Religious Truth and Identity in an Age of Plurality (Routledge New Critical Thinking in Religion, Theology and Biblical Studies) 9780367029371, 9780429019678, 0367029375

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Religious Truth and Identity in an Age of Plurality

This book deals with the intellectual aspects of having diverse religious expressions in proximity and the socio-political consequences. It provides a multi-disciplinary perspective on this complex subject, cross-fertilizing work on religious plurality with truth-claims from theologians as well as philosophers from the continental and analytic traditions. The book includes three major parts. Part 1 explores the ideas around religious diversity and truth; Part 2 draws out the epistemic import of religious diversity; and Part 3 concludes the volume by examining the practical and social aspects of religious diversity. Bringing a transdisciplinary perspective to a topic that remains at the forefront of conversation around the religious life of the world, this book will be of great interest to scholars of Religious Studies, Theology and the Philosophy of Religion. Peter Jonkers is Professor of Philosophy in the School of Catholic Theology at Tilburg University, the Netherlands. Oliver J. Wiertz is Professor of Epistemology and Philosophy of Religion at the Philosophisch-Theologische Hochschule Sankt Georgen, Frankfurt, Germany.

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. Gaming and the Divine A New Systematic Theology of Video Games Frank G. Bosman Theologising Brexit A Liberationist and Postcolonial Critique Anthony G. Reddie Vision, Mental Imagery and the Christian Life Insights from Science and Scripture Zoltán Dörnyei Christianity and the Triumph of Humor From Dante to David Javerbaum Bernard Schweizer Religious Truth and Identity in an Age of Plurality Peter Jonkers and Oliver J. Wiertz For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/ religion/series/RCRITREL

Religious Truth and Identity in an Age of Plurality Edited by Peter Jonkers and Oliver J. Wiertz

First published 2020 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2020 selection and editorial matter, Peter Jonkers and Oliver J. Wiertz; individual chapters, the contributors. The right of Peter Jonkers and Oliver J. Wiertz to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted 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 utilized 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 A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN: 9780367029371 (hbk) ISBN: 9780429019678 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by Apex CoVantage, LLC

Contents

Acknowledgementsviii

General introduction

1

PETER JONKERS AND OLIVER J. WIERTZ

PART I

Religious diversity and truth27   1 Introduction to Part I: the truth-aptness of religious discourse and the problem of realism in relation to religious diversity and pluralism

29

SAMI PIHLSTRÖM

  2 Truth, suffering and religious diversity: a pragmatist perspective

41

SAMI PIHLSTRÖM

  3 Truth, meaning and interreligious understanding

61

ÅKE WAHLBERG

  4 Belief as an artefact: implications for religious diversity

75

ELENA KALMYKOVA

  5 Maimonides and Kierkegaard on fictionalism, divine hiddenness and the scope for interreligious dialogue NEHAMA VERBIN

94

vi  Contents PART II

Epistemic consequences of religious diversity113   6 Introduction to Part II: the epistemic consequences of religious diversity

115

KATHERINE DORMANDY AND OLIVER J. WIERTZ

  7 The epistemic implications of religious diversity

127

JOHN COTTINGHAM

  8 Epistemic desiderata and religious plurality

142

OLIVER J. WIERTZ

  9 “In abundance of counsellors there is victory”: reasoning about public policy from a religious worldview

162

KATHERINE DORMANDY

10 Respecting religious otherness as otherness versus exclusivism and religious pluralism: towards a robust interreligious dialogue

182

DIRK-MARTIN GRUBE

PART III

Practical questions concerning religious diversity201 11 Introduction to Part III: practical questions concerning religious diversity

203

VICTORIA S. HARRISON

12 Christians and the practice of Zen

210

ALEXANDER LÖFFLER SJ

13 Reconsidering the concept of mission in the light of comparative theology

229

KLAUS VON STOSCH

14 How to break the ill-fated bond between religious truth and violence PETER JONKERS

246

Contents vii 15 Can religious diversity help with the problem of religiously motivated violence?

264

VICTORIA S. HARRISON

List of contributors Index of names Index of subjects

281 283 287

Acknowledgements

The present volume is the result of an international research project on religious truth and diversity. The members of the group, consisting of philosophers, theologians and religious scientists, met several times between 2015 and 2017 at the Philosophisch-Theologische Hochschule Sankt Georgen in Frankfurt/Main. These meetings were made possible by a grant from the John Templeton Foundation. We are deeply grateful for this generous financial support. It goes without saying that the ideas expressed in this volume are those of their respective authors and do not necessarily represent the position of the John Templeton Foundation. We also want to express our gratitude to the Philosophisch-Theologische Hochschule Sankt Georgen and its staff for their hospitality. They saw to it that our meetings always took place in an enjoyable environment. We also owe words of thanks to Routledge and, especially, to Joshua Wells and Yuga Harini for their support in bringing this book to publication. Finally, we want to thank the contributors to this volume. Together, they brought about inspiring discussions and a concentrated and friendly atmosphere during our meetings. They also made editing this volume a joyful duty. We owe special thanks to Åke Wahlberg who acted as the “secretary” of our group and also supplied the index. The Editors

General introduction Peter Jonkers and Oliver J. Wiertz

The overall aim of this book is to discuss the profound theoretical and practical effects of the rise of (religious) plurality for the traditional idea of religious truth, and their impact on socio-cultural identity. The main perspective of this volume is a philosophical one, but it is also fully alive to the theological, societal and empirical aspects of this topic. In this introduction, we want to give an initial idea of the multiple connections between the three key terms, viz., religious truth, plurality and socio-cultural identity. First, these terms will be placed in a broader, societal context, since it is important to know why they have become the subject of a vivid public debate and a matter of concern to many people. Hence, it comes as no surprise that these terms are also cutting-edge topics in contemporary theology, religious studies and philosophy of religion. In order to illustrate this, we will present, in the second section, an overview of the main topics in the ongoing discussion of religious diversity in these disciplines and link them to the ways in which these questions are discussed in this volume. Given that the focus of this volume is on different aspects of religious diversity, it has to be noted that contemporary philosophy itself uses different approaches to discuss this question, commonly characterized as continental and analytical. Section three discusses this division and how this volume intends to deal with it in a constructive way. The final section pays attention to the strong theistic, Christian focus of the philosophical dealings with religious diversity hitherto, and to the relation between philosophy of religion, theology and religious studies. It is the hope of the contributors to this volume that these insights may inspire theologians and philosophers of religion with a non-Christian background to develop their own ideas on religious truth and identity in a context of plurality.

Religious truth, plurality and cultural identity The main reason for the fact that concerns over religious truth have been mounting over the last decades has to do with the (potentially) exclusivist implications of this idea for other religions and secular worldviews and the fateful consequences for their peaceful coexistence. What has exacerbated

2  Peter Jonkers and Oliver J. Wiertz this problem is that we live in a society that is not only marked by an awareness of increasing (religious) diversity, but also by a strong attachment to socio-cultural – including religious – identities. In this situation, there is a risk that religious truth is being used as a pretext to justify an exclusivist conception of religious identity, as well as a justification to fence off different religious and cultural communities from each other. In order to introduce this complex problem, it is helpful to start by contrasting these recent developments with the assumptions of so-called modernization theory.1 This influential sociological theory predicted the diffusion of an ethos of individualism and instrumentalism in all modern societies, in combination with a procedural, rational and universalist ethics, and an attitude of (almost) unlimited tolerance towards the socio-cultural other. As Taylor phrases it, “the developing power of disengaged, self-responsible reason has tended to accredit a view of the subject as an unsituated, even punctual self”,2 which has set itself free from substantial ideals of the good life by disqualifying them as parochial and dependent on one’s assent with a particular (religious) worldview. Hence, the assumption of the modernization theory was that, with the spread of modernity, the societal impact of these substantial but also culture-specific moral ideals would fade away and gradually be replaced by a global conception of humankind and an ethics of universal justice and equality, and by the universal ideals of individual freedom and self-determination. However, many people have discovered that the replacement of their attachment to all kinds of substantial values by the procedural, formal and individualist ethics of modernity has fallen short of expectations, and that their attitude of unlimited tolerance, or rather indifference, towards the other is not sustainable. Especially when they are confronted with intricate, existential dilemmas, it turns out that a procedural, formal ethics is unable to offer them a prudent life-orientation. In a similar vein, when confronted with the practical consequences of the strange, and sometimes even repulsive, behaviour of the socio-cultural other, their initial tolerance often turns unexpectedly into a militant intolerance against the other and a rigid defence of their own socio-cultural identity. In other words, people’s attachment to their local socio-cultural identities remains much stronger than the modernization theory predicted. The term socio-cultural identity covers a wide range of culture-specific ideas and activities of individuals and communities, like a gamut of mostly implicit (moral) dos and don’ts, ways of social interaction, patterns of solidarity, language and, of course, also religious traditions. Together they form a general horizon of meaning, against which people define who they are and where they belong; it frames their thinking and inspires their practices. The above shows that substantial values and (religious) ideals of human fulfilment continue to leave a lasting imprint on the lives of people, regardless of their assent with the universal moral standards of modernity. The philosophical reason for this is that these values and ideals serve as sources

General introduction 3 that are vital for humans, since they offer them the indispensable inspiration or motivational potential to commit themselves to these standards. As Taylor puts it, “high standards need strong sources. This is because there is something morally corrupting, even dangerous, in sustaining the demand simply on the feeling of undischarged obligation, or guilt, or its obverse, self-satisfaction”.3 Yet, besides the fact that socio-cultural identities have an enduring impact on the lives of people and societies, they have also lost their self-evidence and stability, since they have become plural, fragile and conflictual. There are several explanations for this evolution. First, there are profound rifts when it comes to the constitutive goods and, hence, the moral sources, which underpin the universal moral standards of modernity.4 Almost everyone supports the (typically modern) standard of universal and equal human dignity,5 but the implementation of this standard in individual societies is very diverse, and sometimes even contradictory because, in order to be effective at all, it has to be linked with culture-specific moral sources and traditions. As such, this problem is nothing new, but it shows again that the modernization process, which was supposed to result in superseding these rifts by making constitutive goods and moral sources subordinate to a procedural, rational and universal ethics, has not had the intended effect. Second, people show their socio-cultural identity far more individually and explicitly than before. This phenomenon is a result of the culture of expressive individualism, which means that people strive for an intimate contact with their deeper (emotional) selves, and prefer listening to their inner voice, instead of following existing socio-cultural patterns. They also express their individual identity far more explicitly through their behaviour, way of dressing, social interaction, etc.6 The inevitable flipside of this development is that identities are far less embedded in stable societal structures, so that they have become more fragile. A final explanation is that socio-cultural identities have become the outcome of a complex process of social recognition, which makes them dependent on contingencies of all kinds. Moreover, this striving for recognition is not only a matter of universal and equal recognition (e.g., human dignity), but, increasingly, also of the recognition of differences (ethnic, linguistic, religious, etc.), thus making socio-cultural identity even more fragile and conflictual.7 It is precisely the combination of the enduring importance of cultural identities, their increasing diversity and, hence, their fragility that can produce disturbing consequences. Because in these circumstances people find it difficult to determine unambiguously who they are and where they belong, some of them tend to define their identity in a rigid and exclusive way, thus building a wall between themselves and other societal groups, and making socio-cultural diversity more conflictual. When this wall crumbles, so that their socio-cultural identity comes under pressure, they tend to hold on to it all the stronger, and their initial attitude of tolerance or indifference suddenly turns into hostility against the socio-cultural other as a defence

4  Peter Jonkers and Oliver J. Wiertz mechanism against “the threat of the other”. So, paradoxically, the increasing plurality and fragility of socio-cultural identities has not made people more flexible and reflective in their attitude towards their own identity and that of others, but often rather the opposite. The idea of religious truth typically plays an exacerbating role in this problematic process, particularly if it is used as a justification for an exclusivist idea of identity. In essence, this is because the tension between the experience of contingency and the demand for absolute commitment is much stronger in the case of religion than for other socio-cultural “identitymarkers”. To give an example, language can also be used to exclude the (linguistic) other, but it does not require an absolute commitment; more importantly, it does not have the same justificatory power as the idea of religious truth: people are attached to their native language not because it is better than other languages, but simply because it is theirs, because they are familiar with it. By contrast, when people proclaim that their religion is the only way to salvation and that “error has no rights” or say that the religion of the other is outdated or even foolish, they implicitly rely on an idea of (religious) truth to underpin their convictions. Because of the omnivalence of religion, these kinds of exclusivist (religious) truth-claims and their related attitudes of militant intolerance can easily spill over into other dimensions of socio-cultural identity, thus further jeopardizing the possibilities for peaceful coexistence of different religious and secular communities.8 That is the reason why many people, including prominent political philosophers like Rawls and Habermas, argue that the notion of religious truth has no place in the public, in particular political, sphere. These authors brand religious truth as intrinsically authoritarian and resulting in oppressing the essential pluralist character of modern societies.9 Therefore, they think that this idea needs to be replaced by notions like an (overlapping) consensus or a post-metaphysical justification of political rule.10

Religious truth and diversity in theology and philosophy of religion Against this background of these developments, it is no wonder that the relation between identity, religious plurality and truth has become a cuttingedge topic in theology and philosophy of religion. At the same time, these developments have also laid bare the limits of the traditional idea of religious truth. Religious truth is the cornerstone of classical theism, which can be defined as a philosophical theory about God’s existence and his essential attributes.11 The most important feature of theism is its foundationalism, viz., the idea that philosophy can give a rationally conclusive answer to the metaphysical question of God’s existence and nature, as well as to the epistemological question of the rational status of these convictions. On the basis of this approach, theism was supposed to result in an ideal system of rationally conclusive religious beliefs, which was able to transcend the historical

General introduction 5 contingencies of the various confessions and provide them with a rationally founded common ground. However, it has turned out that theism’s concept of religious truth is problematic in at least two respects, namely, the fact that it ignored the truth-claims of non-theistic religions and reduced religious truth to something purely doctrinal. These problems came to the fore as soon as theology and philosophy of religion were confronted with more radical expressions of religious plurality and started to pay more attention to the existential dimension of religions. These justified critiques of the theistic notion of religious truth present a challenge to theology and philosophy of religion, and, hence, also to the authors of this book: in particular, they saw themselves confronted with the task to redefine the idea of religious truth in such a way that it can continue to play a vital role in a context of religious plurality. For all the authors of this volume, it is not an option to abandon this notion altogether, since not only Christianity but also other religions claim that their teachings are true and that their faithful should believe in this truth and testify to it in their lives. Moreover, not only religions, but secular worldviews, too, claim to show their adherents the way to “true” human flourishing and “true” fulfilment of life. Obviously, these claims need to be critically examined, not only by means of an internal, theological reflection, but also through an external examination, which is the task of philosophy of religion. In sum, the theologians and philosophers of religion involved in this project feel the need to develop a broader definition of religious truth in the light of recent manifestations of radical plurality and an enhanced focus on the existential dimension of religion, in particular, because it is part and parcel of the religious identity of a person or community. In order to introduce the main discussion points regarding philosophy of religion’s dealing with religious diversity, it is helpful to start with the now classical tripartite scheme of positions concerning the relationship between religions (i.e., exclusivism, inclusivism and pluralism). This division has recently been intensively criticized, but it is still widely used. Originally developed for classifying Christian attitudes to other religions, it is nowadays widely used as a model for framing interreligious approaches in general.12 As a rough characterization, it may suffice to say that exclusivist positions deny the truth-claims of (all) other religions (i.e., their veritistic, epistemic or salvific value). The less radically this denial is formulated, the less clear and stable the distinction is between exclusivism and inclusivism. Inclusivism does not flatly deny other religions any value or truth, but only maintains that the value and truth of one’s own religion are unrivalled, since inclusivism considers itself to be able to “include” (all) other religions. Finally, pluralists deny any singular outstanding value or truth of a particular religion; they view all religions, or at least all world-religions, as equally valuable instruments of gaining religious insight and salvation – or claim that we do not have any good reason to think otherwise. Recently, a fourth position, particularism, has emerged, which emphasizes the radical

6  Peter Jonkers and Oliver J. Wiertz differences between religions to such an extent that it thwarts any attempt at comparing religions or filing them in a common scale of value. Sometimes, even a strict incommensurability between the different religions is claimed. Despite the huge amount of critique pluralism has drawn, it is still safe to say that the “agenda for the contemporary theology of religions is being set by the so-called pluralist school”.13 Yet, the usefulness of this threefold scheme has been questioned by the emergence of so-called comparative theology, which can be seen as an attempt to keep one’s particular tradition without foreclosing the possibility of learning from other religions beyond the well-trodden paths of exclusivism, inclusivism or pluralism. These developments in the philosophical and theological discussion of religious diversity have produced a host of epistemological questions. At least since the days of the Enlightenment and up to the present day, the diversity of seemingly incompatible religious beliefs has been used to undermine the rationality of religious belief in different ways. The problem of the contingency of one’s religious identity, for example, implies that one’s religious affiliation largely depends on accidental factors, like the place and time of one’s birth. This view seems to favour a view of religious beliefs as merely a matter of good or bad luck and therefore as something irrational. This argument, which is also proposed by pluralistic theists, is sometimes not only less convincing than it prima facie appears, but also fires back to the one who proposes it because the position of the person who proposes this contingency argument itself seems to be the product of contingent factors in the history of this person. Another strand of the debate on the apparent negative epistemic consequences of religious diversity dwells on the fact that, due to their incompatible truth-claims, not all religions can be true. Hence, as we have no good reason for viewing one religion as more likely true than others, religious believers should retreat to an agnostic stance. The discussion of the epistemic consequences of religious diversity in analytic philosophy has gained momentum since the recent development of social epistemology and especially its discussion of peer disagreement (i.e., disagreement between people who are epistemically on a par concerning the topic of their disagreement). The question of the rational reaction to peer disagreement becomes relevant for the discussion of religious diversity when one accepts the possibility that religious others may be potential epistemic peers. If persistent rational peer disagreements were impossible, this would mean that religious doctrines, which in most cases seem to be objects of persistent disagreement, fall outside the purview of human reason. The problem of the accidental character of one’s belonging to a particular tradition, and its consequence for the rational status of religious beliefs and identity in general, also becomes manifest in the hotly debated question of the criteria for the discernment of religions other than one’s own. Some even call it the crucial question of contemporary theology of religion.14 One can roughly distinguish two positions: universalists who claim that there are universal, tradition-independent objective criteria, and particularists who

General introduction 7 deny this and argue that an evaluation is only possible with the help of criteria immanent to individual traditions.15 Both positions have corresponding strengths and weaknesses. Universalists have to face the problem that, apart from rather formal criteria (like the principle of non-contradiction), there are only few criteria that may earn near-universal acceptance in religious matters. Moreover, it seems that even the application of more or less universally accepted formal criteria is “coloured” by a particular religious tradition. Hence, the problem of universal criteria re-emerges on the practical level of their application. Nevertheless, that should not divert from the fact that there are some formal near-universal criteria which – even if not guaranteeing strict agreement – at least limit the range of possible rational disagreement about the outcome of interreligious discernment (e.g., the criteria of consistency and coherence). On the other hand, particularists face the threat of relativism and the problem of self-defeat (or self-weakening). Furthermore, the question arises how interreligious dialogue, which includes dialogue about doctrinal matters, would be possible when different religions persistently use different (kinds of) criteria or apply them in hugely different ways. However, particularism offers the opportunity to develop criteria that are accepted by the respective religions because these criteria have their base in these religious traditions themselves. So attempts to justify values like tolerance in the respective traditions have the merit and advantage that these values will not be seen as imposed from outside and, therefore, have better chances of acceptance by the members of the respective tradition.16 Yet, in extreme situations, particularism is liable to the risk that people become encapsulated in their own tradition, so that they are not able or willing to deal critically with their own tradition and to expand their horizon – a threat that is especially pertinent in the field of religion. In order to avoid this risk, philosophy of religion points to the need for religious humility and a critical reflection on one’s own religious tradition. Welcoming religious diversity may even prove to be cognitively and religiously fruitful, since it helps us to highlight our unquestioned assumptions and biases and delivers evidence we would otherwise likely have missed. The question of particularity also emerges in connection with interreligious hermeneutics, which deals with the effects of interreligious encounters on one’s understanding of one’s own and the other’s religious traditions, as well as on the hermeneutical principles needed to realize this double understanding. Should a tradition only be interpreted according to its own explicit or implicit hermeneutic rules or practices, or is it possible to interpret it on the basis of alien hermeneutic principles? The latter hermeneutical attitude is a condition of possibility for a positive attitude towards the beliefs of the religious other and dialogical openness. More practical questions have also become new focal topoi as a result of philosophy of religion’s dealing with religious diversity, such as multiple belonging, multiple religious practices and conditions for fruitful

8  Peter Jonkers and Oliver J. Wiertz interreligious dialogues, including the topic of religious hospitality. Especially in these contexts, the focus is not primarily on doctrinal matters, as happens often when dealing with religious diversity, but rather on the corporeal and practical aspects of religions and their cultural contexts. Important questions in this respect concern the possibility to communicate existential experiences like those of suffering across the borders of particular religious traditions, the role of bodily and ritual aspects of religious identity, and the legitimacy of missionary activity and “church planting” in a context of religious diversity. Against this background, one of the most urgent practical challenges for philosophy of religion is to understand and respond to the rise of religiously motivated violence and intolerance. Are there concrete forms of interreligious encounter that allow a really dialogical and peaceful attitude towards other religions without sacrificing one’s religious identity? Is it more effective to deal with religious extremism from an external or rather from an internal perspective? After this general overview of how religious diversity raises a host of new questions to contemporary philosophy of religion, let us turn to how the authors of this volume respond to these challenges. As the title of this volume already indicates, the focus of their answers is on the consequences of religious diversity for religious truth and the identity of a community of faith. The three-partite division of this book already shows how these answers are arranged: (1) the concept of religious truth needs to be redefined in the light of the rise of religious diversity; (2) religious diversity has major consequences for the epistemic status of religious truth-claims; (3) the ways in which religious truth and diversity interact have far-reaching consequences for the possibility of multiple religious belonging, the legitimacy of missionary activity, and the peaceful co-existence of different religious communities. This means that the issues of religious exclusivism/inclusivism/ pluralism, the contingency of religious beliefs, the possibility of peer disagreement in religious matters, universalism versus particularism regarding criteria for religious discernment and hermeneutic principles for interreligious understanding and, finally, the many practical questions that religious diversity raises will be addressed in various ways throughout the three parts of this volume. The leading question of the first part is a metaphysical one: assuming that one cannot do without the concept of religious truth, but also that this concept needs to be redefined in order to avoid exclusivism, what would an alternative idea of religious truth look like? Sami Pihlström argues that philosophical pragmatism can offer an idea of religious truth that welcomes religious diversity, thus showing a way out of the deadlock of universalism versus particularism. Because classical metaphysical realism can easily lead to religious exclusivism, the question is whether pragmatism can reject this extreme position without yielding to its opposite, viz., anti-realism, which is equally problematic. The solution pragmatism offers is a contextual view of realism, which means that

General introduction 9 religious truth-claims are linked to a specific religious context, not to reality as such. Furthermore, this link is not only situated on a theoretical, but also on a practical level. This practical focus of pragmatism ensures that the brute reality of pain, suffering, evil and death has to be acknowledged, since our metaphysical categorizations of reality depend not only on our theoretical, but also on our ethical and political perspectives. Moreover, the practical dimension of pragmatism and the contextual realism it implies prevents that the acceptance of multiple religious contexts leads to a particularism, which holds that there are no normative standards for our ethical and political choices for rival perspectives insofar as they transcend individual religious traditions. A way to make these two new insights regarding religious truth more concrete is the notion of acknowledgement, in particular, the acknowledgement of the other’s suffering as something real. This leads to a broader, non-foundationalist notion of religious truth, which enables us to communicate suffering and other existential experiences across the borders of particular religious traditions. In sum, in comparison to classical theism, the innovative character of pragmatism consists in its success to contextualize the idea of religious truth without abandoning it altogether, and to link a metaphysical account of religious truth with the ethical pursuit of truthfulness. Åke Wahlberg proposes a different way out of the deadlock of universalism versus particularism by defending an objective understanding of religious truth. He argues that this approach does not inevitably lead to religious exclusivism, but rather makes substantial interreligious dialogue and inter-cultural understanding possible. Wahlberg examines the idea of dialogical truth by exploring its relation with linguistic interaction, and comes to the conclusion that truth has to be treated as a concept that only receives its content through actual linguistic interaction. He thereby draws on Davidson’s account of truth and meaning, according to which the concept of truth depends for its explication on our understanding of linguistic meaning. Hence, it makes no sense to try to define the concept of truth as such; instead, truth has to be treated as an undefined concept within a theory of human speech and behaviour, a concept that only receives its content through actual linguistic interaction. Therefore, this elucidation of truth ends up locating this concept in the intersubjective ability of rational agents to use language. Via the attitude of belief, the meaning of our words is intertwined with what we take to be true. Hence, Wahlberg does not want to drop the idea of religious truth, but instead stresses the necessity of an objective understanding of truth: the only way for an interpreter to enter into the intensional realm of belief and meaning of a speaker is to ascribe beliefs to her. Only because truth-values are objective (i.e., independent of the thinking and believing of rational agents), can different persons apprehend which beliefs other persons actually are likely to entertain. Meaning and belief are therefore essentially dependent on a social context, and the situation of linguistic interaction is indeed the right locus for an analysis of the conceptual

10  Peter Jonkers and Oliver J. Wiertz ramifications of truth. The consequence of these insights for the hermeneutics of interreligious dialogue is that only by discussing what actually is to be deemed true and for what reasons, adherents to diverse religious communities can jointly find the common ground on which mutual understanding is possible and, hence, make room for new conceptualizations. Elena Kalmykova develops a concrete, non-exclusivist approach of the idea of religious truth from the perspective of religious studies. She proposes to treat central doctrinal statements, like “God is triune”, not as theoretical propositions but, rather, as sacred artefacts. She underpins this hypothesis by pointing to the empirical fact that even the most fervent believers are rather ignorant of the doctrines of their religion and certainly do not attribute the same central role to them as philosophers of religion and theologians. Yet, ordinary believers cherish these doctrines as an important part of their religious identity and defend them if they come under attack. This also applies to the role that the idea of religious truth has for these believers. In order to solve this discrepancy, Kalmykova argues that a religious attitude is not only directed towards the contents of a doctrinal statement, but also towards the statement itself. This attitude is reached as a result of embodied action rather than through mental comprehension. This insight leads her to propose that believers often hold doctrinal statements not only as (cognitive) representations, but also and even primarily as sacred artefacts. In order to explain this idea, Kalmykova compares doctrinal beliefs with icons in Orthodox Christianity. In particular, icons are set apart from profane counterparts and prohibited from being changed by lay people. They are accepted because of their proper origin and the authority of the person who transmits them, and they are used to scaffold religious actions and thinking. Obviously, these insights have far-reaching implications for religious truth and identity in an age of plurality. One implication is that, in interreligious dialogue, religious doctrines should be treated with due respect and without attempts to challenge them, just like religious artefacts. Another is that doctrinal beliefs comprise truth-claims, but they are not contained in the doctrinal propositions only. Rather, they are reached in the embodied and experiential treatment of the world, where religious artefacts are used as stepping stones for religious action. Nehama Verbin explores yet another way to transcend religious exclusivism and the opposition between universalism and particularism. She employs the notion of religious fictionalism. It is important to note that this notion is not rooted in scepticism or agnosticism, but in a deeply religious conception of divine hiddenness and radical transcendence, and in a personal commitment to the truth of that insight in a life of faith. For Verbin, this insight offers a fruitful way to develop a hermeneutical strategy for interreligious dialogue. She substantiates her views by means of an interpretation of the work of Maimonides, according to whom it is not possible to know God’s nature, nor to entertain thoughts and utter statements about Him. Instead, there is only a content-less, mystical apprehension of the divine name. Since

General introduction 11 the apprehension of this divine truth does not involve any propositional component, one can safely state that, for Maimonides, truth is subjectivity. Obviously, this idea of religious truth as a purely inward, mystical apprehension implies a radical breach with the theistic conception of religious truth as an objective, propositional knowledge about the external reality of God. Phrased positively, Maimonides’ idea of truth as subjectivity implies that all the denominational distinctions, which rest on cognitive differences of opinion about objective doctrines, are dissolved. The result is a genuine mystical fellowship across denominational borders around the mystical apprehension of the name of the divine as a “subjective truth”. In a similar vein, Kierkegaard insists that there is no direct transition from any observable, objective religious truth to the inwardness of faith, but only a leap. In contrast to an objective approach, the believer has to involve oneself in a subjective, imaginative way in the truth of the God-man; through this participation, one becomes subjectively contemporaneous with Christ. So, in a similar vein as Maimonides, Kierkegaard’s radical, subjective redefinition of religious truth is able to cross denominational boarders, as non-Christians, too, can involve themselves imaginatively in the subjective truth of the gospel narratives. The second part discusses the far-reaching epistemic consequences of religious diversity for the idea of religious truth. Many religious believers have only recently become aware of how deeply the encounter with other religious traditions and communities affects their belief in the truth of their own creed, in particular, the epistemic status of religious beliefs. The questions that arise in the wake of this awareness are: Are religious beliefs nothing but contingent social constructions? Does peer disagreement in religious matters make any sense? Are there universal criteria for religious discernment and hermeneutic principles for interreligious understanding? John Cottingham asks whether religious diversity is a potential threat to the epistemic respectability of religious belief. The existence of many religions, and especially the inconsistencies between their truth-claims, are often taken as a proof that all of them must be false. Yet, believers would object that adopting a religion is to adopt a framework of interpretation, which enables the world to be seen in a certain light as having a meaning and value that cannot be derived from its material properties. However, this is hardly a solution to the problem of the epistemic respectability, since different (religious) frameworks of interpretation are so incommensurable that an epistemic convergence of their different truth-claims seems hardly realistic. A viable way to answer this question is to accept the inevitable epistemic finitude of human existence, leading to an attitude of epistemic humility regarding the truth-claims of one’s own and the other’s religious convictions. For reflective religious believers, this means that their faith is based on glimpses or intimations of the divine, but also that they should characterize their outlook in tentative rather than affirmative, let alone apodictic, terms, namely, as a search or a reaching forward to the divine. This attitude

12  Peter Jonkers and Oliver J. Wiertz implies that believers put on indefinite hold the idea that competing worldviews should ultimately converge on the truth, and accept that the religious search will follow many different paths, partly conditioned by historical and cultural contingencies. This solution enables believers to claim the epistemic respectability of their religious truth, but also encourages them not to claim this respectability only for their own religion, but to extend it to the truthclaims of other religions. This approach enables believers to move beyond the traditional views of religious exclusivism, inclusivism and unqualified pluralism. It also has the great advantage of bringing the question of epistemic respectability closer to the existential dimension of religion, so that it may be more promising for finding convergence rather than divergence. Like Cottingham, Oliver J. Wiertz starts with examining the question of whether believers, having no good reasons for viewing their own religion as more likely true than others, should retreat to an agnostic position. In his discussion of this problem, Wiertz proposes that, instead of focusing on the problem of the justification of religious truth itself, one should rather examine the less far-reaching question of the desiderata that should be fulfilled in order to have true beliefs. He shows that religious plurality renders the fulfilment of these desiderata more difficult, although it nevertheless remains possible to hold them without violating essential intellectual obligations. In other words, religious plurality does not fatally undermine the epistemic reliability of religious truth-claims. At the same time, it is clear that the challenge of religious diversity confronts us with the need for an alternative approach of religious truth-claims than traditional theism, which is prone to exclusivism. According to this alternative approach, Wiertz scrutinizes whether other religious traditions are epistemically comparable and how they, in fact, epistemically compare. Such an intellectual and moral attitude also results in a deeper understanding of one’s own tradition. On a metaepistemological level, religious plurality confronts philosophy of religion with the fact that the diversity of religious traditions is irreducible, thus avoiding inclusivism. It also shows that religious traditions have an existential depth, thus avoiding the intellectualist bias that typically characterizes some forms of traditional theism. Katherine Dormandy balances an often prevailing view of religious diversity as something negative from an epistemological perspective by pointing out beneficial epistemic aspects of religious dissent. In particular, religious diversity makes it possible to engage in foundational-worldview disagreement, which can challenge our unquestioned assumptions, deliver evidence we would likely have missed, and expose us to new epistemic alternatives. It can also combat the epistemically limiting groupthink prevalent in secular and religious communities alike. Engaging in worldview disagreement is especially beneficial when it comes to public-policy issues, which is why religious as well as secular worldviews should be part of public-policy reasoning. In order to substantiate her position, Dormandy argues that beliefsystems and their components (beliefs, concepts and values) are subject to

General introduction 13 epistemic evaluation because they are influenced by empirical evidence, psychological and social factors, which are truth-sensitive. However, because these psychological and social factors are largely implicit, and because groupthink is so pervasive in public policy matters, there is a high risk of circular reasoning and distortion of reality. This risk is exacerbated by the fact that belief-systems are deeply embedded in people’s personal and social existence. In situations like these, engaging in foundational disagreement across worldviews yields a number of epistemic advantages that are greater than disagreement within a worldview: external criticism can draw our attention to weaknesses in our own belief-systems, provide us with additional evidence and offer epistemic alternatives. On the basis of a similar, positive attitude towards the fact of religious diversity, Dirk-Martin Grube examines whether this plurality offers a new epistemic approach to respect the Otherness of the religious Other, which would make it possible to move beyond the traditional views of religious exclusivism, inclusivism and pluralism. If successful, such an approach stimulates a robust interreligious dialogue between potential religious peers, resulting in a meaningful disagreement between the participants. Grube asks which epistemic conditions have to be fulfilled in order to make such a dialogue possible. He basically agrees with Wiertz’s realist theory of truth, but also points to the problem that such a realism tends towards an exclusivist stance (if proposition A is true and B differs from A in relevant ways, B cannot also be true), and is therefore unable to accept the religious Other as a (potential) peer. As a way out of this impasse, Grube proposes that the bivalence or tertium non datur principle is not applicable in the case of religious truth, since religion belongs to the realm of human existence, which is characterized by a fundamental undecidability. This position allows us to make a shift from a bivalent idea of truth to the concept of justification. Justification is geared towards portraying reality adequately, but, unlike epistemological realism, it shifts the grounds from semantics to pragmatics. Rather than focusing on beliefs, justification focuses on the question of whether the person holding a belief is entitled to do so. The epistemic advantages of this approach are that it allows for the possibility of peer disagreement in religious matters. It also allows for including non-cognitivist factors into our deliberations, so that it comes closer to the way in which religion functions in real life; and this approach allows for plurality, since justification is perspectival and context-dependent. From this, Grube concludes that the “justified religious difference approach” is the key to dealing with religious diversity in a constructive way: it takes religious Otherness seriously and does not reduce it to some underlying unity. Obviously, the intricate relation between religious diversity, truth and identity is anything but a purely theoretical matter; it also raises a lot of important practical consequences, three of which will be discussed in this volume. First, there is the question of whether it makes sense to speak of multiple religious belonging. If religious faith is indeed an encompassing

14  Peter Jonkers and Oliver J. Wiertz form of life, this seems to preclude the possibility of belonging to another religious tradition at the same time. Is there a balance between identifying with a specific religious tradition and integrating (elements of) other religions? Alexander Löffler examines this problem from a theological perspective, asking whether it is possible to integrate the practice of Zen in a legitimate and authentic way into Christian faith, so that this practice becomes part of Christian identity. He argues that the Buddhist tradition of Zen owes its existence to the loving work of divine providence, so that one has to expect that Buddhism indeed contains God-derived elements of truth and grace, which Christians cannot simply ignore. This positive attitude does not only apply to those elements of Buddhism that can easily be integrated into Christian identity, but also to the treasures of Buddhism that appear to be quite “unchristian” and incapable of reception. This means that Christians do not practise Zen in a Christian-adapted way, but in a way that fully respects the original Buddhist distinctiveness of Zen and understands it as a God-given challenge and opportunity, which enables Christian practitioners to re-explore previously unimagined facets of the Absolute Mystery. The aim of such a Zen practice among Christians could then be seen in the formation of a truly dialogical spirituality (i.e., a spirituality that allows itself to be catered and shaped not just by one, but by two religious traditions). Such a dialogical spirituality does not only refuse to assimilate the other but is actually interested in the irreducible and impregnable elements of one’s otherness. Eventually, this process initiates a process of spiritual transformation that liberates us from false idols and self-images and thus provides an opportunity for purification and greater openness to the divine and the religious other. The actual movens of this process is the mutual discovery of the spirit in the dialogue partner as well as the concomitant recognition and realization that the truth is greater than our heart and even greater than our theological systems. Hence, what is demanded from Zen-practising Christians is nothing less than a proficiency of living in both religious worlds. There is a second practical matter that needs theological reconsideration as a consequence of the challenge of religious plurality to religious truth, namely the idea of mission. Although this idea has a bad reputation in the Western world today, Klaus von Stosch argues that missionary work is an ethical duty for Christians, since they have to proclaim to the whole world that God loves every human unconditionally. Such an approach means that missionary work is a service to all people, irrespective of whether they are Christian or not. Therefore, the Church cooperates with the whole world in working for the kingdom of God, which is always greater than religious traditions can conceive. Yet, besides this attitude of epistemic humility, a Christian missionary dialogue with the world also has to witness Christ explicitly, since he is the foundation of the belief in God’s unconditional love. Von Stosch then discusses the implications of this insight for Christianity’s relations with Judaism and Islam, respectively. First, God’s lasting election of

General introduction 15 the people of Israel shows that, at the end of times, Christians and Jews will equally recognize in Christ sides that correspond to their own shape of hope (and thus prove them right), and sides that surpass their own shape of hope in unexpected ways (and thus show the lasting right of witnessing of each other’s religion). For Christian missionary work, this means that it has to realize that Christians can learn from the permanent challenge that Jewish life poses to them. Second, the question is whether this special relationship between Christianity and Judaism can be applied to Islam, too. Von Stosch argues that the Qur’an offers a foreign prophecy for Jesus Christ, thus representing a lasting enrichment for the Church. For their part, many Muslims explore today whether they can reinterpret the Qur’an in such a way that it overcomes their traditional supersessionism with regard to Christians and Jews. The final and perhaps most urgent issue that crops up in the wake of the rise of religious diversity concerns the link between religious truthclaims, identity and religiously inspired violence. The primary question in this respect is whether religions themselves are prone to inciting violence or to justifying its use. If so, to what extent does the concept of religious truth and the view on other religions play a role in actualizing this predisposition? Peter Jonkers starts with stating that one of the most important characteristics of religious identity is that it often rests on transcendently guaranteed and justified truth-claims, so that a strong attachment to one’s religious identity can easily lead to superiority, exclusivism and even violence. This attitude can give the faithful both the legitimation and the motivational potential to enforce their religious truth-claims upon others, and this can indeed lead to religious violence. On the face of it, the most obvious solution to this problem is that religions should abandon their truthclaims, especially when entering the public sphere, and translate them into the universal language of public reason. Yet, one can ask whether such a translation is not inevitably reductionist, and whether it is possible to make a sharp distinction between a supposedly universal rational core of all religions and their specific doctrines, parochial ethical norms and peculiar ritual practices. Instead, Jonkers proposes scriptural reasoning as a more promising way to hold on to the idea of religious truth, while avoiding that it becomes exclusivist and violence-inciting. Scriptural reasoning asks all participants to recognize the sacredness or the truth of others’ scriptures to them, but also requires them not to claim an exclusive ownership of their sacred scriptures. Such a polyphonic and non-exclusivist discourse results in a respectful understanding of different religious truth-claims and identities in their own right, and thus helps to prevent religiously motivated violence. Another way to break the ill-fated bond between truth-claims and violence is offered by the idea of religious hospitality. Just like scriptural reasoning, religious hospitality manages to avoid the homogenizing tendency of Enlightenment rationality by recognizing the irreducible otherness of the religious other. Religious hospitality accepts the heterogeneity of religions

16  Peter Jonkers and Oliver J. Wiertz but is, at the same time, convinced that communicating with other religions about their most precious truth-claims not only broadens our understanding of the religious other, but also enriches our religious self-understanding. In the final chapter of this book, Victoria S. Harrison analyzes a specific, contemporary example of the relation between religious truth and religiously motivated violence, namely, fundamentalist Protestantism in the USA. Religious fundamentalists interpret the present conflictual relationship between Christian faith and the dominant culture and society exclusively through the prism of the apocalyptic language of the Bible. Their justification strategy typically rests on the so-called dominion theology, which claims that Christians should assert control over the whole of God’s creation. From this perspective, acts of violence are justified if they serve to hasten Christ’s second coming. Although these fundamentalist beliefs seem irrational or psychologically disturbed, Harrison thinks it is important not to discard them, but to treat them as rational relative to fundamentalist worldviews. In order to be effective, one has to criticize these extremist beliefs from the perspective of a worldview with which they have enough in common. Hence, a healthy diversity of interreligious and, especially, intrareligious views can be a vital resource for effectively responding to fundamentalist perspectives. In other words, a pluralist society might do well to encourage theological debate between those religious groups that, at least to some extent, speak each other’s language. This means that intra- and interreligious pluralism not only incites religiously motivated violence but can also serve as an effective way to criticize it. It goes without saying that this book is not the first one of its kind. We will show this in the following overview of some recent publications, and we will also point out in which ways this volume complements the already existing ones. Dirk-Martin Grube’s and Walter Van Herck’s Philosophical Perspectives on Religious Diversity17 focuses on replacing the idea of bivalent truth with the concept of justification. In comparison, in the present volume this issue is embedded in a wider context and showcased as one among a number of related ways to deal with religious diversity. An additional reason why the present volume is a fitting complement to the Grube/Van Herck anthology is that some discussions in this volume are a continuation and deepening of the above anthology (most notable in the chapter by Grube). Chad V. Meister’s Oxford Handbook of Religious Diversity18 is a useful handbook, covering a wide-ranging area of topics in a general overview. In this way, Meister’s handbook serves as an excellent background for the present book, as it sketches the broader context of the questions and problems discussed in this volume. Roger Trigg’s monograph Religious Diversity. Philosophical and Political Dimension19 displays a plurality of subjects and aspects of the topic of religious diversity and therefore points to the multifarious character of the discussion concerning religious diversity, which is also acknowledged in the present volume. Although Trigg’s book offers an instructive overview, the chapters in the present volume deal with religious

General introduction 17 diversity through in-depth studies of specific aspects of it. Meanwhile, Philip Quinn’s and Kevin Meeker’s classical anthology, The Philosophical Challenge of Religious Diversity,20 is a collection of important essays on the epistemology of religious diversity from the perspective of analytic philosophy. In its narrower focus, it is an ideal supplement to the second part of the present book, which continues, broadens and updates some of the discussions of the Quinn/Meeker anthology. Catherine Cornille’s Interreligious Dialogue Series21 focuses on theological questions and positions. Philosophical aspects do not feature as prominently as in the present volume and are dealt with mainly from a hermeneutical–continental perspective within the framework of comparative theology and, above all, includes voices from different religious traditions. This series is a highly valuable indicator of the current hot topics in the academic discussion of religious diversity.

