about religion is inevitably hopeful and good. The former attitude ignores the tremendous potential for good resident in the religions of the world. Religions are undeniably in need of continuous reinterpretation and reform. There are old beliefs, attitudes, and approaches that need to be rooted up in order that new ones can be planted. The close connection between faith and freedom I am calling attention to in this book gives special emphasis to this pressing need. Religions are worth reforming because of the inexhaustible resources they possess for promoting individual and social flourishing, and for motivating mutually beneficial relations between humans and other natural beings.

Wisdom of the Hebrew Bible and the Christian New Testament The scriptures of the great world religions have endured for centuries largely because they are repositories of time-tested wisdom. Interpretations and applications of this wisdom have changed over the course of time, but the basic wisdom has stood its ground and continued to stimulate the thought and guide the lives of millions of human beings through the ages. The Hebrew Bible and the Christian New Testament are not exceptions to this rule. Whole civilizations and countless lives have drawn on these texts, and the ways of life they endorse and portray. I do so at least in part in my own religious life to this day. As indicated earlier, I reject such aspects of these scriptures as the existence of either a dialogical or omni-attributed God; the doctrine of a primordially inherited, universal state of human sin; the apotheosized Christ and his alleged work of cosmic atonement; the dualism of humans and nature; the urgent need for an afterlife; and the absolute religious authority of the scriptures themselves. But I heartily accept other parts of these scriptures’ depictions and teachings such as their emphasis on the indispensability of just laws for a safe and well-ordered state; the redemptive power of forgiveness and love; the importance of faithfulness to high and demanding ideals; the repeated prophetic insistences of resolute justice and mercy, especially toward the marginalized and downtrodden, and their stern indictment of

120  Points of arrival civil and political corruption; the sober, honest reflections on the perils, disappointments, and sorrows of life, accompanied by fortifying messages of courage and hope; the poetic acclamations of the wonders of nature; the evocations of a profound sense of sacred mystery; and, most of all, the extraordinary parables, sermons, and exemplary life of the Jesus of the Gospels. In Jesus, the ideal of unconditional, self-sacrificing love for all peoples, and especially for the poor and needy, the marginalized and discriminated against, shines forth in all of its challenging inspiration and power. The resolute, uncompromising spirit of the love exemplified in his life and mission is brilliantly proclaimed by the Apostle Paul in his first Epistle to the Corinthians. Here is an excerpt from this marvelous chapter: Love is patient and kind; love is not jealous or boastful; it is not arrogant or rude. Love does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrong, but rejoices in the right. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes for all things, endures all things. . . . So faith, hope, love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love. (13: 4–7, 13 [RSV]) I return repeatedly to the Hebrew and Christian scriptures for instruction, guidance, and help. I have not left them behind. I examine them critically but also lovingly. They are an indispensable part of my heritage and have helped immeasurably to define who I am religiously today. Religion of Nature draws on them in many ways, some no doubt unconscious or only dimly discerned and others consciously recognized, as I have attempted briefly to acknowledge them here.

Seriousness of moral evil While I reject the doctrine of original sin, I continue to recognize the seriousness of moral evil. Our freedom as humans is a great and powerful gift. The central theme of this book is its essential connection to genuine religious faith. But there are two sides of this freedom. It can be used for good or ill. When misdirected and misused, it can have disastrous effects. Human history attests to the wrack and ruin immoral, misguided, malicious freedom has inflicted on the world. I reinterpret the doctrine of original sin, removing its literal interpretation and replacing it with a frank acknowledgment of how pervasive and tenacious moral evil has been in the individual and social lives of human beings throughout history. Much has been accomplished in the way of good, but much has also been committed in the way of evil. Moral evil is manifest not only in individual lives – and to regrettable, if varying, extents in each individual life as any honest person will attest – but also wormed its way into institutions as the accumulating consequences and incentives of sometimes generation-transcending series of morally wrong

Points of arrival 121 individual choices. Insidious institutional outlooks and practices can exert influences on the behaviors of individuals acting within them that are often too subtle or long-established to be easily detected or acknowledged as such. Heinous evils can sometimes be committed by two or more persons acting in concert and giving support to one another – evils that each of them would not be as tempted toward or capable of carrying out separately. The motto “everybody else is doing it!” can have malicious effects. Grave moral evils have been sadly sanctioned by religious institutions, among other kinds of institutions. Religiously supported evils such as pogroms, invasions, and aggressive wars have sometimes reached genocidal proportions. Moral evils are even more sinister and destructive in their effects when they are performed in the name and under the aegis of a putative religious ultimate. Oppressive governments have also found support in religious institutions that rely on these governments for favorable treatment in turn. Wrongly used freedom of choice on the part of individuals is a matter of serious concern, and I have been continuously sensitized to it by my religious heritage of Protestant Christianity. This heritage has helped me to understand the many faces of evil and how fundamentally human freedom is in need of counsel, guidance, and strength in its struggles with evil’s enticements. It has also made me aware of how much we are in need of forgiveness for wrong doings to which we willingly submit, for reconciliation with those we have wronged, and for ministrations of love that can give us encouragement and hope for the future. I once looked to God as the primary source of such guidance and forgiveness. In the absence of God, I realize that we must look to one another. Thanks to my religious upbringing, I have an abiding sense of the depths of moral evil, of the corruptions of the human heart, and of the desperate human need to recognize, cope with, and prevent moral evil its many guises. The problem of moral evil and the shame, guilt, hurt, and destruction to which it gives rise are central to all religious traditions, but they have had special resonance in my life because of the particular religious tradition in which I have been reared. I do not believe in either an essential goodness or an essential evil of human nature, because I do not think of human nature as invariably directed in either of these respects. Our freedom to perform good actions and to become progressively good persons is real, but so is our temptation to do evil and to undergo progressive degenerations of character. We are finally responsible for what we choose to become. Our freedom is conditioned in many different ways, and we need to acknowledge these conditioning factors as we assess our personal responsibilities and the responsibilities of others. We are not all equally free, as I argued earlier. But only in the most extreme cases could it be rightly said that freedom and its responsibilities for immoral actions are totally absent in a human life. Since genuinely free acts are not totally explicable in terms of conditioning causes, there is a mystery about them that cannot be causally resolved

122  Points of arrival and must be kept constantly in mind. Why do we perform those evil acts that we know full well to be evil, to be likely to inflict bad consequences on ourselves as well as others, and for which the underlying motives have no clear explanation or justification? How could we possibly presume to be able to explain the horrible choices of human beings that led up to and gave support to the Nazi Holocaust? I have always been fascinated by the ancient myth of the fall of Satan from heaven. In his great epic poem Paradise Lost John Milton (2003) attributes Satan’s fall to the motivation of preferring to rule in hell instead of being ruled by God in heaven. But what if his decision to defy God had no clear motivation of a causal kind? Surely, he was smart enough to know that his decision would bring ultimate ruin on him and his minions. Surely, he knew that he would not begin to compete with the power of goodness or the power of God. In such a case, we have the specter of evil choices without self-aggrandizing motivation, of choices made entirely for the goal of evil itself, and for no other presumed end. Maybe Satan chose to defy God just for the hell of it! And perhaps – no, I should say probably – we humans are capable of choosing and acting in this way as well. There are cases of human evil like this or at least very close to being like it. Some evils are far beyond explanation or excuse, and realization of this fact attests to the magnitude and mystery of evil. How to put our freedom to its best uses and to avoid the subtle and beguiling lures of moral evil is a central religious problem and concern. Religion is not reducible to morality, but has an enormous amount to do with providing context, vision, and motivation for constructive moral choices, for recognition and avoidance of evil choices, for helping toward forgiveness and reconciliation, and for responding to the plenteous moral evils of the world.

Goodness of nature A repeated phrase throughout the first chapter of the Book of Genesis, as it recounts the successive stages of the creation of the world by God, is “and God saw that it was good.” The chapter concludes with the summary statement, “And God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good” (RSV). This unqualified affirmation of the goodness of nature has stayed with me, even as I have come to attribute its creations to its own internal, self-transcending powers and not to a transcendent creator. The goodness of nature does not center on us humans. We are one among millions of biological species on earth, and earth is a tiny planet located in a solar system located among billions of other stars and planets in only one of the billions of galaxies in an unimaginably vast spatial universe expanding and changing over countless eons of time. But nature has made possible our evolution as a species of life, and it generally nourishes and supports our existence throughout our lives. Its laws are predictable and reliable, providing trustworthy order for our plans and actions.