The divide between analytic and continental philosophy All these ongoing discussions resulting from the rise of religious diversity bear multifarious relations of interdependence, and the different positions in the contemporary discourse have presuppositions that also influence one another. It seems that a philosophical perspective with its acute sense for hidden presuppositions and complex conceptual relationships is especially apt as a basis for dealing with these intricate matters and as a basis for further theological reflections. But, unfortunately, philosophy itself suffers from a radical form of diversity, the much-discussed split into continental and analytic ways of doing philosophy, which threatens the usefulness of philosophy for intellectually coming to grips with the problems and opportunities that religious diversity poses. This book is an attempt to overcome this divide, since authors from both philosophical traditions have contributed to this volume and interact with each other’s insights. Another important dividing line is a disciplinary one. Obviously, religious diversity is a multifaceted reality, so that it needs to be discussed from various scholarly disciplines to get a nuanced view of the problems and opportunities involved. This book is a modest contribution to just that: although the majority of the authors are philosophers of religion, this volume also comprises contributions from (Christian) theologians and social scientists, in particular, from religious studies; furthermore, several chapters discuss insights from these disciplines. The existence of a deep rift between analytic and continental philosophy is as much discussed and bemoaned as it is questioned. The difficulty of spelling out the difference between so-called analytic and continental ways of doing philosophy is well known. It is obvious that these two designations allow no neat definitions because each term refers to plural and varied, if not heterogeneous, philosophical traditions, especially in the case of continental philosophy. But that does not preclude the possibility of family resemblances between these two strands of philosophizing, which allow us to delineate the distinction between continental and analytic philosophy (of

18  Peter Jonkers and Oliver J. Wiertz religion). This distinction appears most clearly in the different styles and methodological commitments and in the different traditions of enquiry that characterize analytic and continental philosophy. However, it has to be noted that many contemporary philosophers evade being classified as continental or analytic philosophers. Instead of an abstract enumeration of the differences between analytic and continental ways of doing philosophy of religion, let us exemplify these differences by comparing the views of two renowned (even if not uncontroversial) representatives of these traditions: Merold Westphal and Richard Swinburne. Westphal’s point of departure to characterize continental philosophy of religion is not an intellectual conundrum, such as the logical relation between propositions affirming the existence of evil and the existence of the theistic God, or a theoretical problem, like the compatibility of divine omniscience and human freedom; rather, it is an existential one: the contemporary spiritual crisis.22 If philosophy of religion is to offer some spiritual medicine, it has to abandon its orientation toward/linkage with science and detached objectivity, and orientate itself according to the model of the Hebrew prophets. This need for a new orientation is strengthened by the uneasiness about a scientific approach of religion, since religion is at odds with a detached observation, and rather demands the acceptance of a “desperate need alleviated only by some gift of grace”.23 Westphal enumerates four characteristics of prophetic speech, which have to be transferred to philosophy of religion to make it also prophetic. These are, first, the personal character, which means that a particular person addresses particular people under particular circumstances in particular ways. Hence, prophetic speech is tantamount to the denial of the old philosophical striving for universality and objectivity, as well as of the view of theism as a theoretical hypothesis argued for or criticized with the help of objective arguments; instead, prophetic speech favours ad hominem arguments. The second characteristic is untimeliness, which means a philosophy of religion “conspicuously out of step with the spirit of its times”.24 This leads to the third characteristic, which is the political character of this new kind of philosophy of religion. The question of God is political in character; therefore, a neat distinction between religious and socio-political questions cannot be upheld. The last is the eschatological character of prophetic speech, which means taking seriously the “priority of God’s future”25 over the past and present. Such a new kind of philosophy of religion will not view truth-claims or moral claims as decisive criteria of discerning the right religion, but rather focuses on the right condition of the heart: an unconditional love of God. When one compares this plea for a prophetic philosophy of religion with Richard Swinburne’s sketch of the programme of analytic philosophy of religion and the criteria of good philosophy in several of his publications, profound differences with Westphal’s approach emerge. While Westphal stresses the personal character of philosophy of religion and rejects the scientific ideal of detached observation, Swinburne claims to argue his

General introduction 19 philosophical issues “with considerable rigour and thoroughness”, since this is also necessary in the context of theological reflection. Swinburne bemoans the flirtation of theology with “continental philosophy” with its “very loose and sloppy style of argument” as “one of the intellectual tragedies of our age”.26 These claims are backed by the conviction of “close similarities . . . between religious theories and large-scale scientific theories”27 – exactly the opposite of Westphal’s view of religion.28 Furthermore, Swinburne’s stress of the necessity of precise concepts, rigorous and cogent arguments and a coherent account of God29 flatly contradicts Westphal’s proposal of ad hominem arguments. Swinburne remains silent about the spiritual character or consequences of philosophy of religion, let alone about its political aspects.30 Without claiming that this volume constitutes an ideal synthesis of the analytic and the continental approaches in philosophy of religion, one can safely say that this book tries to combine the positive aspects of both philosophical traditions. Almost all contributors, regardless of their philosophical background, agree with Westphal that philosophers of religion should recognize the existential and sometimes even personal character of religion and integrate this in their thinking. Moreover, the very fact that the focus of this book is on religious diversity implies that the authors do not treat religion as if it were a universal category, but instead acknowledge the irreducible particularity of religious traditions. The “untimeliness” of this volume consists in the fact that, contrary to the popular idea that religions are nothing but contingent, parochial convictions making it pointless to argue about their truth, all authors hold on to religious truth as an essential characteristic of all religions, even though they also recognize that this idea has to be redefined in a non-exclusivist way in order to allow for religious diversity. Furthermore, many chapters of this volume express, explicitly or implicitly, the idea that religion is not a purely theoretical affair, but has profound political implications, which have to be taken into account by philosophy of religion. Last but not least, most authors take an attitude of epistemic humility with regard to their own religion, and even more towards other religious traditions, because of the inexhaustible character of the divine. However, this does not mean that the contributors to this volume have given up the rigour and thoroughness that characterize analytic philosophy. Many of them unravel the complexities of religious diversity with the help of logic and rigorous argumentation, draw comparisons between religious and scientific disagreements and try to define religious and theological concepts as precisely as possible. It goes without saying that the conceptual and intellectual rigor of analytic philosophy contributes substantively to the clarity of the debate about religious diversity, and to a clear view of the nature of religious truth. In general, although all authors are aware of the potentially reductionist character of a scientific approach of religious diversity and religious truth, none of them accepts the more extreme viewpoint of continental philosophy that religion is the opposite of reason, that

20  Peter Jonkers and Oliver J. Wiertz truth is completely perspectivistic so that the idea of religious truth makes no sense or that a metaphysical approach to God necessarily amounts to idolatry. In sum, although there is no use denying the sometimes profound differences in aims, style and tradition, continental and analytic philosophers of religion should not rest content with the fact that “the gulf became so wide that it became extremely difficult to communicate at all across it”.31 Rather, conversation and collaboration are important and may lead to unexpected insights. Let us give some hints how this is realized in this volume. Analytic philosophy’s stress on the cognitive dimension of religion and religious faith, which sometimes threatens to suppress all non-cognitive aspects of religion, must be counterbalanced by the continental thinker’s vivid awareness of the multifarious nature of religious faith and even of religious truth, as Elena Kalmykova does in her chapter. When an analytical philosopher is open to this richness, he or she must incorporate non-cognitive factors into his/her epistemological deliberations on religious belief, as is done, for example, in Sami Pihlström’s and Dirk-Martin Grube’s contributions. On the other hand, it is not useful to completely ignore the cognitive dimensions of religion because religions themselves claim that their teachings are true and demand their faithful to believe them, as Jonkers argues in his chapter. Analytic philosophy’s moderately optimistic view of our capacity to discuss religious matters like the nature of God in a rational way and in agreement with the methodological standards and values of analytic philosophy must not obliterate the fact that sometimes we are dealing with objects or topics, especially in the religious realm, that pose real challenges for our cognitive faculty and human language. Thus, they call for the humble confession that our logical and epistemological apparatus reaches its limits, so that we have to look for other means of cognition, like literature or arts.32 Therefore, at least a moderate dose of negative theology would be useful for many analytic philosophers of religion, while more linguistic and epistemological optimism would befit some continental thinkers (because such optimism is the presupposition of any self-critical philosophical reflection). Such a middle course is steered in John Cottingham’s chapter, whose stress on the tentative character of religious assertions nicely counterbalances the epistemically more optimistic stance in the chapter by Wiertz. Concerning hermeneutical questions, both traditions also clearly differ. In her chapter, Nehama Verbin stresses the radical difference between this world and the divine and the infinite alterity of God, as well as the fluidity and instability of linguistic meaning. Although she uses her thesis of the ineffability of the divine and the refusal to define God as a way to foster interreligious dialogue, a more extreme version of this view can lead to fundamental doubts about the possibility of intercultural translation and dialogue due to the thesis of the incommensurability of cultures. This may result in the thesis that religious traditions are mutually unintelligible, thus undermining the very possibility of understanding the religious other. As positive as the

General introduction 21 effects of this pessimistic stance may be in terms of a refusal to pass definite judgements about other religions, it risks endangering the whole project of interreligious dialogue, as Wahlberg argues in his chapter. In this respect, analytic approaches with their stress on the stability and intersubjective and objective character of linguistic meaning are an important counterbalance, but, at the same time, the above-raised suspicions highlight the difficulties and dangers of misunderstanding in interreligious dialogue, and the threat of a Western bias of hermeneutical principles, which may foster domination instead of mutual enrichment. These threats to an authentic dialogue are arguably fewer in the focus of analytic philosophers of religion. Peter Jonkers’ dealing with scriptural reasoning and religious hospitability is an answer to these threats without succumbing to the contrary threat of making other traditions unintelligible. Also concerning the socio-political aspects of religion, there are characteristic differences between analytic and continental philosophy of religion. The work in the tradition of analytic philosophy of religion often does not pay due tribute to the fact that religions are shaped by cultures and vice versa and are, therefore, cultural phenomena with socio-political aspects and consequences. It is correct that philosophers need not deal with all aspects of their topic (if only for the reason of limits of time and competence). Yet, the meaning of religious phenomena and the conceptions of God are constituted inter alia by their pragmatic-societal effects, so that reflecting on these phenomena means that one has also to take into account these political-cultural aspects. The chapters by Klaus von Stosch and Victoria S. Harrison are a case in point in this respect. On the other hand, the oldfashioned metaphysical way of dealing with God, which dominates analytic philosophy of religion, is a rich resource for discussing practical problems in connection with religion. So, taking seriously the Anselmian insight that God is a being greater than which nothing can be conceived, gives the plea for religious humility a metaphysical-theological underpinning, as can be seen in John Cottingham’s and Klaus von Stosch’s contributions. An example of a blending of metaphysical and societal questions can be found in Jonkers’ argument against religiously inspired violence, an argument that is based on the assertion of the absoluteness of God. Also, the analytic view of faith as a possible object of rational criticism or justification has important socio-political consequences because it may help to prevent the shielding of religious beliefs from public discussion and, therefore, prevents religious convictions from being conversation-stoppers in the public realm, as Katherine Dormandy argues in her chapter. Rather, the analytic approach motivates a rational public discussion of religious claims in the case of societal conflicts (about head-scarfs, female circumcision, etc.).

Normative Christian perspectives on religious plurality A rather unfortunate characteristic of philosophy of religion, which has drawn more and more critique over the last years, is that it has a Christian

22  Peter Jonkers and Oliver J. Wiertz bias, resulting in an undue narrowness, which prevents this branch of philosophy from performing its full task.33 As can be seen from the bios of the contributors to this volume and their chapters, the majority are Christian theologians, philosophers of religion and religious scientists. Therefore, it is no surprise that most of them approach the topics of this volume from a Christian perspective, asking how a Christian-theistic view on religious truth and its robust idea of identity can be reconciled with (religious) plurality. When quoting examples from particular religions, they mostly refer to Christianity (which itself is multifarious). This has mainly to do with their personal experience and professional expertise. It may be desirable that philosophers or theologians overcome their religious short-sightedness, and the chapters by Verbin, Von Stosch and Löffler in the present volume show the fruitfulness of such a “multireligious approach”. Yet, for philosophers and theologians without multi-religious expertise, it is more appropriate to deal with the religion they are familiar with. Furthermore, referring to one’s familiar religion minimizes the need to take recourse to a generic concept of religion, which recently has been treated with suspicion and disapproval, especially by scholars of religious studies. But what may seem at least as controversial as the focus on Christianity is that all authors in the present volume are united in their explicit aim to deal with questions of religious diversity from a normative perspective and also to give normative answers to these questions, which they underpin rationally. This focus on normative questions is characteristic of a philosophical and theological approach of religious diversity – a characteristic that distinguishes this volume from the bulk of work in the field of religious studies. This brings up the question of interdisciplinarity. Philosophers of religion, just like all philosophers, make normative claims (e.g., religious truth-claims, but also claims concerning the compatibility of determinism and freedom or the good life). The normative character of these claims lies in the fact that they are claims to truth, and thus are a condition for the different philosophical positions to claim intellectual respectability. Most philosophers do not merely describe or assess the discussions on such normative claims from an external perspective, but are themselves involved in these discussions (i.e., they take a stand in them). Sami Pihlström, for example, argues in his contribution for a particular position (pragmatic realism) against its contenders (metaphysical realism and anti-realism). With this, philosophers (of religion) are not violating philosophical-academic standards, but just fulfilling their task as philosophers. However, it is also their job to give a fair account of contrary positions and to weigh the pros and cons as objectively as possible. In this way, philosophy demonstrates its aim to synthesize commitment and detachment, to conjoin insider and outsider perspectives and to show that commitment and normativity do not necessarily vitiate academic standards or are irrational, but rather are a precondition for fruitful and rational academic discussions. This makes philosophy of religion a suitable perspective

General introduction 23 to deal with religious diversity and a basis to further theological explorations and scientific-empirical studies of the topic. Above all, with regard to the discipline of religious studies, philosophy of religion demonstrates that a fruitful conjunction of insider and outsider perspectives is possible and desirable, as well as that a normative dealing with religious topics can be rational at the same time.34 With regard to theology, philosophy of religion points out the inevitable philosophical presuppositions of theology, and offers ways for a clear understanding and a critical discussion of them. Therefore, the mainly philosophical character of this volume on religious diversity is not meant as a denial of the valuable insights about religion in general and religious plurality in particular offered by theologians. Philosophical insights may lead, for example, to a deepened sensitivity to the important role of non-doxastic elements in religion, or to the hermeneutical challenges for a good understanding of religious doctrines and their often entwined historical developments. A  focus on philosophical-normative questions does not mean a denial of the relevance of empirical findings for normative reflections on religions either. Interdisciplinary openness is evinced explicitly in different ways in this volume by the contributions of Victoria S. Harrison, Peter Jonkers and Katherine Dormandy, which draw on insights from social and cognitive sciences. Quite a lot of the chapters in this volume have gained much profit from the collaboration with colleagues beyond the narrow confines of their own discipline or school of thought. This shows up in the view of religions as multifaceted and multi-layered phenomena with metaphysical, epistemic but also practical-societal aspects, which has inspired the set-up of this volume. Our volume is intended as an invitation to philosophers, theologians and scholars of religious studies to join and enrich the discussion on religious diversity.

Notes 1 For a further development of this contrast see: Peter Jonkers, “How to Respond to Conflicts over Value Pluralism?” Journal of Nationalism, Memory, and ­Language-Politics (forthcoming, 2019). 2 Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self. The Making of the Modern Identity ­(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 514. 3 Ibid., 516. 4 Ibid., 495. 5 For an interdisciplinary and intercultural study of the evolution and the complexities of this idea see Marcus Düwell, Jens Braavig, Roger Brownsword, and Diethmar Mieth, eds., The Cambridge Handbook of Human Dignity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). 6 Taylor, Sources of the Self, 374–81; Charles Taylor, “The Politics of Recognition,” in Multiculturalism. Examining the Politics of Recognition, ed. and intr. Amy Gutmann (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 30f.; Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 475. 7 See Taylor, “Politics of Recognition,” 25–27, 31f., 34f. For a further analysis of the implications of recognition for religious diversity, see the chapter by Sami

24  Peter Jonkers and Oliver J. Wiertz Pihlström, “Truth, Suffering and Religious Diversity: A Pragmatist Perspective,” in this volume. 8 For a detailed analysis of this relation see Peter Jonkers, “Religion as a Source of Evil,” International Journal of Philosophy and Theology 78, nos. 4–5 (2017): 424–5. 9 See John Rawls, Political Liberalism: Expanded Edition (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 129, 135. Jürgen Habermas, “Pre-political Foundations of a Democratic State,” in The Dialectics of Secularization: On Reason and Religion, eds. Jürgen Habermas and Joseph Ratzinger (San Francisco: Ignatius, 2006), 24f. 10 Rawls, Political Liberalism, 147, Jürgen Habermas, “Religion in the Public Sphere: Cognitive Presuppositions for the ‘Public Use of Reason’ by Religious and Secular Citizens,” in Between Naturalism and Religion. Philosophical Essays, ed. Jürgen Habermas (New York: Polity Press, 2008), 143. 11 For a general overview of theism and its problems see Svend Andersen, ed., Traditional Theism and its Modern Alternatives (Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 1994); see also Peter Jonkers, “Redefining Religious Truth as a Challenge for Philosophy of Religion,” European Journal of Philosophy of Religion 4, no. 4 (winter 2012): 141–46. 12 For an overview of the discussion cf. Perry Schmidt  – Leukel, “Exclusivism, Inclusivism, Pluralism. The Tripolar Typology  – Clarified and Reaffirmed,” in The Myth of Christian Superiority. A Multifaith Exploration, ed. Paul F. Knitter (Maryknoll: Orbis, 2005), 13–27. 13 Terrence Merrigan, “Religious Knowledge in the Pluralist Theology of Religions,” Theological Studies 58 (1997): 686–707; compare as a recent example Keith Rose’s recent claim “that theological and philosophical stances espousing religious pluralism are the only responsible bases for comparative thought about religion. . . . [T]he call to move forward into a more promising, religiously pluralist future is . . . an unavoidable step guaranteed by religious change and the passage of time”; Kenneth Rose, Pluralism: The Future of Religion (New York and London: Bloomsbury, 2014), 1. 14 Klaus von Stosch, “Das Problem der Kriterien als Gretchenfrage jeder Theologie der Religionen. Untersuchungen zu ihrer philosophischen Begründbarkeit,” in Kriterien religiöser Urteilsbildung, eds. Reinhold Bernhardt and Perry Schmidt – Leukel (Zürich: Theologischer Verlag Zürich, 2005), 37–57. 15 This is only a rough classification; for a more differentiated distinction of diverse kinds of critique in the field of political philosophy, which can be transferred to the field of theology/philosophy of religious diversity see Antti Kauppinen, “Reason, Recognition, and Internal Critique,” Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 45 (2002): 479–98. 16 See for example Christoph Schwöbel’s concept of a religiously motivated concept of tolerance; Christoph Schwöbel, Die religiöse Wurzeln der Toleranz (Freiburg, Basel, Wien: Herder, 2002). 17 Dirk-Martin Grube and Walter Van Herck, eds., Philosophical Perspectives on Religious Diversity: Bivalent Truth, Tolerance and Personhood (London: Routledge, 2018). 18 Chad V. Meister, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Religious Diversity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). 19 Roger Trigg, Religious Diversity. Philosophical and Political Dimension (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). 20 Philip Quinn and Kevin Meeker, eds., The Philosophical Challenge of Religious Diversity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). 21 Catherine Cornille, ed., Interreligious Dialogue Series (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2009).

General introduction 25 22 Merold Westphal, “Prolegomena to any Future Philosophy of Religion Which Will Be Able to Come Forth as Prophecy,” International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 4 (1973): 140. 23 Ibid., 139. 24 Ibid., 144. 25 Ibid., 148. 26 Richard Swinburne, The Coherence of Theism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 7. 27 Richard Swinburne, The Existence of God (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), 3. 28 Westphal, “Prolegomena,” 132f. 29 See also Richard Swinburne, “Philosophical Theism,” in Philosophy of Religion in the 21st Century, eds. D.Z. Phillips and Timothy Tessin (Basingstoke, New York: Palgrave, 2001), 3, 5. 30 Which does not mean that he views them as unimportant (Swinburne speaks of a vocation for doing natural theology), but they seem to be not relevant for the way he does his philosophical work. 31 Michael Dummett, Origins of Analytical Philosophy (London et al.: Bloomsbury, 2014 [1993]), 182. 32 This thought is not totally foreign to analytic philosophy of religion as is testified by Eleonore Stump, Wandering in Darkness (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). 33 Kevin Schilbrack, Philosophy and the Study of Religions. A Manifesto (Malden, MA, Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2014), 10–14. 34 Concerning the role of normativity in religious studies see Thomas A. Lewis, Why Philosophy Matters for the Study of Religion and Vice Versa (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), chapter 2.

Bibliography Andersen, Svend, ed. Traditional Theism and its Modern Alternatives. Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 1994. Cornille, Catherine, ed. Interreligious Dialogue Series. Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2009. Dummett, Michael. Origins of Analytical Philosophy. London et al.: Bloomsbury, 2014 [1993]. Düwell, Marcus, Jens Braavig, Roger Brownsword, and Diethmar Mieth, eds. The Cambridge Handbook of Human Dignity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Grube, Dirk-Martin, and Walter Van Herck, eds. Philosophical Perspectives on Religious Diversity: Bivalent Truth, Tolerance and Personhood. London: Routledge, 2018. Habermas, Jürgen. “Pre-political Foundations of a Democratic State.” In The Dialectics of Secularization: On Reason and Religion, edited by Jürgen Habermas and Joseph Ratzinger, 19–52. San Francisco: Ignatius, 2006. Habermas, Jürgen. “Religion in the Public Sphere: Cognitive Presuppositions for the ‘Public Use of Reason’ by Religious and Secular Citizens.” In Between Naturalism and Religion. Philosophical Essays, edited by Jürgen Habermas, 114–48. New York: Polity Press, 2008. Jonkers, Peter. “Redefining Religious Truth as a Challenge for Philosophy of Religion.” European Journal of Philosophy of Religion 4, no. 4 (Winter 2012): 139–59.

26  Peter Jonkers and Oliver J. Wiertz Jonkers, Peter. “Religion as a Source of Evil.” International Journal of Philosophy and Theology 78, nos. 4–5 (2017): 419–31. Jonkers, Peter. “How to Respond to Conflicts over Value Pluralism?” Journal of Nationalism, Memory, and Language-Politics (forthcoming, 2019). Kauppinen, Antii. “Reason, Recognition, and Internal Critique.” Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 45 (2002): 479–98. Lewis, Thomas A. Why Philosophy Matters for the Study of Religion and Vice Versa. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. Meister, Chad V., ed. The Oxford Handbook of Religious Diversity. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Merrigan, Terrence. “Religious Knowledge in the Pluralist Theology of Religions.” Theological Studies 58 (1997): 686–707. Quinn, Philip, and Kevin Meeker, eds. The Philosophical Challenge of Religious Diversity. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Rawls, John. Political Liberalism: Expanded Edition. New York: Columbia University Press, 1993. Rose, Kenneth. Pluralism: The Future of Religion. New York, London: Bloomsbury, 2014. Schilbrack, Kevin. Philosophy and the Study of Religions. A  Manifesto. Malden, MA, Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2014. Schmidt-Leukel, Perry. “Exclusivism, Inclusivism, Pluralism. The Tripolar Typology – Clarified and Reaffirmed.” In The Myth of Christian Superiority. A  Multifaith Exploration, edited by Paul F. Knitter, 13–27. Maryknoll: Orbis, 2005. Schwöbel, Christoph. Die religiöse Wurzeln der Toleranz. Freiburg, Basel, Wien: Herder, 2002. Stosch, Klaus von. “Das Problem der Kriterien als Gretchenfrage jeder Theologie der Religionen. Untersuchungen zu ihrer philosophischen Begründbarkeit.” In Kriterien religiöser Urteilsbildung, edited by Reinhold Bernhardt, Perry SchmidtLeukel, 37–57. Zürich: Theologischer Verlag Zürich, 2005. Stump, Eleonore. Wandering in Darkness. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Swinburne, Richard. The Coherence of Theism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977. Swinburne, Richard. The Existence of God. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979. Swinburne, Richard. “Philosophical Theism.” In Philosophy of Religion in the 21st Century, edited by D.Z. Phillips, and Timothy Tessin, 3–20. Basingstoke, New York: Palgrave, 2001. Taylor, Charles. Sources of the Self. The Making of the Modern Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Taylor, Charles. “The Politics of Recognition.” In Multiculturalism. Examining the Politics of Recognition, edited and introduced by Amy Gutmann, 25–73. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994. Taylor, Charles. A Secular Age. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007. Trigg, Roger. Religious Diversity. Philosophical and Political Dimension. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Westphal, Merold. “Prolegomena to Any Future Philosophy of Religion Which Will Be Able to Come Forth as Prophecy.” International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 4 (1973): 129–50.

Part I

Religious diversity and truth

1 Introduction to Part I: the truth-aptness of religious discourse and the problem of realism in relation to religious diversity and pluralism Sami Pihlström As the chapters in this first part of the present volume demonstrate, the perennial philosophical concept of truth is fundamental in inquiries into religious diversity and pluralism. In order to say anything meaningful about these issues, we must clarify what we mean by truth – in religion and more generally. Truth, moreover, is a key concept within the debate over realism in philosophy in general and philosophy of religion in particular. The purpose of this introduction to the chapter of Part I is to provide an overview of the realism issue and to briefly point out one possible problematic outcome of realism regarding religious exclusivism and inclusivism, in particular. I will begin with brief remarks on standard varieties of realism, focusing on the concept of truth, and move on to applications of these realisms to the philosophy of religion.1 I will then outline the argumentative move from realism to exclusivism that may stimulate criticisms of realism in relation to religious diversity. Towards the end of this introduction, I  will briefly describe the main ideas of the chapters that follow. The very concept of truth has recently been under attack to the extent that we are now believed to witness a “post-truth” or “post-factual” era. It is indeed remarkable how deliberate lies and general disrespect for truth have been turned into politically powerful resources among populist groups in particular. While there is nothing new in this phenomenon as such, internet and social media have certainly intensified these developments. It would be impossible here to discuss the implications of the rise of political populism for religious pluralism, but the fact that truth needs to be defended certainly motivates us to examine this notion in the context of the religious pluralism as well. The ways we talk about truth, facts and reality when dealing with religious diversity are not politically neutral; on the contrary, any discourse on truth contributes to constructing these notions and thus the world we live in. In this context, an important distinction ought to be drawn between truth in a propositional sense and truth in (what we may call) an existential sense – a discussion that will figure crucially in, for example, Hami Verbin’s chapter in this collection. While the “existential” dimensions of truth may be easily misused by political populists appealing to what individuals and

30  Sami Pihlström social groups feel to be true or false without evidence or argument,2 it does not follow that the existential notion of truth would lack value or philosophical significance altogether. Propositional truth is a matter of propositions (roughly, the meaningful contents of sentences, statements, or beliefs) stating how things are, and this notion of truth is traditionally construed as correspondence between a proposition and the state of affairs it represents: if a proposition p corresponds to the fact that p, then it is true.3 We need not, and cannot, here determine whether the correspondence theory of truth or some of its historical rivals is the most accurate philosophical account of truth; in any case, it must be observed that straightforward construals of propositional truth (in terms of correspondence or anything else) may fail to capture the existential significance of truth for human beings. In the existential sense, something  – for instance, a religious system of beliefs  – may be true “for me” or “for us” by defining our relation to the world and to ourselves at a fundamental level, without necessarily being available to a propositional interpretation in terms of true or false sentences or factual beliefs. In one way or another, this (admittedly sketchy and unclear) distinction between two roles that the concept of truth may play in our lives, including our religious practices, needs to be taken into consideration when discussing the diversity of religious truth-claims.4

The issue of realism As is well known, realism has been a major theme especially in the philosophy of science over the past decades, and continues to be actively discussed. According to scientific realism, there “really” are unobservable theoretical entities postulated in scientific theories (or, in a somewhat more careful formulation, it is up to the world itself to determine whether or not there are such entities); those theories have truth-values independently of our knowledge and experience (i.e., they are true or false independently of our ever being able to verify or falsify them); and scientific progress may be understood as convergence towards mind-independently objective (“correspondence”) truth about the world. These features of scientific realism may have more specific applications in, for instance, the philosophy of physics, the philosophy of biology, or the philosophy of history, and it is debatable whether the concept of truth applies exactly in the same way to the truth (or falsity) of historical explanations and (say) physical or biological hypotheses. The realism debate functions relatively analogously in other areas of philosophy. In ethics, moral realism has been a major topic of dispute. This controversy is about whether there are objective, mind-independent moral truths about morally right and wrong. Just like the scientific realist believes in the objective truth-values of scientific theories, even when they postulate observation-transcendent entities, and the antirealist denies that theories have such truth-values, the moral realist maintains that moral statements

Introduction to Part I 31 are objectively true or false (though their truth or falsehood cannot be immediately perceived), while the antirealist argues that this is not the case (for instance, for the reason that moral “statements” are not factual statements at all, but moral discourse, as expressivists maintain, amounts to a mere expression of non-cognitive attitudes, such as emotions). Highly important dimensions of the realism issue are debated within other core areas of philosophy. For example, metaphysicians and epistemologists have explored realism about the past (and about temporality generally). The question here is whether past objects and events exist mind- and discourse-independently and whether statements about the past – analogously to statements about unobservable objects in science – have objective truthvalues. Many other examples of truth, realism and antirealism in different fields of philosophy can easily be distinguished. These are all different local and contextualized versions of realism (vs. antirealism). These contextualizations of the problem of realism are to be distinguished from the philosophical dimensions of the general or global realism issue that concerns the mind- and discourse-independence of reality and truth. The ontological realism question is whether there is a mind- and languageindependent world. Epistemologically, we may ask whether we can know anything about such a world. The semantic realist, furthermore, maintains that we can refer to or represent the world by using language and concepts; according to such realism, our statements about reality are, indeed, mindindependently true or false, and truth is typically construed as correspondence with the way things are. The concept of independence – as well as, conversely, dependence – is crucial for making sense of the realism discussion. According to typical forms of realism, the world and truths about it are (largely) independent of various things: minds; their experiences and perceptions; concepts or conceptual schemes; language or linguistic frameworks; theories and models; scientific paradigms; perspectives or points of view; traditions; practices; and so forth. We may use “mind-independent” as a shorthand for such forms of independence (to be contrasted with relevant kinds of dependence). The relevant concept of (in)dependence is, at least primarily, ontological: A is ontologically dependent on B, if and only if A cannot (or could not) exist unless B exists (or existed). This ontological notion of (in)dependence must be distinguished from both logical and causal (in)dependence. Statements are logically independent of each other if there is no logical entailment between them. Moreover, a table is causally dependent on its maker but ontologically independent of them because it can continue to exist when they die. Having sketched a preliminary conception of what kinds of realism there are, we should note that the concept of truth plays a key role in all of them. The ontological realist, maintaining that there is a mind-independent world, also maintains that whatever is true about that world is based on the way the world itself is (roughly in the sense of the correspondence theory). Scientific realism, for example, typically claims that theories either correspond

32  Sami Pihlström or fail to correspond to the real system they seek to represent and are thus mind-independently true or false. The same holds for moral realism and basically all forms of realism, though there are also philosophers who want to keep the issues of truth and realism distinct and insist on the purely ontological (non-epistemic and non-semantic) nature of realism.5 Let me also briefly clarify some varieties of antirealism. An easy way of listing them would be to just list the denials of the corresponding realisms. However, more specific characterizations are needed. For example, while idealism is often mentioned as a version of antirealism, as idealists typically maintain that the world is mental, experiential, or spiritual, idealists can also be realists; indeed, Immanuel Kant was an empirical realist while being a transcendental idealist. A more obvious version of antirealism is relativism, according to which the ways the world is, and truths about the world, are relative to conceptual schemes or perspectives. There is no way the world is “in itself”, nor any scheme- or perspective-independent truth. Relativism is close to constructivism (which can also be compared to idealism): we “construct” the world through our language-use, discourses, or conceptualizations, and there is no non-relative reality or truth at all. A quite different version of antirealism is empiricism (in the philosophy of science), according to which only the observable world is real and metaphysical speculations about unobservables should be abandoned; hence, scientific theories should be interpreted as mere instruments of calculation and prediction, instead of sets of mind-independently true or false statements about reality. In this sense, strong empiricism in the philosophy of science denies that science pursues truth. Finally, a distinction ought to be drawn between antirealisms and nonrealisms. Not all denials of realism or realistic truth can be simply classified as antirealisms. For example, Richard Rorty has repeatedly claimed that his “antirepresentationalism” leads us beyond the entire issue of realism, which in his view crucially depends on representationalist assumptions, that is, on the idea that we ought to represent non-linguistic and mind-independent reality and we may succeed or fail in this task.6

Realism and truth in religion and theology Let us now take a look at how some key variants of realism and antirealism – especially with regard to truth – are applicable to the philosophy of religion and theology. The problem of realism in theology and religion obviously concerns the (in)dependence of the world and/or objects purportedly referred to in religious and/or theological language-use, as well as the mind-independent truth or falsity of statements thus formulated. Religious “objects” could include God, souls, angels and many other things postulated in religious practices and theological theorization. In principle, it is possible to be a local realist about some of these ontological commitments while being an antirealist

Introduction to Part I 33 about others: for instance, one could be a realist about God’s existence while being an antirealist about angels – and such unorthodox views could create interesting cases of religious or theological diversity. Note, however, that one does not qualify as an antirealist about God if one just denies God’s existence, because one may very well be a realist about the features of the mind-independent world itself that (one claims) make it the case that there is no God. Atheism is not antirealism but typically presupposes realism. For the atheist, the world is mind-independently such that there is no God; as we might say, the truth of atheism is, realistically, grounded in the way the world objectively is. We may distinguish at least four different “levels” of realism about religion, all of which are in principle neutral regarding the theism vs. atheism controversy. It is helpful to introduce these distinctions by referring to relations between our language-use and the objects our statements may be supposed to be true (or false) about. First, we may apply the realism issue to religious language itself – that is, to the relation between religious language-use and its objects. Second, we may speak about realism and antirealism in relation to theological (e.g., Christian, Jewish, or Islamic) language and its objects. Third, we may distinguish the language of the academic discipline of non-confessional religious studies (or comparative religion) – and its objects – from the first two levels. Fourth, the abstract discourse of the philosophy of religion provides a yet higher “meta-level” context for investigating realism in relation to religion. Accordingly, when asking whether to be realists or antirealists about religious matters, we may ask this question at four different levels (at least), that is, as the question of whether there are, for instance, mindindependent truths about objective reality in (1) religion, (2) theology, (3) religious studies, and (4) philosophy of religion. One may also say that these levels of discourse are, according to realists, truth-apt in the sense that the concept of truth functions in, or can be applied to, them. If they are truth-apt, then it also makes sense to say that one pursues truth when engaging in them. Let us very briefly examine these four levels of the pursuit of truth in turn. First, according to religious realism, the objects of religious beliefs and/ or statements (e.g., God) exist, or fail to exist, independently of religious language-use. That is to say, God is real or unreal independently of whether you, I, or any other individual or group of individuals believes Him to be real. If God exists, He will continue to exist even if no one believes in His existence. Conversely, if God does not exist, He will not come into existence no matter how strongly He is believed in. Religious antirealism, in turn, regards God as mind-dependent, for instance, as a construction based on religious language-use. Accordingly, religious realists and antirealists disagree over whether religious beliefs are mind- and discourse-independently true or false (as determined by an objective mind-independent religious reality).

34  Sami Pihlström Second, according to theological realism, theological doctrines are mindindependently true or false. For example, the doctrine of divine simplicity – that is, the view that God is the simplest possible entity and that all of God’s attributes, such as His absolute goodness and omnipotence, are identical with God himself – is true or false depending on the true metaphysical nature of God. The world itself, God’s own metaphysically fundamental nature, determines the matter; the truth or falsity of the doctrine is grounded in the nature of God. The theological antirealist denies such independence, maintaining that the truth or falsity of theological doctrines depends on our theological perspectives and discourses.7 It may, however, be difficult to draw the exact line here between religious and theological language and the corresponding notions of realism and truth, though generally theological doctrines may be considered metalevel interpretations of religious beliefs maintained in religious communities. Christological, pneumatological, soteriological, and other complex interpretations of Christian beliefs – regarding, respectively, the nature of Christ, the Holy Spirit, and salvation – can be regarded as such meta-level theological doctrines specifying and interpreting “first-order” religious beliefs. An ordinary believer need not, and typically does not, possess the kind of theological sophistication the formulation of these doctrines requires. One could, then, in principle, be a religious realist about, say, the existence of Christ but an antirealist about some more specific theological views, such as the doctrine of Christ’s second coming (though it may also be difficult to determine what realism about Christ means if one is not committed to the theological doctrines that define Christ). It may be a matter of theological dispute which specific doctrines should be taken to play such a defining role.8 The third level to be distinguished is the problem of realism about religious studies, which may be compared to the general realism in the humanities: is the human socio-cultural world also mind-independently the way it is (more or less like the scientific realist about natural science believes non-human nature to be), in the sense that truths about it are determined independently of our theories and discourses, or is it a cultural-theoretical construct in a stronger sense than the natural world? The age-old nature vs. culture distinction is in a sense presupposed here. Scientific realism in the natural sciences must certainly be distinguished from realism about the humanities and social sciences. There is an obvious sense in which culture and society are human and therefore mind-dependent constructs; yet, there is no a priori reason why one could not apply realism across the board, also in the humanities. Even if it may not be easy to regard the humanities as pursuing truth in the same sense in which we may see physics or biology as searching mind-independent truths, there is no principled reason why our theories in the humanities could not be true or false depending on their objects. Such truths could still be independent of the theorist’s own views and experiences. Insofar as religious studies is part of the humanities in the

Introduction to Part I 35 same sense as history or anthropology, the realism debate in the latter is applicable to the former. The exact division of labour between religious studies and theology is far from clear, however. Theological doctrines could be and are often considered “confessional”: to be a Christian is to maintain that certain doctrines about God and Christ are true (though it may be open to discussion what it means in religious life to be committed to their truth).9 However, theology can be studied “neutrally” and non-confessionally, focusing on religious believers’ (and theologians’) beliefs; scholars engaging in such non-confessional study need not engage in the religious or theological practices within which those beliefs are taken to be true.10 If theology can be pursued without religious commitment, then there is no fundamental distinction between theology and religious studies, nor between the relevant issues concerning truth and reality. However, if theology is interpreted confessionally, then one could be a realist about a theological doctrine while being an antirealist about a meta-level account of that doctrine within non-confessional religious studies. Conversely, one might be a realist about a non-confessional interpretation of a religious doctrine about which one is a theological antirealist. Fourth, things get more complicated when the philosophy of religion enters the picture. It can be more or less directly concerned with religious concepts and beliefs, but it can also examine their relation to theological interpretations and non-confessional explanations within religious studies. One may ask whether philosophy of religion has any language or “objects” of its own. Can one be a realist (or an antirealist) about the language used within the philosophy of religion and the relation between that language-use and its relevant objects? Arguably, the complex relations between the objects of religion, theology and religious studies, and the relations between the different ways of speaking about those objects, can be among the “objects” of the philosophy of religion. However, the more general question, which I will not even begin to answer here, is whether there can be mind-independent philosophical truths reached by philosophical theorization. Is there, for example, a mind-independent truth available about realism itself, about other questions in philosophy of religion, such as the nature of evil – or about the way we should think about religious diversity and truth, for that matter? While there is an analogy between scientific realism and the realisms applied to religion and theology, this analogy may also be misleading. The attempt to discuss theological realism by means of an analogy to scientific realism arguably presupposes an evidentialist view of theology as relevantly comparable to science. According to evidentialism, religious beliefs should be evaluated on the basis of the evidence that can be presented in their support, as one evaluates scientific or everyday beliefs. Realism and antirealism cannot, then, be strictly separated from the evidentialism vs. fideism issue (although these two are in principle distinct). This should be kept in mind when reading the chapters in this volume. The ones focusing on truth are relevant to those focusing on epistemic issues of justification, and vice versa.

36  Sami Pihlström

Realism, exclusivism and inclusivism A fundamentally important and timely topic to which the realism debate can be applied is, of course, the issue of religious diversity. It is a commonplace to observe that there are diverse religious belief systems as well as diverse theological construals of them. (There is also a great diversity of theories within religious studies as well as philosophy of religion, but we are here concerned with the “first-order” cases of diversity, as this is what religious pluralism discussions focus on.) Regarding realism and truth, the obvious question to ask is whether, assuming that the relevant religious or theological discourses are “truth-apt” (i.e., the concept of truth can be usefully applied to them), at most only one or more than one position could be true within them. At the simplest level, the question thus is whether more than one religion can be true (assuming that religions can be interpreted as sets of truth-claims).11 If (at most) only one religion can be true, then if there are many religions, all the others must be false (speaking, again, of religions simply as sets of beliefs, or as propositional statements believed to be true). Alternatively, all of them may be false. This is, roughly, the view known as exclusivism. The truth of any particular religion would exclude any other being true. At the level of individual beliefs or doctrines, the truth of any such belief would exclude the truth of all that are logically incompatible with it. It might seem obvious that exclusivism must hold, and many religious groups maintain exclusivists views, believing that they only are among the selected few to be saved by their true beliefs. However, religious inclusivism, the denial of exclusivism, suggests that more than one religion can be true – in some sense of the word. In our multicultural days taking religious diversity very seriously, it might be perceived as an ethical duty to at least try to make sense of religious inclusivism of this kind. Exclusivist arguments may seem to lead to discrimination or at worst violence, whereas inclusivism might support the peaceful coexistence of different religious outlooks. In short, the ethical and political needs of religious toleration and mutual recognition of religious groups might – ethically and politically if not epistemologically and metaphysically – require that we aim at inclusivism, seeking to genuinely recognize (and not merely tolerate) others’ religious outlooks, even when we cannot ourselves join in accepting them.12 In brief, there may be ethical reasons to prefer inclusivism to exclusivism. The problem is that developing an inclusivist account of religious diversity, accommodating the attitudes of tolerance and recognition, might require us to sacrifice our notion of mind-independent truth. Different (conflicting) religions can hardly be true in a full-blown objective sense of corresponding to the way the world is, if there is, realistically, only one way the world (absolutely, mind-independently) is. Therefore, it seems that the conception of religious or theological discourse as truth-apt in a realistic sense entails exclusivism. Only if religious belief-systems can be genuinely false can any of them be claimed to be (objectively, realistically) true.

Introduction to Part I 37 In my own chapter, I suggest that a pragmatist conception of realism and truth might offer ways forward here by reconciling a (moderate) religious inclusivism according to which religious truth is not exclusively “one” and a (moderately, relatively, pragmatically) objective truth enabling us to make sense of the idea that religious beliefs and theological doctrines purport to represent reality instead of being merely language-internal or completely perspectival constructions. It might even be suggested that only a pragmatist account of realism and truth may enable us to construct such a reconciliatory meta-level position. This pragmatist move requires, however, that we understand the notion of truth itself not merely propositionally but also “existentially” as some kind of ethical truthfulness. One may argue that we can be full-blown realists about reality and truth while being inclusivists about religious epistemology, denying that realism entails exclusivism. A plausible option for realists would be to stick to realism in ontology (and semantics, regarding truth) while admitting that there could be more than one epistemically justified sets of beliefs. This is a possible position for those who have no problem in drawing a sharp distinction between ontology and epistemology. For philosophers (of religion) following, say, Kant or the pragmatists, however, such sharp distinctions are themselves problematic. In this sense, the above-sketched worry about realism entailing exclusivism is internal to a post-Kantian approach to the philosophy of religion (which I find plausible for independent reasons). Not only Kantians but also pragmatists, for instance, integrate ontology and epistemology,13 and therefore the exclusivist conclusions one may end up with at the ontological level may be problematic at the epistemological level as well – as well as at the ethical (and, theologically speaking, soteriological) level.

A brief summary of the chapters The chapters of this Part address the topic of truth in relation to religious diversity from a number of interrelated perspectives. After my own chapter (already summarized above), Åke Wahlberg examines these problems from a viewpoint inspired by Donald Davidson’s work, taking the concept of truth itself as fundamental. It is the concept of objective truth that, according to Wahlberg, makes substantial dialogue and understanding between religions and cultures possible. Wahlberg thus argues against the view that the commitment to objective, realistic truth causes difficulties for multicultural communication (or inclusivism); on the contrary, he finds such a commitment necessary for any such communication, because the possibility of meaning presupposes truth. Wahlberg’s essay also serves as a useful introduction to the relevance of Davidson’s conception of truth in the philosophy of religion. Elena Kalmykova’s chapter starts from the distinction between doctrinal and practice-based religiosity. She argues that issues of religious diversity should not be primarily approached in terms of propositional doctrinal

38  Sami Pihlström statements taken to be the core of religious beliefs but rather in terms of embodied and “lived” religious practices for which such doctrinal statements may not be crucial. However, she also suggests that doctrinal beliefs may be held by believers as “artefacts” that still have an epistemic status and may be used in religious practices analogously to the ways in which believers use other religious artefacts. Finally, Nehama Verbin takes her departure from Moses Maimonides’ and Soren Kierkegaard’s ideas, interpreting both as fictionalists committed to divine transcendence and hiddenness. It is on these grounds that, she argues, these classics’ views can benefit interreligious dialogue. Maimonides’ and (especially) Kierkegaard’s accounts of “truth as subjectivity” are obviously closer to the “existential” than the propositional conceptions of truth (see above). Verbin suggests that while the turn from objective to subjective truth may create its own difficulties and set up new boundaries, the fictionalist approach nevertheless deserves to be seriously considered as an option in attempts to embrace the “religious other” in “fellowship”, as distinguished from mere toleration. Together these chapters demonstrate the multitude of ways in which the concept of truth – and diverging philosophical interpretations of its significance – is relevant to explorations of religious pluralism. We need to deal with this concept in order to engage in any meaningful debate on what religious beliefs are and how believers or non-believers can enter into dialogue with those believing differently.14

Notes 1 See, for instance, Ilkka Niiniluoto, Critical Scientific Realism (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), for a very helpful classification of different forms of realism. A major recent collection of articles on various aspects of the realism issue is Kenneth R. Westphal, ed., Realism, Science, and Pragmatism (London and New York: Routledge, 2014). I am in this introduction to some extent relying on some of my earlier formulations in Sami Pihlström, “Pragmatist Perspectives on Religious and Theological Realism,” European Journal for Philosophy of Religion 6, no. 1 (2014): 37–59. 2 Indeed, one often hears people uncritically speaking of “our truths” or “my truths” as if the mere fact that someone firmly believes something to be true would be sufficient to make it true. If Donald Trump claims it to be true that immigrant criminality rate is raising, and if his supporters spread such a “truth” through their social media channels, this does not make that falsehood true. 3 For more technical discussions of the correspondence theory, see, e.g., Niiniluoto, Critical Scientific Realism. For an excellent overview of the significance of the realistic concept of truth, see Åke Wahlberg, “Truth, Meaning and Interreligious Understanding,” in this volume. 4 See also Jonkers, “Redefining Religious Truth as a Challenge for Philosophy of Religion,” 139–59, for the relevance of the notion of truth regarding religious practice. Elena Kalmykova, “Belief as an Artefact: Implications for Religious Diversity,” in this volume is obviously relevant to this issue, suggesting that religious beliefs should be construed in a less “doctrinal” way. Cf. Nehama

Introduction to Part I 39 Verbin, “Maimonides and Kierkegaard on Fictionalism, Divine Hiddenness and the Scope for Interreligious Dialogue,” in this volume for a discussion of truth in a subjective-existential sense. 5 See Michael Devitt, Realism and Truth, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991). 6 See, e.g., Richard Rorty, Truth and Progress (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 7 Note that one could hold different views regarding the meaning of key words such as “the world” or “reality”, especially in relation to God’s reality. One might, e.g., identify the world with the (physical) universe, while maintaining that “reality” is all-encompassing, containing both the universe and the supernatural realm going beyond the universe (especially God). I  speak about the world and reality more or less synonymously, unless otherwise indicated; yet, we should acknowledge the theological need to speak about God without simply reducing God to a being among others within the world. 8 Theological and religious views may also influence our views on realism in other domains: for example, the problem of evil has typically been discussed presupposing moral realism; it may look quite different if one starts from moral antirealism. Cf. Thomas L. Carson, “Axiology, Realism, and the Problem of Evil,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 75 (2007): 349–68. 9 Perhaps one could, after all, be a realist about theological doctrines in the sense of claiming that they are objectively true or false, while being an antirealist about their “existential” implementations in actual religious life, viewing such life as a matter of symbols and rituals rather than any propositionally expressible theological commitments. 10 In the Nordic countries, academic theology is generally understood as a nonconfessional study of religious beliefs, doctrines, practices, their history, etc. Theologians need not be committed to the doctrines they study, or to any religious ideas. In some other religious and theological traditions, it may be harder to understand that one could engage in theology while avoiding religious commitments. 11 It is, of course, controversial whether religions can be interpreted as sets of truthclaims. If religions were mere rituals and practices without truth-aptness, then we would not have the problem addressed here at all. See again Kalmykova, “Belief”. 12 On the central importance of the concept of recognition in religion, see Risto Saarinen, Recognition and Religion: A Historical and Systematic Study (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2016). On the debate between inclusivism and exclusivism generally, see Paul J. Griffiths, Problems of Religious Diversity (Oxford and Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2001). 13 See also Sami Pihlström, Pragmatic Pluralism and the Problem of God (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013). 14 I am grateful to Peter Jonkers and Oliver J. Wiertz for very helpful comments on this introduction.

Bibliography Carson, Thomas L. “Axiology, Realism, and the Problem of Evil.” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 75 (2007): 349–68. Devitt, Michael. Realism and Truth. 2nd ed. Oxford and Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1991 [1984]. Fine, Arthur. The Shaky Game. 2nd ed. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1996 [1986].

40  Sami Pihlström Griffiths, Paul J. Problems of Religious Diversity. Oxford and Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2001. Jonkers, Peter. “Redefining Religious Truth as a Challenge for Philosophy of Religion.” European Journal for Philosophy of Religion 4, no. 4 (2012): 139–59. Mackie, John L. Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977. Mackie, John L. The Miracle of Theism: Arguments for and against the Existence of God. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1983. Niiniluoto, Ilkka. Critical Scientific Realism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. Peirce, Charles S. The Essential Peirce. 2 vols. The Peirce Edition Project, edited by Nathan Houser et al. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992–98. Pihlström, Sami. “A Pragmatic Critique of Three Kinds of Religious Naturalism.” Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 17 (2005): 177–218. Pihlström, Sami. Pragmatic Pluralism and the Problem of God. New York: Fordham University Press, 2013. Pihlström, Sami. “A Pragmatist Perspective on Theological and Religious Realism.” European Journal for Philosophy of Religion 6 (2014): 37–59. Rorty, Richard. Truth and Progress. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Saarinen, Risto. Recognition and Religion: A  Historical and Systematic Study. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. Westphal, Kenneth R., ed. Realism, Science, and Pragmatism. London and New York: Routledge, 2014.

2 Truth, suffering and religious diversity A pragmatist perspective Sami Pihlström

Introduction This essay discusses the problem of religious diversity by focusing on the question of truth. A  pragmatist approach to truth  – crucially indebted to William James’s pragmatism – will be argued to yield both a philosophical enrichment of the issue and a challenge that must be critically acknowledged. I will draw attention to how the question of truth comes into the picture when we need to deal with the diversity of religious (and non-religious) responses to human suffering. As this is a decisive test case for pragmatist approaches to religious diversity, our discussion will be inevitably connected with the theodicy issue. My introduction to this part of the present volume offers a preliminary discussion of the truth-aptness of religious discourse, focusing on the issue of realism vs. antirealism. If we endorse realistic truth in a full-blown sense, we will be on the road to exclusivism, that is, the view that there is at most only one single true religion and the truth of any one religious outlook would exclude the truth of any other.1 Pragmatist conceptions of truth can, I will now argue, be seen as seeking a plausible middle ground option. Pragmatism has, especially since James, been defended as a critical mediator between realism and antirealism as well as evidentialism and fideism, and it can be suggested that it mediates between inclusivism and exclusivism, too. This offers an indirect meta-level argument for pragmatist views on truth applied to religion and theology, because it seems that pragmatism is uniquely able to deal with the problem of combining (humanly speaking) realistic objective truth with a moderately inclusivist account of religious diversity. The later sections of this chapter deal with the relation between truth and theodicy. We may see pragmatists, among others, as arguing against what they take to be an illusionary metaphysically realist view postulating allegedly objective reasons for the reality of suffering. Pragmatism, moreover, can be enriched by recognition-theoretical considerations highly relevant to the pursuit of religious inclusivism (though this relevance will inevitably remain somewhat implicit in this inquiry). Suffering is at the centre of this analysis.

42  Sami Pihlström While I will defend a pragmatic approach to truth and religious diversity affirming a close link between the concepts of truth and individual, existential truthfulness, what I  am calling antitheodicism also needs the concept of objective, realistic truth.2 Pragmatism runs the risk of opening a slippery slope from James towards more radical (e.g., Rortyan) forms of pragmatism coming dangerously close to endorsing “post-truth” and “post-factuality”. Therefore, I do acknowledge the worry that the concept of truth might get messed up in pragmatism in such a way that the very project of responding to the ethical needs of inclusion becomes threatened. The chapter will thus conclude by pragmatically defending the value of (objective) truth and truthfulness. However, it will also be concluded that various tensions remain and that pragmatism is therefore needed at the meta-level. I prefer to leave open the possibility that even the pragmatist might need to end up with a defence of objective, realistic truth – within pragmatism. When developing a pragmatist approach to the realism debate (in science, religion, theology, and elsewhere), the genuine differences between these practices must be appreciated. This, we might say, is to embrace a “pragmatic realism” about the realism debate itself. The ways in which this debate is pragmatically committed to employing an objective concept of truth  – embedded in a more inclusive concept that also includes truthfulness – need to be carefully addressed.

Pragmatism, realism and truth Full-blown realism  – metaphysical realism operating with the concept of an absolute representation of reality from a “God’s-Eye View” – regarding religion, theology, and religious truth may, as we saw in my introduction to Part I, easily lead to religious exclusivism. According to such metaphysical realism, there is, in principle, an absolute way the world is independent of the human mind or any human practices, beliefs, perspectives, and theories. We should now take a look at how pragmatism seeks a middle ground in the realism debate by rejecting such a strong form of realism without rejecting realism tout court. This is highly relevant to the diversity issue. Fortunately, the tradition of pragmatism offers a fresh perspective here. The so-called classical pragmatists – Charles S. Peirce, William James and John Dewey3 – all defended views that can be regarded as to some extent realistic but to some extent nonrealistic – or at least in some sense idealist or constructivist (though it also needs to be pointed out that none of the classical pragmatists were really tempted to defend any form of relativism). The tensions we find in these thinkers’ positions illuminate the ways in which the realism issue has been and continues to be at the heart of the pragmatist tradition.4 A similar tension seems to be at work in contemporary neopragmatism, that is, in thinkers like Richard Rorty and Hilary Putnam. In theology and philosophy of religion specifically, this tradition has been represented by philosophers such as Eberhard Herrmann and Dirk-Martin Grube.5

Truth, suffering and religious diversity 43 Pragmatism can be seen as a philosophical approach seeking to mediate between realism and antirealism in a manner comparable to Immanuel Kant’s attempt to argue that empirical realism is compatible with (and even requires) transcendental idealism. Hence, the realism vs. antirealism tension is inevitably present in pragmatism. However, pragmatists have typically attempted to move beyond this tension. The essential tension that needs to be dealt with here can be briefly expressed as follows: the world is (empirically) independent of us, but its independence (or the mind-independence of any truths about it) is itself a human construct within our purposive practices and may receive different forms within different practices. Moreover, the world and whatever exists or is real within it can exhibit a number of different practice-laden forms of mind-independence. For example, the mind-independence of electrons, of historical facts, and of God (if, indeed, such entities or structures are mind-independently real) are all quite different kinds of mind-independence, and it makes sense to speak about these different kinds only within different practices in which they play their functional roles. The practice of physical science within which the independent existence of electrons is relevant does not, presumably, have any role for God, but on the other hand the religious person’s prayer addressed to a God believed to be real independently of that activity of praying hardly presupposes that electrons, or any other theoretical entities of physics, are real. There is no need to reduce all these to the same essence of what it means to be mind-independent. Any plausible form of pragmatic realism is itself “practice-involving”, not just a view maintained for “practical” (e.g., nontheoretical, instrumental) reasons. For pragmatists endorsing this contextuality of mind-independence, the dependence vs. independence issue is never purely ontological but always also epistemic. Some contemporary pragmatists, including Eberhard Herrmann, have suggested that the realism issue in religion and theology can be fruitfully articulated in terms of Putnam’s distinction between internal and metaphysical realism, using internal realism as a model for realism in theology and religion.6 While I am not entirely convinced by this proposal, let me briefly recapitulate the main points of this form of realism; this will only serve as an example of an influential and theologically relevant version of neopragmatism here. One of Putnam’s characterizations of the difference between internal and metaphysical realism is based on his observation that our perceptions and conceptions of the world are relative to language and/or conceptual schemes, since “elements of what we call ‘language’ or ‘mind’ penetrate so deeply into what we call ‘reality’ that the very project of representing ourselves as being ‘mappers’ of something ‘language-independent’ is fatally compromised from the very start”.7 This formulation seems to employ a relatively straightforward idea of language-dependence (or mind-dependence). While metaphysical realism maintains that we can, in principle, theorize about a language- and mind-independent world an sich, the basic point of

44  Sami Pihlström internal realism is that there is no such disengaged viewpoint available for us. All our engagements with reality begin from an internal standpoint irreducibly involving human practices and linguistic categorizations of reality. Metaphysical realism pursues a theocentric conception of the world, while internal realism argues that we cannot get rid of our anthropocentric, and therefore inevitably limited and contextual, ways of representing and coping with reality. This corresponds to the way in which the world has, in the pragmatist tradition generally, been seen as a “human world”, as plastic or malleable to our purposeful actions and practice-based conceptual categorization.8 A pragmatist perspective on theological realism can be summarized in terms of the following key points. First, pragmatism should be firmly set against scientism: non-scientific perspectives and practices are equally important for us as scientific ones. Second, even if realism in its strongest forms cannot be accepted, one must  – as becomes especially clear in James’s reflections  – acknowledge the brute reality of pain, suffering, evil and death. More generally, third, it can be argued that ethics and metaphysics are deeply entangled in pragmatism: our metaphysical categorizations of reality depend on our ethical perspectives (and vice versa); thus, the relevant realism issues are also entangled.9 These ideas correspond to the ways in which pragmatism offers a significant promise in the philosophy of religion generally. Epistemically, pragmatism moves beyond the evidentialism vs. fideism controversy, transforming the debate on the rationality of religious belief. Existentially, pragmatism seeks to move beyond “theodicist” attempts to solve the problem of evil and suffering; responding to the reality of evil – in a “realistic spirit” – is thereby seen as a major challenge for any ethically serious religious and theological thought, and also for any attempt to account for the diversity of such thought.10 The epistemic and the existential challenges in contemporary philosophy of religion are, of course, entangled. Moreover, pragmatists need to examine the complex relation between relativism and pluralism. It must be somehow secured that the plurality of acceptable (and, possibly, equally rational) human practices and perspectives (e.g., religious or theological ones) does not lead to a full-blown relativism according to which there are in the end no normative standards governing human reason-use and theorization at all, or no reasonable choices to be made between rival perspectives. Inclusion cannot be extreme or all-encompassing but must be subjected to critical, especially ethical, scrutiny. Thus, the relations between religion, ethics, and politics also need to be taken very seriously by the pragmatist. It might even be suggested that to examine religious and theological realism pragmatically is to pay due attention to the ethical and political dimensions of religious diversity keeping pragmatic truth in the focus of the discussion. Pragmatism may be the only perspective on the realism debate that can seriously make sense of the idea that “mind-independent” truth is not a

Truth, suffering and religious diversity 45 realistic “given” but a practice-laden construct; this idea can be employed in making sense of the possibility of there being more than one practice-embedded true religious outlook. Accordingly, pragmatist conceptions of realism and truth bear considerable relevance to the controversy between exclusivism and inclusivism. Metaphysical realism with its dream of a “God’s-Eye View” leads to religious and theological exclusivism. It is such realism with its non-human – theocentric – pursuit of “Objectivity” (with a capital “O”) that makes it hard for us to maintain that different, even apparently conflicting, religious or theological ideas could all be “true” in a perspectival, practice-embedded sense. At the meta-level, we pragmatically need such a pragmatism softening the notion of truth into a humanly valuable pursuit of truthfulness, in which ethics and metaphysics are inseparable. This sounds like a circular argument, but I am suggesting that its circularity is not vicious but, rather, self-strengthening: it is only by applying pragmatism that we can defend pragmatism. In addition to developing their own version of the Kantian entanglement of empirical realism and transcendental idealism, pragmatists may take seriously a pragmatic analogy of Kantian “noumena”. Putnam, who generally seeks to avoid strong metaphysical commitments, points out that he is “not inclined to scoff at the idea of a noumenal ground behind the dualities of experience, even if all attempts to talk about it lead to antinomies”; furthermore, he adds that because “one cannot talk about the transcendent or even deny its existence without paradox, one’s attitude to it must, perhaps, be the concern of religion rather than rational philosophy”.11 In later writings, Putnam (arguing against, e.g., what he regards as pseudo-Wittgensteinian relativistic “language-game theology”) seems to maintain that a realistic attitude to what religious perspectives are perspectives on is a presupposition of religious and theological language-use.12 We could, by analogy, extend these insights into the religiously inclusivist view that different religious and theological perspectives – though apparently conflicting – may all be in touch with a reality we can only indirectly and incompletely reach by our human means. Insofar as a realistic postulation of a transcendent reality of religion cannot really be spoken about in any normal language, pragmatic realism cannot be committed to any strong epistemological realism about the transcendent. It can only incorporate a minimal assumption of ontological realism regarding transcendence. There is something out there that we may have to postulate insofar as our religious attitudes are to have any sense in our practices (or to be sensibly denied), but we need to recognize that such postulations could always be completely mistaken  – and here, of course, pragmatists join hands with realists. The ways in which pragmatism succeeds in articulating a sound version of religious inclusivism – an inclusivism that does not turn into an uncritical relativism rejecting all normative criteria in terms of which truth-claims can be critically compared – should be regarded as meta-level pragmatist “tests” of pragmatism itself. Pragmatism

46  Sami Pihlström is a self-critically reflective philosophy  – and this again highlights its relevance to religious diversity.

Recognizing diversity The next step in our treatment of the resources of pragmatism for dealing with the problem of truth in the context of religious diversity is to observe that pragmatism can be enriched by a theory of recognition. As theorists of recognition (in German, Anerkennung) in the broadly Hegelian tradition famously developed by Axel Honneth and Charles Taylor (among others) have emphasized, a proper analysis of the concept of recognition, especially in its applications to interpersonal relations, crucially requires an “as” clause specifying the content of the relevant requests for recognition and the corresponding acts of granting recognition. In paradigmatic interpersonal (or inter-group) cases, A asks B to recognize it as something specific, say, as X, and B either grants or refuses to grant such recognition of A as X. (By requesting such recognition, A also recognizes B as a potential recognizer of A as X.) Obviously, we are here dealing with a notion that has huge relevance to discussions concerning religious diversity. It is a continuous challenge to religious groups in a multicultural society to recognize each other (as religions, as sources of meaning and value for their members, and so on), and the phenomenon of religious diversity itself needs to be adequately recognized in order for us to be able to deal with its ethical, political, and epistemological features. Generally speaking, the discussion of recognition has evolved from the recognition of general features such as human dignity to the recognition of specific identities and thus differences (“identity politics”); this, of course, makes the concept highly relevant to religious diversity. The details of theories of recognition and the discussion following Honneth’s Kampf um Anerkennung need not concern us here.13 What is important for us is that there is an interesting difference between the concepts of recognition and acknowledgement. This difference becomes relevant, for instance, when we employ these concepts in seeking to understand the ways in which we should respond to other human beings’ suffering – a major case of conflicts in a religiously diverse and multicultural situation.14 This difference needs to be examined when inquiring into a pragmatist account of the kinds of realism and truth that may be at issue in relation to religious diversity, especially the diversity of our responses to suffering. Indeed, it turns out that truth is, again, central here. We may say that the concept of recognition inevitably invokes issues of truth, especially regarding the truth of the relevant “as” clause, that is, whether A is X, or is what s/he/it is recognized as. When focusing on the recognition of another’s suffering, or of the victims of suffering and their experiences, we cannot avoid the question of what the sufferer(s), or their experiences, are to be recognized as. However, this already creates

Truth, suffering and religious diversity 47 a (possibly also politically sensitive) field of power structures, presumably only strengthened in circumstances of religious diversity. The potential recognizer has, at least within certain limits (constrained by the initial request for recognition), the power to determine what the potential recognizee is to be recognized as. This may create ethically difficult issues of proper communication of suffering and its recognition. Even the very act of recognizing someone, or some group, as a “victim” of some particular evil may be politically problematic, if that person or group does not wish to be categorized as a victim, or if their wish to be so characterized plays a controversial political role. At least the potentially problematic aspects of “victimization” (either by oneself or by others) have to be taken into consideration whenever a question about recognizing someone as a victim is raised. Philosophical theorization on recognition should appreciate the fact that empirical research – for instance, results drawn from history or the social sciences  – may be fundamentally important for, and also philosophically highly relevant to, filling in the various “as” clauses in our recognizing others’ suffering. In a sense, historical and social-scientific studies of evil and suffering offer us “naturalized” and empirically diverse yet philosophically significant accounts of these phenomena, considerably expanding merely philosophical reflections on evil and suffering (such as the aprioristic, speculative theodicy discourse, to which pragmatists like James have been strongly opposed). Such empirical enrichment enables us to more effectively communicate our religious or theological (or secular) attitudes to others’ suffering across a diversity of weltanschaulichen orientations – much better than a mere abstract philosophical theory of suffering, for instance, let alone a theodicy allegedly justifying innocent suffering. However, no matter how substantially empirical accounts may fill in the relevant “as” clauses in our analyses of the recognition of suffering, we arguably also need a more purely philosophical notion of acknowledgment. It may be suggested that acknowledgment differs from recognition in not requiring, or not even allowing, the same kind of “as” clause as recognition. Thus, the truth about the “as” of recognition, the truth about, say, A’s really being X in our schematic formulation, does not come to the picture in acknowledgment. This does not mean that truth would be irrelevant to relations of acknowledgment, however. On the contrary, one may argue that a deeper, more dynamic concept of truth – something we might derive from James’s pragmatism – plays a fundamental role here. It offers us a broader, richer, and more clearly non-foundationalist notion of truth in order to communicate suffering, and our acknowledgment of others’ suffering, in an ethically appropriate way across diverse religious, theological, and secular outlooks. This is precisely the issue of truth that becomes relevant when we seek to deal with the religious diversity problem in an ethically sensitive way. Truth is here fundamentally a feature of our relation to – our acknowledging – others’ perspectives on the world, but not “as” anything particular, as distinguished from “standard” acts of recognizing others.15

48  Sami Pihlström This ethical challenge is ipso facto a challenge of developing the notion of truth itself in a pragmatist manner. Here, the acknowledgment of others’ experiences, such as experiences of suffering, particularly in their ethical dimensions (e.g., our future-oriented worry, care, or Sorge for the other, as distinguished from attempts to know any specific factual truths about the other “as” something distinctive) is an ineliminable part of the dynamics of truth in adequately responding to otherness, including the others we encounter when encountering religious diversity in our societies. It is this essentially “worried” future-directedness that the pragmatist conception of truth arguably takes into account better than any other, especially if we read James’s writings on truth alongside his relational conception of identities based on his radical empiricism, as suggested in José Medina’s interpretation of his theory of truth.16 It is on these grounds that we may also seek to develop a synthesis of pragmatism and recognition theory, focusing on the notions of truth and truthfulness, and especially their intimate relation. It can be argued that James’s conception of truth already incorporates important aspects of the concept of truthfulness. Moreover, it is precisely this broader notion of truth that we need when hoping to reconcile (moderate) religious inclusivism and its recognizing and/or acknowledging attitude to otherness and diversity with the possibility of still continuing to pursue truth and objectivity in theological and religious matters. Let us examine this a bit further.

Pragmatist truth and acknowledgment The pragmatist theory of truth is far from uncontroversial, as anyone who ever read undergraduate textbooks on truth knows. We might, however, approach it by referring to the distinction between truth and truthfulness, analyzed, for instance, by Bernard Williams.17 These are clearly different notions. One may pursue truthfulness without thereby having true beliefs; one can be truthful also when one is mistaken, insofar as one sincerely seeks to believe truths and avoid falsehoods and also honestly seeks to tell the truth whenever possible (and whenever the truth to be told is relevant). Clearly, whatever one’s theory of truth is, one should in some way distinguish between truth and truthfulness. On the other hand, certain theories of truth, such as the pragmatist theory, may be more promising in articulating the intimate relation between truth and truthfulness than others. We might say that this distinction is in a way “softened” in James’s pragmatist conception of truth, which rather explicitly turns truth into a value to be pursued in one’s (individual and social) life rather than simply a matter of propositional truth corresponding to facts that are independently “there”. Truth(fulness) in the Jamesian sense is richer and broader than mere propositional truth. It is a normative property of our thought and inquiry (in a wide sense), not simply a semantic property of statements. Its normativity is, we might say, both epistemic and ethical. James’s pragmatic truth incorporates

Truth, suffering and religious diversity 49 truthfulness, as truth belongs to the ethical field of inter-human relations of mutual dependence and acknowledgment. It also incorporates an acknowledgment of the inner truth of others’ experiences, especially experiences of suffering. It is therefore an account of truth suited for our need to live in a situation of religious diversity. Jamesian pragmatic truth is also inextricably entangled with our individual existential concerns; therefore, it is indistinguishable from James’s general individualism, which in this context is also obviously relevant as a Jamesian approach to religious diversity. Such diversity starts at the individual level. Individuals’ responses to existential life-challenges having a religious dimension vary considerably, and any existentially or religiously relevant conception of truth must in some sense appreciate this temperamental variation – without succumbing to the temptations of uncritical subjectivism or relativism, though.18 In his discussion of James’s theory of truth, which I find highly relevant to these concerns, Medina defends Jamesian pluralism in a politically relevant manner: in ethics and politics, we can never reach an “absolute” conception of what is universally best for human beings and societies, but different suggestions, opinions, experiential perspectives, and interests must have their say  – must be acknowledged (though this is not Medina’s terminology). A conception of political solidarity can, then, be grounded in Jamesian ideas concerning truth. James advocated not only pluralism and individualism but also (on Medina’s reading) a relational conception of individual identities: nothing exists in a self-sustained manner but only as parts of networks of mutual interdependence. Such a metaphysics of diversity and relationality needs the concept of acknowledgment. While James’s pluralism and relationalism are elements of a metaphysical view according to which “nothing can be understood in and by itself, but rather in relation to other things, in a network of relations”, they are irreducibly ethical and political, applying even to the reality of the self: “to have a sense of self is to have a sense of the dependences that compose one’s life”.19 We are, Medina continues, “diverse and heterogeneous beings  .  .  . shaped and reshaped through diverse and heterogeneous networks of interpersonal relations”, and the Jamesian self is a bundle of such relations.20 It is precisely in this context that we should, according to Medina, appreciate James’s theory of truth. True beliefs are “good to live by”; when maintaining a belief, any belief, we are responsible for its consequences in our lives, and in those of others. The pragmatic “theory” of truth – which should not be called a “theory”, in order to avoid seeing it as a rival to, say, the “correspondence theory” – invokes not only, say, the agreeable consequences of true beliefs but also ethical ideas such as solidarity and justice. Therefore, we may say that truth (in the pragmatic sense), truthfulness, and acknowledgment are conceptually tied to each other. One cannot really pursue truth in the Jamesian sense unless one also acknowledges, or at least truthfully seeks to acknowledge, others’ perspectives – especially those

50  Sami Pihlström structured by suffering  – on reality.21 Therefore, something like Jamesian pragmatic truth is what accounting for religious inclusivism requires. If we take even a brief look at James’s various pronouncements of the significance of the problem of evil and suffering, in particular, we may note how thoroughly those discussions of the diversity of our human responses to such predicament are coloured by references to reality and truth. I suggest that these occurrences of such terms ought to be taken seriously as elements of James’s philosophical theory of truth and reality – and thus as elements of his pragmatism. James argued, against “the airy and shallow optimism of current religious philosophy”, that what sufferers experience “is Reality”: “But while Professors Royce and Bradley and a whole host of guileless thoroughfed thinkers are unveiling Reality and the Absolute and explaining away evil and pain, this is the condition of the only beings known to us anywhere in the universe with a developed consciousness of what the universe is”.22 Idealist, optimistic philosophers “are dealing in shades, while those who live and feel know truth”; a Leibnizian theodicy postulating a harmony of the universe is “a cold literary exercise, whose cheerful substance even hell-fire does not warm”.23 These are as important characterizations of what James means by truth and reality in the pragmatic sense as are his famous pronouncements about truth being “only the expedient in our way of thinking”, truth being satisfactory, etc. Furthermore, theodicies are, for James, part of the “unreality in all rationalistic systems” of “religious” philosophy that remain “out of touch with concrete facts and joys and sorrows”.24 James here even quotes at length from Leibniz’s Théodicée, concluding that “no realistic image of the experience of a damned soul had ever approached the portals of his mind”.25 His critique of theodicist responses to suffering are thus pregnant with references to truth and reality. James’s formulations can be seen as philosophically urging us to acknowledge the meaninglessness of suffering (i.e., the fact that there is no overall harmonious world-system or a necessary divine reason for suffering over and above the diversity of human beings’ individual experiences). This is, in a sense, to recognize the sufferer as a sufferer. As recognition requires the “as” clause – B recognizes A as something, as X – the one who employs the concept of recognition here must presuppose that there is something like the truth about the matter whether A is X, or can be construed as being X. This can be, and in many cases is, a truth created by the act of recognition itself; many important social facts, statuses, and institutions are created in this way. Thus, the fact (or the factual or propositional truth) that A is X, which enables B to recognize A as X, is either independent of B’s recognition act or constituted by it, by B’s “taking” A to be X. However, in both cases we are dealing with truths about the (social) world. Now, it may be argued that the traditional correspondence theory of truth does not serve this situation very well. What we need is a more dynamic pragmatic notion of truth also covering cases where the truth of A’s being X is “made” by us. But even more importantly, we need a pragmatic notion

Truth, suffering and religious diversity 51 of truth for those cases where there is no “as” dimension at all – that is, for acknowledgment rather than recognition. This is another “level” of ethical truth, so to speak, truth reconceived as something like truthfulness. It is a conception of ethical truth compatible with, or perhaps even required by, James’s famous dictum that there can be no “final truth” in ethics until the “last man” has had his experience and his say.26 Thus, this is precisely the kind of ethical truth we need for a conception of ethics that admits, with James, that “there is no such thing as an ethical philosophy dogmatically made up in advance”.27 Acknowledging, with James, that there is no such final truth in ethics – or religion – but an inescapable diversity to which we need to take an inclusivist attitude is, we may argue, part of what we can, and should, mean by our being committed to ideals such as truthfulness and sincerity in our acknowledgment of others and their morally relevant perspectives on the world we jointly inhabit, both secularly and in contexts of religious diversity. There can, then, be something like the pursuit of truth, as well as something like truth itself, inherent in the act of acknowledgment even if there is no narrow propositional sense of truth available regarding any “as” clause, as required in recognition. This pursuit of truth in a pragmatist sense is essentially the pursuit of a truthful attitude to the other person’s suffering (or one’s own suffering), which in the end will then lead into, or at least enable, a truthful attitude to experience in general – or the world in general. At this point it should come as no surprise that precisely this kind of pursuit of truth and truthfulness is relevant in an inclusivist understanding of religious diversity. This yields an indirect (and reflexive) argument in favour of pragmatism: its conception of truth (and truthfulness) pragmatically works in the service of acknowledging diverse others and the diversity of their othernesses, their diverse experiences of suffering and attempts to communicate those experience to others. However, things are not as simple as that. While James’s pragmatism integrates truth and truthfulness, or incorporates elements of the notion of truthfulness into the pragmatically articulated notion of truth itself, and while (we may say) his pragmatism generally is framed by taking evil and suffering seriously in an “antitheodicist” manner (that is, without succumbing to the temptations of theodicy that would allegedly explain away the reality of meaningless suffering), it can be argued that the notion of truth itself is, in an irreducible way, required by the kind of antitheodicist attitude that James is recommending as a sine qua non of a properly ethical acknowledgment of otherness. This is because the notions of truth and truthfulness are needed for antitheodicism itself.