Points of arrival 123 Our biological makeup also gives marvelous capacities of creativity and freedom that can be exercised within the constraints of these laws. These capacities can be channeled and directed by minds capable of reason, imagination, and judgment, as well as by the special kind of knowledge gained through emotional sensitivity and discernment. There are also nature’s gifts of grace – namely, the gifts of good things, big and small, that are conferred upon or happen to each of us in the course of our lives that are unexpected and not brought about directly by our plans or choices. When gratefully acknowledged and responded to, these gifts can help to aid and guide our freedom to grow as individuals and to make our best contributions to others and to the world. There is a mystery of grace and its goodness, as well as a mystery of evil. We do not choose or deserve all of the good things life bestows on us. Much of life is a gift, and not all of it is our accomplishment. The accomplishment part is being alert to life’s gifts and being ready to build on them creatively and constructively to the fullest possible extent. Above all, nature is a vast field of wonder and sublimity, and we are privileged to be not only integral parts of that wonder and sublimity but also persons who are conscious and aware of the universe with some sense of our own place within it and some ability, at least here on earth, to have influences on it with nature’s gifts of grace, intelligence, and freedom. It is true that nature’s creations and its destructions go hand in hand, the first enabled and made possible by the second. The earth is a dynamic system, and it and its creatures today were made possible by destructions and losses of yesterday – its geological evolutions, its biological extinctions and emergences, its changes of climate and atmosphere, and its continuing creations and destructions in the present. As a system of intricate order and interconnection, the earth and its creatures are also susceptible to storms, floods, wildfires, diseases, droughts, and other kinds of disruptions and disturbances, as its countless variables affect the course of its developments day by day and year by year. We humans are fallible, vulnerable, sometimes direly threatened creatures of a volatile nature just as its other creatures are. The God of the Hebrew Bible can be presumed to have been aware of these aspects of his creation, even as he pronounced them good overall and with all things considered. He has knowingly created a finite world with all of the susceptibilities and dangers of that finitude. Nevertheless, he pronounces it good. We are within our rights, in my judgment, to acknowledge the essential goodness of nature as well. We can do so largely because, when we put our minds to it, it is hard if not impossible to imagine a world without a blend of creations and destructions – one with orderly laws but no possible harm resulting from the operations of those laws, and with no possible human misjudgments or misuses of human choices that are yet truly free. Such an imagined world would have to be devoid of change, because with change there is always loss of something in order that something else

124  Points of arrival can be attained. A world in which nothing bad or regrettable ever occurred would be chaotic because without natural laws, it would have no order and not even be a world. Its human creatures would have no freedom to choose among alternative courses of action or to make mistakes or learn from their mistakes. And the world would be a static world in which nothing new could ever occur. I suppose it is conceivable that there be a world in which all organisms are vegetarians and in which there are no predations of sentient creatures with their consequent sufferings and losses. But it would be a world devoid of the vast variety of carnivore and omnivore creatures that populate the earth today – each with its own splendid particularity of form and action. Disposal of carrion would be a problem. The whole process of biological evolution would have to be radically different, as would the intricate food chains of earth that make use of the energy of the sun. Is a better world than this one really possible or conceivable? I think with the first chapter of Genesis that this world is essentially good as it is, despite the agonies and sorrows, pains and losses, threats and dangers that result inevitably from its volatility and multifaceted character, its complex and inescapable linkages of creations and destructions, its blends of causal continuity and ceaseless change. The harsh aspects of nature should be kept constantly in mind and rightly mourned for the tragic effects they can have on individual members of our species, as well as the individuals of other species. I have them in mind as I reflect at the time of this writing on the destructive effects of hurricanes in the United States and islands to the south of it, a powerful earthquake in Mexico, and raging wildfires in California. Similar cataclysmic natural events are taking place elsewhere in the world. Then there are the tragedies of individual lives such as the births of deformed babies, horrible accidents, agonies of discouragement and despair, and starvations, diseases, sufferings, and deprivations that affect humans and nonhumans alike. And there are the tragedies of human cruelty, greed, prejudice, pride, and indifference that inflict oppression and suffering on humans and other creatures of earth. But these events and others similar to them do not countenance hopelessness and disparagement of the world because they constitute a part – by no means all – of the story of nature. Is nature only partly good, then? I believe that the only kind of good possible is partial goodness, because I have no clear conception of what absolute goodness would mean and for reasons I have already adduced. Absolute goodness could not characterize a finite world or the lot of finite beings of the world such as we and all of the other creatures of nature are. Not every aspect of it will be good from every perspective, in every moment of time, but it is still possible for it to be rightly judged as good overall. And a nonfinite world with no hint of destruction, tragedy, suffering, or evil – and yet with codependent, truly free sentient beings – is not to me even imaginable. It suffers from radical intelligibility similar to that of the notion of a God with supposedly infinite attributes. We might think that we can imagine an

Points of arrival 125 absolutely good world, but I do not believe that we really can. A significant barrier to affirming the essential goodness of nature is the illusion of its unfavorable contrast with an absolutely good world. We humans are part of the story of an essentially good nature. We have the capacity in our freedom to endanger, despoil, and destroy aspects of the natural world on earth, and we have done an appalling job of doing that, especially in modern times. But we also have the ability to mitigate harms of nature that are inflicted, or that we ourselves inflict, on ourselves and our fellow creatures. We have the freedom to love and serve nature even as we are motivated to love and serve ourselves. We can do so with our studies of the etiology and prevention of diseases, our protection of forests and proper uses of arable land, our care for oceans and water courses, our restrictions and preventions of industrial pollutions, our monitoring of ever-growing and encroaching human populations, our attention to endangered species and their habitats, our setting aside of wild places, and so on. We can be tyrants of the good earth or friends of it. We have the freedom to choose not only our attitudes, policies, and actions as these affect the earth, its ecological systems, and its nonhuman creatures but also the lives of our fellow human beings. We can strive for insightful and effective helpfulness, mercy, justice, and love in each of these respects. Our freedom can be informed and guided by proper and empowering kinds of religious commitment. All of the world’s religions have ample potential resources for this kind of commitment. There is a need for widespread awakening to these resources and for their immediate implementation on this good earth and in this good universe. There is no room here for naïve sentimentality or clueless optimism. Countless obstacles lie ahead, and some of them are frankly religious – or I would argue, pseudo-religious – in character. There is also no justification for rejecting the home that is ours on earth, for denying its essential goodness, or for abdicating our responsibility to contribute actively to the earth’s wellbeing and the wellbeing of our fellow humans in every way that we can. Religion at its best makes these convictions abundantly forceful and clear. Any version of religion or type of religious faith that dismisses them, assigns them low priority, or minimizes their importance fails in an essential part of its duty. This is an inescapable implication of affirming the essential goodness of nature.

Pivotal role of mystery I have repeatedly called attention to hiddenness as one of the six rolefunctions of religious ultimates. This characterization can also be stated as the pivotal role of the intimation of sacred mystery in genuine religious faith. One connotation of the term mystery is the absence of relevant knowledge or understanding about something. “I can’t figure out how this thing works! I’ve tried everything I can think of, but it is still a mystery to me!”

126  Points of arrival These all-too familiar complaints express common experiences of befuddlement and frustration, but this is not the sense of mystery I have in mind in this section. The religious sense of mystery means much more than being curious or puzzled about routine aspects of the world or of one’s experiences of the world. Moreover, the typical scientific sense of mystery is not quite what is meant. There would be no science without earnest and sustained theoretical curiosity about the intricate workings of the world, including the workings of human bodies and minds. The religious sense of mystery may include aspects of such puzzlement and curiosity as it strives to bring certain religious intuitions or teachings into clearer, more coherent expression. But this sense reaches far beyond such strivings. The religious sense of mystery permeates religious life and can never be fully fathomed or resolved. In fact, the more it is contemplated, the more mysterious it becomes. And yet there is also an ever-increasing awareness of its necessary role in the ultimate focus and foundation of human life. The religious sense of mystery has resounding overtones of stupendous wonder, awe, and amazement. It incorporates feelings of dependence on and reverence for an ultimate that cannot be finally captured or contained in any conceptual system. The religious sense of mystery is the sense of the radical uniqueness or transcendence of the religious ultimate that is in paradoxical tension with its radical immanence throughout the world. It is also the sense of ineliminable tension between the awesome primacy or overwhelming majesty of the religious ultimate and its healing rightness. I pointed to these and other tensions in Chapter 2. Some of the most evocative, enduring, and instructive forms of religious teachings are those of paradox, parable, and koan that suggest important religious truths but also remind us constantly of the radical limitations of our attempts at conceptual understanding or straightforward statement of these truths. The ominous presence and power of the religious ultimate press urgently on people of religious faith. Its momentous saving reality is deeply experienced but also veiled from routine exposition or explanation. Its character and reality can be feebly adumbrated but never fully apprehended. It is as much felt and emotionally discerned as rationally comprehended, or perhaps better stated, it is known existentially – through profound feeling and ardent volitional commitment; through involvement of the whole questing, seeking, yearning human spirit, heavy with emotion and through a kind of glancing peripheral vision – and not just through directly inquiring reason. This is not to say that the latter is unneeded or of no importance; it is only to say that it is insufficient and inadequate by itself. The abiding religious sense of mystery is a persistent, irresistible reminder of this fact. The religious focus on an impenetrably mysterious ultimate is a muchneeded safeguard and warning, as I have noted in other places in this book, against audacious pretension to be in possession of absolute, non-negotiable

Points of arrival 127 religious truths and to have exclusive resolutions of daunting religious mystery. The felt assurances of personal faith need to be kept in balance with the fallibility of attempts to describe and defend discursive beliefs accompanying such faith rationally. The religious sense of unfathomable mystery qualifies and restrains all such attempts. Dialogue with others, including those of different religious persuasions, is essential to genuine faith. It can call unavoidable attention to and provide help in filling in the inevitable gaps and deficiencies of the religious outlooks of any particular person, group, or tradition. This statement holds true as much for so-called experts in a particular religious tradition or in the field of religion as a whole as it does for the most untutored religious practitioners. As I continue to emphasize, authentic faith is always in process of inquiry, aspiration, and growth. It never stands still. The deep-lying, haunting, consuming sense of mystery keeps it forever active and alive. I do not recall having many discussions about religious mystery in my early religious upbringing. Religion then seemed mostly to be about firm convictions and confident statements of belief. Protestant ministers and other religious leaders more or less told us what is religiously true and to be accepted as such. They did not give indications of doubt or uncertainty in their own faith stances, and they did not invite honest reflection or shared questionings about basic religious beliefs. In fact, religious doubt seemed often to be portrayed as the enemy of faith rather than its friend. But as my own religious development continued, the sense of mystery came increasingly to the fore, and it is basic to my religious faith today and to my view of all forms of authentic religious faith. The Bible has influenced me profoundly in this regard. And my career as a teacher of philosophy has kept me constantly aware of the deep mysteries that confront us humans on every hand. Philosophy is as much in the business of questioning answers as in proffering answers to questions. Plato’s rightly named Dialogues are outstanding exemplifications of this fact, as is each great philosopher who dares to question the elaborately argued conclusions of philosophical geniuses who went before him or her. Then there is the fact of what are often radical differences among the religions of the world. Such things have continued to impress me and to remind me of those basic mysteries of life that invite my own reflection but finally disabuse any pretension to indubitable resolution. Before leaving the topic of religious mystery, I want to testify to the large extent to which my reading of the Bible through the years has brought home to me how fundamental a role the sense of mystery plays in my present version of religious faith. All of the great figures of the Bible were imbued with an overwhelming sense of the mystery of God. Abraham falls on his face in God’s presence at the time of his covenant with God on behalf of the future nation of Israel. At the time of his being called by the God of the burning bush to lead the Jews out of Egypt and toward the Promised Land, Moses is told to remove his

128  Points of arrival sandals because he is treading on sacred ground. And when he receives the Decalogue on Mount Sinai, God tells him that he cannot view God’s face, because to do so would mean death. Moses is placed in the cleft of a rock and allowed only to see God’s back as God passes by. Isaiah’s vision of God in the temple is awesome and clouded with mystery, as is the experience of some of Jesus’s disciples as they witness his Transfiguration. The Apostle Paul exclaims in one of his letters, “O the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments and how inscrutable his ways!” He then quotes from the Book of Isaiah, “For who has known the mind of the Lord, or who has been his counselor?” (Romans 11: 33–34; Isaiah 40: 13 [RSV]). The Epistle to the Philippians speaks of “a peace of God which passes all understanding” (Philippians 4:7 [RSV]). Finally, there is the experience of Job when God responds to his entreaties out of the whirlwind. God tells Job in no uncertain terms that there are countless aspects of his actions in founding and sustaining the immense world that Job, as a mere mortal, could never hope to comprehend. Job finally has to repent of his impudence in daring to question the ways of God and to admit, “I have uttered what I did not understand, things too wonderful for me, which I did not know” (Job 42: 3 [RSV]). It is important to note, however, that it was his honest and unrelenting questions in the face of received and smugly assumed past religious doctrine that brought him to this encounter with divine mystery. The humble acknowledgment of pervasive religious mystery conveyed in these and many other parts of the Bible has deeply influenced me and remains with me as an essential part of my personal religious faith and my outlook on religion in general to this day. The inquiring mind, necessary and important as it is in the life of religion, must be kept in tension with the sense of holy mystery. Thus five features of my religious upbringing and previous stance of faith have been carried forward into my present faith which I label as Religion of Nature. As we have now seen, these features that seem to me to be especially prominent and enduring are the indispensable importance of religion, the enduring wisdom and inspiration of the Bible, the dreaded seriousness of moral evil, the essential goodness of nature, and the inscrutable mystery that surrounds any putative religious ultimate deserving of that name. I want next to indicate four other prominent features that I have added to these five. The resulting total of nine features is not intended to provide a full account of my present stance of faith. But they can serve together to sketch some especially important elements of my current religious outlook and to supplement explications of it that I have provided in other writings. The first feature is my recognition of religion’s intimate relation with the natural sciences. The next two relate to crucial religious implications I detect in the vast and ever-changing universe described by contemporary science, on the one hand, and in its analyses and depictions of intricate evolutionary and ecological interdependencies of life-forms here on earth, on the other. The fourth feature is the concept of a radically incarnate religious ultimate.

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Religion’s intimate relation with the natural sciences Religion that deliberately cuts itself off from current culture and seeks to identify stubbornly and unequivocally only with religious outlooks of the distant past also dooms itself to irrelevance to the present. Religion can continue to be authentic and meaningful only when it takes the trouble to inquire deeply into the complex currents of contemporary culture so as to find ways to reinterpret and effectively communicate religion’s claims to truth, value, and importance within the thought patterns, assumptions, beliefs, and practices of peoples and institutions that are inevitably framed and conditioned – both consciously and unconsciously – by contemporary culture. This is not to say that religion is exempt from duty to be critical of aspects of culture it determines, after due deliberation, to be in need of such criticism. But it is to say that religion needs to keep pace with changing cultures and their outlooks and practices, both in order to remain relevant to the lives of those who are being shaped by these changing cultures and to make searching use of aspects of the cultures that need to be understood for the sake of knowledgeable and appropriate religious criticism. The cultures of the world today are becoming increasingly informed by the natural sciences. The approaches, methods, and findings of these sciences are having pervasive effects on the attitudes, beliefs, and practices of every part of the world from east to west, and north to south – and from sophisticated urban centers to remote villages. Scientific ideas and their accompanying technologies are becoming a part of everyday life and of everyday thinking everywhere. They transcend in multiple ways the particularities of the different cultures of the contemporary world and are providing an increasing kind of common ground among these cultures. The peoples of the world are being brought into contact with one another to a historically unprecedented extent by scientific developments and discoveries. Ours is a scientific age every bit as much as the culture of Western Europe in the Middle Ages can rightly be characterized as having been a religious age. It is a scientific age of increasingly global proportions. To ignore the profound influence of Christianity on the Middle Ages in the West would be risible folly, and to ignore the need to explore ways in which religion can be brought into positive conversation with cultures deeply influenced by contemporary science would be a similar grave error. There never has been a time in which it was appropriate to view religion as being locked in inexorable conflict with science, and our time is certainly no exception. Religion and science speak to different aspects of human life and awareness, but these aspects are complementary, not opposed. They become opposed only when the one field seeks to encroach on the field of the other and to pretend to a broader or even totalistic competence than that to which it is entitled. Issues that are distinctively scientific cannot be resolved religiously, and those that are distinctively religious cannot be resolved scientifically.1

130  Points of arrival And yet each can contribute in important ways to the other, including helping through their appropriate interactions to keep in view the proper lines of demarcation between their respective domains. What I want to discuss in the following sections are ways in which developments in the natural sciences have influenced aspects of my current religious faith but have not tempted me to try to reduce central religious questions to scientific ones or to eliminate the religious ones altogether. When I reflect on the influences of natural science on my present religious outlook, three aspects of contemporary natural science come immediately to mind. As I indicated earlier, the first of these is the vastness of an everchanging universe as presently envisioned by scientific cosmology, at the one extreme, and by scientifically portrayed microphysics, at the other. The second is the scientific explications of biological evolution and of the ecological relationships and dependencies on earth that include us humans. The final one is the compelling religious sense of the radical incarnation of the religious ultimate evoked in me to a significant extent by these scientific ideas. Science is not my religion, and I do not view science as the final arbiter of all meaning and truth, but the character of my current religious faith and the choices that have led up to its formation have been shaped to a profound degree by science. I shall discuss each of the three topics in turn.