A slippery slope? Here a major problem arises. It could be argued that there is a slippery slope from Jamesian pragmatism (regarding truth) to Rortyan postmodernist pragmatism, which according to some critics becomes virtually indistinguishable

52  Sami Pihlström from O’Brien’s thoroughly antirealist or nonrealist view in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four.28 Does this mean that the pragmatist theory of truth in the end collapses truth entirely? Does the very project of formulating a pragmatist theory of truth framed by an antitheodicist approach to evil and suffering, and thus the very possibility of ethically adequately communicating and acknowledging suffering, thereby collapse too? And how does this threatening possibility relate to the pursuit of acknowledgment and (pragmatic) truth about others’ suffering in a context of religious diversity? In his essay on Orwell, Rorty rejects the realistic reading of Nineteen Eighty-Four, according to which the book defends an objective notion of truth in the context of a moral critique of the horrible way in which the main protagonist is made to believe that two plus two equals five. Rorty denies that “there are any plain moral facts out there in the world, . . . any truths independent of language, [or] any neutral ground on which to stand and argue that either torture or kindness are preferable to the other”.29 Orwell’s significance lies in a novel redescription of what is possible: according to Rorty, he convinced us that “nothing in the nature of truth, or man, or history” will block the conceivable scenario that “the same developments which had made human equality technically possible might make endless slavery possible”.30 The key idea, Rorty maintains, is that truth as such does not matter: “what matters is your ability to talk to other people about what seems to you true, not what is in fact true”. This is followed by a wellknown Rortyan one-liner: “If we take care of freedom, truth can take care of itself.”31 In terms of (religious) diversity, this might be rephrased as the view that if we recognize individual variations and let them flourish, there is no need to worry about truth. Rorty, famously, rejects the very idea of our being responsible to any nonhuman objective reality – assumed, he believes, in realist accounts of truth – and emphasizes that we can only be answerable to human audiences.32 Again, this could be analyzed as a relation of recognition: we recognize human audiences as our potential rational critics in a way we cannot recognize non-human reality. However, part of our response to a (relevant) audience is a response to an audience using the concepts of truth and reality. We have to recognize the relevance of that concept by recognizing the relevant audience. This is a case of what has been called mediated recognition:33 we recognize objective reality and truth by recognizing the audience(s) and our responsibility towards them. We recognize objective reality itself by being answerable, and recognizing ourselves as being answerable, to an audience (potential rational critics) that might challenge our views. Such challenges could, of course, take place in contexts of religious diversity; hence, we need pragmatic truth(fulness) for a proper acknowledgment of that diversity. One obvious problem is that the relevant audience could change (randomly) in an Orwellian manner. Our use and (thus) any possible meaning of the concept of an objective reality could even be destroyed. Then the kind of mediated recognition sketched above would no longer work. In

Truth, suffering and religious diversity 53 a sense there would no longer be an audience we would be responsible to any more. There would then be no views to have – not even a diversity of different views – on anything anymore; rational thought would collapse. In other words, we can recognize each other as using the concept of objective reality and a related concept of truth, and thereby recognize each other and ourselves as being normatively committed to pursuing objective truth about reality – but only until O’Brien (or some comparable enemy of facts and truth) gets us. Then that commitment collapses, and so does our recognition of each other as users of the notion of truth. So does, then, our commitment to truthfulness. The very possibility of taking religious diversity seriously as a situation of ethical, political, and epistemological argument and reflection would thus also collapse. No pursuit of inclusivist truth in a pragmatic sense would then be possible. In this way, pragmatism might end up in self-reflective incoherence: a Jamesian inclusivist attempt to acknowledge individual perspectives and their diversity might lead to a collapse of that very project, as a result of the fragmentation of the very concept of truth the pragmatist needs in the articulation of what it means to take others’ suffering seriously. One reason why the Rortyan-cum-Orwellian outcome is so troubling and so deeply threatening is that it threatens to destroy our commitment to the idea that taking evil and suffering seriously in the first place  – recognizing their irreducible reality in their sheer meaninglessness – entails viewing the world in general in a different light.34 This is because the very idea of viewing the world in any way whatsoever presupposes some version of the concepts of objectivity and truth, and these are now in danger of collapsing. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, there is no viewing the world at all anymore, no rational answerability to anyone regarding how to view it. (The answerability an individual has towards the Party is not rational.) Therefore, at a meta-level, there is no way of defending either exclusivism or inclusivism about such views. Can, however, truthfulness (in the sense fundamental to acknowledgment) be maintained even if mere propositional truth (fundamental to recognition, given the central role of the “as” clause) collapses in the style of Rortyan neopragmatism? Acknowledgment, rather than recognition, can be seen as the key to truthful communications of suffering, just as it is key to a (moderately) inclusivist understanding of religious diversity. This can also be seen as a fundamentally Jamesian view. James argued against our instinctive “blindness” and “deafness” in relation to other human beings and their individual ways of viewing the world. James may be read as presenting us with a profound, and endless, ethical challenge to acknowledge otherness, especially the other’s suffering (as the framing of the entire pragmatist project makes clear), in terms of inclusion (without using that label). We are here dealing with the need to acknowledge others’ suffering itself as well as others’ attempts to communicate suffering, possibly across diverse religious and theological (and non-religious) outlooks. As James maintains

54  Sami Pihlström in his 1898 lecture “Human Immortality”, encouraging us to acknowledge what he calls our “half-brutish prehistoric brothers”: “ ‘Tis you who are dead, stone-dead and blind and senseless, in your way of looking on. You open your eyes upon a scene of which you miss the whole significance. Each of these grotesque or even repulsive aliens is animated by an inner joy of living as hot or hotter than that which you feel beating in your private breast.”35 The same line of thought is strongly present in James’s 1899 essay “On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings”. There James, observing the work of outdoor manual labourers, charges himself, and us, of being “as blind to the peculiar identity of their [those others’] conditions as they certainly would also have been to the ideality of mine, had they had a peep at my strange indoor academic ways of life”.36 It is extremely difficult for us to fully grasp the diversity of the inner meaningfulness of individuals’ very different forms of life. It is this kind of blindness that we have a moral duty to avoid (no matter how natural it is for us), just as we are, according to Emmanuel Levinas, invited to appreciate the other’s face.37 It is, moreover, by self-critically countering such instinctive blindness that we may cherish the virtues of acknowledgment and truthfulness  – and this, I  am suggesting, is part of what it means to develop the notion of truth itself in a pragmatic manner. When developed in this Jamesian way, the notion of truth already has an ethics of truthfulness and acknowledgment built into it and may not be as vulnerable to the Rortyan-Orwellian (O’Brienian) slippery slope as it might seem. Yet, the pragmatist inclusivist should be constantly aware of the danger of sliding down that slippery slope.

Testimony and martyrdom The issue of truth and truthfulness in relation to recognition and acknowledgment should also be linked with the (possibility of) testimony, especially moral testimony and martyrdom38 – which, as has been remarked, were in a sense rendered impossible in the Holocaust, in which people were murdered anonymously, deprived of any reason to die for anything, let alone of the possibility to communicate their experiences of suffering. The moral witness testifies of something whose actual (factual) propositional truth and its actual historical occurrence is, though not irrelevant, not the most important issue. The moral truth of what happened is what really matters in such cases of acknowledging (the diversity of) suffering  – and thus, again, we need to revisit the issue of truth and truthfulness, as this kind of moral truth may have more to do with truthfulness than with, say, the propositional truth of moral statements that philosophers participating in the mainstream metaethical dispute over moral realism and antirealism focus on. Moreover, again, the moral truth (truthfulness) relevant here is a matter of developing a general attitude to the world, not confined to facts about any particular historical event.

Truth, suffering and religious diversity 55 In any case, even then we still need a notion of truth, even if we reach the limits of testimony, or the impossibility of bearing witness – something that Holocaust writers and philosophers investigating the Holocaust have emphasized in diverse ways.39 Even the non-testifiability and non-martyrdom of the suffering of the Holocaust victims will not destroy the concept of truth. But what if this concept is destroyed in Orwell’s, or rather O’Brien’s, manner? Then, arguably, the very idea of a moral witness or moral testimony becomes obsolete, or even impossible. This has direct bearing on the issue of religious diversity and inclusivism. We can fully acknowledge the limits and fragility of testimony and the moral witness only by acknowledging the fundamental insecurity and foundationlessness of the (or any) moral truth(s) that we (can, or could) testify about. Acknowledging the seriousness of moral testimony is itself an inherently inclusivist project, as the logical compatibility of (propositional) truth-claims is not the central issue; instead, the diversity of individual ethico-religious outlooks emerging from the need to share experiences of horrible suffering (impossible to be ever covered in any single testimony) is at the core of (e.g.) Holocaust testimony, and this idea itself needs inclusivist articulation. But then the notion of truth can never disappear. The impossibility of ever fully acknowledging the “whole truth and nothing but the truth” about the non-testifiable suffering of the martyr, or of any suffering individual, or any moral witness, is a crucial part of the acknowledgment of others’ suffering in general. Again, the relevant notion of truth needed here for proper communication of suffering, in this case specifically for moral witnessing or testimony, viz., a notion of truth incorporating truthfulness, is the broader pragmatic notion, not the more traditional correspondence-theoretical one narrowly restricted to propositional truth.

Conclusion The argument of this chapter started out from the introduction to this part of the book, exploring the issue of realism in general and in relation to religion in particular, affirming the relevance of this issue to the topic of religious diversity. It is against that background, covered in the introduction, that I  have suggested that inclusivism  – which should be seen as morally motivated or even required, though only in a moderate sense not collapsing into relativism – makes it necessary for us to reject metaphysical realism. The present chapter first focused on the argument that pragmatist accounts of truth and realism along Jamesian lines might accommodate a plausible inclusivism, while also maintaining an adequate conception of objective truth. I then added some recognition-theoretical remarks on the relevance of this approach. I  even suggested (with qualifications) that pragmatism might be uniquely able to reconcile moderately objective realistic truth with existential-individualistic “truth” incorporating truthfulness. In particular, I distinguished between recognition and acknowledgment, suggesting that

56  Sami Pihlström the former needs propositional truth while the latter can be based on a richer pragmatist view of truth as truthfulness. However, I also examined the challenges of avoiding the “slippery slope” down to Rorty and the Orwellian disappearance of truth, acknowledging a tension within pragmatism itself. The continuous need to be committed to pursuing truth must be affirmed, however pragmatic our notion of truth becomes in its “softened” Jamesian versions. Otherwise others’ suffering, or the diversity of our religious (and non-religious) responses to suffering, will not be properly acknowledged. Pragmatism may not be sufficient for dealing with the vast issues surrounding religious diversity, multicultural tolerance, recognition, acknowledgment, and inclusivism, let alone a solution to the problem of evil and suffering, but it may very well be a practical necessity for our attempts to explore these topics in a religiously sensitive and ethically appropriate manner. In this sense, this chapter should be read as a qualified and self-critical defence of pragmatism. The fact that pragmatism itself may “work” in pursuits like this may turn out to be a very important indirect  – reflexive – consideration in its favour. There is no non-circular defence of pragmatism available but only a pragmatic argument that self-critically seeks to show that there are ways in which pragmatism does work – if not ideally, at least satisfactorily. This comes close to saying that pragmatism is pragmatically “true” as a response to the problem of religious diversity, but this view also needs to be conjoined with a full recognition of the diversity of pragmatisms.40

Notes 1 As all the chapters of this part, my chapter primarily focuses on the concept of truth in the inclusivism vs. exclusivism debate, rather than, e.g., eschatological or soteriological dimensions of the religious pluralism issue. 2 These are major themes in Sari Kivistö and Sami Pihlström, Kantian Antitheodicy: Philosophical and Literary Varieties (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). This chapter is to some extent indebted to that coauthored work of mine. 3 For a collection of historical and systematic discussions of pragmatism, see Sami Pihlström, ed., The Bloomsbury Companion to Pragmatism (London: Bloomsbury, 2015 [paperback ed.], 1st ed. published 2011). 4 See Pihlström, Pragmatic Pluralism and the Problem of God. 5 Cf. Eberhard Herrmann, “A  Pragmatic Realist Philosophy of Religion,” Ars Disputandi 3 (2003), www.arsdisputandi.org. See also Eberhard Herrmann, “Realism, Semantics and Religion,” in Philosophical Studies in Religion, Metaphysics and Ethics, eds. Timo Koistinen and Tommi Lehtonen (Helsinki: Luther-Agricola Society, 1997), 77–94. Herrmann draws on Putnam in arguing that sciences and “views of life” such as religions have different functions and hence different notions of truth. In the latter, being true means not “to be the case” (as in science) but to be “true to life” in a qualitative sense, with true expressions being “adequate expressions of what it means to be a human being” (92). See also Dirk-Martin Grube, “Respecting Religious Otherness versus Exclusivism and Religious Pluralism: Towards a Robust Interreligious Dialogue,” in this

Truth, suffering and religious diversity 57 volume for a pragmatism-inspired discussion of religious diversity  – from an epistemological point of view. 6 See the publications cited in the previous note. 7 Hilary Putnam, Realism with a Human Face, ed. James Conant (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 28. 8 See, e.g., William James, Pragmatism: A  New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking (1907), eds. Frederick H. Burkhardt, Fredson Bowers and Ignas K. Skrupskelis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975), chapter 7. On the distinction between theocentric and anthropocentric perspectives as parallel to the Kantian distinction between transcendental realism and transcendental idealism, see Henry E. Allison, Kant’s Transcendental Idealism: An Interpretation and Defense – a Revised and Enlarged Edition (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004; 1st ed. 1983). On Putnam’s approach to metaphysical issues in the philosophy of religion, see Hilary Putnam, “God and the Philosophers,” Midwest Studies in Philosophy 31 (1997): 175–87. Note that even a rather strong realist would endorse the view that our concept of reality is practicedependent while insisting on the ontological independence of reality itself. However, the pragmatist urges here that this distinction between reality “itself” and our conceptualizations of it, if developed in a metaphysically pregnant way, already relies on a problematic form of metaphysical realism. 9 See Sami Pihlström, Pragmatist Metaphysics: An Essay on the Ethical Grounds of Ontology (London: Continuum, 2009). Putnam’s key work in this area is Hilary Putnam, The Collapse of the Fact/Value Dichotomy and Other Essays (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002). 10 I briefly deal with these epistemic and existential challenges in Sami Pihlström, “Rationality, Recognition, and Anti-Theodicy: On the Promise of Pragmatist Philosophy of Religion,” Pragmatism Today 4, no. 2 (2013), www. pragmatismtoday.eu. See also Pihlström, Pragmatic Pluralism and the Problem of God, chapter 5. 11 Hilary Putnam, Realism and Reason (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 226. 12 See Hilary Putnam, “On Negative Theology,” Faith and Philosophy 14 (1997): 407–22. 13 See Axel Honneth, Kampf um Anerkennung, 2nd ed. (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2005; 1st ed. 1992). For a major recent contribution to the recognition discussion in theology, see Saarinen, Recognition and Religion. 14 Cf. here Victoria S. Harrison, “Can religious diversity help with the problem of religiously-motivated violence?” and Peter Jonkers, “How to break the ill-fated bond between religious truth and violence” both in this volume, dealing with violence in the name of religion. 15 I am using the concept of acknowledgment in a sense derived from Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), but I am not engaging in any Cavell scholarship here. See, for further discussion linking Cavellian acknowledgment and truth, Paul Standish and Naoko Saito, eds., Stanley Cavell and Philosophy as Translation: The Truth is Translated (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2017). 16 For James on truth, see James, Pragmatism, chapter 6. Cf. José Medina, “James on Truth and Solidarity: The Epistemology of Diversity and the Politics of Specificity,” in100 Years of Pragmatism: William James’s Revolutionary Philosophy, ed. John J. Stuhr (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010), 124–43. 17 Bernard Williams, Truth and Truthfulness (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002).

58  Sami Pihlström 18 See Jonkers, “How to break,” for a discussion of religiously and existentially relevant conception of truth coming close to truthfulness. For analyses of James’s individualism in relation to his views on religion and truth, see, e.g., James Pawelski, William James’s Dynamic Individualism (Albany: SUNY Press, 2007); Christopher Polke, “Towards Metaphysics of Religious Diversity: A  Jamesian Investigation,” ESPR 2018 conference paper, www.philosophy-of-religion.org/ content/09-members/christian-polke-towards-a-metaphysics-of-religious-diversity. pdf. See also Pihlström, Pragmatic Pluralism and the Problem of God. 19 Medina “James on Truth and Solidarity,” 124. 20 Ibid., 125. 21 One way of cashing out the distinction between acknowledgment and recognition might be to say that the general acknowledgment of others’ perspectives (without any specific “as” clause) is always concretely realized as a recognition of some particular other as something specific. Thus, acknowledgment and recognition would operate at different levels of generality, rather than being in any way rival or conflicting notions. 22 James, Pragmatism, 20–21. 23 Ibid., 22, 20. 24 Ibid., 17. On James as a critic of theodicism, the requirement that the problem of evil be argumentatively discussed in terms of theodicies, see Kivistö and Pihlström, Kantian Antitheodicy, chapter 5. 25 James, Pragmatism, 19–20. 26 William James, The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy, eds. Frederick H. Burkhardt, Fredson Bowers, and Ignas K. Skrupskelis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), 141. 27 Ibid. 28 Cf. Williams, Truth and Truthfulness, as well as Rorty’s exchange with Conant on this issue in Robert B. Brandom, ed., Rorty and His Critics (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2000). Richard Rorty’s key essay on Orwell, “The Last Intellectual in Europe: Orwell on Cruelty”, is available in Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). 29 Rorty, Contingency, 173. 30 Ibid., 175. 31 Ibid. 32 This theme runs through Rorty’s entire thought, but Contingency, Irony and Solidarity, containing the Orwell essay, is one of its best articulations. 33 On the concept of mediated recognition, see Heikki J. Koskinen, “Mediated Recognition and the Categorial Stance,” Journal of Social Ontology 3 (2017). I am indebted to Koskinen for his careful systematic analysis of recognition and related notions. 34 For an articulation of this idea, see Kivistö and Pihlström, Kantian Antitheodicy, chapter 6. 35 William James, “Human Immortality,” in Essays on Religion and Morality, eds. Frederick Burkhardt, Freson Bowers and Ignas K. Skrupskelis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), 99. 36 William James, “On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings,” in Talks to Teachers on Psychology and to Students on Some of Life’s Ideals, eds. Frederick Burkhardt, Freson Bowers and Ignas K. Skrupskelis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), 134. 37 Acknowledging otherness and others’ suffering by acknowledging the truthfulness and sincerity of the others’ experience (and face, à la Levinas) could be seen as a theme integrating the concerns of James and Levinas. (Surprisingly, the problem of evil is not really thematized in Megan Craig’s otherwise important

Truth, suffering and religious diversity 59 study: Megan Craig, Levinas and James [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011]). For Levinas’s antitheodicy, see his “Useless Suffering,” in Emmanuel Levinas, Entre-nous: Thinking about the Other, trans. Barbara Harshav (London: Continuum, 2006). 38 As analyzed, e.g., in Avishai Margalit, The Ethics of Memory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002). 39 See, e.g., Primo Levi’s works, as well as Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz (New York: Zone Books, 2002). 40 Thanks are due to Oliver J. Wiertz and Peter Jonkers for their kind invitation to contribute this essay and for their detailed feedback on an earlier draft, as well as to a number of colleagues whose comments have been very helpful at various stages: Thomas Schmidt, Dirk-Martin Grube, Timo Koistinen, Risto Saarinen, Åke Wahlberg, Heikki J. Koskinen, Panu-Matti Pöykkö, Ana Honnacker, Ulf Zackariasson, and above all, Sari Kivistö.

Bibliography Agamben, Giorgio. Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive. Translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen. New York: Zone Books, 2002 [1999]. Allison, Henry E. Kant’s Transcendental Idealism: An Interpretation and Defense – a Revised and Enlarged Edition. New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2004 [1983]. Brandom, Robert B., ed. Rorty and His Critics. Malden, MA and Oxford: Blackwell, 2000. Cavell, Stanley. The Claim of Reason. New York: Oxford University Press, 1979. Craig, Megan. Levinas and James. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011. Herrmann, Eberhard. “Realism, Semantics and Religion.” In Philosophical Studies in Religion, Metaphysics and Ethics, edited by Timo Koistinen, and Tommi Lehtonen, 77–94. Helsinki: Luther-Agricola Society, 1997. Herrmann, Eberhard. “A Pragmatic Realist Philosophy of Religion.” Ars Disputandi 3 (2003). www.arsdisputandi.org. Honneth, Axel. Kampf um Anerkennung. Revised edition. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2005 [1992]. James, William. Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking, edited by Frederick H. Burkhardt, Fredson Bowers, and Ignas K. Skrupskelis. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1975 [1907]. James, William. The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy, edited by Frederick H. Burkhardt, Fredson Bowers, and Ignas K. Skrupskelis. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1979 [1897]. James, William. “Human Immortality.” In Essays on Religion and Morality, edited by Frederick H. Burkhardt, Fredson Bowers, and Ignas K. Skrupskelis. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1982 [1898]. James, William. “On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings.” In Talks to Teachers on Psychology and to Students on Some of Life’s Ideals, edited by Frederick H. Burkhardt, Fredson Bowers, and Ignas K. Skrupskelis. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1982 [1899]. Kivistö, Sari, and Sami Pihlström. Kantian Antitheodicy: Philosophical and Literary Varieties. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016.

60  Sami Pihlström Koskinen, Heikki J. “Mediated Recognition and the Categorial Stance.” Journal of Social Ontology 3 (2017): 67–87. Levinas, Emmanuel. Entre-nous: Thinking-of-the-other. Translated by Michael B. Smith, and Barbara Harshav. London: Continuum, 2006 [1996]. Margalit, Avishai. The Ethics of Memory. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2002. Medina, José. “James on Truth and Solidarity: The Epistemology of Diversity and the Politics of Specificity.” In 100 Years of Pragmatism: William James’s Revolutionary Philosophy, edited by John J. Stuhr, 124–43. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010. Pawelski, James. William James’s Dynamic Individualism. Albany: SUNY Press, 2007. Pihlström, Sami. Pragmatist Metaphysics: An Essay on the Ethical Grounds of Ontology. London: Continuum, 2009. Pihlström, Sami. Pragmatic Pluralism and the Problem of God. New York: Fordham University Press, 2013. Pihlström, Sami. “Rationality, Recognition, and Anti-Theodicy: The Promise of Pragmatist Philosophy of Religion.” Pragmatism Today 4, no. 2 (2013): 27–37. www.pragmatismtoday.eu. Pihlström, Sami, ed. The Bloomsbury Companion to Pragmatism. London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2015. Polke, Christopher. “Towards Metaphysics of Religious Diversity: A Jamesian Investigation.” Paper presented at the conference of the European Society for Philosophy of Religion in Prague, August 2018, www.philosophy-of-religion.org/content/09members/christian-polke-towards-a-metaphysics-of-religious-diversity.pdf. Putnam, Hilary. Realism and Reason. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983. Putnam, Hilary. Realism with a Human Face, edited by James Conant. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1990. Putnam, Hilary. “God and the Philosophers.” Midwest Studies in Philosophy 31 (1997): 175–87. Putnam, Hilary. “On Negative Theology.” Faith and Philosophy 14 (1997): 407–22. Putnam, Hilary. The Collapse of the Fact/Value Dichotomy and Other Essays. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2002. Rorty, Richard. “The Last Intellectual in Europe: Orwell on Cruelty.” In Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, edited by Richard Rorty. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Saarinen, Risto. Recognition and Religion: A  Historical and Systematic Study. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. Standish, Paul, and Naoko Saito, eds. Stanley Cavell and Philosophy as Translation: The Truth Is Translated. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2017. Williams, Bernard. Truth and Truthfulness. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002.

3 Truth, meaning and interreligious understanding Åke Wahlberg

Introduction The concept of truth is astonishingly lucid and easy to use. When confronting a Holocaust denier, we do not question the trivial objectivity of truth, nor do we fiddle with the objectivity and realistic features of truth when inquiring into whether our spouse cheated on us  – the question of what “truth” means or how the truth predicate relates our utterances to reality does not even occur to us in these situations. At the same time, the concept of truth remains one of the most debated, most enigmatic concepts within the history of Western thinking. The ease with which we deploy the concept of truth thus contrasts sharply with the profound elusiveness and normative grandeur that have been ascribed to it throughout the centuries. Inflated versions of truth (or Truth) may have been sent to the dust bin of history by thinkers such as Nietzsche and Foucault, yet the fascination with truth as a topic of intellectual reflection has never dwindled. In academic reflections on the diversity of religious traditions and interreligious dialogue, the last couple of decades have seen an intense discussion of how truth is to be characterized, or more precisely, how religious truth should be understood, and what impact it has, or should have, on dialogue.1 In the course of this, a certain bogeyman is prevalent in many accounts. This bogeyman is the picture of “absolute” truth, or Truth capitalized, the “possession” of truth, or “definite” claims to truth. The notion of truth in this vein is mainly described as a problem confronting religions in a world marked by diversity; it is said to potentially undermine mutual respect and tolerance, and to generate practical difficulties which have to be circumvented or which ultimately call for some radical modifications of our thinking about religion.2 Clearly, John Hick, in his enormously influential works on religious pluralism, has partly set the agenda for this. Contrary to what many would think, however, Hick does not belong to the debunkers of the notion of truth. Instead, he introduces a new truth predicate, mythological truth, which is only very loosely related to truth commonly understood. And he develops this notion of mythological truth in a very transparent and well-argued way alongside his account of

62  Åke Wahlberg literal truth. As for the latter notion of truth, Hick attributes truth in this sense to objectively correct descriptions of reality, whereas a “statement or sets of statements about X is mythologically true if it is not literally true but nevertheless tends to evoke an appropriate dispositional attitude to X”.3 It is not entirely clear why Hick chooses to call this dispositionevoking property “truth” (maybe “goodness” or “appropriateness” would be more pertinent denotations).4 But while I do not share Hick´s views on religious diversity in general, his strategy is still a legitimate attempt to solve problems in a constructive way. Furthermore, since he clearly distinguishes mythological truth from the pedestrian notion of truth we all use every day and which he has nothing against, his theory remains vivid and conceptually perspicuous. In other prominent views, by contrast, it seems that varying phenomena ranging over a multiplicity of philosophical categories are being negotiated under the one heading of truth. This approach brings about major confusion. One ubiquitous problem is that truth is conflated with epistemic categories such as knowledge and certainty. For example, Paul Knitter describes the modern awakening to a new understanding of truth thus: Our contemporary historical consciousness has recognized the ongoing, pluralistic nature of truth. Persons have painfully experienced how final, absolute judgments break down in face of new discoveries from scientific research or of new insights from other cultures.5 These are clearly two very different issues that are being blended together: Judgement as an epistemic notion, on the one hand, and truth concerning the question of whether our theories square with reality, on the other. Those “absolute judgements”, which may or may not have been warranted, have turned out to be false, which rather than questioning the non-pluralistic nature of truth actually reinforces it. Similarly, Gordon Kaufman says: Traditional conceptions of religious truth and its dissemination appear to be connected with fundamentally authoritarian models, such as teacher/student or guru/disciple in which truth is something known to one of the parties  – it is a possession of one of the parties  – and is then communicated to, passed over to, the other party who receives and accepts it. In all these instances truth appears to be understood on the model of property, something that is owned by one party, and thus is not directly available to others, but which can be passed on or given over to others if the owner so chooses.6 This passage, as William Alston poignantly remarks, would only make sense “if ‘truth’ were replaced by ‘knowledge’ ”.7 Kaufman uses the notion of truth erroneously (or at least idiosyncratically) to comment on the epistemic

Truth, meaning, interreligious understanding 63 and social status of some religious teachings, a confusion from which some of his truth-theoretical conclusions seem to stem. A related conceptual disarray derives from the customary practice of hypostasizing truth in religious matters. To describe God as the Truth or to reify the notion of truth to make a religious point is of course legitimate, and it represents a linguistic use which has to be accounted for. Yet such usages become problematic if these expressions directly and tacitly spill into a discussion of truth which involves the concept of truth we all know and use every day. This is for example expressed by this puzzling remark by Frederiek Depoortere and Magdalen Lambkin: “if we want to say something about the Truth at all, we are in need of truths, even when these truths are not able to fully express the Truth”.8 Apparently, “truths” uncapitalized and in the plural refers to assertions, or propositional contents, while “Truth” capitalized refers in this context to some ultimate or absolute domain of reality as talked about within different religious traditions. It seems, first of all, that these two notions of truth are equivocal – Truth being a piece of reality and truths being assertions about that piece of reality. Perhaps worse, the discussion has very little to do with the concept of truth, even as it professes to provide a sagacious and penetrating exploration of religious truth. The common mistake of these accounts is that they blur the conceptual distinctions, sometimes turning the innocuous concept of truth into a problem or making it a target of criticism which instead should have been levelled at persons and groups displaying irresponsible epistemic behaviour or ignoring plausible viewpoints different from their own. This notwithstanding, the conceptual interconnections between truth and other notions, if perspicuously delineated, remain vital for explicating the concept of truth, so I  will argue. It might even be impossible to give informative characterizations of truth without invoking other philosophical categories, without viewing it in its conceptual interrelatedness with belief, knowledge, assertion, etc. Thus an essential conceptual relation, which will be the main subject matter for the remainder of this chapter, is the relation of truth to meaning. And on this, Kaufman offers an interesting take. Arguing against what he calls a monolithic understanding of truth, truth as a possession (he means, of course, purportedly true assertions, or knowledge), he advocates a dialogical conception of truth that “is identified as a living reality that emerges within and is a function of ongoing, living conversation among a number of different voices”.9 He infers this new conception from his observations of how real conversations among a number of participants unfold, how the vagueness of meaning and the indeterminacy of some terms push the interlocution into new terrain: But the penumbra of connotations and indeterminacy surrounding each word’s relative determinateness of meaning, taken together with the diverse kinds of experience and history undergone by the participants in the conversation, make it inevitable that each hearer will grasp

64  Åke Wahlberg and attend to something slightly different from the others and from the speaker . . . and the conversation proves to be the matrix in which new truth emerges for them, truth that goes beyond anything they had known before.10 Apart from the fact that Kaufman’s discussion is really about epistemology or perhaps hermeneutics, rather than truth, his appraisal of how meaning and its relative indeterminacy in a conversation are related to truth, is perceptive. I think this dialogical setting in which Kaufman locates the search for truth is indeed the right place to advance a deeper understanding of the concept of truth, in general as well as with respect to religious issues. In what follows I will expand on this, inspired by Kaufman. My aim is to illuminate the role the concept of truth plays in communication, and subsequently to present some implications of this for how we should approach the issue of truth within an interreligious setting. In the next section of this chapter, I  will flesh out the relation between truth, meaning and communication by drawing on Donald Davidson’s account of truth and meaning. In the final section, I will return to the distinct issue of truth in the context of religious diversity and make some suggestions concerning the concept of truth and interreligious dialogue.

The relation between truth and meaning It is trivial that the application of the truth predicate and the ascription of truth-values depend on the meaning given to the words used in an assertion. The sentence “He is a jackass”, referring to some individual, will have different truth-values depending on whether the utterer means a male donkey or just a stupid person. My concern here, however, is a more profound relation between these two concepts, truth and meaning, namely the basic function of objective truth for the interpersonal engenderment and transmission of linguistic meaning. This issue could have far-reaching consequences for how we should think about truth and human communication, and, in this context, about interreligious relations. To make my case clear, I will start by reflecting on an account of truth that brackets the question of how meaning and truth are related, while at the same time relying on our intuitive understanding of this relation. In the light of the pitfalls of more ambitious correspondence-style theories of truth, William Alston advances a realistic conception of truth that sidesteps the more metaphysically charged discussions of truth and metaphysical realism; his view is a minimal realist conception of truth.11 He avoids the argumentative burden of full-fledged correspondence theories and truth-maker realism, yet nonetheless seeks to defend the realist core of the concept of truth. The essence of his account, which aims to capture what it is for a proposition to be realistically true, is this: (1) The proposition that p is true iff p

Truth, meaning, interreligious understanding 65

This is Alston´s T-schema on the basis of which T-statements can be construed; for example: (2) The proposition that grass is green is true iff grass is green

The T-statements articulate the T-schema in a way which, according to Alston, makes it possible to grasp the concept of realist truth: The suggestion is that if we understand that any T-statement is conceptually, analytically true, true by virtue of the meaning of the terms involved, in particular the term ‘true’, then we thereby understand what it is for a proposition to be true. Understanding that amounts to recognizing how it is that the content of a proposition, what it is ‘a proposition that’, determines a (necessarily) necessary and sufficient condition for the truth of that proposition. And once we see that, we grasp what it is for a proposition to be true in a realist sense. This gives us the realist concept of propositional truth.12 In turning the T-schema into a T-statement the essential move is to substitute “the same declarative sentence for both occurrences of ‘p’ ”.13 This means that the declarative sentence constituting the that-clause of the proposition needs to be the same (i.e. have the same meaning) as the declarative sentence used on the right-hand side of the bi-conditional. Being the same must amount to expressing the same proposition which, as far as I can tell, must have something to do with having the same truth-conditions.14 In assessing whether two sentence tokens express the same proposition, we can hardly ignore the question of what would make those sentence tokens true. Thus in order to grasp the analyticity of a T-statement, we need to grasp what it would be for the declarative sentence in both its tokens to be true. So prior to grasping what it is for a proposition to be true, the objective of Alston’s T-statements, we therefore need to grasp what it is for a sentence expressing a proposition to be true. In spelling out “the basic intuition of the realist conception of truth  – that a proposition is true when its ‘content’ is ‘realized’ in the way things are”,15 the T-schema demonstrates how the concept of meaning depends on the concept of truth. By referring to analyticity via the implicit notion of sameness of meaning, Alston visualizes this nexus. This dependency was among the fundamental insights which led Donald Davidson to the conclusion that a reversed implementation of Tarski’s truth convention16 would give us the meaning of all sentences contained in a language. In his initial attempt to find a way of giving the meaning of each sentence in a language, he starts out from the intentional, and futile, expression “means that” as linking a quoted sentence with that sentence itself providing the meaning of the quoted sentence: s means that p “gorillas are mammals” means that gorillas are mammals

66  Åke Wahlberg He then tries to locate an extensional predicate that could replace “means that” and that would give the meaning of the left-hand sentence in an informative way: The theory will have done its work if it provides, for every sentence s in the language under study, a matching sentence (to replace ‘p’) that, in some way yet to be made clear, “gives the meaning” of s. One obvious candidate for matching sentence is just s itself, if the object language is contained in the metalanguage; otherwise a translation of s in the metalanguage. As a final bold step, let us try treating the position occupied by “p” extensionally: to implement this, sweep away the obscure “means that”, provide the sentence that replaces “p” with a proper sentential connective, and supply the description that replaces “s” with its own predicate.17 The intermediary meaning-giving predicate, together with the sentential connective, establishes a conditional, yielding the following schema: (T) s is T if and only if p whereby the predicate “is T” at first remains a placeholder. The only restriction concerning which predicate could fill the role of “is T” is that a theory of meaning utilizing it would have to “entail all sentences got from schema T when ‘s’ is replaced by a structural description of a sentence and ‘p’ by that sentence”.18 Davidson concludes that this restriction leaves us with only one possible candidate. A  theory of meaning required to account for all assertory sentences within the framework of schema T will end up giving the truth-conditions for every sentence, thus mirroring Tarski’s convention T: (T) s is true if and only if p Whereas Tarski relies on a pre-theoretical understanding of meaning to yield the extension of the truth predicate in a given (formal) language, Davidson presupposes a pre-theoretical understanding of truth to encompass sentence meaning for a given language. A theory of truth, then, providing bi-conditionals (T-sentences) which state truth conditions for every sentence of a language, is in principle what a person understanding a language must have at her disposal implicitly, so Davidson’s conclusion. As a result, while inquiring into the basic requirements for a theory of meaning, Davidson arrives pretty much where Alston claimed to have found an informative, though minimal, illumination of the concept of realist truth. Whereas Alston is not concerned explicitly with the tight mutual dependence of truth and meaning, Davidson, commenting on Tarski, recognizes this interrelatedness as a central aspect of any inquiry into the concept of truth: “Convention T suggests, though it cannot state, an

Truth, meaning, interreligious understanding 67 important feature common to all the specialized [that is, relativized to a specific formal language] concepts of truth. It succeeds in doing this by making essential use of the notion of translation into a language we know”.19 This important feature is the fact that the T-sentences rely on the meaning equivalence of both sides of the conditional. Or, if the meta-language is different from the object-language, on the notion of translation. Since, as Davidson suggests, “Convention T embodies our best intuition as to how the concept of truth is used”,20 translation as transmission of meaning seems to be conceptually inseparable from our notion of truth. And I think this is the reason why it is difficult to give a minimal illumination of realist truth in abstraction from meaning. Accordingly, Alston’s assumption that “in bringing out what truth is we need not advert to any semantic considerations concerning the meaning of linguistic items”21 might be problematic. Granting this conceptual entanglement of truth and meaning, how can we capitalize on it so as to elucidate the concept of truth? Davidson recognizes that “truth must somehow be related to the attitudes of rational creatures”, concluding that “this relation is now revealed as springing from the nature of interpersonal understanding”.22 This, moreover, is what makes truth a philosophically interesting notion in the first place.23 Instead of embarking on the project of defining truth, which he considers fruitless and doomed to fail, he presents an alternative way of elucidating the concept of truth, a methodology that aims to give an account of the role this concept plays in explaining human attitudes and acts. He allows himself to treat Tarski’s model as a theory to be applied to empirical phenomena, concluding that “absent this empirical connection, the concept of truth has no application to, or interest for, our mundane concerns, nor, so far as I can see, does it have any content at all”.24 This is the crucial step: Rather than trying to circumscribe the concept of truth by naming some truth properties, or stripping it of all properties (deflationism), Davidson rejects the whole project of defining truth and treats it instead as an undefined concept within a theory of speech and behaviour, a concept that is given content by being applied to empirically assessable features of the world, namely, human behaviour, in the widest possible sense: Nothing in the world would count as a sentence, and the concept of truth would therefore have no application, if there were not creatures that used sentences by uttering or inscribing tokens of them. Any complete account of truth must therefore relate it to actual linguistic intercourse.25 We are interested in the concept of truth only because there are actual objects and states of the world to which to apply it: utterances, states of belief, inscriptions. If we did not understand what it was for such entities to be true, we wouldn’t be able to characterize the contents of these states, objects and events.26

68  Åke Wahlberg He therefore contends that truth can only be adequately understood by inquiring into human speech and understanding. Davidson’s claim is that our grasp of the concept of truth is what underlies our ability to understand speech. Understanding a language amounts to being able to state, for every sentence in that language, truth-conditions giving the meaning of these sentences: Since all of us do understand some speakers of some languages, all of us must have adequate evidence for attributing truth conditions to the utterances of some speakers; all of us have, therefore, a competent grasp of the concept of truth as applied to the speech behavior of others.27 How does this unfold in practice? In understanding speech we certainly do not explicitly treat the behaviour and utterances of our interlocutors as empirical evidence confirming our assignment of truth-conditions to their sentences. Yet what Davidson illustrates at a theoretical level is supposed to mirror our everyday use of language. In interpreting our fellow language users we assign truth-conditions to their utterances by relating those utterances, directly or inferentially, to conditions obtaining in the world. This, at least, is the basis for our ability to comprehend speech. The concept of truth, then, derives from the interpretive practice of linking utterances of speakers to objects and states of affairs. Thus the relation between truth and meaning, which was implicit in Alston’s account of realist truth, and which permeates Davidson’s discussion on language, turns on how language users communicate and understand each other. It is a matter of the human practice of using language and comprehending speech. Kaufman, in his description of truth as “a function of ongoing, living conversation”, was right in emphasizing the close connection between our concept of truth and the practical venture of intersubjective understanding.28 This connection is what Davidson, over a vast stretch of his career, tried to elucidate by reflecting on how we interpret the speech of others.29 The entanglement of truth and meaning is not just something that pertains to the ascription of truth-values or evaluation of truth-claims. Instead, it bears on the sheer constitution of meaning and on the nature of communication, in a fundamental way. Via the notion, or attitude, of belief, the meaning of our words is intertwined with what we take to be true. This becomes salient from the perspective of someone interpreting speech: Whether the man looking at a Chevrolet while saying “This is a Trabant” entertains a false belief or gives his words a different meaning from ours is, taken on its own, not a determinate thing at all. Only by projecting a belief system onto the speaker, and thus keeping his beliefs steady, can an interpreter separate belief from meaning and thereby unravel what the speaker means by his words.30 Therefore, the determination of word meaning, on which the truth-conditions of sentences depend, requires intersubjective

Truth, meaning, interreligious understanding 69 negotiation of beliefs between interlocutors. Generally, in order for this to succeed, for the disentangling of belief and meaning to get off the ground, interlocutors have to agree on a substantive amount of beliefs providing the foundation and starting point for interpretation. If truth were not an objective notion, this would turn out to be an outright arbitrary undertaking. Only because truth-values are objective (i.e. independent of the thinking and believing of rational agents) can different persons apprehend which beliefs other persons, sharing the same environment, actually are likely to entertain. The concept of truth, expressed by our intuitive grasp of what truth is, is what drives interpretation. It is the objective measure which allows for the intersubjective bargaining of belief and meaning. The required agreement is possible precisely because the truth of beliefs is independent of our holding those beliefs, and for what reasons, and is hence devoid of any subjective import: “The references of names, the extensions of predicates, the combinatorial devices themselves, are in the hands of teachers and society; truth is not”.31 Our intuitive grasp of truth is thus what enables us to reconstruct and track the reasoning of our interlocutors. While epistemological considerations as to what would constitute a good reason for holding a certain belief remain at the disposal of individuals, the epistemic transcendence of truth permits the convergence of different lines of reasoning adapted by various agents.