A vast and ever-changing universe The concept of a vast and ever-changing universe is the first ingredient of this shaping. The universe as viewed by most scientists is far from being a static system. It has evolved over billions of years into its present form, and some of its most basic constants, constituents, and laws came into being as outcomes of this evolutionary process. The four basic forces – strong, weak, electromagnetic, and gravitational – may have emerged from an original unity or unified field. Electrons and other fundamental particles have coalesced into atoms and atoms into molecules. Stars have evolved, and within stars, heavy elements essential to life have formed. Billions of galaxies with their billions of stars and their accompanying planets have come into being. Earth has formed, has eventually been bathed in oxygen through photosynthesis, and myriad types of oxygen-breathing organisms have arrived on the face of the earth. Thus there has been cosmic, stellar, galactic, terrestrial, and biological evolution. And within the biological evolution on earth, human beings have come into being and their cultural evolutions have begun and proceeded apace. Such evolutionary changes and developments continue to this day. The idea of evolution, which is basic to all of contemporary science, points to the universe as the arena of restless, relentless change – and yet change that takes place always within overarching, continuing order. There are the regularities and predictabilities of causal laws, but these are accompanied by such things as quantum perturbations, phase transitions, symmetry

Points of arrival 131 breakings, and unpredictable emergences. Emergent phenomena can exhibit their own distinctive laws – laws that are novel transformations of previous regularities. Laws pertaining to biological phenomena, for example, are added to those of nonliving phenomena, and the former are neither entirely predictable from the latter nor reducible to the latter. Out of the restlessly churning, endlessly creative and destructive processes of nature genuinely new and unprecedented things come into being. Causality in nature works in concert with novelty, and the alternative, unpredictable paths of change and development to which the concept of novelty points are the keys to all kinds of evolution, as they are to the possibility of human freedom. If there were no novel paths of choice and action available, freedom would be impossible. Evolutionary biology on earth, with its pervasive exhibition of the role of novelty as an essential ingredient in all such change, gives evidence for the existence of genuine human freedom, construed as consciously and intentionally directed novelty or choice among alternative courses of thought and action. It also provides support for the vital connection between the thoughtful exercise of freedom and authentic faith that I am affirming in this book. In addition, this aspect of contemporary science focuses attention on the interplay of continuity and change that marks the history of the universe over billions of years and evidences its spectacular dynamism, grandeur, and mystery (see Crosby 2017a: 57–86, and Crosby 2017b: passim). Cosmological evolution, as depicted by contemporary science, points to astounding spans of space and time in the present universe. By implication, these spans must transcend even the ever-growing spatiotemporal dimensions of our incredibly vast universe. If, as I asserted earlier in this chapter, all change is transformation of something already existing and there is no such thing as change without something preexisting to be subjected to change, then there can be no such thing as an absolute beginning of the present universe. Its currently calculated 13.8 billion-year evolution from the distant past to the present did not spring into existence out of nothing, but was likely due to transformations of the residue of a previous universe. And if the current universe gives rise in its turn to future ones, then each of those will be transformations of what preceded it and made its own emergence possible. The scenario of multiple successive vast universes evolving through endless time staggers the imagination.2 But staggering enough is our present scientific vision of the Big Bang origin of our present still evolving and expanding universe. Not only has our universe stretched over many billions of years into the past but also it continues to expand in space. An estimate of our universe’s present diameter, assuming a constant rate of its inflation, is 92 billion light-years (Redd 2017). We can abstractly indicate such immensities of time and space, but we cannot begin to imagine them. If we take the 92 billion light-years as an estimate of our universe’s present size, what are we to make of its tiniest aspect? The tiniest one for

132  Points of arrival contemporary physics is the Planck length of 1.616 × 10–35 meters. This is an incredibly small number. It makes even a miniscule proton look almost gargantuan in contrast. If we compare this number with the estimated spatial extent of our universe at present, as indicated in the previous paragraph, we get an extraordinary contrast of the currently estimated smallest extent of our universe with its currently largest one. In between these extremes are all of the particles, atoms, molecules, macroscopic objects, living beings, planets, satellites, stars, and galaxies of the universe. If contemplation of these immensities of space along with the earlier indications of the immensities of time do not inspire us with mind-boggling feelings of wonder and awe, it is hard to imagine what would. We live in an immense and truly amazing world. When I try to fit traditional notions of God into this picture, I find that they do not begin to fit. They are modeled too much on one tiny part of the staggeringly immense universe – namely, we human creatures on the tiny speck of earth. I do not wish to argue that the quality of our lives is swallowed up into or made insignificant by sheer quantities of measurement, but I do want to suggest that the universe is so vast and mysterious in its own right, and so supportive of evolutionary developments that have brought us humans and our capacities of thought, imagination, creativity, and resourcefulness into being, that we should give religious priority to the universe itself and not to a humanlike consciousness imagined to have created it out of nothing or out of some kind of preexistent chaos. In other words, consciousness and mind, in this alternate vision, are late arrivals. They are preceded by non-conscious sources of creativity and origination, and are but one type of its countless creations. First, there is nature and then there are conscious beings like us, and not the other way around. Or to put the point differently, matter-energy gives rise after eons of evolution to mind, instead of mind giving rise to matter-energy at the outset. Mind is a function of matter instead of matter being something distinct from mind, to say nothing of being the product of mind. Furthermore, who knows what types of minds and capacities of mind there may well be elsewhere in this vast universe? They may exceed anything we can imagine, and all of them will most likely have arisen from the fructifying forces, tendencies, and capacities of nature itself. This view makes more sense, to me at least, than does creation of the incredibly vast and complex present universe and possible successions of past universes by a postulated divine mind akin in all too patent respects to the limited and limiting measures of our human minds – either that or an alleged divine mind made unintelligible and inaccessible by presumed omni-attributes, as I argued earlier. Our personal minds are impressive and wonderful in many ways, to be sure, but it is hard for me to accept them as convincing models of an adequate religious ultimate. This conclusion becomes even more pointedly evident if I try to imagine such a divine mind, envisioned as creator and sustainer of the staggeringly

Points of arrival 133 immense universe or successive universes, as having regular intercourse with us humans on our tiny earth in a dialogical or person-to-person manner. The notion of God as a personal creator and sustainer of the universe perhaps made more sense in the three-tiered, earth-centered, relatively cozy universe of prescientific times. But it seems hopelessly antiquated, inadequate, and irrelevant to me today. The mystery and wonder of an incredibly enormous nature eclipse for me the putative character and role of an imagined personal God. In my view, nature more adequately qualifies for the six role-functions I have used to describe religious ultimates, and I shall say more about this matter in the last section of this chapter. The vision of an unimaginably vast, ever-changing, restlessly prolific nature provided by today’s natural sciences has helped to bring me to this view.

Evolutionary and ecological interdependencies on earth The early notion of humans as striding like some kind of colossus over the face of the earth, separate from nature in their essence and entitled by divine mandate to manage it as representatives of God on earth, has given way to the scientific picture of humans as integral parts of the evolutionary and ecological interdependencies characterizing all of earth’s creatures. The central motif of both evolutionary biology and ecology is radical interdependence, not subordination of all other creatures to human beings. All of the species of earth, including the human species, are seen to be connected by an evolutionary history that has given rise to each one of them. The helical thread of DNA is common to them all. Extinctions of previous species have made way for the emergences of new ones. And despite the remarkable differences among the forms of life on earth, these are differences of degree, not differences of kind. What before was believed be a radical transcendence of humans over nature, at least in their essential spiritual characters as beings created in the image of God, can now be seen from a scientific and religious perspective to be a radical immanence of human beings in nature with its inherent processes and laws. I see no reason to opt for the earlier theistic view, and I find profound religious meaning in the scientific view. In the latter, we are subordinate to nature, rather than nature being subordinate to us. We are servants of nature, rather than nature being a servant to us. Nature is our home, rather than our being only transients here, destined for some supposedly unearthly, far better realm or state of being. We can thankfully affirm our status as creatures of nature and our evolutionary kinship with all of the other creatures of nature, instead of reluctantly putting up with a presumed temporary earthly consignment – with all of its trials, troubles, and pains – as we look toward arriving at last at our supposed true home beyond the grave. This sense of not really belonging to the earth can contribute to a tendency not to be overly concerned with the wellbeing of the earth and of its other creatures: a recipe for ecological and, I would add, flagrant religious irresponsibility.

134  Points of arrival The sense of being at home in nature is an essential part of the assuring good news of Religion of Nature. Our being finite creatures existing over finite spans of time, as are all other living beings on earth, is something to be welcomed rather than deplored. There is no need to set the scientific theory of biological evolution at odds with a confident religious affirmation of the meaning and value of human existence. Our biological evolution binds us to the earth, makes us an integral part of the community of earth’s creatures, and indicates that this earth is our field of activity and responsibility. It also shows how privileged we are to be such remarkably evolved creatures as to have attained conscious awareness of our evolutionary heritage and to be able to ponder scientifically, religiously, artistically, and philosophically the mysteries and wonders of our surrounding world. We are purposeful creatures, as are all living beings in at least some degree, and our existence on this earth can provide diverse and ample purposes for the living of our lives. We should not allow ourselves to be distracted from finding, affirming, and living in light of these immanent purposes by a wistful pining for an imaginary better way of life or a more satisfying and rewarding world. We can strive thankfully to make good use of all that is available to us here and now. We do not have to live forever to have purposeful, nourishing, and fulfilling lives. Our mortal existence is a gift, not a curse. It is a gift we share with all other living beings. Death is an essential part of the saga of biological evolution on earth; without it, we would not have evolved to be here. And eventual death is every bit as essential to the gift of new life for each of the creatures of earth, including us humans, as is birth. We are born to live, and we are born to die. In the meantime, we live. This is the way of the world, and humans are integral parts of the natural world. We humans are not only branches of the burgeoning tree of biological evolution and, in consequence, interdependent through time with all other forms of life in the sense of sharing with them their basic genetic structures, environmental dependencies, and ways of life. We are also currently interdependent with them and with the nonliving parts of the earth in tightly woven webs of ecological interconnection. The detailed findings of ecological science make this kind of interdependence inescapably clear. They also make clear the grave dangers of foolishly ignoring or trying to sidestep its unavoidable truth. Biologist E. O. Wilson observes, “It is easy to overlook the services that ecosystems provide humanity. They enrich the soil and create the very air we breathe.” The “air we breathe” is the oxygen emitted into the atmosphere by photosynthesizing bacteria and plants. Without it, aerobic creatures such as us could not exist. By their ingestions of carbon dioxide, bacteria and plants in their turn help to regulate the temperature of earth. Organisms within these ecosystems are diverse, with many different kinds of plants, microorganisms, bugs, and animals. These creatures efficiently divide their labor, Wilson notes, allowing them “to run the world precisely as we would

Points of arrival 135 wish it to be run, because humanity evolved within living communities and our bodily functions are finely adjusted to the idiosyncratic environment already created” (Wilson 1992: 347). When we jeopardize the integrity of ecosystems, with their intricate patterns of interrelation and interdependency, we imperil our own livelihood along with the livelihoods of other creatures in these ecological matrices. We have a clear obligation not to do so, based not only on prudential consideration of our safety and wellbeing but also on recognition of the inherent moral and religious values of the ecosystems themselves and of their constituent life-forms and nonliving environments. Thus the folly of ecological indifference and insensitivity is painfully evident not only in destructive consequences for human life but also in devastating consequences for the whole earth and all of its creatures and their environments – consequences we can witness on every hand on the ecologically damaged and endangered earth of our time. Sustained resistance by human beings to such folly and their ardent care for the ecological health of all aspects of the earth are of central importance in the moral posture enjoined by Religion of Nature and in the religious commitment that flows from its plea for humble, dedicated, resourceful reverence for nature. To be morally concerned for humans is inseparable from being morally concerned for the earth and its multifarious life-forms. Human justice and ecological justice are tightly conjoined. The moral and religious outlook of Religion of Nature is deeply informed by contemporary ecological science. The latter has profoundly affected the choices and developments of my naturalistic faith.

Radical incarnation Bhakti Hinduism, traditional Christianity, and Mahayana Buddhism view their respective incarnated religious ultimates as continuing to transcend the earth and to exist in their more basic or true character elsewhere. They dip onto earth, stay for a period of time, and then return to a realm to which they more fundamentally belong. Their salvific presence, ministry, and power on earth are confined to a limited period of time, after which they re-assume their true state. Thus Vishnu becomes Krishna, God empties himself to become Jesus of Nazareth, and the Bodhisattva becomes a historical Buddha. The incarnationalism of Religion of Nature, in contrast, is more radical. The religious ultimate is incarnate because it is none other than nature itself, in all of its physicality, diversity, and dynamism. Nature transcends itself in the sense of surpassing its past and present forms as it relentlessly evolves through time, even to the extent, as I argued earlier, of our present universe being in all likelihood the transformation of an earlier one, and they in turn are transformations of preceding ones. Nature is not only natura naturata or “nature natured.” It is also natura naturans or “nature naturing.” In other words, it is volatile, processive,

136  Points of arrival and evolutionary throughout. Nature continually transcends itself but is not transcended by something other than or more ultimately real than itself. This religious ultimate is at all times radically immanent and radically incarnate. Nature is also noetically transcendent; that is, it is inexhaustibly wondrous and mysterious, forever exceeding even our best human attempts to comprehend, manage, or tame fully its overwhelming majesty and power. Its noetic transcendence is indicated by its indeterminacy with respect to the future, the innumerable interior perspectives of its conscious or nearly conscious creatures, and its vastness of space and time. There is no way in which we could know in fine detail what its character will be in the distant future, nor will we ever be able to comprehend the details of earlier universes from which it may have arisen. Its continuing expansion will soon place its outer spatial limits beyond our ken because of their becoming beyond the reach of speed of electromagnetic signals, if this expansion has not done so already. Moreover, we cannot directly comprehend the universe from the subjective perspectives of its countless other sentient beings. We cannot know from the inside what it is like to be a bee, a bird, a beaver, a buffalo, or a bowhead whale. We can only observe such creatures’ behaviors and try to extrapolate and imagine what their inner awareness might be like. None of us humans can fully comprehend even his or her own self. Our conscious selfhood is too fleeting and complex, and it is underlain and continuously influenced by the dark, unruly mysteries of the unconscious. So the internal fields of consciousness and of the unconscious, both aspects of nature in at least its more sentient forms, are far from being entirely knowable or known. Nature’s character as radically incarnate and wholly immanent does not detract in the least from its transcendence of itself through space and time or from its interweavings of the knowable and the unknowable. The former will always pale when compared with the latter. Nature eminently qualifies, therefore, for the role-function of hiddenness on both its personal and its cosmic sides. Given what I have already said about the cosmic hiddenness of nature, we can witness its hiddenness on the personal side. Nothing we humans can conceive, analyze, explain, imagine, or state can plumb nature’s depths of sublimity and mystery. Does this radically incarnate or immanent nature also qualify as a religious ultimate with respect to the other five role-functions? Let us look at each remaining one in turn. We begin with uniqueness. Nature is certainly unique. There is nothing else like it. It undergoes changes constantly and has evolved into diverse forms and guises with the passage of time, a time that stretches even further into the past than this present universe and will likely give rise to new universes in the remote future. Old natural laws may pass out of being and new ones emerge; older principles, constants, and constituents may give way to new ones. But nature itself persists through all such changes. It is creative but uncreated. It is destructive but undestroyed. It is the source and sustainer of all that comes into existence and passes away – and it does neither. Of nothing else can these things be said. As the focus

Points of arrival 137 of religious commitment and concern, it has a unique place in the lives and outlooks of persons committed to it as their religious ultimate. Their lives are informed and guided by it as by nothing else. Implicit in nature’s uniqueness is a third role-function – namely, its permanence as the focus of religious commitment; that is, its everlastingness or endurance through all time. Only nature can lay claim to this kind of permanence. Everything else comes into being and passes away, including each and every naturae naturatae, or the successive universes or faces of nature, each perduring over vastness of time but each eventually giving way to new ones. Natura naturans, the indominatable and imperishable presence and power of nature itself, persists in some form or other through all of its evolutionary transformations. This cosmic permanence gives personal context, support, and assurance to adherents of Religion of Nature. We do not live forever, nor do we hope or expect to do so. But the nature that gives us birth, sustains us in our lives, and, finally, brings about our deaths is a religious ultimate that gives relative stability and order to our existence, a stability and order within which we can pursue our purposes, ideals, and goals, and, having done so, pass the baton of our contributions and achievements to those who come after us. Nature itself is far from being immune to change, but it is never in danger of passing out of being. There is both challenge and comfort in awareness of this fact. The challenge is to contribute what we can to the ongoing processes of nature here on earth in the time allotted to us, and to give what we can of what we human beings are capable of contributing. The comfort is in knowing that we are parts of a thread of time with conscious awareness of the passage of time, and that we have the opportunity to develop the distinctiveness of our individual lives and their potential for distinctive contributions that are conferred on us by nature. We are not chess pieces moved by relentless cosmic laws but conscious persons with significant amounts of freedom to set the course of our lives and to devise and make our contributions within the flow of cosmic time. Each of us humans is a part of something deeply significant, and we gain our significance in large measure by the contributions we can make, both individually and collectively, to the wellbeing of nature in the company of our fellow human and nonhuman creatures here on earth, and to the ongoingness of the world. Our brief candles of existence can bring light into a world that would be less conscious and less capable of consciously directed acts of freedom without our presence and without the likely presence of other conscious beings in this vast universe with similar gifts. There is sentience among nonhuman creatures on earth, of course, but ours is a degree of biologically and culturally evolved sentience that the other creatures of earth do not seem to possess. Nature confers on us humans a significant range of autonomy and intelligence, and with these gifts comes responsibility to use these gifts constructively and wisely. With this sense of responsibility also come purpose, meaning, and the prospect of flourishing human