Truth and interreligious dialogue For our concerns, what follows from these considerations is a novel way of thinking about truth in interreligious and interdenominational matters. Taking the focus off the issue of conflicting truth-claims, we can examine the role that the concept of truth plays in the attempt to understand other religious belief systems than our own. Before religious believers can recognize conflicting religious truth-claims as such, the meaning of the words used in those claims must be made transparent. However, with Davidson, we can turn things around and establish that truth-claims also regulate what is meant by the words used. As discussed above, this is so because the interpretation of sentences cannot be separated from the ascription of beliefs to speakers using those sentences. What speakers believe to be true remains interdependent with the meaning of their words in the intersubjective context of communication. At a theoretical level, moreover, this might be the right locus for a philosophical discussion on truth and religious diversity. If we give up the abstract picture of conflicting truth-claims necessitated by a plurality of doctrinal systems falling under the generic concept of religion, we will stop thinking about truth amidst religious diversity as a problem. Instead, we will come to acknowledge that our common grasp of objective truth is the ultimate basis for mutual understanding across religious-cultural boundaries.

70  Åke Wahlberg Inasmuch as this account is correct, all endeavours to understand alien religious doctrines or statements detached from the question of truth would be insufficient. Since the truth-claims of the adherents of a religious community will channel the socially constituted development of their concepts, the task of decrypting their reasoning is inevitable. In arguing across the borders of different traditions, by discussing what actually is to be deemed true and for what reasons, adherents of different religious communities can jointly find the common ground on which mutual understanding is possible. Truth and meaning thus go hand in hand.32 Conceptually divorcing meaning from truth, by contrast, would seem to impede intercontextual understanding. For example, David Burrell’s remark on religious dialogue that “Dialog, like any probing conversation, attends to meaning rather than truth”33 is an illustration of an attempt to disconnect these two elements. It presupposes that our words and sentences together form a realm of meaning independent of their application, and that truth enters the stage only in a subsequent step that could as well be left out. The main problem is that the basic function of truth, and of our grasp of the concept of objective truth, in communication and therefore in the intersubjective determination of meaning, is being neglected. Similarly, John Hick first correctly remarks that “[o]ur awareness of the world is necessarily an awareness of it as it impinges upon us and becomes meaningfully organized in our consciousness”. But he then goes on to say that “[a]ll awareness, whether of our more immediate or of our more ultimate environment, is accordingly formed in terms of conceptual systems embodied in the language of particular societies and traditions”.34 As we have reason to think, those concepts contained in conceptual systems are sensitive to the interpersonal ascription of beliefs and thus to our belief-forming processes. Hence, instead of saying that conceptual systems unilaterally form our awareness, it might be more accurate to state that features of the world, which are immediately empirically accessible or intersubjectively ascertainable via intermediary beliefs, give rise to our concepts: Those salient features of the world that cause us to hold certain beliefs constitute the basis for our ability to ascribe beliefs to others and hence to communicate. Admittedly, we mostly take meaning for granted. We rely heavily on conventional linguistic structures, also known as natural languages and their sub-domains, in conveying information. But from a Davidsonian point of view, the fact that we do understand each other easily, and can smoothly translate utterances between different languages located in broadly the same cultural sphere, is ultimately due to us sharing an enormous amount of beliefs and displaying common interests and values. In encounters between different religious communities, though, the situation might be more precarious. Elaborated interpretation might be called for. The meaning of the words used in such cases is not solid, it is not unequivocally determined. Just as the concepts within a religious tradition are the result of a continuous, intersubjective and public interpretation

Truth, meaning, interreligious understanding 71 among the adherents, the conceptual framework for interreligious relations is always a work in progress. One might think that understanding a community’s religious discourse is a matter of grasping meanings or of one-sidedly getting acquainted with an alien worldview. But on Davidson’s view it is in fact a matter of reciprocal outlining and enhancing of interpretive conjectures. How we relate linguistically to the world, and hence how our concepts work, is the product of our intersubjective coordination of beliefs. Here, again, the concept of truth is the anchor around which the generation of meaning proceeds, the objective pivot point enabling communication. In order for us to understand religious expressions external to our own narrow context, the question of what foreign believers take to be true, and of what reasons they can put forward in support of their beliefs, is vital. This view, finally, is more far-reaching than one might think at first glance. It regards truth as objective (i.e. the truth-value of a sentence or belief is completely independent of whether a speaker or believer considers it true). Yet the truth-value of a sentence token or belief always keeps a certain residue of indeterminacy, since a sentence on one interpretation might be taken to express a true belief, while enunciating a false one on a different interpretation. To specify which interpretation should be accepted is in the end the task of the interpreter making the behaviour and speech of the interpreted person intelligible, and of the interpreted person trying to convey some intelligible content. But interpretation of language cannot always be completely and unambiguously settled. There are no ultimate facts, external to our mutual interpretations of each other, which determine what our words mean. On the topic of religious disagreements, Rose Drew, in a very insightful article on truth in religious dialogue, remarks that “[w]hat is said in a Buddhist context will not necessarily mean the same thing when it is said in a Christian context. Hence, two apparently contradictory statements, once properly understood, may prove indeed to be contradictory . . . or may both turn out to be true despite initial appearances”.35 And in emphasizing that this in no way diminishes the realism of religious statements she invokes Paul Boghossian saying that “once a vocabulary is specified, it will then be an objective matter whether or not assertions couched in that vocabulary are true or false”.36 This is the obvious necessity of agreeing on what our words mean in identifying disagreements in belief, because truth is trivially relative to a vocabulary while being absolute and objective once a vocabulary is determined. Yet the question of which vocabulary is being used is not an objective matter in the same sense. While holding on to the objective, or absolute nature of truth, we can concede that the continuous interchange of meaning and belief in our interpretations deprives truth-claims of their absolute, synchronic and diachronic invariability. This might echo some of the insights entailed in dialogical and pluralistic accounts of religious truth. At least it should give some relief to those worrying about the harsh and non-negotiable absoluteness of truth.37

72  Åke Wahlberg

Notes 1 See Grube, “Respecting religious otherness versus exclusivism and religious pluralism,” in this volume for some balanced and insightful reflections on what might be practically problematic about the notion of truth in the context of interreligious relations. For an enlightening discussion on religious truth and its implications for interreligious resentments, see Jonkers, “How to break the illfated bond between religious truth and violence?” in this volume. 2 This tendency could be loosely described as “post-modern” and it seems to have had a considerable impact on theology departments as well as on public conceptions of religion in general. 3 John Hick, An Interpretation of Religion: Human Responses to the Transcendent (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989), 348. 4 I guess that a very broad understanding of correspondence underlies this account. Like a correspondence theory of truth relates utterances to reality, Hick pictures mythological truth as a sort of attitudinal correspondence to reality, hence the label “truth”. I thank Oliver J. Wiertz for this suggestion. 5 Paul F. Knitter, No Other Name? A Critical Survey of Christian Attitudes toward the World Religions (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1986), 218. 6 Gordon D. Kaufman, God, Mystery, Diversity: Christian Theology in a Pluralistic World (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1996), 197. 7 William P. Alston, “Realism and the Christian Faith,” International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 38 (1995): 50. 8 Frederiek Depoortere and Magdalen Lambkin, “The Question of Truth in a Multireligious World. Reflections at the Interface of Continental Philosophy and Interreligious Studies,” in The Question of Theological Truth: Philosophical and Interreligious Perspectives, eds. Frederiek Depoortere and Magdalen Lambkin (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2012), 273. 9 Kaufman, God, 199–200. 10 Ibid., 198–99. 11 For a comprehensive overview of the philosophical discussion on truth and realism, see Sami Pihlström, “Introduction to Part I. The truth-aptness of religious discourse and the problem of realism in relation to religious diversity and pluralism,” in this volume. 12 William P. Alston, A Realist Conception of Truth (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996), 27. 13 Ibid. 14 Although Alston refutes a truth-conditional account of sentence meaning, he could hardly claim that a declarative sentence token, expressing a proposition, could be identified without assessing which proposition it expresses. A proposition, obviously, cannot be made explicit without accounting for what would make it true. Cf. William P. Alston, Illocutionary Acts  & Sentence Meaning (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000), 116–20. 15 Alston, Truth, 30. 16 Alfred Tarski, “The Semantic Concept of Truth and the Foundations of Semantics,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 4 (1944): 341–76. 17 Donald Davidson, “Truth and Meaning,” in Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation, ed. Donald Davidson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001), 23. 18 Ibid. 19 Donald Davidson, “On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme,” in Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation, ed. Donald Davidson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001), 194–95. 20 Davidson, “Very Idea,” 195. 21 Alston, Truth, 31.

Truth, meaning, interreligious understanding 73 22 Donald Davidson, “The Structure and Content of Truth,” The Journal of Philosophy 87 (1990): 326. 23 Cf. Donald Davidson, “Truth Rehabilitated,” in Truth, Language, and History, ed. Donald Davidson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005), 12. 24 Donald Davidson, “The Folly of Trying to Define Truth,” in Truth, Language and History, ed. Donald Davidson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005), 36. 25 Donald Davidson, “Epistemology and Truth,” in Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective, ed. Donald Davidson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001), 181. 26 Davidson, “Folly,” 35. 27 Davidson, “Epistemology,” 182. 28 Due to its practice-ladenness, this account has some rather strong affinities with a pragmatist approach to the concept of truth. See Pihlström, “Truth, suffering and religious diversity: a pragmatist perspective,” in this volume. 29 Davidson´s method of radical interpretation serves the explication of the concept of meaning: “The point of the theory [of interpretation] was not to describe how we actually interpret, but to speculate on what it is about thought and language that makes them interpretable”; Donald Davidson, “Could There Be a Science of Rationality?” in Problems of Rationality, Donald Davidson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004), 128. 30 “[T]he line between empirical truth and truth due to meaning cannot in general be clearly defined on behavioral grounds; and behavioral grounds are all we have for determining what speakers mean. . . . As a consequence, an interpreter must separate meaning from opinion partly on normative grounds by deciding what, from his point of view, maximizes intelligibility”; Donald Davidson, “Three Varieties of Knowledge,” in Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective, ed. Donald Davidson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001), 215. 31 Davidson, “Truth Rehabilitated,” 15. 32 These reflections presuppose a robustly propositional nature of religious belief. For an important complement to this view, see Elena Kalmykova, “Belief as an artefact: implications for religious diversity,” in this volume. Kalmykova argues on empirical grounds that some, or most, religious doctrines serve as objects of veneration rather than as propositional elements of religious belief systems. In any case, interreligious dialogue requires interpretation and according to my reasoning the concept of objective truth is the key to this, even if it turns out that some religious communities treat their main doctrines as artefacts. 33 David B. Burrell, Towards a Jewish-Christian-Muslim Theology (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), 6. 34 Hick, Interpretation, 173. 35 Rose Drew, “Theological Truth and Dialogue: A  Buddhist Christian Perspective,” in The Question of Theological Truth. Philosophical and Interreligious Perspectives, eds. Frederiek Depoortere and Magdalen Lambkin (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2012), 263. 36 Drew, “Theological Truth,” 263. 37 I am grateful for extensive comments by Katherine Dormandy and Oliver J. Wiertz on earlier drafts of this chapter. I also thank Dirk-Martin Grube, Peter Jonkers, Elena Kalmykova, Bruno Niederbacher and Sami Pihlström for helpful suggestions.

Bibliography Alston, William P. “Realism and the Christian Faith.” International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 38 (1995): 37–60. Alston, William P. A Realist Conception of Truth. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996.

74  Åke Wahlberg Alston, William P. Illocutionary Acts & Sentence Meaning. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000. Burrell, David B. Towards a Jewish-Christian-Muslim Theology. Chichester: WileyBlackwell, 2011. Davidson, Donald. “The Structure and Content of Truth.” The Journal of Philosophy 87 (1990): 279–328. Davidson, Donald. “Epistemology and Truth.” In Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective, edited by Donald Davidson, 177–92. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001. Davidson, Donald. “On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme.” In Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation, edited by Donald Davidson, 183–98. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001. Davidson, Donald. “The Myth of the Subjective.” In Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective, edited by Donald Davidson, 39–52. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001. Davidson, Donald. “Three Varieties of Knowledge.” In Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective, edited by Donald Davidson, 205–20. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001. Davidson, Donald. “Truth and Meaning.” In Inquires into Truth and Interpretation, edited by Donald Davidson,17–42. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001. Davidson, Donald. “Could There Be a Science of Rationality?” In Problems of Rationality, edited by Donald Davidson, 117–34. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004. Davidson, Donald. “The Folly of Trying to Define Truth.” In Truth, Language and History, edited by Donald Davidson, 9–38. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005. Davidson, Donald. “Truth Rehabilitated.” In Truth, Language, and History, edited by Donald Davidson, 3–17. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005. Depoortere, Frederiek, and Magdalen Lambkin. “The Question of Truth in a Multireligious World: Reflections at the Interface of Continental Philosophy and Interreligious Studies.” In The Question of Theological Truth: Philosophical and Interreligious Perspectives, edited by Frederiek Depoortere and Magdalen Lambkin, 267–307. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2012. Drew, Rose. “Theological Truth and Dialogue: A Buddhist Christian Perspective.” In The Question of Theological Truth: Philosophical and Interreligious Perspectives, edited by Frederiek Depoortere, and Magdalen Lambkin, 241–66 Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2012. Hick, John. An Interpretation of Religion. Human Responses to the Transcendent. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989. Kaufman, Gordon D. God, Mystery, Diversity: Christian Theology in a Pluralistic World. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1996. Knitter, Paul F. No Other Name? A Critical Survey of Christian Attitudes toward the World Religions. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1986. Tarski, Alfred. “The Semantic Concept of Truth and the Foundations of Semantics.” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 4 (1944): 341–76.

4 Belief as an artefact Implications for religious diversity1 Elena Kalmykova

It is common for philosophy of religion to identify religious beliefs of adherents of a given religion with holding doctrinal statements of that religion as true. Doctrines are thus considered as a core of religion. When philosophers of religion approach religious diversity, they usually focus upon particular religious statements, such as “God is triune”. In order to analyze and evaluate diverse religious beliefs they tend to focus on religious doctrines, formulated as systems of propositions. For example, Christianity, Islam and Judaism are seen as having a similar theistic core, as their doctrines can be presented in the form of propositions “God is omniscient, omnipresent, wholly good”, etc. Because of this initial reduction of religious beliefs to doctrinal propositions the problems and challenges of religious diversity and interreligious dialogue are treated in philosophy primarily as doctrinal disagreements. In this chapter I  am going to challenge the assumption that doctrinal statements serve as a core of religious belief, and argue that it hinders the philosophical inquiry and empirical treatment of religious diversity. Religious beliefs, as they exist empirically, often diverge from doctrinal statements. I will consider some facts that point to a discrepancy between the idea that doctrinal propositions are the content of religious beliefs and the actual treatment of doctrinal statements in lived religion. As we will see, these discrepancies sometimes reach such an extent that some researchers in cognitive science claim that religious beliefs should not be considered beliefs in the strict sense at all. In the following section, I will propose my solution to this problem, which intends to save epistemic status of doctrinal beliefs and religious beliefs in general. The solution is based on an embodiedenactive approach, which complements the pragmatic approach to religion of Sami Pihlström, and the Davidsonian approach of Åke Wahlberg in this volume. I  will argue that doctrinal beliefs are often held by believers as artefacts with valuable, yet mysterious contents. Thus doctrinal statements are developed and used in religious practice along and sometimes on par with material artefacts (icons, relics), while their meaning is realized in religious action. This means that religious diversity can be regarded on par with cultural diversity, while material objects and practices of religion should

76  Elena Kalmykova be considered as important and constitutive for religion as the doctrines. Finally, religious doctrines should be treated in interreligious dialogue with the same respect as sacred artefacts.

Discrepancies between doctrinal statements and actual beliefs In this section, I am going to provide reasons for the thesis that doctrinal statements are not central to religion. Doctrinal statements are not what people actually believe In philosophy, doctrinal statements are deemed to be the propositional content of religious mental states, shared by believers and motivating their religious behaviour. However, recent findings of cognitive scientists of religion uncovered that explicitly proclaimed religious beliefs, based on doctrinal statements, differ from the real convictions people have, as their actions show. Justin Barrett names this discrepancy “theological incorrectness”. Empirical studies show that this discrepancy affects believers across various cultures and traditions. In the experiments conducted by Barrett, Hindu and Christian believers were first asked to evaluate whether certain properties were God’s attributes – such as omnipresence and timelessness. After that, believers were asked to repeat a short story about God. This is an example of such a story: A boy was swimming alone in a swift and rocky river. The boy got his left leg caught between two large, gray rocks and couldn’t get out. . . . He thought he was going to drown and so he began to struggle and pray. Though God was answering another prayer in another part of the world when the boy started praying, before long God responded by pushing one of the rocks so the boy could get his leg out.2 Despite the initial theologically correct attribution of omnipresence and timelessness to God, most believers tended to compose their narratives as if God had to finish answering another prayer before responding to a prayer of the boy in trouble. Thus they misreported what was actually told in the story, attributing to God human properties, such as time and space constraints. As Barrett shows, even though Hindu and Christian believers, when asked about God, repeat doctrinal statements of God’s omnipresence, omniscience, timelessness, etc., in practice they tend to relate to God as if God was an ordinary human-like agent, bound by limitations of time and space, and in need of finishing one action before starting another one, or to leave one place in order to appear in a different one.3 There are other experiments and data pointing to the same phenomenon. For example, the way many Christians actually think about God is different

Belief as an artefact 77 from the doctrinal idea of a nonphysical, formless, and omnipresent deity. God is occasionally thought of as an old man living in the clouds, as these statements from a devout Protestant reveal: “When I pray? Well, I normally, I just think about like . . . a human being, like a typical human being, long hair and the beard, and I think of him on a cloud up in Heaven, and just, like, listening . . . but I know that’s not true”.4 So in practice some believers tend to think of God as an anthropomorphic being, even though they are aware of the theological incorrectness of this kind of thinking. That is why Pascal Boyer concludes that “experimental tests show that people’s actual religious concepts often diverge from what they believe they believe. This is why theologies, explicit dogmas, scholarly interpretations of religion cannot be taken as a reliable description of either the contents or the causes of people’s belief”.5 However, this radical conclusion is not the only possible explanation of the experimental data. Barrett explains this phenomenon by introducing two kinds of cognitive processes for different tasks. He argues that in the tasks requiring quick and rich inferences intuitive knowledge (e.g. that agents are constrained by time and space) is used. But if given longer time for thinking, religious believers can reflect on their theological knowledge, use theological concepts that contradict intuition, and compose narratives more fitting to the doctrinal statements about God.6 Nevertheless, the argument holds that beliefs in doctrinal properties of God are often not properly entrenched into “operative knowledge” (i.e., knowledge that is used on-the-fly for problem solving) and do not sufficiently guide a believer’s behaviour, especially when it is not directed at the contemplation of divine properties. In their religious practice – a practice that defines religious behaviour, such as prayer  – many humans relate to God as if God were a human-like agent. It takes time to unfold the propositional content of doctrine-based religious belief and utilize it in the inferential process. Thus, doctrinal beliefs are apparently related to action and to other beliefs in a different way than the beliefs of everyday kind. No matter how we interpret the results of Barrett’s experiments, they show that some doctrinal beliefs (such as timelessness, omnipotence and omnipresence of God) often do not play an action-guiding role, or at least their impact on religious action is not mediated by the correct interpretation of their propositional content. This finding undermines the supposition that the content of religious mental states can be identified with doctrinal propositions. Even though religious believers assent to doctrinal statements, their behaviour is often not guided by these statements, thus creating a tension between doctrinal beliefs and the actual beliefs shown by their behaviour. Doctrinal ignorance It is common in the study of religion to consider holding religious belief as attributing truth to a particular doctrinal proposition. However, there

78  Elena Kalmykova is a significant tension between institutionally framed religion with its clear doctrines and lived religion (i.e., what and how adherents of this religion actually believe and practice).7 In lived religion, believers are surprisingly uninterested in the doctrinal statements of their religion. Instead of upholding clear and systematic doctrines, religious adherents usually have vague, piecemeal, and even theologically wrong beliefs. It is often the case that even the most fervent believers are rather ignorant of the doctrines of their religion. According to a survey by Life World Research from 2014, 64 per cent of Americans believe that Holy Spirit is a force, and not a person.8 Pew Research Center uncovered that 45 per cent of American Catholics do not know that, according to Catholic doctrine, the bread and wine used in Communion do not merely symbolize but actually become the body and blood of Christ.9 In sum, common believers do not attribute to doctrinal propositions the same central role in religion as philosophers and theologians. Nevertheless, it would be incorrect to claim that religious believers are indifferent to doctrines. Despite a wide neglect of doctrinal statements by common believers, doctrines are treated by the latter as an important and cherished part of their tradition. Attacks on the doctrines easily ignite a defensive stance in religious adherents, even if they barely know these doctrines. For example, hardly any Christians have a proper theological understanding of the doctrine of the Trinity and the differences between persons and substances. Nevertheless, even uneducated Christians usually adamantly defend the Trinitarian God against attacks by Muslims, who consider it as deviating from strict monotheism, and atheists, who claim it to be sheer nonsense. Apparently, doctrines play some role in the religious beliefs of common adherents, but in a different way than the role philosophers and theologians attribute to them. It might be tempting to claim that we should not take common believers as exemplars of religious belief. Perhaps they are not good believers at all because of their superstitions, sloppy reasoning and lack of theological knowledge. One might argue that theologians with their good knowledge of doctrines should be seen as a paragon of the proper religious believer. In this case, the claim that doctrinal propositions are essential for religion holds. However, history of religion shows that considering doctrinal propositions as a core of religion renders not only common believers as improperly believing, but the first Christians and Apostles too. The first Christian communities had no particular doctrine apart from faith in Christ. It took several centuries, seven Ecumenical Councils and heated theological disputes between the leaders of various Christian groups to develop a unified doctrine and enforce it upon all the adherents. The same is true for other doctrinal religions, like Islam and Buddhism, which started as a group without a clear doctrine, but with a strong faith and trust in a religious leader. The first religious communities held rather diverse and vague beliefs, just as is the case with lived religion nowadays.10 Clear doctrines are developed

Belief as an artefact 79 only at a later stage in the history of every religion, so that its latest doctrinal formulations can hardly be considered the essence of that religious belief. Exempt from doxastic norms Unlike many other beliefs, religious ones are very stubborn and sometimes almost impervious to arguments and evidence. Formation, change and abandonment of religious beliefs seem to be exempt from doxastic norms. According to research by a sociologist Sauvayre, in 71 per cent of cases it was not the factual evidence against the doctrinal teaching of a cult, but conflict of values such as immoral behaviour of a cult leader which triggered exit from the cult.11 And as other empirical investigations show, this neglect of arguments and evidence is common to believers of traditional religions as well. What influences abandonment of religious beliefs was studied in a research of religious decline in early adulthood in USA.12 The data show that college education – that is, getting new scientific knowledge and reasoning skills, exposure to new facts and arguments – does not play a significant role in diminishing religiosity, contrary to what is assumed by New Atheists. Moreover, the biggest religious decline was seen among people without any college education. What in fact stimulated diminished religiosity and loss of faith was taking part in behaviours prohibited or denounced by their religion as immoral, like extramarital sex, drugs and alcohol use. Hence, what in most cases makes people believe or disbelieve and eventually abandon their religious adherence is not argument or factual evidence against religious doctrines. The apparent discrepancies between doctrinal beliefs and everyday beliefs are often used to demonstrate the irrationality of religious beliefs, their incompatibility with scientific findings, or even to claim that they are not beliefs at all. The latter was proposed by cognitive scientist Neil Van Leeuwen in his paper “Religious Credence is not Factual Belief”, where he argues that empirical results show that religious credences have aetiologies, behavioural and cognitive effects different from factual beliefs. He claims that religious beliefs do not have evidential vulnerability: they are not prone to be abandoned if they conflict with perceptual states or lead to a contradiction. Thus, Van Leeuwen concludes, what we call religious beliefs is an attitude more similar to such cognitive states as hypothesis, fictional imagining and assumption for the sake of argument. As can be immediately noticed, Van Leeuwen’s approach dissociates religious belief from religious practice and religious ways of life in general, treating it as a purely mental phenomenon. However, unlike assumptions or hypothesizing, religious belief, and doctrinal belief in particular, is incorporated into a religious way of life and comes into existence within the latter. I agree with Van Leeuwen´s claim that religious beliefs have some properties distinct from those of factual beliefs. However, I think we should not equate religious beliefs in general and doctrinal beliefs in particular with imaginings and other similar states, since

80  Elena Kalmykova religious beliefs, unlike imaginings, are very stable and possess a high value for believers, which no “assumption for the sake of argument” can have. In the following, I will argue that apparent discrepancies between religious and factual beliefs can be explained without rendering religious beliefs irrational or claiming that they cannot be called beliefs at all. Thus, from this short empirical overview we can conclude that the way doctrinal beliefs are held by religious adherents differs from everyday kinds of beliefs. In identifying religious belief with the content of doctrinal propositions we miss  important properties of the phenomenon of religiousness. Therefore, the role that doctrinal propositions play in religion should be reassessed.

Reassessment of doctrinal beliefs Let us start with revisiting the fundamental assumption underlying analytical treatment of religious beliefs: that religious beliefs are attitudes towards a certain propositional content, provided by religious doctrines. Formation of an attitude towards religious propositions is possible if and only if a proposition is clear and aptly represents the states of affairs for the individual mind. We do not believe in a proposition per se, we believe in what is the case, according to a proposition. We “see through” the linguistic expression of propositions, reaching out to the representation of the states of affairs and then choosing our attitude towards it: believing in it, doubting or imagining that it is the case, etc.13 As John Searle insists, belief is an attitude towards that what is represented by a proposition.14 Thus, the possible range of attitudes towards propositions regards in most cases our attitudes to the representations of the states of affairs. However, in case of doctrinal propositions, reaching to the represented states of affairs is hindered by the unclarity and mysteriousness of the proposition. Doctrinal statements like “God is triune” cannot be understood on the basis of common sense and logic, available to all believers. Neither do these statements represent perceptually and universally accessible states of affairs. Doctrinal propositions are mysterious and require proper interpretation in order to be fully comprehended and grasped. This poses a significant obstacle to the comprehension of religious doctrines and, therefore, to holding a proper propositional belief regarding their content. As a result, even those believers who firmly assent to doctrinal propositions, as those who were studied by Barrett, do not hold them as fully comprehended propositions, integrated into their minds and giving rise to appropriate behaviour. As the representational content of such belief is not fully reachable, I argue that a religious attitude is directed not only towards the content of a doctrinal statement (as it is not fully graspable), but also towards the statement itself. Moreover, the meaning of such statement is reached not by a mental comprehension, but in embodied religious action. Religious doctrine is believed to contain much more than the human mind can possibly comprehend, since divine mysteries, revealed to humans

Belief as an artefact 81 by God and preserved in doctrines, transcend human mental capabilities.15 Thus, when one accepts a doctrine, what is actually accepted is not only the comprehended part, but also the content of revealed divine mysteries, which is believed to be encapsulated in religious doctrine. In this sense, religious doctrine is a container with a highly valuable and sacred content. As the content cannot be fully and properly extracted from the container, the container itself assumes the value pertaining to the contents. Hence, the contents of religious belief – a religious doctrine in a form it was assented to and held – turns out to be different from everyday kinds of beliefs. The integrity of the container – of an internalized religious doctrine – secures the integrity of the contents. In Islam, for example, the very words of the Qur’an are believed to be God’s words, so it is crucial for believers to know Arabic in order to reach the Divine mysteries contained in the Arabic text of the Qur’an. We can suppose that similar considerations, and an attachment to the sacred status of the verbal container of a sacred meaning, underlie the resistance in many Orthodox churches to translations of the liturgy into more readily comprehensible, everyday language. In any case, religious doctrines are accepted as they are, and are not allowed to be reformulated or changed in the same way as everyday beliefs. They can be changed only by authorized religious specialists as a result of a very complex process, securing that divine mystery revealed by it is kept intact. They assume the properties of artefacts and the attitude towards them changes respectively. In order to account for the observed discrepancies of doctrinal beliefs I want to propose the hypothesis that doctrinal statements are held not only as representations, but also as artefacts. Moreover, as these artefacts belong to the realm of the religious, they are treated as sacred. Thus doctrines are held on par with other sacred religious artefacts, constituting lived religion: shrines, icons, sacred grounds, temples, sacred texts. In order to unfold this hypothesis I am going to use a definition of sacred artefacts, proposed by Émile Durkheim. As he writes, sacred things are “things set apart and surrounded by prohibitions”, and religion is “a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things”.16 Thus we can formulate that two main properties of sacred things or artefacts are: 1 They are set apart. 2 They are surrounded by prohibitions. In the proposed hypothesis I expand Durkheim’s definition and claim that doctrinal beliefs can be also set apart and surrounded by prohibitions. The most important point here is that this affects the functions doctrinal beliefs play in the cognitive realm. Religious believers treat doctrinal propositions in the same Durkheimian way as they treat other sacred objects – as separated from everyday beliefs, and demanding particular reverential religious treatment. As artefacts, they are also surrounded by prohibitions, which

82  Elena Kalmykova make them almost invulnerable to arguments. Due to these properties, they do not function in the same way as ordinary everyday beliefs. I suggest that the proposed hypothesis can clarify the discrepancies of doctrinal beliefs, which so often lead to the rejection of the cognitive significance of religious beliefs (Boyer, Van Leeuwen).17 In the following I will argue that, given the properties of religious doctrines (mysteriousness, inaccessibility to everyday epistemic means), holding them as artefacts is the most feasible attitude for humans. Yet, this does not threaten the cognitive significance of doctrinal beliefs, if we consider them in an embodiedenactive framework. So let us see how being held as an artefact affects the treatment of doctrines in religious practice.

Holding a religious doctrine We can distinguish key points in which the property of being treated as an artefact affects the treatment of doctrines in religious cognition: 1 Holding. Religious doctrine is held as set apart from profane counterparts and prohibited from being changed by lay people. 2 Acceptance. It is accepted in a similar way and for similar reasons as an artefact: its origin and the authority of a person transmitting it have key roles here. 3 Formation. Religious doctrine is elaborated on the basis of some revelation. It is set apart, refined or shaped by humans. However, in doctrinal religions only religious specialists are allowed to produce and change doctrinal statements. 4 Usage in practice. Religious doctrines are used in religious practice and are related to it as an artefact. Just as other artefacts, doctrinal statements are used as scaffolding for religious actions, directed at them or utilizing them (prayer, liturgy, meditation). For example, one can contemplate or meditate on a given religious doctrine (“God is Love”, “Everything is impermanent”). In order to better illustrate the hypothesis and bring more substance to the discussion, I  am going to compare the treatment of doctrines to the treatment of a particular religious artefact, namely an icon. Icons are comparable to the doctrinal statements to the extent of developing and conveying religious meaning. In the Orthodox tradition, icons are often called “Scripture to the illiterate”, and are believed to be “an expression of a theological reality”, as contemporary Orthodox theologian Archbishop Stylianos writes. Just like a doctrine, an icon contains divine mysteries beyond human comprehension. An icon is “an immediate presence of the invisible Holy in historical time”.18 Thus an icon presents a religious reality as a part of this reality itself and hence demands the same reverent treatment as the objects it presents. Meanwhile, there is no doubt that an

Belief as an artefact 83 icon is an artefact: icons are created by humans as an expression of revelatory religious experience.19 We can see how the property of being “set apart” is expressed by contrasting the treatment of icons to that of other objects of home interior. In the Orthodox tradition, icons are widely used in churches and at home, where they are placed in a special corner or on a wall. To a disinterested bystander an icon is just another tempera on wood painting hung on the wall. It is made of the same material and takes a space similar to that of other paintings. But for a religious occupant of the apartment the icon is distinct from other paintings and cannot be treated in the same way. If the owner feels like it, interior design can be restyled, which will lead to repainting the walls from white to maroon, which in turn requires a change of paintings, curtains, furniture, etc. But the icon is excluded from all these changes. Its role in the interior is completely different from the role other interior objects play. Even if a modern style of interior renders the icon glaringly obsolete, this will not force a religious person to remove the icon or exchange it for a modern one, which fits the interior better. As a sacred artefact, an icon can be a strong expression of religious identity, signifying the occupant’s belonging to Christianity. Similarly, in other religions sacred artefacts are used as a part and parcel of identity: tefillin (black leather boxes with inscriptions from the Torah worn on the body) in Judaism, the Five Ks in Sikhism, which are to be worn all the time, etc. In the same way, doctrinal beliefs are usually set apart from everyday flux of beliefs, thoughts and other products of everyday interaction with the world. If one amends the colouring of an icon together with the changes of colouring of an interior, then this icon is not treated as a religious object, but merely an object of interior design. Just as the image on the icon is set apart from secular images and prohibited from being changed, doctrinal beliefs are often set apart from everyday epistemic processes and from critical treatment to which other beliefs are subjected. Nevertheless, sacred artefacts can be displaced. If an owner converts to Buddhism, it is quite likely that the icon will be removed from the wall. However, in some cases other religious artefacts can be (and sometimes are) placed nearby. If a doctrine is held as an artefact, it can be held together with another one, apparently contradicting it.20 Thus holding a religious artefact is not arbitrary or irrational, but is governed by rules and norms, which are completely different from those governing treatment of mundane things.

Acceptance of religious doctrines Religious beliefs are often accused of being improperly formed and accepted in violation of doxastic norms – such accusations were made by Dan Sperber, Pascal Boyer, and Neil Van Leeuwen, for instance. Indeed, the contents of our everyday beliefs should fit the observable states of affairs and logic

84  Elena Kalmykova of our thought. No other influences (imagination, desires, fears) are permitted for the proper formation of these beliefs. However, religious doctrines and beliefs are created, kept, distributed and transformed in a way radically different from that of the propositional contents of the corresponding states of mind. As I will argue, the appropriation of doctrinal beliefs is governed by rules similar to those governing the appropriation of religious artefacts. If doctrinal statements have the properties of religious artefacts, it means that their acceptance is also partly governed by the norms pertaining to religious artefacts. The most important of these are: 1 A proper origin of doctrinal statement matters most for accepting it 2 A doctrinal statement, just as a religious artefact, can be produced or elaborated by religious authorities only The production of religious artefacts as icons is surrounded by strict prohibitions: one is not supposed to make an icon without special education, nor to violate the religious norms surrounding the production of icons (an icon is to be signed by the name of the divine person depicted on it and sanctified in a Church). Nor is one allowed to change the image on an icon – to add or to remove any details. Believers can only accept an icon as a whole, as it was produced by religious authorities. The same is true in respect of doctrinal statements: they are formulated by religious specialists and are supplied to the believers in a ready-made form. A common adherent is not supposed to change the doctrine of Trinity even if it does not fit the other beliefs he or she has. One can only reject it as such. If we accept the hypothesis that religious doctrines are held as sacred artefacts, then the particularities of their formation, acceptance and abandonment, about which Van Leeuwen writes, cease to seem irrational. Unlike everyday beliefs, which are formed and changed by a person in accordance with common doxastic relations and norms, sacred artefacts can be produced by authorized religious specialists only. To accept religious artefacts only from such authorities21 is rational and justified in the context of religion, and is a part of religious practice. Thus doctrines, icons, and other artefacts are produced by religious authorities and transmitted to believers in a ready-made form. That is why doctrinal beliefs apparently violate doxastic norms that other beliefs should follow when they are formed and accepted as artefacts.

Usage of religious doctrines in practice Unlike the regular content of mental states, artefacts bring about different attitudes and solicit specific religious actions. Due to their partly incomprehensible, but highly valuable religious contents, doctrinal statements demand special action in order to relate to divine mysteries presented by doctrines. As doctrine belongs to the religious realm, its contents require

Belief as an artefact 85 religious means of reaching its meaning. Similar means are applied to other religious artefacts, all of which possess cognitive significance, although this can only be explicated in a specific action and context. A hypothesis that beliefs, held as artefacts, nevertheless have cognitive functions hinges on a widely accepted thesis that comprehending propositions is not the only means of religious cognition. Cognition does not take place in our mind only, as embodied-enactive approaches to religion show. Enactivism stresses that religious cognition involves various kinds of “scaffolding” – structures and artefacts that make up a religious material culture.22 Religious cognition is a process, it is an action, which uses all these structures and artefacts in order to “think the unthinkable”, as Matthew Day calls it, or to experience the objects and states which do not belong to this reality and everyday experience. Thus actual religious belief, which empirical research uncovers, is not a purely mental state, but is realized in embodied actions involving various artefacts. Day stresses that material artefacts are not merely “thin cultural ‘wrap arounds’ that dress-up the real cognitive processes going on underneath”, but in fact are “central components of the relevant machinery of religious thought”.23 So I argue that doctrinal statements, instead of being the core of religious belief, are only one element of a massive array of religious artefacts providing religious cognition and constituting religious belief. Thus even if doctrinal belief is held as an artefact, it nevertheless has an important cognitive function, just like other artefacts, while its meaning is reached in religious action. In order to consider what kind of meaning-revealing action a doctrinal belief is, we can again take recourse to the example of an icon. In the Orthodox Christian tradition, when a person focuses on an icon in prayer, she can come closer to God, presented by the icon, and understand more about God. An icon is not an arbitrary token representing some states of affairs, as propositional statements are often deemed to be. Instead, an icon presents religious states of affairs, and is a part of them. Using Tillich’s distinction between sign and symbol,24 we can state that an icon not merely points at something beyond itself, but also is a part of the reality it is depicting. As a part of the religious, and not merely social realm, an icon should not be acted upon and understood as an object of art or a coloured piece of wood. An icon, like other religious artefacts, affords or solicits particular action in a specific religious context in order to unfold and reach the meaning it is part of. It requires particular religious training to perceive this religious affordance in an object. Thus an icon solicits prayer from those raised in a Christian tradition, but not from Buddhists or Muslims.25 So the religious meaning of an icon is reached through a particular informed and skilful religious action. In a similar way, a doctrine is not merely a representation, but also part of a religious reality. Therefore, the content of a doctrine is to be uncovered and reached by a specific religious action: by prayer, meditation, chanting, repetition of a doctrinal statement. An example of how a particular doctrine

86  Elena Kalmykova can be acted upon in religious practice might be helpful to illustrate my point here. A friend of mine, a highly intelligent and well-educated Orthodox Christian, wrote to me in 2002 how he struggled to accept the doctrine of Mary, the mother of God. He could neither understand nor accept the idea of virgin birth and perpetual virginity, finding it a challenge to rationality. Thus he followed the advice of his priest and started to pray to the Virgin Mary, repeating the verse from Bible: “Hail, thou that art highly favoured, the Lord is with thee: blessed art thou among women” (Lk 1:28), as a poetic expression of the doctrine. He repeated it until, eventually, the doctrine of Mary settled down in his heart. As a result, he found himself in peace with this doctrine, accepted it and never tried to challenge it again. In the Buddhist practice of meditation we can find a somewhat similar way to grasp the full contents of mysterious and sometimes contradictory doctrines, such as a doctrine of “no-self”. Sociologist Michal Pagis provides an insightful account of how Buddhist tenets are grasped in a particular embodied religious action. In Buddhism, purely intellectual acceptance of doctrine is deemed insufficient, so that the contents of a doctrine is to be reached by focusing upon it in meditation, and “it is only through the practice of meditation that the tenets are experienced on the bodily level and thereby are ‘realized’ as truth”.26 So doctrines, like icons, are interwoven in religious practice, where they obtain their meaning in particular religious actions, like prayer, meditation, and contemplation. Doctrinal statements or sacred texts even can be written down and worn on the body in small boxes, as the tefillin in Judaism. Hence, the way in which these artefacts possess religious meaning is not simply by representing the states of affairs contained in a proposition. Religious artefacts, including doctrines, function as a sort of scaffolding for cognitive religious actions and religious thinking, where their meaning is reached.

Implications for religious diversity So the proposed hypothesis intends to explain the observed discrepancies between doctrinal statements and the latter´s treatment by religious people. Actual religious beliefs are constituted by a manifold of embodied religious actions and artefacts, and not by the content of doctrinal statements. The reason behind theological incorrectness and neglect of doctrinal statements in lived religion is that doctrinal statements are often held as sacred artefacts, which are accepted from religious authorities in a ready-made form. Held as sacred artefacts, doctrinal beliefs are usually not sensitive to evidence and arguments. There are several properties that distinguish beliefs, held as sacred artefacts, from regular propositional beliefs: 1 They are set apart from everyday beliefs, and their dispositional and representational properties are realized not in merely holding them, but in embodied religious action.

Belief as an artefact 87 2 They are treated similarly to other sacred artefacts: they are developed by specialists, and accepted, held or rejected by lay people for similar reasons and in a similar way. 3 They can be substituted by other artefacts in religious cognition for the goal of reaching religious meaning. When we now apply this hypothesis to the problem of religious diversity, the key issues of which concern, as is stated in the Introduction to this volume, competing religious truth-claims, religious identity and interreligious dialogue, we can draw several important conclusions. Doctrinal differences as cultural diversity One of the important conclusions I am going to draw is that the theological development of doctrines shows many similarities with the cultural elaboration of artefacts, so that diversity of doctrines converges with cultural diversity. Initial forms of religion can be very simple, as was the case for the first Christian communities, which had neither churches,27 nor developed doctrines. However, over time some religions can grow enormously complex, producing architecture, iconography, rituals and doctrine into separate constitutive parts of religion, which are developed by specialists only. In the process of disputes and the application of various cultural and philosophical styles, doctrinal statements were made more complex, intricate, and distant from their initial simple forms. Just as in iconographic styles, in the development of doctrinal beliefs we can trace the influences of particular epochs, cultures and styles of thinking. For instance, the tenets of Christian doctrine were first shaped by Platonism and, in the Middle Ages, reformulated under the influence of Aristotelian philosophy. Thus, I argue, the elaboration of doctrine, performed by specialists, can be seen as a cultural development of initial revelation. Of course, this elaboration of doctrine cannot be seen as arbitrary or superfluous. Development of doctrines can be compared to religious artefacts of natural or supposedly supernatural origin, which have an initial revelatory experience as their core, subsequently surrounded by multiple layers. The elaboration of the latter is partly guided by contingent historical circumstances and partly by logic and requirements of worship. We can consider as an example, the Black Stone – one of the most revered Islamic relics, believed to be a stone from Heaven. The Black Stone was placed in a silver frame, which was subsequently fastened with silver nails to the Kaaba – a square-shaped building, which later was surrounded by the mosque Masjid al-Haram. The elaboration and expansion of the initial artefact over centuries was enormous: by itself, the Black Stone has a size of about 20 centimetres by 16 centimetres, the Kaaba, where it is placed, is about 13 meters high, and the surrounding mosque now covers about 400,000 square

88  Elena Kalmykova meters.28 The silver plate, the granite building, the mosque were not parts of the initial artefact, but became sacred constituents of it, all playing an important role in worship. In the same way, the initial revelation of Christ, to which more and more details and conceptual perfection by specialists over centuries were added, led to the formulation of religious doctrines, such as the doctrine of the Trinity. The same is true regarding the development of doctrinal beliefs of other world religions, which have covered a long route from simple convictions of the first religious community to complexities of culturally enriched, allencompassing doctrines, developed over the ages. The extent of doctrinal beliefs thus depends on historical, cultural and institutional circumstances, the current stage of religious development and, as we have seen, does not always correspond to the actual beliefs of religious adherents. Production and elaboration of artefacts is a result of an artistic, imaginative response to religious states of affairs, or if they have a natural (sacred groves) or miraculous, non-human origin (Black Rock, some icons, etc.), they are framed, delimited, and properly separated from profane ones. Religious authorities ensure that the relation of the artefact or statement to the religious mysteries remains in place. We might therefore suppose that the elaboration of a doctrine is a particular religious practice, performed by religious authorities, and intertwined with other religious practices and institutions in certain historical circumstances. Thus, intricacies of religious doctrines can be deemed as a product of cultural and historical development, and not as the inherent properties of the original religious revelation or a necessary component of religion. Hence, pre-doctrinal religions should not be considered as primitive or somehow radically different from developed doctrinal religions: the roots of doctrinal religions are non-doctrinal. Therefore, elementary forms of religion can find a proper place in our taxonomy of religions. Moreover, religious diversity can be deemed similar to cultural diversity. Implications for interreligious dialogue This approach has important implications for the way religions are treated, and especially for the practical treatment of religious diversity in interreligious dialogue and policy making. I can distinguish positive and negative outcomes. The negative one is that an analysis of doctrinal beliefs can possibly lead to doctrinal changes, but only when performed within the boundaries of one religion and by the experts of this religion. Otherwise the results of doctrinal elaboration will be rejected for the same reasons why the artefacts as icons are not accepted when changed or produced by those who are not recognized as specialists, and especially by those who are adherents of a different religion. Thus, discussions regarding the doctrinal statements are not always a fruitful approach to interreligious dialogue.29 Such discussions are important in order to raise awareness of religious diversity and

Belief as an artefact 89 particular teaching by a religious group. But it is futile to expect that the doctrinal beliefs of the adherents can be amended as a result of interreligious dialogue. Furthermore, we should abandon the naive belief that doctrinal propositions are the subject of the same scrutiny by religious believers as everyday propositional beliefs, and can be “improved” or “disproved” by outsiders. A positive outcome of the proposed hypothesis is that religious doctrines should be treated in interreligious dialogue with due respect and without attempts to challenge them, just like religious artefacts, shrines and texts are to be treated. Religious tolerance therefore should equally concern both the material religious culture and the realm of religious beliefs. We might even draw a parallel between the violent attacks on sacred objects, as committed by the Taliban on the statues of Buddha, and attacks on the sacred doctrines, like acts of mockery by New Atheists or proponents of rival religious traditions. If religious diversity is to be tolerated, it should be equally tolerated in all the parts that are sacred for the religious adherents. Implications for philosophy In addition to the aforementioned key issues of religious diversity, a more fundamental question should also be tackled here: What is the core of religion that makes it different from another? Is it a doctrine as a fundamental set of beliefs that makes a basic difference between religions, as many philosophers tacitly or explicitly deem? If this is the case, non-doctrinal religions fall out of the scope of philosophical consideration of religious diversity. However, the approach proposed in this chapter allows us to erase the sharp distinction between doctrinal and “primitive”, pre-doctrinal religions, which did not develop any doctrine. Doctrinal statements, held as artefacts, lose their central role in religion, attributed to them by many philosophers and theologians. If we admit that they are most often treated by religious believers as artefacts, they turn out to be just another component of the cognitive machinery of religion, on par with other religious components. Dispositional and representational properties of artefacts are realized not in merely holding them, but in a skilful religious action upon them. Thus all religious artefacts can bring about religious attitudes and religious cognitions, being a part of the cognitive religious scaffolding. Hence a person might rely on other artefacts in reaching religious meaning and objects. As doctrines of developed religions are extremely complicated and require special education (catechizing) in order to be understood and memorized, religious adherents often prefer other, more accessible and palpable means facilitating religious cognition: icons, rosary beads, narratives, etc. Holding them and using them in religious practice is what constitutes actual religious belief. Religion as a historical phenomenon has non-doctrinal roots, from which doctrines are developed as culture becomes more elaborate. Thus highly developed all-encompassing doctrines do not represent the essence and scope of religious diversity. They

90  Elena Kalmykova should be deemed on par with cultural diversity or diversity of artistic styles, not the credential one, as what religious people believe is not the same as what the doctrines state. At the same time, material objects, traditions and practices of religion should be considered as important and constitutive for religion as doctrines. Thus my proposal to consider treatment of doctrines similar to that of sacred artefacts is by no means derogatory and does not aim to render religious beliefs non-cognitive. Doctrinal beliefs possess important cognitive contents, but it is not contained in the propositions only. It is reached in the embodied and experiential treatment of the world, where religious artefacts are used as stepping stones for religious action. Thus the function of being an artefact does not undermine the epistemic status of religious doctrines, but clarifies their role in actual religious beliefs. So the challenges of religious diversity should be reassessed. If my critical analysis is correct, the consideration of the logical structure of propositions, which usually takes place in philosophical approaches to religious diversity and during interreligious dialogues, turns out to be insufficient for successfully dealing with religious diversity. This way of treating religious beliefs neglects the important functions and properties of non-doctrinal and non-propositional aspects of beliefs of religious adherents. Implications for religious identity Similarly, we can revisit the issue of competing religious truth-claims and multiple religious identities in the light of the proposed hypothesis. If religious doctrines can be held as artefacts, then one can hold competing and incompatible religious doctrines simultaneously. For example, one can both believe in Jesus Christ and in karma. An explanation of this curious situation is that one or both of these incompatible doctrines are held as an artefact, without a deep understanding of the propositional contents of the underlying doctrines and their implications. It is similar to keeping an icon on the wall, a mezuzah on the door post and a statue of Buddha on a table. All these objects have religious significance and can be used by a contemporary believer. However, it is the embodied practice of a believer that shows which of the objects are properly incorporated into the system of meanings and propositional knowledge, and which are used mostly as artefacts. To sum up, the positive outcome of the proposed hypothesis is that both in research and interreligious dialogue we have to focus on the embodied, experiential way religions exist in our society. We should shift the focus of attention from abstract doctrinal beliefs to the way these beliefs are experienced in action, in the ways religion marks the space, in rituals surrounding the doctrines, in the artefacts and how their meaning is reached in practice, in the norms of action religion puts forward. We need to consider religious practice and religious forms of life in addition to the consideration of the logical structure of doctrinal propositions. Philosophical inquiry into

Belief as an artefact 91 religious diversity can benefit greatly from taking into account the latter aspects of religion. At the same time we should respect the doctrinal beliefs as much as we respect religious artefacts, such as statues of Buddha or icons.

Notes 1 This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program, Marie Curie grant 660954. 2 Justin Barrett, “Cognitive Constraints on Hindu Concepts of the Divine,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 37 (1998): 613. 3 Ibid. 4 Justin Barrett and Brant Van Orman, “The Effects of the Use of Images in Worship on God Concepts,” Journal of Psychology and Christianity 15 (1996): 44. 5 Pascal Boyer, “Religious Thought and Behaviour as By-products of Brain Function,” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 7 (2003): 119. 6 Justin Barrett, “Theological Correctness: Cognitive Constraint and the Study of Religion,” Method & Theory in the Study of Religion 11 (1999): 325–39. 7 Meredith McGuire, Lived Religion: Faith and Practice in Everyday Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). 8 Bob Smietana, “Americans Love God and the Bible, Are Fuzzy on Details,” Life Way Research (2016) lifewayresearch.com/2016/09/27/americans-love-god-andthe-bible-are-fuzzy-on-the-details/ 9 Pew Research Center. U.S. Religious Knowledge Survey by the Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion & Public Life. (2010), http://assets.pewresearch.org/ wp-content/uploads/sites/11/2010/09/religious-knowledge-full-report.pdf 10 However, this is not applicable to the range of diversity of beliefs, as it is much wider today. 11 Romy Sauvayre, “Le Changement de Croyances Extrêmes du Cadre Cognitif aux Conflits de Valeurs,” Revue européenne des sciences sociales 49 (2011): 61–82. 12 Jeremy Uecker, Mark Regnerus and Margaret Vaaler, “Losing My Religion: The Social Sources of Religious Decline in Early Adulthood,” Social Forces 85 (2007): 1667. 13 A helpful discussion of the particularities of religious language and the understanding of the meaning of religious truth-claims is given in Åke Wahlberg, “Truth, meaning and interreligious understanding” in this volume. 14 John Searle, Making the Social World. The Structure of Human Civilization (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). 15 According to Thomas Aquinas, we cannot comprehend the mysteries of God, not only because they exceed our cognitive abilities, but also due to our lack of proper language. As the words we use when we make statements regarding God are the same as those we use in application to worldly things, it is impossible to fully express divine truths or to fully reach them through cognitive propositions. Similar claims regarding the impossibility of divine truths to be fully grasped in propositions are made by other religions as well. For example, in Islam God and Divine properties are believed to be completely beyond the reach of human comprehension and language. 16 Emile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (Oxford University Press, 2001 [1912]), 46. 17 A detailed account of the belief as an artefact hypothesis can be found in Elena Kalmykova, “Holding Doctrinal Belief as an Artefact,” Religious Studies, forthcoming. 18 Abp Stylianos, “The icon in Orthodox spirituality,” Phronema 4 (1989): 45–13.

92  Elena Kalmykova 19 Some icons, though, are believed to have come into existence miraculously, “Not Made by Hands” – for example, Mandylion and some icons of Christ and Virgin Mary. 20 When the meaning of the doctrine is not completely clear for a believer, contradictions do not affect the choice of faith and do not prevent them from being held simultaneously. The more a given religious statement is taken as an artefact, the less sensitive to inconsistencies it is. 21 Neil Van Leeuwen, “Religious Credence is not Factual Belief,” Cognition 133 (2014): 29. 22 Joel Krueger. “Extended Mind and Religious Cognition”, in MacMillan Interdisciplinary Handbooks on Religion – Mental Religion: The Brain, Cognition, and Culture, ed. Niki Clements (Farmington Hills, MI: Macmillan Reference, 2016). 23 Matthew Day, “Religion, Off-Line Cognition and the Extended Mind,” Journal of Cognition and Culture 4 (2004): 116. 24 Paul Tillich, Theology of Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1959). 25 An interesting idea how the world is perceived as providing religious affordances was proposed by Kevin Schilbrack in his presentation in Birmingham (April 14, 2017). Basing his idea on psychologist James Gibson’s idea that animals see their environment as providing affordances, i.e., opportunities for action, Schilbrack argues that religious objects are perceived by believers as providing possibilities for a particular action. However, seeing religious affordances in the world requires particular training, which is provided by religious practices. 26 Michal Pagis, “From Abstract Concepts to Experiential Knowledge: Embodying Enlightenment in a Meditation Center,” Qualitative Sociology 4 (2010): 469. 27 Carolyn Osiek and David Balch, Families in the New Testament World: Households and House Churches (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1997). 28 Gordon Newby, “Kabah,” in Encyclopedia of Religion, Vol. 8, ed. Lindsay Jones (Detroit: MacMillan Reference, 2005), 5049. 29 These discussions, though, play an important role in intra-religious dialogue, between the denominations of one religion.

Bibliography Barrett, Justin. “Cognitive Constraints on Hindu Concepts of the Divine.” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 37 (1998): 608–19. Barrett, Justin. “Theological Correctness: Cognitive Constraint and the Study of Religion.” Method & Theory in the Study of Religion 11 (1999): 325–39. Barrett, Justin, and Brant Van Orman. “The Effects of the Use of Images in Worship on God Concepts.” Journal of Psychology and Christianity 15 (1996): 38–45. Boyer, Pascal. Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought. New York: Basic Books, 2001. Boyer, Pascal. “Religious Thought and Behaviour as By-products of Brain Function.” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 7 (2003): 119–24. Day, Matthew. “Religion, Off-Line Cognition and the Extended Mind.” Journal of Cognition and Culture 4 (2004): 101–21. Day, Matthew. “Constructing Religion without The Social: Durkheim, Latour, and Extended Cognition.” Zygon 44 (2009): 719–37. Durkheim, Emile. The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life. Oxford University Press, 2001 [1912]. Krueger, Joel. “Extended Mind and Religious Cognition.” In MacMillan Interdisciplinary Handbooks on Religion – Mental Religion: The Brain, Cognition, and

Belief as an artefact 93 Culture, edited by Niki Clements, 237–54. Farmington Hills, MI: Macmillan, 2016. McGuire, Meredith. Lived Religion: Faith and Practice in Everyday Life. Oxford University Press, 2008. Newby, Gordon. “Kabah.” In Encyclopedia of Religion. Vol. 8, edited by Lindsay Jones, 5049–50. Detroit: MacMillan, 2005. Osiek, Carolyn, and David Balch. Families in the New Testament World: Households and House Churches. Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1997. Pagis, Michal. “From Abstract Concepts to Experiential Knowledge: Embodying Enlightenment in a Meditation Center.” Qualitative Sociology 4 (2010): 469–89. Pew Research Center. U.S. Religious Knowledge Survey by the Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion & Public Life. (2010), http://assets.pewresearch.org/wpcontent/uploads/sites/11/2010/09/religious-knowledge-full-report.pdf Sauvayre, Romy. “Le Changement de Croyances Extrêmes du Cadre Cognitif aux Conflits de Valeurs.” Revue européenne des sciences sociales 49 (2011): 61–82. Schilbrack, Kevin. “Religious Affordances.” Paper presented at Open End Meeting (April 2017), Birmingham, UK. Searle, John. Making the Social World. The Structure of Human Civilization. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Smietana, Bob. “Americans Love God and the Bible, Are Fuzzy on Details.” In Life Way Research. (2016) lifewayresearch.com/2016/09/27/ americans-love-god-and-the-bible-are-fuzzy-on-the-details/ Sperber, Dan. On Anthropological Knowledge. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985. Stylianos, Abp. “The Icon in Orthodox Spirituality.” Phronema 4 (1989): 45–13. Tillich, Paul. Theology of Culture. New York: Oxford University Press, 1959. Uecker, Jeremy, Mark Regnerus, and Margaret Vaaler. “Losing My Religion: The Social Sources of Religious Decline in Early Adulthood.” Social Forces 85 (2007): 1667–92. Van Leeuwen, Neil. “Religious Credence is not Factual Belief.” Cognition 133 (2014): 698–715.

5 Maimonides and Kierkegaard on fictionalism, divine hiddenness and the scope for interreligious dialogue Nehama Verbin Fictionalism “Fictionalism” is an umbrella term that covers different philosophical positions concerning different areas of discourse, among which are mathematics, physics, ethics and religion. Caddick Bourne characterizes fictionalist views as aiming to deny that “a target area of discourse gives us a reason to believe in certain objects which it represents or seems to represent”;1 Eklund provisionally argues that fictionalism about a region of discourse is the position that “claims made within that discourse are not best seen as aiming at literal truth but are better regarded as a sort of ‘fiction’ ”, or as “useful fictions”.2 Eklund distinguishes between ontological fictionalism and linguistic fictionalism. His provisional definition captures the nature of linguistic fictionalism; the ontological thesis, on the other hand, is the thesis that “entities characteristic of the discourse do not exist or have the ontological status of fictional entities”.3 Revisionary fictionalism and hermeneutic fictionalism may also be distinguished. While hermeneutic fictionalism holds that users of the particular discourse do not aim at literal truth but only pretend or appear to do so, revisionary fictionalism is prescriptive, holding that they ought to use their utterances as pretend-assertions. A useful distinction can also be made between types of fictionalism that use the word “fiction” to deny the existence of the objects discussed in the “fiction” and those that are committed to ontological indifference, viewing the objects or characters within the fiction as belonging to the fiction, while remaining indifferent regarding their ontological status. Other types, divisions and characterizations are offered by Eklund and others. Although motivations for fictionalism in various target discourses vary, underlying many of them is the conviction that the objects featuring in the target discourse do not exist.4 In what follows, I will show that Maimonides’ fictionalism and Kierkegaard’s are rooted neither in ontological scepticism nor in agnosticism but rather, in their conceptions of divine hiddenness. Profound religious commitment grounds their religious fictionalism; it gives rise to their commitment to the truth towards which the

Maimonides and Kierkegaard 95 life of faith aspires. Both, however, insist that the nature of that “truth” cannot be brought to light by an insistence on any straight-forward conception of “objectivity”, or “correspondence”, construed over-and-against “subjectivity”.

Maimonides According to Maimonides, biblical narratives are not to be understood literally; rather, they are parables whose purpose is to reveal (albeit, not through asserting) various secrets about the sublime and the path towards apprehending it to those who are prepared to grasp them. Specific constituents of those parables are to be re-interpreted too. Focusing on predicates that seem to refer to God’s attributes, Maimonides seems to insist that they are to be understood as “attributes of action” or, preferably, as negative predications. The meaning of his comments on religious language, however, is highly controversial as is the degree to which he is committed to what he seems to espouse. In what follows, I shall place his analysis of religious language in the context in which it is embedded, namely, in his conception of divine transcendence, and then provide a few clues as to how I believe that they are to be understood. Fictionalism and divine transcendence in Maimonides Maimonides’ famous emphasis on divine transcendence has metaphysical, epistemological and semantic dimensions. Maimonides seems to deny the possibility of speaking about God, of knowing anything about Him, as well as of being placed in any relation to Him.5 The metaphysical dimension shows itself particularly in the Guide I/52, where Maimonides explicates God’s metaphysical transcendence in terms of His incorporeality: There is no relation between God, may He be exalted, and time and place. . . . For time is an accident attached to motion. . . . Motion, on the other hand, is one of the things attached to bodies, whereas God, may He be exalted, is not a body. (I/52)6 Thus: There is, in truth, no relation in any respect between Him and any of His creatures.  .  .  . How then could there subsist a relation between Him, may He be exalted, and any of the things created by Him, given the immense difference between them  .  .  . than which there is no greater difference? (I/52)7

96  Nehama Verbin God’s epistemological transcendence, too, is expressed in various passages throughout the Guide. In the following passage, Maimonides explicitly states that God’s nature cannot be known by human beings: all men, those of the past and those of the future, affirm clearly that God, may He be exalted, cannot be apprehended by the intellects . . . and that apprehension of Him consists in the inability to attain the ultimate term in apprehending Him. (I/59)8 Maimonides’ convictions concerning God’s metaphysical and epistemological transcendence shape his views of religious language. Maimonides insists that we cannot apply any predicate to God. He insists that everything that is predicated of God is done so in a purely equivocal manner, emphasizing that this applies to “existence” too: “[T]he term ‘existent’ is predicated of Him, may He be exalted, and of everything that is other than He, in a purely equivocal sense.” (I/56).9 Given that the meaning of, for instance, “knowledge”, “power”, “will”, “life” and “existence” when applied to God “is in no way like their meaning in other applications” (I/56),10 do such terms, when applied to God, bear any meaning at all? Davies maintains that they do. Commenting on Maimonides’ conception of “perfection”, he states: Maimonides nowhere denies that God is perfect, possessing all perfections in a manner appropriate to the divine nature. What he denies is that such perfections can be subsumed under the same definition as created perfections. . . . He posits the existence of divine perfections . . . without thereby undermining his understanding of divine unity and transcendence or his insistence that divine and created perfections can only be referred to with the equivocal use of language.11 The following passage, however, seems to suggest that Maimonides had believed that when applied to God, the attributes, including “perfection” do not come to possess a new meaning: It is clear at the first glance that there is no correlation between Him and things created by Him . . . it is impossible to represent oneself that a relation subsists between the intellect and color although, according to our school both of them are comprised by the same “existence”. How then can a relation be represented between Him and what is other than He when there is no notion comprising in any respect both of the two, inasmuch as existence is, in our opinion, affirmed of Him, may He be exalted, and of what is other than He merely by way of absolute equivocation. (I/52)12

Maimonides and Kierkegaard 97 Maimonides, here, points to our inability to apply colour terms to the concept of the intellect due to the fact that there is no “relation” between them. An attempt to do so clearly results in nonsense. By analogy, it would be impossible to apply any concept whatsoever to the divine intellect, since no relation could subsist between them. It thus seems that Maimonides here states that biblical utterances, which purport to describe God’s attributes and/or God’s actions, to the extent that they refer to God, cannot, in principle, come to possess meaning, any meaning whatsoever, given the mis-relation between God and the world, and given the fact that whatever meaning and/or definition such attributes or actions can come to possess will be contaminated by their mundane origin and context. If that is correct then, in insisting that names are used equivocally in utterances about God, Maimonides insists that, devoid of their ordinary meaning, the seeming names/attributes/actions do not come to possess a new one. In other words, I maintain that Maimonides’ fictionalism is not an error theory of the nature of religious utterances; it does not judge our utterances about God, to the extent that they are truly about God, as merely false; it renders them meaningless. Maimonides’ austere view concerning religious language appears to be somewhat modified in his comments concerning attributes of action and negative predication. He seems to interpret biblical references to God’s nature as references to His manner of acting. He seems to allow “attributes of action”: “Every attribute that is found in the books of the deity, may He be exalted, is . . . an attribute of His action and not an attribute of His essence” (I/53).13 Since he also denies the application of relational attributes to God, insisting that there is no relation between God and the world, it follows that “attributes of action” cannot and, indeed, do not refer to God’s own manner of acting in the world.14 By “attributes of action” Maimonides means our human and perspectival tendency to interpret and describe certain worldly realia as effects, brought about by an agent. When we perceive embryos of living beings and the manners in which they are cared for by their caregivers, we tend to say of God that He is merciful. When we perceive calamities annihilating whole tribes or regions, exterminating both young and old, we tend to say that God is jealous and avenging (I/54). Maimonides insists, however, that no conclusions concerning God’s nature can be drawn on the basis of what we tend to identify as the effects of His agency. Given the dangerous ramifications of the use of “attributes of action”, namely, the temptation to draw certain conclusions concerning the causal agent’s essence from discernable mundane states, conceived of as effects, Maimonides calls for further purification of our idea of God. He calls for negating in thought and speech what God is not: “Know that the description of God, may He be cherished and exalted, by means of negations is the correct description” (I/58).15

98  Nehama Verbin Maimonides’ negative theology introduces a new “language game” into the life of faith. We do not merely negate various attributes (deficiencies) when using his via negativa, stating, for example, that God is not many, or that God is not finite. We also deny the appropriateness of applying attributes, any attribute whatsoever, to God. Using the analogy of the wall, which is not endowed with sight, he emphasizes that his via negativa involves double negations that cannot be replaced by positive assertions (I/58). It involves double negations that undo themselves. His via negativa suggests that it is not possible to know God’s nature, to entertain thoughts and utter statements about Him: As everyone is aware that it is not possible, except through negation, to achieve an apprehension of that which is in our power to apprehend and that, on the other hand, negation does not give knowledge in any respect of the true reality of the thing with regard to which the particular matter in question is negated – all men . . . affirm clearly that God, may He be exalted, cannot be apprehended by the intellects. (I/59)16 Maimonides’ via negativa, therefore, culminates in silence: “The most apt phrase concerning this subject is the dictum occurring in the Psalms, Silence is praise to Thee, which interpreted signifies: silence with regard to You is praise” (I/59).17 Although Maimonides insists that we cannot speak about God, he maintains that we can refer to Him by the “articulated name”, YHWH, which alone refers to Him: All the names of God, may He be exalted, that are to be found in any of the books derive from actions. There is nothing secret in this matter. The only exception is one name: namely Yod, He Vav, He. This is the name of God, may He be exalted, that has been originated without any derivation, and for this reason it is called the articulated name. This means that this name gives a clear unequivocal indication of His essence, may He be exalted. . . . in such a way that none of the created things is associated with Him in this indication. (I/61)18 Maimonides describes the sage who has cleansed his mind of the false images of God that it tends to produce and contemplates the divine name YHWH, in subjective mystical terms: the sage experiences “intense passionate love”, perceiving “beauty” or “light”.19 Thus, all the philosophers say: “We are dazzled by His beauty, and He is hidden from us because of the intensity with which He becomes manifest, just as the sun is hidden to eyes that are too weak to apprehend it” (I/59).20

Maimonides and Kierkegaard 99 And elsewhere: the Sages have indicated with reference to the deaths of Moses, Aaron, and Miriam that the three of them died by a kiss . . . Their purpose was to indicate that the three of them died in the pleasure of this apprehension due to the intensity of passionate love. (III/51)21 It is this content-less mystical apprehension that constitutes the Maimonidean sage as a sage. As we have seen, it does not involve the acquisition of objective knowledge about God, His nature, will or actions, since no such knowledge is possible. It cannot be conveyed by means of propositions, which can be true or false. The apprehension of the truth is made possible through one’s becoming a full human subject (i.e., a perfected human intellect) it is achieved in subjectivity, when one’s intellect ascends above the body: And there may be a human individual who  .  .  . achieves a state in which he talks with people and is occupied with his bodily necessities while his intellect is wholly turned toward Him, may He be exalted, so that in his heart he is always in His presence, may he be exalted, while outwardly he is with people. (III/51)22 When one realizes one’s potential as a human subject, created in God’s intellectual image, one can contemplate the divine name in a climactic mystical moment of apprehension.23 Since the apprehension of such a divine truth does not involve a propositional component that can be formulated or taught by means of meaningful and true assertions, it cannot be characterized as “objective knowledge”. We may, thus, state that for Maimonides, “truth is subjectivity”. Friends, foes and interreligious dialogue Given Maimonides’ emphasis on divine transcendence, and given his emphasis on subjectivity, which places a non-propositional, mystical state of apprehension at the centre of the religious life, who are Maimonides’ religious friends and foes? In the Introduction to the Guide, Maimonides declares that it is written for the perplexed Jewish intellectual, who is “perfect in his religion and character” but who has also studied “the sciences of the philosophers and come to know what they signify”.24 Maimonides believes that having done so, he “must have felt distressed by the externals of the Law”;25 he must have felt perplexed by the meaning of various terms “occurring in the books

100  Nehama Verbin of prophecy”.26 The first purpose of the Guide, as Maimonides introduces it, is exegetical, namely, to explain their meanings. From a Maimonidean perspective, however, the source of the distress is not particularly Jewish. The distress is internal to any revealed religion with holy-scripture, an oral or written tradition, which inevitably apply predicates to God, and a commitment to reason (as Maimonides understands it), which entails a commitment to divine transcendence and the prohibition against compromising it in speech and action. Maimonides himself was deeply engaged with Islamic philosophy and its manner of addressing similar difficulties, and he has often referred to it in the Guide. Pointing out fundamental difficulties shared by religious intellectuals of different religious persuasions, the Guide, therefore, sets up a religious community, characterized by profound fellowship among the perplexed. Each member of the Guide’s virtual community of the perplexed engages with similar difficulties and each is committed to the same goal, namely, living a religious life guided by reason. Each member is, therefore, committed to uprooting idolatry (i.e., non-transcendent conceptions of God) from their own minds, as well as from the minds of their nominal community fellows. The multi-denominational religious community that the Guide sets up is a genuine one, despite the ritualistic distinctions among its members. Although the mutual commitment to reason is embedded in different ritualistic practices, such practices have a mere instrumental significance. Although Maimonides insists that Moses’ prophecy and the Law are unique and cannot be surpassed, the Law plays a preparatory role, helping the community as a whole, and each member individually, to rule the body and the mind, to foster true beliefs and keep away from false and harmful ones, to conquer and control one’s physical impulses, and ultimately, where possible, to ascend above the body so that the individual of perfect intellect could contemplate the sublime. Within that framework, there is no conceptual space for the uniqueness of Moses and his prophecy, which Maimonides seems to emphasize, insisting, for example, that “nothing like it happened before and will not happen after” (II/33)27 or that the term “prophet” when used with reference to Moses and other prophets is amphibolous.28 Despite these statements, Maimonides uses the same description of Moses’ climactic providential death in the state of apprehending the divine as he does of Aaron’s and Miriam’s climactic deaths: “the three of them died in the pleasure of this apprehension due to the intensity of passionate love” (III/51).29 It thus appears that the comments on the uniqueness of Moses and his prophecy are driven by political motivations rather than philosophical ones. The description of Moses’ death in the Guide III/51, which – I maintain – portrays a religious climax that is, in principle, accessible to prophets other than Moses, and moreover, to Jews and non-Jews alike is, thus, to be taken as the central description of the climax to which the religious life is to aim.