138  Points of arrival lives. The flourishing does not come automatically, but, given our freedom and other gifts of nature, it is possible for us to aspire toward and achieve it. The background of our personal and social existence is the permanence or everlastingness of nature. Its foreground is the passing years within that permanence that are given to us to experience the support and wonders of nature, cope with its tragedies and perils, and respond to the challenges and opportunities of our finite lives. We are not all equally privileged or gifted – and some far less so than others – but those who are more so can contribute out of their gifts to the quality of lives of those who are less well privileged or endowed. The healthy can assist the sick, the hopeful encourage the despondent, the rich contribute from their riches to bringing about better living conditions for the poor, the wise help to enrich the understanding of others who can benefit from their counsel, the members of just societies work to ameliorate the conditions of the victims of unjust ones, and so on. Plights of the poor, the meek, the sick, the ostracized, the depressed, and the oppressed call urgent attention to the struggles, exigencies, and needs of life that affect us all and that evoke concern and require attention from all who strive to live meaningful and contributory lives here on earth. We are finite beings subject to the uncertainties of life. We can strive to love one another and to love the other creatures and aspects of nature, and we can do so in engaged, active, and effective ways. In doing so, we learn to be doers of good in the world and alert to its sufferings and evils. We live in a world where causes have effects and actions have consequences. But it is also a world in which we humans have conscious freedom to produce effects and bring about consequences. In other words, ours is a karmic world. What does this fact have to do with the permanence of nature as the religious ultimate? It means that we have the ability to contribute to the process of time, to be part of the complexity of its moments as they flow endlessly on. Our human contributions do not have discernible effects on cosmic evolution. But they do have effects on the continuing evolution of the earth and its creatures, as we can see from the anthropogenic global climate changes we are currently experiencing and from other evidences of the impacts of widespread human actions on ecological systems. Furthermore, our effects on cultural evolution through the centuries, especially through the past 10,000 years, can be observed through the course of human history. The background of our life on earth, with its opportunities for the creative exercise of our freedom, is the everlastingness of an ever-changing nature – an everlastingness that within our relatively brief human stretch of time has made possible all that we humans currently are and have the capability still to become. The measure of the meaning of a human life is what it gives to life, not what it takes from it. “Measure” is a metaphor, because I am speaking of quality, not quantity. We do not have to live forever to have richly meaningful lives. We can have meaningful lives as privileged participants in the ongoingness of nature, sharing and marveling in its wonders and taking

Points of arrival 139 responsibility for the effects of our choices and actions on our fellow human beings, on our human communities and cultural traditions, and on the ecosystems of earth of which we are integral parts. Nature’s gifts of time and of our freedom to act and make differences with our actions in time are significant parts of the religious meaning of nature’s permanence for the living of our personal lives. There is the goodness of nature and of the commendable human contributions to nature and culture that came before us, and there is the good we ourselves are able to choose and create, a good that becomes part of a future to inspire and guide others after us. Time is our field of action, and behind it, supporting it, and contextualizing it is the permanence or endless time of nature. I have had the fourth role-function of rightness in mind as I described our obligations to use our intelligence and freedom to become more fully aware of the forces of suffering and evil in the world, and to become forces that work for the lessening of suffering and toward the flourishing of our fellow humans and of all the world’s creatures. We can do so as expressions of our personal commitment to nature as our religious ultimate and in grateful acknowledgment of the goodness (or cosmic rightness) of nature, the goodness I described earlier in this chapter. We can continue to work toward more just and equitable human societies, with their appropriate political and economic structures. And we can devote ourselves to finding ways to live in greater harmony with nature, by way not only of being gladly at home in nature but also of accepting the responsibilities of being part of the enormous family of all of earth’s creatures and of being grateful participants in the processes of nature that make our human presence on earth possible.3 Nature is cosmically primary by virtue of its being the ultimate source and sustainer of all that exists. For Religion of Nature, there is nothing beyond, behind, or beneath nature – nothing that is supernatural, distinct from, or more ultimate than nature. And nature is personally primary because its cosmic primacy as well as its other traits qualifies it as an appropriate focus of ultimate commitment and concern. Of all things important in life, commitment to nature is for Religion of Nature the most important, and in an abiding sense it is more important than all other important things taken together. Faithfulness to nature in all of its guises – human and otherwise – lies behind, motivates, and informs all other concerns, giving to them their relative priority and ordering. It is the meaning that gives final meaning to all of the penultimate meanings and concerns of daily life. Such faithfulness does not usurp other kinds of meaning but provides the deepest level of inspiration, context, and guidance for their expression. Finally, the cosmic and personal pervasiveness of nature is readily apparent. For Religion of Nature as my present stance of faith, there is no place or time that is unnatural or independent of nature. Natural principles, processes, and laws are immanent in everything that exists, from the tiniest subatomic quark to the most remote galaxy. We are natural beings, and all of our cultural and individual accomplishments are natural – that is,

140  Points of arrival manifestations of our natural endowments and their potentialities as an emergent species of life on earth. Even our most heinous deeds through the course of human history are expressions of our character as natural beings with the capability of choosing between good and evil actions and of resisting or succumbing to enticements of many different kinds to commit evil ones. There are impulses to goodness within us, but also impulses for evil. We must learn to choose the first and to work continuously against the second. For adherents of Religion of Nature, nature pervades personal life in a sense closely related to the role-function of primacy. Its suffusive influences are, at least in aspiration if not always in fact, continually present. One never takes, or is allowed to take, a vacation from one’s obligations and duties to nature. These pervade one’s life. Also pervading the life of naturalistic faith, in principle if not always in fact, is profound gratitude for being a creature of nature with the potentialities and responsibilities of nature’s gifts of intelligence, feeling, and freedom. Nature is not only outside of us. It is deeply within us, and exploration and activation of the significance of this fact, with all of its implications, is a central part of the devotion to nature as the religious ultimate. Nature fully and adequately exhibits for me, therefore, the six role-functions of a religious ultimate. Its assurances, demands, and empowerments flow from this fact.4

Conclusion Every journey of faith is distinctive. There will be overlaps with other journeys, but there will also be differences. This is especially true to the extent that religious persons and religious institutions devote themselves to ongoing inquiry into the basic features of religious traditions inherited from the past in the effort to apply the resources of these traditions to issues, concerns, and prospects of the present. We cannot live religiously in the past any more than we can live there in other ways, but we have much to learn from the past. To learn from it is to learn how to reapply its lessons; how to leave behind those that we deem, on close and respectful analysis, to be no longer pertinent; and to add to features of the past we judge still to be relevant such new features as we also find to be needed to inspire, inform, and guide authentic religious life. I have offered a sketch of my own journey of faith in this and the preceding chapter as an example of such a process of continuing reexamination. Others will come to different conclusions, and we can learn from one another even while differing religiously from one another. An abyss of mystery yawns beneath even the most insightful and prodigious religious visions and systems of thought and practice, and there is ample room for different perspectives on this mystery. The process of ongoing religious inquiry can lead to a renovation of an old tradition in which its materials are reassembled, re-prioritized, and

Points of arrival 141 re-allocated, but in which the final result continues to be recognized and affirmed as a current version of the old tradition. Or the process of inquiry may lead to abandonment of an older tradition and the development of a new one, albeit with aspects of the older tradition carried over into the new one. Or there may be outright conversion to another existing religious tradition or perhaps even to a secular outlook on the world. We cannot know in advance where a process of persistent reexamination may lead. In other words, there can be different degrees of change from the old to the new, but a religious faith that is not allowed to undergo any criticism, reassessment, or change through the years or through the course of an individual’s life is bound to become increasingly sterile and obsolete. Socrates memorably declares in Plato’s Apology that the unexamined life is not worth living (Plato 1973: 23 [38a]), and the same idea applies to unexamined religion. Unexamined religion is unappropriated religion, religion that is kept at arm’s length rather than allowed to function in the heart of one’s being, religion that can have little or no bearing on the central issues of life. The continuing examination that is essential to authentic religion requires continuing acts of honest, thoughtful, consciously directed freedom. The responsibility for such freedom cannot be handed to someone else. Each person must struggle with its requirements to the best of his or her ability. As Thich Nhat Hanh wisely observes, Each of us may have views that we hold on to and consider to be the truth, and we are attached to those views. But if you get caught in your views, then you have no chance to progress. . . . [S]ometimes I have to leave part of myself behind in order to be able to advance on my path. (2016: 153) Each religious tradition must also be kept open to the need for the fresh acts of reassessment and freedom that are required if the tradition is to be kept relevant and alive. If no urgently needed religious questions are raised, no urgently needed answers will be found. Religion will be relegated to the backwaters of life and culture instead of being at the forefront, where it belongs and where it can, if properly practiced and conceived, do immeasurable good. Religious faith is a fundamental guide for responsible acts of freedom, and the conscientious exercise of freedom is the safeguard of authentic faith. A faith shorn of freedom is no faith at all.