Maimonides and Kierkegaard 101 Thus, not only is the problem that the Guide sets at its centre one that renders denominational boundaries insignificant, but the climax of the religious life is described in terms that tend to dissolve denominational distinctions too. There are no philosophical grounds for privileging, in principle, a Jewish prophet over and against a non-Jewish one, and there cannot be a prima facie preference for Jewish prophecy over and against a Muslim one. Moreover, as we have seen, the climactic moment of apprehending God does not involve propositional content concerning God’s nature, will or actions. It reveals no religious doctrines through which different religious denominations can be distinguished. As a mystical moment of apprehending God, it presupposes a virtuous life and a keen intellect, which are, in principle, accessible to adherents of different religious traditions. Although Maimonides’ conception of the climax of the life of faith constitutes an elitist “club”, it is not a closed one; it is a self-making elitism, which requires moral virtue and rational commitment that are in principle, in everyone’s capacity to pursue, even if not to realize. Thus, the Guide’s emphasis on divine transcendence, its fictionalist stance towards its written and oral tradition, which renders meaningless all talk about God, and its ideal of mystical subjectivity as the climax of the religious life, shape a religious community without denominational borders. It establishes genuine fellowship across denominational boundaries, while setting up a wall between itself and the vulgar, who are seen as corrupt idolaters who are immersed in their body and whose eyes stray after it. The Maimonidean cross-denominational community is universalistic, rather than specific, and despite appearances, open and democratic. I shall now turn to Kierkegaard’s fictionalism and to his commitment to God’s hiddenness in which it is embedded.30

Kierkegaard Kierkegaard on divine hiddenness and truth as subjectivity Kierkegaard maintains that God is never directly present to us, never directly revealed; he insists that there is no direct transition into faith from any observable objective fact or thesis. Since God is hidden, seeing God, believing, always involves a leap, an inward act of will, for Kierkegaard: Nature is certainly the work of God, but only the work is directly present, not God. With regard to the individual human being, is this not acting like an illusive author, who nowhere sets forth his result in block letters or provides it beforehand in a preface? And why is God illusive? Precisely because he is truth and in being illusive seeks to keep a person from untruth. The observer does not glide directly to the result but on his own must concern himself with finding it and thereby break the

102  Nehama Verbin direct relation. But this break is the actual breakthrough of inwardness, an act of self-activity, the first designation of truth as inwardness.31 God is never present to us as a publicly observable medium-sized object on whose existence or nature we can all agree. He is hidden in His creation. Perceiving God, therefore, involves “inwardness” and “self-activity”. It is in one’s inwardness that one perceives God “out there”: No anonymous author can more slyly hide himself, and no maieutic can more carefully recede from a direct relation than God can. He is in the creation, everywhere in the creation, but he is not there directly, and only when the single individual turns inward into himself (consequently only in the inwardness of self-activity) does he become aware and capable of seeing God.32 God’s hiddenness has semantic consequences for Kierkegaard. Insisting that God recedes from a direct relation with us, Kierkegaard emphasizes the indispensable need to communicate the secret of God’s absent presence through indirect means. He distinguishes accidental secrets from an essential secret. Accidental secrets can be understood directly as soon as they are made public. The secret that lies at the heart of the life of faith is an essential secret. It cannot be formulated, expressed, or communicated directly. Indirect communication is the only possible means to convey it.33 Thus, similarly to Maimonides, Kierkegaard too, recognizes and emphasizes the difficulty to talk about God. The difficulty, for Kierkegaard, has to do with the fact that what is to be communicated, the God-man, is a riddle, a paradox, an offense to reason: “when the teacher . . . is a paradox, then all direct communication is impossible”.34 And: If he is the sign of contradiction, then he cannot give a direct communication – that is, the statement can be entirely direct, but the fact that he is involved, that he, the sign of contradiction, says it, makes it indirect communication.35 Kierkegaard emphasizes that there is neither direct communication nor direct recognizability. If there were direct recognizability, “the God-man would be an idol; then direct recognizability is paganism”.36 In other words, not only is God hidden in his creation, but He is also hidden in His revelation. Kierkegaard emphasizes that Christ’s divinity cannot be deduced from history. It is not an objective given, like the colour of his hair, his weight or height. Thus: “He is not and does not want to be for anyone the person one has come to know something about incidentally from history . . . because we can learn nothing from history about him . . . he is and wants to be the sign of offense and the object of faith”.37

Maimonides and Kierkegaard 103 The Christ of faith is hidden in the ambiguous Jesus of history; recognizing the Jesus of history as the Christ of faith involves a subjective act of inwardness, a leap, indeed, the greatest leap. Kierkegaard explicates the leap into discipleship (through “offense”) in terms of his concept of “contemporaneity”. He maintains that to have faith in Christ is to be contemporary with him. Contemporaneity is not to be understood historically. Christ’s historical contemporaries were in no privileged position to perceive his divinity than subsequent generations are: Whatever true Christians there are in any generation are contemporary with Christ, have nothing to do with Christians in past generations but everything to do with the contemporary Christ . . . his life on earth has the eternal contemporaneity.38 And: since Christ is the absolute, it is easy to see that in relation to him, there is only one situation, the situation of contemporaneity; the three, the seven, the fifteen, the seventeen, the eighteen hundred years make no difference at all; they do not change him, but neither do they reveal who he was, for who he is, is revealed only to faith.39 Having faith in Christ is being contemporary with him. Contemporaneity with Christ is a condition of faith, or better put, a feature of it. I maintain that Kierkegaard’s conception of “contemporaneity with Christ” shapes the type of fictionalism that he portrays. To shed light on Kierkegaard’s notion of “contemporaneity” I shall digress into a brief discussion of fiction. I shall explicate Kierkegaard’s fictionalism and his conception of “truth as subjectivity” in which it is embedded in terms of that discussion. Fiction and contemporaneity According to Walton, “fiction” has “nothing essentially to do with what is or is not real or true or factual”.40 Rather, works of fiction, over and against non-fictional works prescribe imaginings and generate fictional truths. They do so by serving as propos in games of make-believe. Propositions whose imaginings are prescribed are fictional and the fact that a given proposition is true in a work of fiction is a “fictional truth”. Unlike works of fiction, histories and biographies do not prescribe imaginings, nor do they generate fictional truths. Walton emphasizes that our characteristic relation to fiction is as participants – not as distant onlookers. Works of fiction draw us into them by means of the imagination: We don’t just observe fictional worlds from without. We live in them (. . .) together with Anna Karenina and Emma Bovary and Robinson

104  Nehama Verbin Crusoe and the others, sharing their joys and sorrows, rejoicing and commiserating with them, admiring and detesting them. . . . It is this experience that underlies much of the fascination representations have for us and their power over us.41 I wish to propose that we understand Kierkegaard’s notion of “contemporaneity” with Christ and the gospels, as well as his conception of truth as subjectivity in terms of the kind of imaginative involvement that characterizes our relation to works of fiction and the fictional characters that they bring to life. The truth of the narratives, for Kierkegaard, is not to be explored by investigating their objective rational status. Their truth, for Kierkegaard, lies in one’s subjective imaginative involvement in them, in one’s manner of participating in them, in one’s passionately living in them; in other words, in one’s becoming contemporary with them, and with Christ, whom they represent. Focusing on the objective status of the fictional characters and events, on the question of their historical existence or non-existence is stepping out of the narratives, and in so doing, stepping out of one’s contemporaneity with Christ. The transition into objectivity is, therefore, a transition away from discipleship, and away from faith. Contemporaneity, however, is not merely a matter of imaginative involvement, analogous to our involvement with ordinary works of fiction. It goes beyond it. I  would like to introduce the notion of “subversive fiction” to shed further light on Kierkegaard’s conception of contemporaneity and on the role that imaginative involvement plays in Kierkegaardian discipleship. Our relation to fiction is characterized by a dual response, involving two perspectives: an external one, which sees the fictional world as artifice, and an internal imaginative perspective, which is characterized by participation in the fictional world. On the one hand, we are aware that Anna Karenina is a character in a novel; we are aware that the fictional world that we enter into by means of the imagination is an artifice whose content is under the control of a writer. On the other hand, “we don’t just observe fictional worlds from without. We live in them.”42 According to Walton, “[T]he dual standpoint which appreciators take is . . . one of the most fundamental and important features of the human institution of fiction”.43 Our dual response to fictional narratives sometimes collapses. I  distinguished elsewhere between two directions of collapse: one involving the collapse of the internal perspective, the other involving the collapse of the external one.44 In his “Of the Standard of Taste” Hume pointed to our resistance to enter imaginatively into moral sentiments that are different from ours: Where the ideas of morality and decency alter from one age to another, and where vicious manners are described, without being marked with the proper characters of blame and disapprobation; this must be

Maimonides and Kierkegaard 105 allowed to disfigure the poem, and to be a real deformity. I cannot, nor is it proper I should enter into such sentiments.45 Hume points out that when a work of fiction calls us to adopt a moral position that contradicts our own, when it calls us to endorse, for instance, slavery, racism or misogynism, we are reluctant to participate fully in the game of make-believe and imaginatively endorse such moral sentiments. The internal perspective thus collapses into the external one by means of an “imaginative resistance”.46 Certain works of fiction, however, elicit a different direction of collapse, a collapse of the external perspective into the internal one. I use the term “imaginative persistence” to characterize this phenomenon; I call fictional works that elicit “imaginative persistence” subversive works of fiction.47 Subversive works of fiction absorb the participant into the fictional world in such a manner that the fictional game-world completely reorients the participant’s life. Instead of leading its participant to place the fictional narrative within the framework of her ordinary life and conception of reality, a subversive work of fiction leads her to place her life within the framework of the narrative. It is important to realize that the subversive nature of a fictional narrative is not grounded in its historicity. A narrative need not command beliefs nor need it employ the standard procedures for knowledge acquisition in order to be subversive. A narrative may become subversive merely by engaging the imagination, by inviting one to imaginatively occupy a particular perspective from within which various events are imaginatively experienced. Various biblical narratives, for instance, the gospel narratives, may function as subversive fiction. The Jesus story may elicit a variety of intense emotions (or quasi-emotions), for instance, pity, anger, and despair. The story may transform various thematic beliefs to which the participant was committed. It may challenge the participant’s understanding of the manner in which concepts such as “saviour” and “salvation” can be used. Over and against the conception of the saviour as the one who brings relief, victory, peace and prosperity, it presents a suffering man (rabbi/prophet/miracleworker) who dies in shame and despair; over and against the notion of “salvation” as peace and glory, the story presents the crucifixion. Being transformed by the image of the despairing Jesus on the cross, one’s picture of the world may be utterly changed. What was previously perceived to be real and valuable: freedom from pain, social status, the quest for knowledge, life itself, may now seem empty and meaningless. The pursuit of happiness, health and wealth may be replaced by a surrender to suffering, which may now be conceived of as a medium for salvation and as the primary means of self-improvement available to human beings. Thus, participation in the Jesus story may lead one to feel differently and think differently, to pursue a different way of life, to engage in a different set of practices, and to employ a different set of concepts. When the gospel

106  Nehama Verbin narratives become subversive, one becomes “contemporary” with Christ, in Kierkegaardian terms; one becomes his disciple. In the following passages from Practice in Christianity, Kierkegaard distinguishes between “history” and “sacred history”: “History, says faith, has nothing at all to do with Jesus Christ; with regard to him we have only sacred history.”48 He explicates the distinction between “history” and “sacred history” in terms of “contemporaneity”. “Contemporaneity with Christ” can be understood in terms of imaginative involvement in a subversive work of fiction: The difference between poetry and history is surely this, that history is what actually happened, whereas poetry is the possible, the imagined, the poetized. But that which has actually happened (the past) is still not, except in a certain sense (namely, in contrast to poetry), the actual. The qualification that is lacking – which is the qualification of truth (as inwardness) and of all religiousness is – for you. The past is not actuality – for me. Only the contemporary is actuality for me. That with which you are living simultaneously is actuality – for you. Thus every human being is able to become contemporary only with the time in which he is living – and then with one more, with Christ’s life upon earth, for Christ’s life upon earth, the sacred history, stands alone by itself, outside history.49 An historical narrative, which represents past events, which merely prescribes believing, belongs to the past. However, “The past is not actuality – for me”.50 It is only when a narrative draws one into it by prescribing imaginings, that one can become contemporary with it; it is then that the narrative can become subversive – a life-changing narrative: If you cannot prevail upon yourself to become a Christian in the situation of contemporaneity with him, or if he cannot move you and draw you to himself in the situation of contemporaneity, then you will never become a Christian.51 Being contemporary with Christ is being moved by him and drawn to him, to becoming his disciple, his imitator  – not his admirer. Discipleship is a matter of subjectivity; it is a matter of passionate commitment; it is a matter of imaginative involvement or absorption. To summarize, Kierkegaard’s fictionalism, the subjective notion of truth that it elicits and his emphasis on contemporaneity with Christ are deeply embedded in his conception of God’s hiddenness, in his conception of the ambiguity of all facts and events, of all narratives, including, and aboveall, the gospel narratives. The challenge of discipleship is grounded in that ambiguity; rising up to the challenge deeply engages the imagination. Discipleship is, therefore, not a matter of rational deliberation of objective data;

Maimonides and Kierkegaard 107 it involves a leap; it involves “the passion of inwardness”, one’s utmost subjective commitment. Kierkegaard’s religious friends and foes Owing to the significance of the gospel narratives and the figure of Christ that they portray, and owing to Kierkegaard’s emphasis on contemporaneity with them, it may seem that there is no space for meaningful religious fellowship nor for dialogue with a person who does not engage with the gospel narratives. Even if that were true, it would not follow that there is no space for dialogue or fellowship with a non-Christian. Imaginative involvement in the gospel narratives is possible for non-Christians too. Non-Christians too, may be passionate about these narratives. They may find them existentially challenging, and even life-changing. Fellowship in passionately relating to the gospels and to the Christ that they represent is, therefore, possible for both Christians and non-Christians. Moreover, imaginatively entering into the Christian story, whatever one’s background beliefs are, and whatever one’s nominal religious affiliation is, fosters stronger affiliation with the Kierkegaardian believer than accepting it as faithful history. Kierkegaard explicitly states that the passionate nonChristian, even the passionate pagan is preferable to the so-called Christian, who relates to the gospel narratives in the wrong way, as to mere history, which prescribes beliefs that are susceptible to empirical validation or refutation: “paganism is much closer to Christianity than an objective Christianity.”52 The passionate pagan is aware of the fact that s/he is not a Christian; from that standpoint, s/he can come to understand and appreciate what being a Christian means, and what it involves. Moreover, his or her passion may lead him/her to Christ. Unlike the passionate pagan, the “objective” Christian is self-deceived about who s/he is. It is difficult to expose the deception and help him/her recognize it for what it is. Thus, Kierkegaard’s fictionalism, with its emphasis on inwardness, passion, subjectivity, and contemporaneity, similarly to Maimonidean fictionalism, redraws the boundaries of religious fellowship across and within religious denominations. While the notion of fellowship among Christians is problematized through Kierkegaard’s attempt “to introduce Christianity into Christendom”,53 religious fellowship between a Kierkegaardian believer and a non-Christian, even a pagan is facilitated. This is not a trivial issue. When the religious boundaries and distinctions that we presuppose are challenged, the very nature of the dialogue, its targeted partner and one’s aims in pursuing dialogue with him or her may alter with it. Moreover, Maimonidean and Kierkegaardian subjectivity have much to say about the difference between “religious fellowship” and a “religious crowd”. Like Maimonides’ climactic contemplative state, Kierkegaard’s notion of the “single individual” presents a notion of “truth” that is not established by manufactured consent, but that is realized in “inwardness”.

108  Nehama Verbin In other words, Kierkegaard’s notion of the “single individual”, like Maimonidean subjectivity, functions as a corrective that may ensure that “religious fellowship” does not turn into a “religious crowd”.54 The fellowship that can emerge from the mutual passionate engagement with the gospel narratives, like the Maimonidean fellowship that can emerge between different sages who passionately and inwardly contemplate the divine name, does not produce objective knowledge that can foster cohesion within a religious crowd. In many ways, it is a fellowship of religious orphans. Mutual recognition among religious orphans is, I believe, a good solid ground for fruitful interreligious dialogue. I, thus, conclude that different types of fictionalism, with their differing construals of “truth as subjectivity”, may give rise to different types of “religious fellowship” that may cross denominational distinctions in different ways, dissolving some religious boundaries while creating others. The shift from “objectivity” to “subjectivity” may create its own particular set of difficulties, especially when subjectivity is construed as an unrealizable ideal.55 However, as long as the religious “other” or some religious others are not merely tolerated but, rather, embraced in fellowship, such forms of fictionalism deserve a serious consideration in discussions of interreligious dialogue.

Notes 1 Emily Caddick Bourne, “Fictionalism,” Analysis Review 73, no. 1 (2013): 147–62. 2 M. Eklund “Fictionalism,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta, http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2017/entries/ fictionalism 3 Eklund, “Fictionalism”. 4 Victoria S. Harrison, “Philosophy of Religion, Fictionalism and Religious Diversity,” International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 68 (2010), fn 38. 5 For more on divine transcendence in Maimonides, see Shlomo Pines, “The Limitations of Human Knowledge According to al-Farabi, Ibn Bajja and Maimonides,” in Studies in Medieval Jewish History and Literature, ed. Isadore Twersky (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), 82–109; Shlomo Pines, “The Philosophical Purport of Halachic Works and the Purport of the Guide of the Perplexed,” in Maimonides and Philosophy, eds. Shlomo Pines and Yirmiyahu Yovel (Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, 1986), 1–14; Shlomo Pines, “Translator’s Introduction: The Philosophical Sources of the Guide of the Perplexed,” in Maimonides, The Guide of the Perplexed, trans. Shlomo Pines, (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1963), ivii-cxxxiv. For more on the radical transcendence of the divine and its bearing on interreligious dialogue, see also John Cottingham, “The Epistemic Implications of Religious Diversity,” and Jonkers, “How to Break the Ill-Fated Bond between Religious Truth and Violence,” in this volume. 6 Moses Maimonides, The Guide of the Perplexed, trans. Shlomo Pines (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963), 117. 7 Ibid., 118. 8 Ibid., 139. 9 Ibid., 131.

Maimonides and Kierkegaard 109 10 Ibid. 11 Daniel Davies, Method and Metaphysics in Maimonides’ Guide of the Perplexed (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 57. 12 Maimonides, Guide, 117–18. 13 Ibid., 121. 14 See Ibid., I/52. 15 Ibid., 134. 16 Ibid., 139. 17 Ibid. 18 Maimonides, Guide, 147–48. On meaning and reference in Maimonides, see Ehud Z. Benor, “Meaning and Reference in Maimonides’ Negative Theology,” Harvard Theological Review 88, no. 3 (1995): 339–60. 19 I am here joining the minority view of those who read the Guide as a work in philosophical mysticism. For a prominent proponent of this view see David R. Blumenthal, Philosophic Mysticism: Studies in Rational Religion (Ramat Gan: Bar Ilan University Press, 2006). 20 Maimonides, Guide, 139. 21 Ibid., 627–8. Maimonides’ commitment to metaphysical, epistemological and semantic transcendence is modified by the existence of the articulated name that is contemplated in a mystical state, and by his use of the metaphor of the divine intellectual overflow. On the tension between “absolute transcendence” and “modified transcendence” in the Guide, see, e.g., Alvin J. Reines “Maimonides’ True Belief Concerning God: A Systematization,” in Maimonides and Philosophy, eds. Shlomo Pines and Yirmiyahu Yovel (Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1986); Nehama Verbin, “Moses Maimonides on Job’s Happiness and the Riddle of Divine Transcendence,” European Journal for Philosophy of Religion 8, no. 4 (2016): 125–41. 22 Maimonides, Guide, 623. 23 See also “I/Introduction,” 7 and III/51, 627–28. 24 Maimonides, Guide, Introduction, 5. 25 Ibid. 26 Ibid. 27 Maimonides, Guide, 366. 28 Maimonides, Guide II/35; see also the Guide II/34, where Maimonides insists that all prophetic revelations apart from Moses’ revelation come through an angel. 29 Maimonides, Guide, 628. 30 If a justification is required for putting together Maimonides and Kierkegaard, then I appeal to Wittgenstein’s conception of “perspicuous representation” and to his remarks on how it can be brought about by “assembling reminders”. See Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G.E.M. Anscombe (New York: Macmillan Publishing Co. Inc., 1968), §122. For more on the use of Wittgenstein’s notion of “perspicuous representation” in philosophy of religion, see Nehama Verbin, “Martyrdom: A Philosophical Perspective,” Philosophical Investigations 15, no. 1 (January 2012): part I. 31 Søren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments, eds. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, NY: Princeton University Press, 1992), I, 243–44. 32 Kierkegaard, Postscript, 243. 33 See Ibid., 72–92, and particularly 79–80. 34 Søren Kierkegaard, Practice in Christianity, eds. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, NY: Princeton University Press, 1991), 123. 35 Ibid., 135.

110  Nehama Verbin 36 Ibid., 143. 37 Ibid., 23. 38 Ibid., 64. 39 Ibid., 63. 40 Kendall L. Walton, Mimesis as Make-Believe: On the Foundations of the Representational Arts (Cambridge, Massachusetts and London: Harvard University Press, 1990), 102. 41 Walton, Mimesis, 273. 42 Ibid. 43 Kendall L. Walton “How Remote are Fictional Worlds from the Real World,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 37 (1978–1979): 21. 44 See Nehama Verbin, “Faith and Fiction,” in Faith in the Enlightenment? The Critique of the Enlightenment Revisited, eds. Lieven Boeve, Joeri Schrijvers, et al. (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2006), 182–94. 45 David Hume, “Of the Standard of Taste,” Aesthetics: A Critical Anthology, eds. George Dickie and R.J. Schafani (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997), 604–5. 46 See also Richard Moran, “The Expression of Feeling in Imagination,” The Philosophical Review 103, no. 1 (January  1994): 75–106; Tamar Szabo Gendler, “The Puzzle of Imaginative Resistance,” The Journal of Philosophy XCVII, no. 2 (2000): 55–81. 47 For more on these issues, see Verbin, “Faith and Fiction”. 48 Kierkegaard, Practice, 30. 49 Ibid., 63–64. 50 Ibid., 64. 51 Ibid. 52 Kierkegaard, Postscript, 279. See also the famous passage in Postscript, 201. 53 Søren Kierkegaard, The Point of View for My Work as an Author, eds. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1998), 123. 54 See, e.g., Kierkegaard, Point of View, 109, 111. 55 This difficulty shows itself in different ways in Maimonides and Kierkegaard. Maimonides emphasizes the uniqueness of Moses, and Kierkegaard emphasizes that “according to the supreme criterion the single individual is beyond a human being’s powers” (Kierkegaard, Point of View, 118). See also George Pattison, Kierkegaard’s Upbuilding Discourses: Philosophy, Literature and Theology (London and New York: Routledge, 2002).

Bibliography Benor, Ehud Z. “Meaning and Reference in Maimonides’ Negative Theology.” Harvard Theological Review 88, no. 3 (1995): 339–60. Blumenthal, David R. Philosophic Mysticism: Studies in Rational Religion. Ramat Gan: Bar Ilan University Press, 2006. Caddick, Bourne Emily. “Fictionalism.” Analysis Review 73, no. 1 (2013): 147–62. Davies Daniel. Method and Metaphysics in Maimonides’ Guide of the Perplexed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Eklund M. “Fictionalism.” In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, edited by Edward N. Zalta. http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2017/entries/fictionalism Harrison, Victoria S. “Philosophy of Religion, Fictionalism and Religious Diversity.” International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 68 (2010): 43–58.

Maimonides and Kierkegaard 111 Hume, David. “Of the Standard of Taste.” In Aesthetics: A  Critical Anthology, edited by George Dickie and R.J. Schafani. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997. Kierkegaard, Søren. Practice in Christianity, edited and translated by Howard V. Hong, and Edna H. Hong. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991. Kierkegaard, Søren. Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments, edited and translated by Howard V. Hong, and Edna H. Hong, vol. I. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992. Kierkegaard, Søren. The Point of View for my Work as an Author, edited and translated by Howard V. Hong, and Edna H. Hong. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998. Maimonides, Moses. The Guide of the Perplexed. Translated by Shlomo Pines. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963. Moran, Richard. “The Expression of Feeling in Imagination.” The Philosophical Review 103, no. 1 (1994): 75–106. Pattison, George. Kierkegaard’s Upbuilding Discourses: Philosophy, Literature and Theology. London and New York: Routledge, 2002. Pines, Shlomo. “Translator’s Introduction: The Philosophical Sources of the Guide of the Perplexed.” In Maimonides, The Guide of the Perplexed, translated by Shlomo Pines, ivii–cxxxiv. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1963. Pines, Shlomo. “The Limitations of Human Knowledge According to al-Farabi, Ibn Bajja and Maimonides.” In Studies in Medieval Jewish History and Literature, edited by Isadore Twersky, 82–109. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979. Pines, Shlomo. “The Philosophical Purport of Halachic Works and the Purport of the Guide of the Perplexed.” In Maimonides and Philosophy, edited by Shlomo Pines and Yirmiahu Yovel, 1–14. Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, 1986. Reines, Alvin J. “Maimonides’ True Belief Concerning God: A  Systematization.” In Maimonides and Philosophy, edited by Shlomo Pines, and Yirmiyahu Yovel, 24–35. Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1986. Szabo Gendler, Tamar. “The Puzzle of Imaginative Resistance.” The Journal of Philosophy XCVII, no. 2 (2000): 55–81. Verbin, Nehama. “Faith and Fiction,” In Faith in the Enlightenment? The Critique of the Enlightenment Revisited, edited by Lieven Boeve, Joeri Schrijvers, et  al., 182–94. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2006. Verbin, Nehama. “Martyrdom: A Philosophical Perspective.” Philosophical Investigations 35, no. 1 (January 2012): 68–87. Verbin, Nehama. “Moses Maimonides on Job’s Happiness and the Riddle of Divine Transcendence.” European Journal for Philosophy of Religion 8, no. 4 (2016): 125–41. Walton, Kendall L. “How Remote are Fictional Worlds from the Real World.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 37 (1978–1979): 11–23. Walton, Kendall L. Mimesis as Make-Believe: On the Foundations of the Representational Arts. Cambridge, Massachusetts and London: Harvard University Press, 1990. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Philosophical Investigations. Translated by G.E.M. Anscombe. New York: Macmillan Publishing Co. Inc., 1968.

Part II

Epistemic consequences of religious diversity

6 Introduction to Part II: the epistemic consequences of religious diversity Katherine Dormandy and Oliver J. Wiertz

Introduction One way to understand a belief system is as a set of beliefs that stand in epistemic relationship with each other. John Cottingham further clarifies the idea of religious beliefs as constituted by their role in the life of the believer. However, this introduction will consider religious beliefs in terms of their content, the truth of which the argument from religious diversity impugns. Of course, what characterizes distinctly religious content is highly controversial. For present purposes we will rely on our intuitive ability to recognize paradigmatic examples of religious beliefs; such beliefs often, for example, postulate or imply the existence of a transcendent reality, or prescribe certain ways of living in the light of such a reality.

The Argument from Religious and Philosophical Diversity The argument that diversity undermines beliefs about religious matters goes like this: There are many people whose beliefs about religious matters are incompatible with mine, yet whose epistemic qualifications are on a par with mine (the Diversity Claim). 2 If there are many people whose beliefs about religious matters are incompatible with mine, yet whose epistemic qualifications are on a par with mine, then I should abandon my own beliefs or reduce the confidence with which I hold them. 3 Conclusion: I should abandon my own beliefs or reduce the confidence with which I hold them.1

1

This argument applies not just to those who subscribe to the teachings of a particular religion, but also to those who endorse a particular philosophical position concerning religious diversity, such as exclusivism or pluralism. For this reason we focus generally on beliefs about religious matters, and not narrowly on religious beliefs.

116  Katherine Dormandy and Oliver J. Wiertz Let’s look at premise 1, the Diversity Claim. This claim, if true, amounts to evidence against one’s own beliefs about religious matters. Evidence is an indication that a particular proposition is true or false, perhaps with a certain probability. Some evidence, namely true and deductively valid premises, entails the truth or falsehood of propositions that it supports or opposes. But evidence is not always truth-entailing. Much or probably most evidence offers merely inductive support for a proposition, and is therefore logically compatible with its falsehood. For example, the fact that a reliable meteorologist predicts rain speaks in favour of rain, but does not exclude the possibility that it will not rain. Evidence can be understood for present purposes as a person’s representational experiences or her justified beliefs,2 for these represent things that are candidates for being the case. Two beliefs are incompatible if they cannot both be true. For example, the Christian belief that Jesus is both human and divine is incompatible with the Muslim belief that he was merely human, at least as these beliefs are most naturally interpreted.3 Every religious belief system, and every philosophical approach to religious truth (pluralism, exclusivism, etc.), is incompatible with many others. Even pluralism, which claims that all of the belief systems of the great world religions are true,4 is incompatible both with religious exclusivism and with every religious belief system that holds itself to be exclusively true. A person’s epistemic qualifications are factors that are relevant to attaining true beliefs and avoiding false ones.5 This includes the possession of epistemic virtues, good evidence, and competence in evaluating it. If a person has good evidence about a topic and evaluates it carefully and virtuously, he can be expected to be in a good position to form true beliefs and avoid false ones about this topic. Moreover, if his epistemic qualifications are on a par with yours, then it seems that his chances of achieving true beliefs are at least as high as yours. It must be noted, however, that epistemic parity does not imply that you have the same epistemic qualifications as your interlocutor. You each presumably have different bodies of evidence, different epistemic skill sets and virtues, and so forth. The term epistemic peer is often applied to people whose epistemic qualifications are on a par with ours.6 Attempts to define epistemic peerhood proliferate;7 some are so narrow that only people with exactly the same evidence and epistemic abilities make the cut. Yet when it comes to beliefs about religious matters (whether religious or philosophical), this notion must be construed as broadly as possible. There is little chance otherwise that there even are epistemic peers with conflicting beliefs in the highly complex area of religion,8 a result that would fly in the face of the widespread phenomenon to which the Diversity Claim calls out attention – namely, that there are people who disagree with us about religion yet who are apparently worthy of the utmost epistemic respect. Much speaks in favour of premise 1. The world is large and varied. Surely no individual person or community – religious or philosophical – can have

Introduction to Part II 117 all of the evidence of relevance to religious matters, not least because, as Cottingham argues,9 participation in a particular religion is necessary to obtain certain sorts of evidence about religion to begin with. Nor can any single person or community develop all of the relevant epistemic competences, let alone to the same extent. Moreover, it is likely that most of us know people who disagree with us, for whom we have the highest intellectual and personal respect, who have extensive life experience and competences. And even if we don’t know many such people personally, most of us have ample evidence that they exist. It would be the height of intellectual arrogance, the proponent of the Argument from Religious and Philosophical Diversity maintains, to think that our evidence and competence are epistemically superior to those of anyone who disagrees with us. Let us turn to premise 2: that the Diversity Claim demands abandoning or at least reducing the confidence of one’s own beliefs about religious matters. The reason why it ostensibly does so is that it provides evidence against their truth. Proponents of the Argument from Religious and Philosophical Diversity differ over precisely what doxastic reaction within this range is appropriate. Whatever the case, the strength of the appropriate reaction depends on how strongly the Diversity Claim speaks against our own beliefs. If it speaks strongly enough, we simply cannot justifiedly maintain our own beliefs at all.10 If by contrast it speaks somewhat less strongly, then there might be room to maintain our own beliefs, albeit less confidently.11 There are two ways in which the Diversity Claim speaks against our own beliefs. The first is indirect: The fact of religious diversity among peers undermines the idea that the reasoning and evidence supporting each person’s beliefs are truth-conducive. This is not a direct attack on the truth of the beliefs, for poorly produced beliefs can still be true. On the one hand, disagreeing interlocutors might have much of the same evidence as I do (such as philosophical arguments) and be just as competent, in general, at evaluating it as I am; this fact can call my own evaluation of this sort of evidence into question. On the other hand, disagreeing interlocutors might have very different evidence than I do – a likely eventuality in the case of religion, where personal experiences tend to play an important evidential role for religious believers. What the Diversity Claim calls attention to here is that there is evidence that I lack and that points away from the truth of my own beliefs and towards the truth of competing beliefs; if I had had this other evidence, then I may well have formed different beliefs.12 The second way in which the Diversity Claim speaks against one’s own beliefs is direct. It calls attention to a feature of reality that one would not have expected had one’s own beliefs been true. What this feature is varies depending on what one’s own belief system is. If for instance I subscribe in an exclusivist way to a particular religious belief system, then the surprise is the fact that many other people do not subscribe to it. Why is this a

118  Katherine Dormandy and Oliver J. Wiertz surprise? Because most exclusivist religious belief systems hold that transcendent reality, or God, is all-good and all-powerful, even perfectly so. Yet it is not in the character of such a being to select a relatively small group of people to enjoy religious enlightenment while leaving everyone else in the dark. So the world thus looks very different to the way it would be if one of the exclusivist religious belief systems were true, disconfirming such belief systems. Pluralists argue, by contrast, that the Diversity Claim is exactly what one would expect to be true given their view. After all, what could better explain the great wealth of religious experiences and traditions13 than the truth of every religious belief system? Because of this, the thought goes, the Diversity Claim does not just speak against exclusivist religious belief systems, but it speaks for pluralism. On closer inspection, however, it becomes clear that not even pluralism is safe from the Argument from Religious and Philosophical Diversity. Although pluralists are right in thinking that their view predicts the existence of religious diversity, the world has several other features that pluralism predicts would not occur. First, in a pluralistic world, atheism is a complete surprise. For if transcendent reality truly revealed itself through a variety of cognitive systems and cultures, it would surely have prevented so many people from utterly failing to recognize it. For similar reasons, second, the existence of exclusivist world religions – that is, religions that reject pluralism – is deeply surprising. So religious (and secular) diversity encompasses phenomena that cannot be explained by pluralism on its own; this means that these phenomena are direct evidence against pluralism. Moreover, we must not forget that the Diversity Claim also speaks against pluralism indirectly, since it calls into question the reliability of the reasoning and other processes that gave rise to it – after all, many people with apparently comparable epistemic qualifications to pluralists reject pluralism. The Argument from Religious and Philosophical Diversity thus speaks against pluralism just as it does against exclusivism. When a piece of evidence speaks against a proposition, logically it must speak for its negation. Which logical alternative to exclusivism and pluralism does the Diversity Claim support? It does not speak for naturalism, the view that there is no transcendent reality at all; for if naturalism were true, we would not expect, at least not without controversial auxiliary assumptions, that so many people would adopt religious belief systems. The logical alternative to exclusivism and pluralism that the Diversity Claim supports instead is what we may call the epistemic inaccessibility view. On this view, insight about transcendent reality is distributed patchily among various religions and philosophies of religion, because the metaphysical and epistemological breach between us and transcendent reality, as Cottingham (this volume) discusses, can only be bridged imperfectly. The phenomena associated with religious diversity speak evidentially for the epistemic inaccessibility view, since the complex and confusing situation in which we find

Introduction to Part II 119 ourselves is exactly what it predicts. These phenomena speak against any belief systems that construe themselves exclusivistically or pluralistically.

Replies to the Argument from Religious and Philosophical Diversity The Argument from Religious and Philosophical Diversity, as we saw, concludes that the Diversity Claim demands at least weakening and at most abandoning one’s own beliefs about religious matters. Yet opponents of the argument hold that we can in certain circumstances maintain our own beliefs about religion or the philosophy of religion just as they are. There are two strategies for arguing this. One strategy is to deny premise 1, the Diversity Claim. This works by dividing this claim into its two conjuncts and denying one of them. The first conjunct, that there is a diversity of belief systems concerning religious matters, is uncontroversial. It is the second conjunct that opponents of the Argument from Religious and Philosophical Diversity deny: that the epistemic qualifications of disagreeing interlocutors are on a par with one’s own. We may call this conjunct the Epistemic-Parity Claim. If this conjunct is false, then so, of course, is the whole premise. This strategy is employed primarily by defenders of religious belief systems who construe their truth-claims exclusivistically. One example is the Calvinist-inspired approach of Alvin Plantinga.14 On his view, human beings suffer the so-called “noetic effects of sin”, which impede religious knowledge. God, however, repairs the cognitive faculties of a select group, enabling its members, by means of religious experiences, to perceive traces of divine reality in the world. This approach provides a reason to favour one’s own belief-forming processes on religious matters over those of disagreeing interlocutors. On top of this, it provides an auxiliary belief to explain the surprising datum that many people have false beliefs about religion: namely, because God declined to repair their cognitive faculties. Why he did so, however, is not discussed. None of the authors in the second part of the present volume accept this argument for religious exclusivism, whether because of its apparent arbitrariness or because they regard it as incompatible with respectful dialogue with religious others. Yet nor do the following chapters embrace pluralism, on the grounds that this view, as we saw, has problems of its own. The second strategy for responding to the Argument from Religious and Philosophical Diversity is to deny its conclusion. Proponents of this move, discussed by Wiertz (in this volume), standardly appeal to the cumulative evidence of one’s own religious tradition and experiences,15 which we may call partialist evidence.16 Such evidence, the thought goes, supports one’s own beliefs so well that it would be irrational to abandon or even weaken them; this means that either the first or second premise of the argument from religious and philosophical diversity must be false. This strategy has the

120  Katherine Dormandy and Oliver J. Wiertz advantage of committing its proponents to no specific explanation for the supposed epistemic inferiority of disagreeing interlocutors. It enables them instead to withhold judgement on this issue, or simply to suppose that, even though disagreeing interlocutors are reasonable and have done their epistemic best, they simply  – and blamelessly  – worked from misleading evidence. This strategy can, but need not, be combined with the first one. A third strategy is proposed by Grube (this volume). He denies the second premise, arguing that it is epistemically acceptable to hold fast to one’s own beliefs, even in the face of the disagreement of interlocutors on a par with oneself. That is, it is acceptable as long as one’s own beliefs are justified, which Grube understands in a way that is permissive enough to withstand the counterevidence of the Diversity Claim. All three strategies have an important feature in common: they rely heavily on partialist evidence. It is this feature that proponents of the Argument from Religious and Philosophical Diversity reject, claiming that evidence of this sort is good for nothing. Every religious belief system, they say, has its own time-honoured traditions and impressive religious experiences which, from its own internal point of view, appear as incontrovertible evidence. Examined from the outside, however, the evidence supporting each competing belief system is symmetrical in strength and function with the evidence supporting every other. There is simply no neutral way to adjudicate among the various traditions. Partialist evidence, then, is epistemically useless. The charge, in other words, is that the Diversity Claim has implications not just for one’s own religious and philosophical belief system, but also for the “meta-question” of which epistemology governs the formation of beliefs about these matters to begin with. Proponents of the Argument from Religious and Philosophical Diversity say that the right epistemology is one that favours a certain kind of evidence about religion: evidence that is impartialist – that does not stem from this or that particular tradition or set of experiences, but is rather intersubjectively accessible (i.e., that can be communicated from one person to another and that makes or implies no tradition-specific assumptions).17 Impartialist evidence includes, for example, philosophical arguments, academic investigations into religious texts, and uncontroversial empirical phenomena such as the fact of religious diversity. Only in the light of such evidence can one be in a position to neutrally evaluate belief systems about religious matters. Exclusivist opponents of the Argument from Religious and Philosophical Diversity, however, deny that impartialist evidence about religious matters deserves to be weighted so heavily. The restriction to this sort of evidence, they argue, yields a prejudice against belief systems that construe themselves exclusivistically. It is rather partialist evidence through which ultimate reality, or God, tends to reveal himself to human beings. As Cottingham argues in this volume, evidence about religious matters can frequently only be gathered from within the religious framework itself. On top of this, most

Introduction to Part II 121 religious believers depend heavily on partialist evidence to support their own religious beliefs, so delegitimizing this evidence would yield vast religious scepticism. What are we to make of this debate? Both sides have insights. To see this, consider that every person sees the world through his or her own perspective. On the one hand, opponents of the Argument from Religious and Philosophical Diversity are right that one’s own perspective can yield insights that are otherwise difficult to come by. Excluding partialist – or perspectivedependent – evidence thus risks missing aspects of any religious reality that there may be. On the other hand, proponents of the argument are right that one cannot rely just on one’s own perspective, for perspectives unavoidably limit our viewpoint too. For this reason, impartialist evidence, which is less constrained by one’s own perspective, is also important. The correct epistemology for beliefs about religious matters in the light of religious and philosophical diversity, then, is what Dormandy has elsewhere called an egalitarian epistemology:18 this emphasizes the epistemic importance of partialist as well as impartialist evidence in pursuit of a complete picture of religious reality. What does an egalitarian epistemology have to say about the argument from religious and philosophical diversity? The fact of diversity and the apparent epistemic parity of disagreeing interlocutors (i.e., the Diversity Claim) is itself a piece of impartialist evidence; this means that egalitarianism accords it a certain epistemic weight. One cannot, just on the basis of partialist evidence, simply deny either the epistemic parity of disagreeing interlocutors or the argument’s conclusion. This means that it will likely be difficult to hold one’s own beliefs about religious matters with the heights of confidence that one might ideally like to.19 At the very least, a weak version of the conclusion of the Argument from Religious and Philosophical Diversity will likely – though not necessarily – hold, at least if one starts off from a very high degree of certainty already. How much of a weakening this would involve, however, is a case-by-case matter. The replies to the Argument from Religious and Philosophical Diversity that we have discussed so far are defensive. Any weakening of one’s own religious and philosophical confidence is seen as a threat. A similar defensive attitude can often be found in religious communities, which aim to discourage or even suppress the beliefs of those who disagree with community doctrine. This defensive reaction is psychologically comprehensible, but differs emphatically from the attitude to disagreement in other areas, such as science. Philosophers of science have long argued powerfully that, when people with diverse experiences and incompatible beliefs engage in respectful disagreement with each other, each can learn from the insights of the other.20 Here, a weakening of one’s own confidence is not regarded as an epistemic failure but rather as the result of a sharpening and nuancing of one’s own understanding. For this reason parallel discussions have developed about the possible epistemic benefits of religious diversity and

122  Katherine Dormandy and Oliver J. Wiertz disagreement, not least by Wiertz and Dormandy in this volume. The worry that religious commitment is incompatible with this sort of exploratory attitude is discussed by Dormandy.21 This brief discussion provides the background for the following contributions, each of which wrestles in its own way with the epistemic problems, approaches, and arguments arising from the phenomenon of religious diversity.