Notes 1 For an excellent brief discussion of this point, see Viney and Woody (2017: 234–5). 2 Physicist Lee Smolin (2013: 235–8) discusses and defends this idea. See also Unger and Smolin (2015: 100–61, 262–3, and 357–60). 3 I discuss these responsibilities at considerable length in Crosby (2013).

142  Points of arrival 4 See my discussion of Religion of Nature’s assurance, demand, and empowerment in Crosby (2011: 150–5). The whole of the final chapter of this book provides an earlier description of my personal journey of faith.

References Crosby, Donald A. 2011. Faith and Reason: Their Roles in Religious and Secular Life. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. ———. 2013. The Thou of Nature: Religious Naturalism and Reverence for Sentient Life. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. ———. 2017a. The Extraordinary in the Ordinary: Seven Types of Everyday Miracle. New York, NY: State University of New York Press. ———. 2017b. Consciousness and Freedom: The Inseparability of Thinking and Doing. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Delgado, Sharon. 2017. Love in a Time of Climate Change: Honoring Creation, Establishing Justice. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press. Hanh, Thich Nhat. 2016. At Home in the World: Stories and Essential Teachings from a Monk’s Life. Berkley, CA: Parallax Press. Milton, John. 2003. Paradise Lost, ed. John Leonard. New York: Penguin. Plato. 1973. The Collected Dialogues of Plato, Including the Letters, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Redd, Nola Taylor. 2017. “How Big Is the Universe?” www.space.com/24073-howbig-is-the-universe.htmls Smolin, Lee. 2013. Time Reborn: From the Crisis in Physics to the Future of the Universe. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Unger, Roberto Mangabeira and Lee Smolin. 2015. The Singular Universe and the Reality of Time: A Proposal in Natural Philosophy. CEambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Viney, Wayne and William Douglas Woody. 2017. Neglected Perspectives on Science and Religion: Historical and Contemporary Relations. London and New York: Routledge. Welby, Victoria. 1903. What Is Meaning? Studies in the Development of Significance. London: Macmillan. Wilson, Edward O. 1992. The Diversity of Life. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Index

Abraham 127 absolutism, religious see mystery; religious diversity, approaches to Advaita-Vedanta 31, 44, 66; see also Shankara Afterlife: belief in 107 – 11; and ancient Judaism 42; and tragedies of life 108, 110; unintelligibility and undesirability of 109 – 11 Al-Ghazzali 7, 60 Analects of Confucius 79 Anselm of Canterbury 101 Apartheid, religion’s role in bringing to an end 79 Aquinas, Thomas 7, 45; his religious philosophy as illustrative of jnana yoga 60 Aristotle 45 Athanasius 100 Atonement and apotheosis 100 – 4 Augustine of Hippo: his religious philosophy as illustrative of jnana yoga 60 Averroes 45 Bellah, Robert 37n1 Bergson, Henri 55n1 Berlin, Isaiah 48 – 9 Bhagavad Gita 61, 79 Bible: and Religion of Nature 120; and the religious sense of mystery 127 – 8; wisdom of 119 – 20 Bonhoeffer, Dietrich 85 Borg, Marcus J. 43 Brahman with qualities or without qualities 45, 65, 66 Brueggemann, Walter 98 – 9 Buddha, Gautama: his experience of grace 13; his four “Passing Sights” and final enlightenment 8

Buddha-Nature in relation to the pervasiveness of suffering in the world 30; its presence in all things 88; its presence in every sentient being 76, 88 change as transformation of something already existing ix, 115; applies to changes of religious beliefs and stances of faith 115 Cobb, John B. Jr. 51 complexity of the world and of differences among humans 47 Confessional Church in Nazi Germany 78 Confucius: his religious philosophy as illustrative of jnana yoga 60 contemplative monism 44 – 5; Advaita Vedanta as example of 44 convictional openness as pluralism see religious diversity, approaches to; religious pluralism Cotton, John 55n6 creation: pronounced good in the Book of Genesis 81 – 2 Crosby, Pamela xiii, 95 Dao: cannot be spoken 33, 66; ebb and flow of 76; source and sustainer of all things 88 – 9, 102; see also Lao-Tzu; Tao Te Ching Delgado, Sharon 117 Deutsch, Eliot 55n5 doubt: existential 8; not the enemy of faith 11, 40 – 1, 92; see also truth, existential Drees, Willem 95, 97 Dupré, Louis 17 Eckhart, Meister 43 Eire, Carlos M. N. 71n3

144 Index ethics: and the religious ultimate 104; way of works (karma yoga) not reducible to 65, 76 evil: collective and institutional expressions of 120 – 1; moral and natural 114n1; seriousness of 120 – 2 faith, authentic religious: an act of the whole person x, 4, 11, 23, 73, 74, 76, 80, 81, 116, 126; always in motion, never static x, 9 – 10, 93; and art 79; cannot be coerced 47, 55n6; and conversion 5 – 7; dialogue with others essential to 127; distinction from secular forms of faith 18, 74; and ethics 76, 78 – 9, 104, 118, 119 – 20, 122; and grace 13; importance of seen in its enormous potential for good or evil 118 – 19; and increasing cultural diversity 4; as luring ideal and salvific means 76; negative communal side of 83–87; negative ecological side of 90 – 1; negative personal side of 79 – 83; not identical with belief in God 18, 41; not opposed to science 84; not opposed to the culture of its time 84 – 6; not synonymous with belief 3 – 4, 5, 8; Odysseus and Aeneas as exemplars of 16n4; open to reason 80; opposed to sentimentalism, magic, and narrow self-interest 82 – 3, 118; and patriarchalism 86 – 7; personal and cosmic sides of 18; positive communal side of 78 – 9, 118; positive ecological side of 87 – 90; positive personal side of 74 – 8; requires active freedom x – xi, 67, 81, 92 – 3, 100, 114, 115, 116, 119, 120, 138 – 9, 141; and sense of mystery and wonder 74, 76, 125 – 9; symbolic expressions of essential 73; three fundamental options regarding 40; transforms the past ix; two crucial signs of 12; ventures into the future x, 4, 12 – 13, 114, 115; and weakness of will 11 – 13; as world-affirming 81 – 2; see also role-functions of religious ultimates faith, secular 34 – 6, 77 – 8; as a choice 36, 93; Marxism and secular humanism as examples of 35; as nonaffiliation with religious institutions 34; as non-endorsement of one or more of the role-functions of religious ultimates 35; as rejection

of theism 35; secular communities as communities of faith 36 foundationalism 5 – 6 freedom: compatibilist view of rejected 15n1; conditioned by causality but not determined by it 1 – 2, 11, 103, 122; and conviction 10; existential 9; not absolute 1, 47; options for provided by different religious and secular outlooks 39; relation to grace 13; relation to personal destiny ix – x, xi; relation to religious beliefs and stances of faith 2 – 7; responsibility for acts of in relation to religious beliefs and stances of faith 9 – 11; varying causal conditions of 103 – 4; and weakness of will 11 – 13, 15n3 Galileo, Galilei 84 Gandhi, Mohandas: as example of the way of works 64, 65, 79 goal-functional analysis of religious ultimates 19 – 20; see also rolefunctions of religious ultimates God see monotheism Gospels 79 Guthrie, Stewart 43 Hanh, Thich Nhat 76, 141 Hardy, Thomas 22 Heidegger, Martin 60 Hiddenness as religious role-function 33 – 4; Apostle Paul and Tao Te Ching on 33; as concealing and revealing 34; of nature 136; and paradox, story, myth, and symbol 25 – 6; and permanence 34; and pervasiveness 25, 33; and primacy 33; shrouds all religious ultimates 33; in tension with rightness, and Job, Jews of Babylon, and Jesus as examples of this tension 33 – 4; see also mystery Hinduism and reverence for nature 89 Humanism, secular see faith, secular Humans: conjunction of human and ecological justice 135; as created in the image of God 104 – 5, 107, 133; at home in nature 133, 134; neither essentially good nor essentially bad 121; not separate from nature 104 – 7, 133; responsibilities to nature 125 Ibn Arabi 43 inclusivism, religious see religious diversity, approaches to

Index  145 indigenous religions and reverence for nature 89 Isaiah 128 James, William 3, 42 Jataka stories 79 Jesus 33, 43, 65; example of selfsacrificial love for all persons 120; as God incarnate 100 – 4; increasing identification with the ultimacy of God 101; natural imagery in his parables 88 Jews of Babylon 33 Job and the mystery of inexplicable suffering 27, 33, 82 – 3, 128 Kami 89 Kane, Robert 1, 2 Kazantzakis, Nikos 55n1 Keen, Sam 55n1 Kierkegaard, Søren 102 Lamprecht, Sterling 47, 48 Lao-tzu: his religious philosophy as illustrative of jnana yoga 60 Lehmann, Paul L. xiii, 85 – 6 Luria, Isaac 42 Madhyamika-sastra see Nagarjuna Maimonides 7, 45; his religious philosophy as illustrative of jnana yoga 60 Mandate of Heaven 76 Marxism see faith, secular Maya 45, 65 McKim, Robert 39, 40 Milton, John 122 Moore, Charles A. 57 Monotheism 41 – 5; being-itself as version of 42, 99; central symbol of is human being 43, 98 – 9; dialogical and omni-attributed God 98 – 100; finite God as distinct from the world 61; God as immanent and transcendent 88; God as male 87; mystical version of 42 – 3; panentheism as version of 42; traditional conception of 41 – 2, 98 – 100; and the way of devotion 61 – 2 Moses 127 – 8 mystery: not just puzzlement and curiosity 125 – 6; pivotal religious role of 125 – 9; warns against pretension to absolute religious truth 126

Nagarjuna: his religious philosophy in the Madhyamika-sastra as illustrative of jnana yoga 60; and as mainly illustrative of raja yoga 66 nature: bright and constructive, but also dark and destructive 96, 123 – 4; confers significant amount of autonomy, freedom, and responsibility on humans 137 – 8; continuously transcending itself and not transcended by something more real than itself 106, 136; goodness of 122 – 6; and human artifacts 91; humans as integral parts of 104 – 7, 134 – 5; marvel and majesty of 95 – 6, 123; mind and spirit not separable from 96; as natura naturans and natura naturata 135, 137; a nature entirely devoid of danger, tragedy, loss, pain, and the like not even imaginable 124 – 5; noetically transcendent 136; not focused on humans 46; not personal 96; personal deity eclipsed by 96; pro-life 96; pronounced as good by God in the Book of Genesis 122, 123; as religious ultimate exhibiting the sixrole functions of religious ultimates 46, 96, 133, 136 – 40; sacredness of 46, 88 – 9, 96 Neurath, Otto 5 – 6 Niebuhr, Reinhold 100, 105, 106 – 7 Nietzsche, Friedrich 82; on nihilism, active and passive 93n1 nihilism see Nietzsche, Friedrich Nirvana 66 Odysseus and Aeneas 16 Otto, Rudolf 27 Pascal, Blaise 5, 7, 116 Patriarchalism and religion: Mohammed and 86; Saudi Arabia and 86; see also faith, authentic religious, and patriarchalism Paul, Apostle: his description of Christian love 120; his despair leading to conversion 8 – 9, 11; his experience of grace 13; his references to religious mystery 128 permanence as religious rolefunction 30 – 3; Advaita Vedanta on 31; Augustine and Boethius on timelessness of the religious ultimate 31; its implications for uniqueness,

146 Index primacy, pervasiveness 32; Judaism and Zoroastrianism on its everlastingness 31; of nature 137 – 8; tensions with primacy and rightness 32 – 3, 126 pervasiveness as religious rolefunction 23 – 6; allows for affirmation or negation of the world’s reality 24; of nature 139 – 40; relation to hiddenness 25; in tension with uniqueness and primacy 24 – 5, 126; unique as allpervading 24 Peters, Karl E. 55n1 philosophical naturalism 45 – 6; Aristotle as proponent of 45; Carvaka and his sect as proponents of 46; Lucretius as proponent of 45; see also religious naturalism philosophy: its intimate relation with religion in Indian religious thought 57 – 8 Plato 25, 127, 141 pluralism: different from plurality 71, 71n4; see also religious diversity, approaches to; religious pluralism polytheism 43 – 4; and Christian doctrine of the Trinity 44; and Christian veneration of saints 44; deities distinct from the world 61; does justice to diversity of the world and to diverse kinds of religious commitment 44; gods, goddesses, and avatars in Hinduism 43, 61; and veneration of ancestors 44; and the way of devotion 61 – 2 primacy as religious role-function 21 – 3; entails uniqueness but not the only kind of uniqueness 22; of nature 139; tensional relation with uniqueness 23 protocol statements 5 Psalmist 61, 77, 87 – 8 Qur’an 79; on Allah and nature 88 Radhakrishnan, Sarvepalli 57 reason: includes more than discursive argument and theoretical expression 116, 118, 126 relativism, religious 37, 70; see also religious diversity, approaches to religion: and ecology xii, 87 – 91; four ways of practicing xii; singular importance of xii, 92; see also ways of being religious; yoga

Religion of Nature 46, 117, 120, 128, 134, 142n4; as radical incarnation of the religious ultimate 135 – 40 religious diversity, approaches to 47 – 53; absolutists (or exclusivists) 48 – 9, 79 – 80, 84; inclusivists 49; pluralists 50 – 3, 97; relativists 53; syncretists 49 – 50 religious naturalism 45 – 7, 120; environmental focus of 46; nondualistic and immanentist 46, 104; Spinoza as proponent of 45 – 6; strong recent movement toward in the United States 47; see also nature; philosophical naturalism religious pluralism xii, 37; acknowledges only partial truth in religious claims and traditions 69, 97, 71n2; five emphases of 52 – 3; hiddenness and 71; humility and 71; in relation to the four ways of being religious 68 – 70; as safeguard against violence 70; seemingly required by a high sense of the hiddenness or mystery of the religious ultimate 52 – 3, 55; see also religious diversity, approaches to rightness as religious role-function 26 – 30; the central idea in religious faith 27; character of made mysterious by the Book of Job 27; as confidence in the hope of deliverance from ignorance and evil 26 – 7; and ethics 104; as fascinans in tension with mysterium 27; of nature 139; relations to uniqueness, primacy, pervasiveness, and hiddenness 26 – 30; relations with human effort and will 29; tension with the pervasiveness of evil illustrated in Zoroastrianism 29 – 30; tension with the pervasiveness of suffering in Buddhism 30; threat of predestination to and predestination’s connection with the idea of grace 29 role-functions of religious ultimates: different from religious ultimates’ attributes 18, 19; personal and cosmic applications of 20; see also hiddenness; permanence; pervasiveness; primacy; rightness; uniqueness salvation: yearning for central to religious faith 17 Satan’s fall from heaven 122

Index  147 Schelling, Friedrich 60 Schweitzer, Albert: as example of the way of works 63 – 4, 65, 79 science, natural: biological and ecological aspects of 133 – 5; challenges traditional concept of God 132 – 3; and cosmological evolution 131; increasing global influence of 129; its important relation to religion 129 – 30; science and religion as complementary, not opposed 129; and the vastness and dynamism of the universe 130 – 3 Scriptures, religious: authority of 111 – 13; authority of neither purely external nor internal 113; each of us is the final interpreter of 111 – 12; fallibility of their human authors and interpreters 112; many different scriptures, both within and among different religious traditions 111 – 12; and various translations of 112; wisdom of the Scriptures of the world 119 Shakespeare 107 Shankara 7, 44, 66; his Advaita Vedanta religious philosophy as illustrative of jnana yoga 60, 65 Shintoism and reverence for nature 89 sin: freely chosen 102 – 4; original 102 – 3, 120 Smith, Huston 17, 18, 65, 71n1 Spinoza, Baruch de 45 – 6 Stevens, Wallace 74 Syncretism, religious see religious diversity, approaches to Tao Te Ching 33, 60, 79, 88 – 9 Teresa, Mother: as example of the way of works 64 – 5, 79; her spiritual struggles 64 – 5, 82 – 3 theism: not identical with religion xi; see also monotheism Thirty Years’ War as exposing evil of religious absolutism 69 – 70

Tillich, Paul 3, 99; his religious philosophy as illustrative of jnana yoga 60 – 1 Tippet, Krista 73, 74 Torah 79 Truth: absence of the latter is absence of a meaningful life 7 – 8; propositional and existential 7 – 9, 73, 113, 126; see also doubt, existential Uniqueness: of nature 136 – 7; as religious role-function 21 Vedanta 55n4 Volf, Miroslav 36, 47, 55n6 ways of being religious: each poses a significant choice of focus and commitment 58, 67 – 8; their accommodations to different persons with different predilections, interests, needs, and the like 58, 59; their interlinkages with one another 59, 67; see also yoga Welby, Victoria 80 – 1, 115 – 16 Welky, David 55n3 Wells, Joshua xiii Westminster Shorter Catechism 61 Whitehead, Alfred North 2 – 3, 12, 42, 43 Williams, Roger 55n6 Wilson, E. O. 134 – 5 Winthrop, John 55n6 yoga: of devotion (bhakti yoga) 61 – 3; of knowledge (jnana yoga) 58 – 61; the latter not reducible to ethics 65, 76; of mystical experience (raja yoga) 65 – 8; of works (karma yoga) 63 – 5 Yang, Fenggang 71n4 Zoroastrianism 29 – 30