Summary of the contributions to Part II John Cottingham examines the common view that the epistemic respectability of religious beliefs is undermined by religious diversity. In the second part of his chapter, he compares the situation of religious diversity to that of the diversity of scientific beliefs; in the latter case there is a hope that contrasting theories will eventually converge on the truth, constrained by “the way things are”; but the implausibility of such a hope in the religious case threatens the idea that religious beliefs could aspire to the status of knowledge. He proposes an attitude of humility, which involves accepting the inevitable epistemic finitude of human existence. This is especially relevant in the case of religious knowledge, since monotheistic religions hold God to be incomprehensible. Cottingham concludes by arguing that, even if this problem can be resolved on a theoretical level, a practical problem remains for the believer. This concerns how commitment, which is necessary for a religious faith to flourish, can combine with respect for different, but equally powerful, commitments of those belonging to different faiths – commitments which one recognizes could well have been one’s own had things been different. The supposedly insoluble epistemic problem of religious diversity thus gives way to a universal human longing for meaning which finds expression in different forms. Like Cottingham, Oliver J. Wiertz starts by examining an argument claiming that religious diversity threatens the epistemic status of religious beliefs. He notes, however, that it is often unclear which epistemological categories are at issue. To clarify matters, he appeals to the various epistemic values laid out in William Alston’s epistemic-desiderata approach. Wiertz argues that in none of Alston’s categories does religious diversity destroy the positive epistemic status of religious beliefs  – though he says that it can impede many desiderata. His main conclusion is that the believer cannot take the truth of her own religious beliefs for granted, but must scrutinize whether and how other religious traditions compare to hers epistemically. This sort of intellectual and moral attitude may result in a deeper understanding of one’s own tradition. In the concluding methodological remarks, Wiertz claims that the situation of religious diversity favours epistemologically internalist approaches, which focus on cognitively accessible reasons for one’s beliefs, in contrast to externalist

Introduction to Part II 123 stances which do not make this demand. He finishes by encouraging philosophers of religion not to ignore the particularity of religious doctrines, since these influence our judgements about the epistemic depth and seriousness of other religions and hence provide resources for dealing with them rationally. Katherine Dormandy’s contribution focuses on the epistemic potential of religious plurality, in particular when it comes to reasoning about matters of public policy. Her aim is to address the view of certain religious activists, who argue that their own religious beliefs are the only legitimate basis for public policy. Far from threatening one’s own foundational worldview, or impede society from constructing reasonable public policy, foundationalworldview disagreement about public policy with those outside your religious tradition, engaged in respectfully, can be epistemically beneficial. It can challenge our unquestioned assumptions, deliver evidence we would otherwise miss,  and expose us to new epistemic alternatives. It can also combat the epistemically limiting groupthink prevalent in secular and religious communities alike, particularly when matters of public policy are on the table. This is so even if your religious worldview is true or divinely inspired. Dirk-Martin Grube takes a similar, positive, attitude towards the fact of religious plurality, focusing on the theoretical foundations needed for a constructive approach to interreligious dialogue. He proposes that the bivalence or tertium non datur principle does not apply to religious truth. Instead, the concept of justification is more promising. Whereas bivalent truth implies that one person is right and another wrong, the softer concept of justification allows people to hold their own beliefs without being committed to denying others the right to hold to theirs. In this way, the shift of emphasis from bivalent truth to justification allows for religious plurality without sacrificing a realist theory of truth, according to which truth means portraying reality properly. Grube concludes by distinguishing two different kinds of disagreement: disagreements in which we take our interlocutor’s beliefs to be straightforwardly false, and disagreements in which we take her beliefs to be justified. Only in the latter case, Grube argues, is there room for robust dialogue. We are confident that the contributions to this Part will advance existing conversations about the epistemic consequences of religious diversity, as well as open up new ones.

Acknowledgement Much of this discussion is translated and adapted from Katherine Dormandy, “Religiöse Vielfalt und Religiöser Dissens,” in Handbuch analytische Religionsphilosophie, eds. Klaus Viertbauer and Georg Gasser (Metzler Verlag, forthcoming).

124  Katherine Dormandy and Oliver J. Wiertz

Notes 1 Cottingham formulates this conclusion as the claim that religious beliefs lack epistemic respectability; on Wiertz’s construal it says that an agnostic position is the only rational option. See: Cottingham, “The epistemic implications of religious diversity,” and Oliver J. Wiertz, “Epistemic desiderata and religious plurality,” both in this volume. 2 Earl Conee and Richard Feldman, Evidentialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). 3 But see Dennis R. Potter, “Religious Disagreement: Internal and External,” The International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 74 (2013): 21–31. 4 In his later texts, Hick expands his thesis to include more local religions too. 5 It is merely for simplicity that we here exclude a broader range of epistemic aims, such as understanding or wisdom. 6 See Richard Feldman and Ted Warfield, eds., Disagreement (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010); Richard Feldman, “Reasonable Religious Disagreement,” in Philosophers Without Gods: Meditations on Atheism and the Secular Life, ed. Louise Antony (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 194–214. 7 See Feldman, “Religious Disagreement.” 8 Nathan King, “Disagreement: What’s the Problem? or A Good Peer is Hard to Find,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research LXXXV (2012): 249–72. 9 John Cottingham, The Spiritual Dimension: Religion, Philosophy and Human Value (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), chapter 5; cf. also Cottingham, “The Epistemic Implications.” 10 John Schellenberg, The Wisdom to Doubt: A  Justification of Religious Skepticism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007); Feldman, “Religious Disagreement.” 11 Gary Gutting, Religious Belief and Religious Skepticism (Notre Dame, IND: University of Notre Dame Press, 1982); Robert McKim, Religious Ambiguity and Religious Diversity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001); Philip L. Quinn, “Toward Thinner Theologies: Hick and Alston on Religious Diversity,” in The Philosophical Challenge of Religious Diversity, eds. Kevin Meeker and Philip L. Quinn (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 226–43; Wiertz, “Epistemic Desiderata” discusses this matter further. 12 Katherine Dormandy, “ ‘In abundance of counsellors there is victory’: Reasoning about public policy from a religious worldview,” in this volume develops this argument but draws a different, positive, conclusion from it. 13 John Hick, “Religious Pluralism and Salvation,” in The Philosophical Challenge of Religious Diversity, eds. Kevin Meeker and Philip L. Quinn (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 54–66. 14 Alvin Plantinga, Warranted Christian Belief (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). 15 William P. Alston, Perceiving God: The Epistemology of Religious Experience (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991); Plantinga, Warranted; Jerome Gellman, “In Defense of a Contented Religious Exclusivism,” Religious Studies 36 (2000): 401–17. 16 Katherine Dormandy, “Resolving Religious Disagreements: Evidence and Bias,” Faith and Philosophy 35 (2018): 56–83. 17 Dormandy, “Resolving.” 18 Ibid.; see also Wiertz, “Epistemic desiderata” and Dormandy, “ ‘In abundance of counsellors there is victory’.” 19 Keith Ward, “Truth and the Diversity of Religions,” in The Philosophical Challenge of Religious Diversity, eds. Kevin Meeker and Philip L. Quinn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 108–25.

Introduction to Part II 125 20 Helen Longino, Science as Social Knowledge: Values and Objectivity in Scientific Inquiry (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990); Helen De Cruz and Johan De Smedt, “The Value of Epistemic Disagreement in Scientific Practice: The Case of Homo Floresiensis,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A, 44, no. 2 (2013): 169–77. 21 Katherine Dormandy, “The Epistemic Benefits of Religious Disagreement,” Religious Studies, forthcoming.

Bibliography Alston, William P. Perceiving God: The Epistemology of Religious Experience. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991. Basinger, David. Religious Diversity: A  Philosophical Assessment. London: Routledge, 2002. Conee, Earl, and Richard Feldman. Evidentialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Cottingham, John. The Spiritual Dimension: Religion, Philosophy and Human Value. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Cruz, Helen de, and Johan De Smedt. “The Value of Epistemic Disagreement in Scientific Practice: The Case of Homo Floresiensis.” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 44, no. 2 (2013): 169–77. Dormandy, Katherine. “Resolving Religious Disagreements: Evidence and Bias.” Faith and Philosophy 35 (2018): 56–83. Dormandy, Katherine. “Religiöse Vielfalt und Religiöser Dissens.” In Handbuch analytische Religionsphilosophie, edited by Klaus Viertbauer and Georg Gasser. Stuttgart: Metzler Verlag, forthcoming. Dormandy, Katherine. “The Epistemic Benefits of Religious Disagreement.” Religious Studies, forthcoming. Feldman, Richard. “Reasonable Religious Disagreement.” In Philosophers Without Gods: Meditations on Atheism and the Secular Life, edited by Louise Antony, 194–214. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Feldman, Richard, and Ted Warfield, eds. Disagreement. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Gellman, Jerome. “In Defense of a Contented Religious Exclusivism.” Religious Studies 36 (2000): 401–17. Gutting, Gary. Religious Belief and Religious Skepticism. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1982. Hick, John. Problems of Religious Pluralism. New York: St. Martin’s, 1985. Hick, John. An Interpretation of Religion. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989. Hick, John. “Religious Pluralism and Salvation.” In The Philosophical Challenge of Religious Diversity, edited by Meeker, Kevin, and Philip L. Quinn, 54–66. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. King, Nathan. “Disagreement: What’s the Problem? or A  Good Peer is Hard to Find.” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research LXXXV (2012): 249–72. Longino, Helen. Science as Social Knowledge: Values and Objectivity in Scientific Inquiry. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990. McKim, Robert. Religious Ambiguity and Religious Diversity. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.

126  Katherine Dormandy and Oliver J. Wiertz Plantinga, Alvin. “Pluralism: A  Defense of Exclusivism.” In The Philosophical Challenge of Religious Diversity, edited by Meeker, Kevin, and Philip L. Quinn, 172–92. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Plantinga, Alvin. Warranted Christian Belief. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Potter, Dennis R. “Religious Disagreement: Internal and External.” The International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 74 (2013): 21–31. Quinn, Philip L. “Toward Thinner Theologies: Hick and Alston on Religious Diversity.” In The Philosophical Challenge of Religious Diversity, edited by Meeker, Kevin, and Philip L. Quinn, 226–43. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Schellenberg, John. The Wisdom to Doubt: A Justification of Religious Skepticism. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007. Ward, Keith. “Truth and the Diversity of Religions.” In The Philosophical Challenge of Religious Diversity, edited by Meeker, Kevin, and Philip L. Quinn, 108–25. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.

7 The epistemic implications of religious diversity John Cottingham

The general shape of the problem The “problem” of religious diversity has become one of the standard topics in philosophy of religion courses. More recently, it has become a weapon of the militant atheists in the “culture wars”. The assumption in both contexts is that religious diversity is a potential threat to the epistemic respectability of religious belief. This is how the atheist Philip Kitcher sets out the problem, in uncompromising terms, in a recent collection entitled The Joy of Secularism: The core challenge of secularism is an argument from symmetry. Variation in religious doctrine is enormous, and central themes in the world’s religions are massively inconsistent with one another. Defenders of supernatural beings can sometime conceal the difficulty from themselves by focusing on a few religions with shared central doctrines inherited from a common origin – as for example when religious diversity is conceived in terms of the differences among the three Abrahamic monotheisms. More radical problems emerge once one recognizes the possibility of polytheism, of spirit worship, of the devotion to ancestors that pervades some African religions, of the sacred spaces of aboriginal Australians, of the “mana” introduced in Polynesian and Melanesian societies. Adherents of these rival views of the supernatural realm come to believe in just the same ways as do their Abrahamic counterparts. They too stand in a long tradition that reaches back into the distant past, originating, so they are told, in wonderful events and special revelations. Plainly, if the doctrines about the supernatural favoured by the Christian – and also by Jews and Muslims – are correct, then these alternative societies are terribly deceived. Their members have been victims of an entirely false mythology, instead of the correct revelation lavished on the spiritual descendants of Abraham. What feature of the Christian’s acceptance of Jesus as Lord and Saviour distinguishes that commitment as privileged, marks it off from the (tragic) errors of the world’s benighted peoples?

128  John Cottingham Nothing.  .  .  Had the Christians been born among the aboriginal Australians, they would believe, in just the same ways, on just the same bases, and with just the same convictions, doctrines about the Dreamtime instead of about the Resurrection. The symmetry is complete.  .  .  . Because of the widespread inconsistency in religious doctrine, it is clear that not all of these traditions can yield true beliefs about the supernatural. Given that they are all on a par, we should trust none of them.1 Although this is presented as a single argument (what Kitcher calls the “argument from symmetry”) it actually contains several different considerations that are supposed to make epistemic trouble for the adherents of a given religious worldview. Let me review these in turn.

The argument from inconsistency The most prominent strand in Kitcher’s reasoning, invoked at the start of his remarks, is an issue about the radical divergences in the claims made by different religions. At its simplest: The different religions are inconsistent, therefore they cannot all be true. This is of course a formal or logical rather than an epistemic problem as such: if X and Y are inconsistent, then if X is true Y must be false, and vice versa. But at best this shows that X and Y cannot both be true in all respects. There could be overlap, insofar as two inconsistent theories may both contain part of the truth, or some element of truth. Compare for example the wave and particle theories as applied to micro phenomena such as photons. Since the properties of waves and particles are inconsistent, both theories cannot be true in all respects, nor can they contain the last and final word on the nature of light; but they may contain important elements of truth, or they may be an important stepping stone along the way to finding the truth. Kitcher does allow for the possibility of overlap between inconsistent theories, but assumes that it will only arise in cases where there is a common historical root to rival religions, as in the three main Abrahamic faiths (which are all monotheistic, for example). But he hasn’t shown that it’s impossible to find overlap areas, or common ground, between these religions and the other religions he mentions. He implicitly rules this out by focusing on what he calls the “doctrines about the supernatural”, which he takes to be the all-important core of a religious outlook, thus setting things up for his observation that there is “massive inconsistency” between polytheism and monotheism, for example. But in the attitudes to the divine found among seemingly very diverse religions, in the archetypal human responses of awe and reverence for instance, or in the acts of worship that are part of a search for union or harmony with the divine, there may well be much more

Epistemic implication of religious diversity 129 commonality of religious impulse and outlook than might be supposed if we concentrate only on theological doctrines about the “supernatural”.

The problem of epistemic credentials Since our chosen theme is the epistemic implications of religious diversity, let us now reformulate Kitcher’s inconsistency objection in explicitly epistemic terms. It may be put as follows: If any two religions X and Y are inconsistent, then we know, without further investigation that they cannot both be true (or at least that they cannot both be true in all respects). So if we claim to know that X is true (or at least that it is closer to the truth than Y) then the epistemic credentials of X must be superior to those of Y. But there is no such epistemic superiority: the epistemic credentials of any two religions X and Y will be found to be “on a par” (all are equally defective). Phrased this way, the argument is targeted at religious believers who claim to know for sure that their own religion is true. No doubt there are such believers. But there are probably many more, following in the footsteps of Kant who famously denied knowledge to make room for faith,2 who present their favoured religion as an object of faith rather than knowledge. And traditionally (from Aquinas onwards) faith is held to be within the province of revealed truth, rather than demonstrative or scientifically/empirically certified knowledge. Yet to formulate one’s religious beliefs in terms of faith rather than knowledge clearly does not eliminate the problem of epistemic credentials. For if the defender of religion asserts that their allegiance to religion X is a matter of faith arising from revelation, this simply shifts the question on to how we know X’s supposed “revelation” is epistemically better grounded than Y’s. This seems to be the thought behind Kitcher’s comment that “adherents of these rival views of the supernatural realm come to believe ‘in just the same ways’ as do their Abrahamic counterparts”. He mentions stories of “wonderful events and special revelations” from the past. So the question he raises, in effect, is about what justifies our saying that one of the alleged revelations is authentic in respect of its epistemic credentials while the others are spurious. However, while most of the world’s great religions do have founding narratives involving either mythical events or historical revelation of the divine, it is far from clear that these narratives, whether mythical or purportedly historical, are supposed bear the whole epistemic weight in supporting allegiance to the religion in question. A mere “story of a wonderful event” is

130  John Cottingham not supposed by any reflective believer to function on its own as the epistemic grounding for their religious belief. The influential Jewish religious thinker Abraham Heshel put the point powerfully over 60 years ago: What was the source of the faith of the people in Biblical times? Is it correct to define their faith as an act of relying upon an inherited doctrine? Is it correct to say that for more than three thousand years the Jews had access to only one source of faith, namely the records of revelation? Is it true that Judaism derived its religious vitality exclusively from loyalty to the events that occurred in the days of Moses and from obedience to Scripture in which those events arc recorded? Such an assumption seems to overlook the nature of man and his faith. A great event, miraculous as it may be, if it happened only once, will hardly be able to dominate forever the mind of man. The mere remembrance of such an event is hardly powerful enough to hold in its spell the soul of man with its constant restlessness and vitality. There was wrestling for insight out of which Jewish faith drew its strength.3 The point about religion as an ongoing “wrestling for insight” can be broadened out in a way that exposes the over-simplification of construing the epistemic credentials of faith merely in terms of revealed miraculous events. To adopt a religion, amongst other things, is to adopt a framework of interpretation which enables the world to be seen in a certain light, as having a meaning and value that cannot be derived merely from its material properties. Purported past events, to be sure, are thought of as disclosures of the divine, but so, for many believers, are a range of significant aesthetic and moral and spiritual experiences (compare the poet Hopkins’ experience of the natural world, in its mysterious beauty, as “charged with the grandeur of God”4). Such experiences that are part of what it is to be human, and belong to our lives here and now. I suspect that if one conducted a survey of reflective believers asking about the epistemic grounding for their religious faith, one would find that it does not rest solely, or perhaps even mainly, on one-off miraculous occurrences, but rather is a much more holistic affair, resting on a complex network of human experience which enables a richer and more abundant form of life. All this is part of “revelation”, for the believer, and is reasonably taken to provide epistemic support for allegiance to the religion in question.5

The counterfactual argument, or the argument from contingency We now come to a further strand in Kitcher’s argument which seems potentially more worrying for the believer, and which his chosen label “the argument from symmetry” is designed to underline. He says: “Had  .  .  . Christians been born among the aboriginal Australians, they

Epistemic implication of religious diversity 131 would believe, in just the same ways, on just the same bases, and with just the same convictions, doctrines about the Dreamtime instead of about the Resurrection”.6 Put most simply, the argument appeals to the contingency of the cultural and historical circumstances in which the religious believer happens to have been born and brought up. You happen to have been born and educated in a Christian family, or in a predominantly Christian society, but if (counterfactually) circumstances had been different, you would have belonged to a different religion. If you had been born in Riyadh, to Islamic parents, you would almost certainly have been a Muslim. Or as John Stuart Mill put the point over a century and a half ago: The same causes which make [someone] a churchman in London would have made him a Buddhist or a Confucian in Pekin [sic].7 As has often been pointed out, however, contingency of this kind is not necessarily felt to be epistemically threatening in the case of scientific beliefs about the world, so it is not immediately clear why it should be threatening in the religious case.8 If you had been born in the middle ages you would very likely have held the Earth to be flat, but that does not cast doubt on your present day claim to know that the Earth is spherical. Perhaps there is a degree of “epistemic luck” involved here – we are lucky enough today to have access to photographs of the Earth taken from space, and a host of other data that were not available to our medieval counterparts, but our resulting claim to know more about the nature of the planet is not at all impugned by the fact that we might have thought differently had we not had access to this data. This type of response relies on our being able to claim epistemic superiority in virtue of having better information, better data, more reliable methods. But this in turn invites a counter-response  – one that Kitcher in fact makes: “What feature of the Christian’s acceptance of Jesus as Lord and Saviour distinguishes that commitment as privileged, marks it off from the (tragic) errors of the world’s benighted peoples?” There is an implicit comparison with science here. Where there are divergent views about a scientific question such as the configuration of the solar system, the reason for epistemically privileging one view over the other is going to consist in an (in principle) detectable flaw or insufficiency in the data of one of the parties: the observations were not checked adequately; there was an error in measurement, telescopic observation of the heavens was not available at the time, and so on. The assumption is that nothing analogous is available in the religious case. So the confidence of Mill’s “churchman in London” is not based on his ability to point to epistemically superior methods of arriving at the truth, but is due (as Mill puts it earlier on in the passage mentioned above) to “mere accident” – that is to say, the mere contingencies of historical or geographical circumstance.

132  John Cottingham This raises many complex questions about epistemic luck which there is no space to pursue here.9 But it may be easier to determine how far, if at all, the “accidents” of birth and culture are epistemically damaging if we switch from the analogy with scientific knowledge to the analogy with moral knowledge. Is historical or cultural contingency damaging to the epistemic status of moral knowledge claims? Some philosophers, of course, hold that morality is not a cognitive matter at all, but that what look like moral statements are in fact disguised expressions of emotional reaction or personal or social preference. But assuming for present purposes the correctness of an objectivist view of moral truth – which most philosophers working today would support in one form or another – let us consider for example the proposition that slavery is wrong. Virtually everyone today would probably say they know this for certain: if there are genuine moral truths, and if any of them can be said to be known, this is one of them. But however clear and certain this appears to almost all of us in the twenty-first century, we do not have to go further back than a couple of centuries to find a time when it was fiercely debated; and if we go back to the Classical world of ancient Greece and Rome, we find a culture where, so far from being recognized as wrong, slavery was universally accepted as part of normal life. There are various ways of coming to terms with this kind of contingency and variation, but the most promising, and most intuitively plausible, seems to me to construe moral knowledge as something that develops slowly over time. Just as scientific truths do not present themselves straightforwardly to the inquirer, but have to be established by a long hard process of refining our observations and our theories, so insight into moral truths develops over time, as people learn to reflect more carefully on the human condition and (amongst other things) on the differences and similarities between peoples. Facts concerning our common human vulnerability, for example, may prompt thoughts of the kind we find starting to emerge in the Hebrew bible (“do not mistreat the foreigner, for you were once slaves in Egypt”10); and though all sorts of reasons, of convenience, of self-interest, of inertia, or sheer thoughtlessness, may lead people to accept social arrangements which ignore the extent to which we are all fundamentally “in the same boat”;11 further reflection, and repeated challenge by prophets and reformers will, if all goes well, bring people closer to the truth. So although it may well have been the case that I  would have supported slavery had I  been a sugar grower in the Caribbean or a cotton farmer in South Carolina in the eighteenth century, this merely shows that my eighteenth-century alter ego had failed to make the kind of moral progress that we take for granted in later generations. The upshot is that the counterfactual scenario specifying what I would have believed under different cultural circumstances need not count against the sound epistemic status of my present-day belief that such a slavery was and is morally repugnant.

Epistemic implication of religious diversity 133

Exclusivism and the “benighted” So what happens if we accept, in the domain of religion, the kind of “progressivist” model just sketched with respect to morality and science (i.e. the model according to which our epistemic grasp of the relevant truths steadily improves over time)? It seems that progressivism may enable us to escape the challenge of the “counterfactual” appeal (the appeal to what I would have believed in different cultural circumstances) – but apparently at a high cost. The cost might seem to be the adoption of an arrogant exclusivism: the stance that I, or we, in our epistemically privileged position are entitled to claim knowledge of (scientific, moral, religious) truths, but that the beliefs of those in past epochs or different cultures were or are just wrong – epistemically defective, as it were. This appears to be the point raised by Kitcher when he speaks (with heavy irony) of the “tragic errors of the world’s benighted peoples”. We might perhaps be prepared to bite the bullet in the scientific case, for we do in fact think that the approaches, for instance, to medicine or astronomy found in previous epochs, were simply mistaken or based on epistemically suspect credentials; and we might even accept it in the moral case  – thinking for example that our moral intuitions have simply been refined and improved as compared with societies that used to allow child labour, wife-beating, forced marriages and so on. But in the religious case, though we may be prepared to condemn certain forms of religion in other cultures (and indeed our own past) as epistemically flawed, because they are based on mere superstition or fear – as possible examples one might think of voodoo, or witchcraft, or early cults involving blood sacrifice – the rise of global awareness and a greater awareness of the sophistication and rich spirituality of religious traditions other than our own has made it much harder to share the arrogant exclusivism of our Victorian forebears in their attitude to the “lesser breeds without the law”.12 Such an objectionable (to our present eyes) arrogance can be vividly seen in a verse from the once popular nineteenth-century hymn “From Greenland’s Icy Mountains”: Shall we, whose souls are lighted with wisdom from on high, Shall we to those benighted the lamp of life deny? Salvation! O salvation! The joyful sound proclaim, Till earth’s remotest nation has learned Messiah’s Name.13 The attitude has not entirely disappeared. In our own time we find militant fundamentalists of various creeds who apparently envisage a world in which their own chosen form of orthodoxy will reign supreme over all the planet.

134  John Cottingham But (no doubt as a result of many factors, including rapidly widening travel and communication) there has also arisen, in many quarters, a more reflective “globalist” outlook that inclines towards tolerant and even welcoming acceptance of diversity in religious belief, even on the part of those who are themselves devoutly committed to a particular creed or faith. So what are the epistemic implications of these “globalist” developments? In particular, can one combine an open-minded and tolerant globalism with the progressivism we saw reason to advocate earlier in the scientific and moral domains? And how does this bear on the traditional aspirations of the various religions to truth and objectivity?

Globalism, objectivity and convergence It might at first be thought that welcoming a plurality of faiths involves retreating to a kind of wishy-washy liberal relativism, which abandons any claim to objectivity. For in religion, as in other domains, to believe in objective truth and knowledge is necessarily to believe that there are right and wrong answers. In the domain of scientific inquiry, for example, it seems evident that the existence of a plurality of competing explanations and rival theories is a sign that something is amiss and needs to be resolved. To be sure, different teams of scientists may pursue different hunches and different lines of inquiry, but the expectation is that ultimately our scientific theories will converge, or at least show a tendency to converge, as they get closer to the truth. As Bernard Williams once observed, in science (6.1) “there should ideally be convergence on an answer, where the best explanation of the convergence involves the idea that the answer represents how things are”.14 The very notion of objectivity in the sciences seems to presuppose that our theories and explanations should in principle be constrained by the way the world is, so that there will, or should ideally, be a convergence which is, as Williams went on to put it, “guided . . . by how things actually are”.15 In the domain of morality, in contrast to that of scientific inquiry, Williams himself was very sceptical about the possibility of convergence: he saw no prospect of a “convincing theory of knowledge for the convergence of reflective ethical thought on ethical reality in even a distant analogy to the scientific case”.16 His attitude here partly reflected the influence upon him of Nietzsche’s deflationary view of the status of morality, that “peculiar institution”, as Williams called it, based on the (supposedly dubious) idea of binding and inescapable obligations.17 The current philosophical consensus however, has emerged as very much more sympathetic to the idea of objective and authoritative moral requirements than was common among Williams’s generation; and it is probably fair to say that the majority of moral philosophers working today hold that there are objectively right answers to ethical and moral questions. Such answers may of course be very difficult

Epistemic implication of religious diversity 135 to establish (requiring complex investigation and careful debate), and there may also be hard cases where we are forced to choose between competing goods; but in principle (so runs the prevailing contemporary view) genuine objective ethical truth about what is good and right is, as it were, already there waiting to be investigated, just as scientific truth is. And this gives grounds for thinking that, although it may take a long time to achieve, we may in principle expect an ultimate convergence in ethical thought, just as in science.18 In the case of religious thought, by contrast, things look more intractable. For here what is at stake is not just the acceptance of a theory in physics (for example about the nature of gravity) or in ethics (for example about the relation between justice and utility), but the adoption of an outlook concerning the ultimate significance of the entire universe and our place within it. Thus the theist, who holds that the meaning of each individual’s existence lies in his or her relationship to a loving personal Creator, will presumably see the whole of reality in a completely different light from the Buddhist who maintains that the very idea of an individual self is an illusion and that the cosmos is an impersonal flux of conditions that arise and pass away. The prospect for convergence between such radically distinct and incommensurable worldviews appears, to say the least, remote. Yet the advocates of the distinct outlooks just mentioned nevertheless firmly believe that their own respective worldviews are objectively correct, representing the true, the enlightened, answer as to the ultimate nature of reality. And to espouse an objectivist view of truth, as we have just seen, is to hold that differing views ought ultimately to converge. Hence, if one maintains that, for example, the Islamic, or the Christian, or the Buddhist worldview is objectively correct, this seems to carry with it a presumption that ultimately, given enough time and the right conditions, everyone on the planet should come to acknowledge the truth of the worldview in question. And this might seem to lead us back to what we earlier called an “arrogant exclusivism”, as the only position consistent with maintaining the idea of objective truth and knowledge in religion. In fact however, such an inference would be wholly mistaken, since, as will appear in the following (and final) section, there is no logical connection whatever between subscribing to objectivism in religion and subscribing to exclusivism.

Human epistemic finitude and the limits of religious knowledge There is no denying the existence of an exclusivist tendency in the great monotheistic religions, which have often laid claim to be the sole repositories of truth about the divine. One only has to think of the Augustinian slogan Extra ecclesiam non est salus,19 or the view held by many Muslims that the Qur’an is the “Final Revelation . . . the last scripture revealed by Almighty Allah, confirming what little truth remains in parts of previous

136  John Cottingham scriptures and refuting and correcting fabrications and additions which have crept into current day versions of such scriptures”.20 But it is also true, and important, that the great monotheistic religions hold God to be incomprehensible – this being an established mainstream theological doctrine within the Abrahamic tradition. God, in Judaism, is utterly unlike the gods of the gentiles; he cannot be beheld and is too sacred even to be named  – he is simply “I  am that I  am”.21 In Islam, Allah has no less than ninety-nine names,22 but although we may be able to glimpse something of the attributes to which these names refer, it is held to be impossible for our limited human capacity to comprehend the essence of God. And in Christianity, as emphasized by the doctors of the Church from Augustine through to Aquinas and beyond, God cannot be grasped or comprehended by the human mind  – any attempt to suppose we had grasped his nature would be a form of idolatry.23 Much more recently, the contemporary philosopher John Schellenberg, writing outside the framework of traditional theism, has stressed the relatively minute period of time, in planetary terms, during which human religious thought about the ultimate nature of reality has been operating, and has proposed a view he calls “ultimism”, according to which it is reasonable to suppose that up till now human religious awareness has scarcely scratched the surface.24 Seen against the background of these traditional and more recent reminders of our human finitude and our radical epistemic limitations, there seems good reason to be wary of religious adherents who make strident knowledge claims, proclaiming that their beliefs represent knowledge of the final and ultimate truth. Given the incomprehensibility of the infinite to the finite human intellect,25 it seems both prudent and necessary for reflective religious believers to characterize their outlook in more tentative terms, as a search, a reaching forward to the divine. Such a reaching forward, if it is not to be entirely directionless, will no doubt have be based on something in our human epistemic equipment that is held to provide glimpses or intimations of the divine; but will most emphatically not need to claim definitive knowledge, let alone knowledge of the complete and final truth. Thus even St Paul, not perhaps best known for being tentative, and who was sure that in Christ he had glimpsed the “image of the invisible God”,26 was nevertheless fully ready to acknowledge our inherent human epistemic limitations: “now we see through a glass, darkly”.27 Those attracted to this more cautious and humble view of our human epistemic endowments may be prepared to put on indefinite hold the theoretical requirement that competing worldviews should ultimately converge on the truth, constrained by the reality of “how things actually are”. Such convergence will, to be sure, be the ultimate telos, the “point omega” of religious inquiry – so much is required by objectivism; but in the meantime, given our human finitude, it will be accepted, and indeed expected, that the religious search will be a long and arduous one (this is the “progressivism”

Epistemic implication of religious diversity 137 we discussed earlier), and that it will follow many paths, partly conditioned by historical and cultural circumstance. This surely is part of the meaning of what remains for its time one of the most thoughtful attempts to confront the “epistemic problem of religious diversity”, the declaration Nostra Aetate (1965), which speaks of the “ultimate inexpressible mystery which encompasses our existence”, and goes on: From ancient times down to the present day there is found in various peoples a certain recognition of that hidden power which is present in history and human affairs. Religions found everywhere try to counter the restlessness of the human heart, each in its own manner, by proposing “ways”, comprising teachings, rules of life, and sacred rites. The Catholic Church rejects nothing that is true and holy in these religions. She regards with sincere reverence those ways of conduct and of life, those precepts and teachings which, though differing in many aspects from the ones she holds and sets forth, nonetheless often reflect a ray of that Truth which enlightens all men.28 Seen through this kind of lens, there is no insoluble epistemic “problem” about religious diversity, but rather a universal human longing for objective meaning and value which is glimpsed and expressed in diverse ways. The “problem” that remains, if there is one, is not a theoretical problem for the philosophy of religion, but rather a practical problem about how the specific commitment and allegiance that is necessary for a religion to flourish can be combined with a respect for different but equally powerful commitments expressed in divergent faiths – commitments that one recognizes could very well have been one’s own had things been different (a practical form of the “counterfactual” or “contingency” objection). But there is no contradiction in, for example, being wholeheartedly committed to one’s spouse while recognizing that, had the accidents of social encounter been different, one might have married someone else. And there is no contradiction in recognizing that marriages may take many divergent forms, that all are responses to the universal “restlessness of the human heart”, and that each relationship over time becomes incorporated into a form of life that (if all goes well) enables those involved to find objective meaning and value. Without labouring the comparison, somewhat analogous points can reasonably be made about religious commitment. It is worth ending, finally, by reminding ourselves that philosophers of religion often over-intellectualize their subject, taking religious allegiance to be solely a matter of theories and doctrines. Conceived of that way, it is hardly surprising that the exclusive focus is on truth-conditions and knowledge claims. These have been our main concern in this chapter. But we need to realize – as indeed is suggested by the phrase from Nostra Aetate about “ways, rules of life and sacred rites” – that a great deal of religious observance relates to moral and spiritual praxis rather than theological theory.

138  John Cottingham And it is clear that at this practical level what we often find is not divergence, but a remarkable degree of convergence. Those who, through direct personal experience and encounter, have come to appreciate something of this convergence would probably tend to agree with the monk Klaus Klostermaier, who spent two years in Vrindaban, a sacred Hindu place of pilgrimage. Recording his experience of dialogue with those of a very different faith tradition he later wrote: Dialogue was not a mere talking about religion: that is very often pure babble, vanity, self-glorification. Nor was dialogue the “comparative religion” of experts. . . . How strangely empty and flat those books now seem to us, those books that have been written about other people’s religions as though they were museum pieces. . . . How little the dialogue depends on our philosophical systems.29 What Klostermaier came to see was that at the practical level of human need, the enduring struggle for meaning amid the anguish of human life, we will always find common ground, irrespective of differences of doctrine and ideology.30 Let us leave the last word on this subject with Rudyard Kipling whose insight into religious diversity was also shaped by formative experience in India and by his personal contact with the richly interwoven tapestry of cultural and religious traditions he found there: My brother kneels, so saith Kabir, To stone and brass in heathen-wise, But in my brother’s voice I hear My own unanswered agonies. His God is as his fates assign; His prayer is all the world’s – and mine.31

Notes 1 Philip Kitcher, “Challenges for Secularism,” in The Joy of Secularism: 11 Essays for How We Live Now, ed. George Levine, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011), 26, all emphases supplied. 2 Immanuel Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft, B xxx; Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (London: Macmillan, 1929), 29. 3 Abraham Joshua Heshel, God in Search of Man, (New York, NY: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1955), 26. 4 Gerard Manley Hopkins, “The World is Charged with the Grandeur of God,” in Gerard Manley Hopkins, The Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins, eds. William H. Gardner and Norman H. MacKenzie, 4th ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), 66. 5 See John Cottingham, Philosophy of Religion: Towards a More Humane Approach (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), chapter 3, §3. 6 Kitcher, Challenges, 26.

Epistemic implication of religious diversity 139 7 John Stuart Mill, “On Liberty,” in John Stuart Mill, On Liberty; with the Subjection of Women, and Chapters on socialism, ed. Stefan Collini (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 21. 8 Compare Alvin Plantinga, “Pluralism: A Defense of Religious Exclusivism,” in The Rationality of Belief and the Plurality of Faith: Essays in Honor of William P. Alston, ed. Thomas D. Senor (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995), 191–215. 9 See Max Baker-Hytch, “Religious Diversity and Epistemic Luck,” International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 76 (2014): 171–91. 10 Deut 5:15; 24:18. 11 Compare Philippa Foot’s criticism of Nietzsche’s moral myopia in this respect in her “Nietzsche’s Immoralism,” in Nietzsche, Genealogy, Morality. Essays on Nietzsche’s “On the Genealogy of Morals”, ed. Richard Schacht (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1994), 3–14. 12 Rudyard Kipling, “Recessional”, composed for Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee, 1897. 13 “From Greenland’s Icy Mountains” (1819), by the Anglican parson Reginald Heber, who became Bishop of Calcutta in 1823. 14 Bernard Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (London: Collins, 1985), 136. 15 Ibid., 136. 16 Ibid., 152. 17 Ibid., chapter 10. 18 For more on the issues raised in this section see John Cottingham, “The Spiritual and the Sacred: Prospects for Convergence between Religious and NonReligious Accounts,” in Religion and Atheism: Beyond the Divide, eds. Norman Richard and Tony Carroll (London: Routledge, 2017), chapter 11. 19 Augustine, “On Baptism, Against the Donatists,” in Augustine, The Writings against the Manichaeans, and against the Donatists, ed. Philip Schaff, trans. John R. King, revised Chester D. Hartranft, Nicene and Post-Nicene-Fathers, First Series, IV (New York: Cosimo Classics, 2007), 4, 17, 25, 411–514. 20 “What is the Qur’an?” Islamic Pamphlets, accessed 12 February  2019, http:// islamicpamphlets.com/the-quran-the-final-revelation-to-mankind. 21 Ex 3:13. 22 According to tradition (hadith); many of the traditionally cited names are taken from the Qur’an. 23 Augustine, “Sermon 52,” in Augustine, Sermons on the New Testament III (51–94), ed. John E. Rotelle, trans. Edmund Hill, The Works of Saint Augustine: A Translation for the 21st Century III/3 (Brooklyn, NY: New City Press, 1991), LII:16; Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, 1–49, eds. John Mortensen and Enrique Alarcón, trans. Laurence Shapcote, (Lander, WY: The Aquinas Institute for the Study of Sacred Doctrine, 2012), I, Q. 12, A. 7. 24 John L. Schellenberg, Evolutionary Religion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). 25 Compare René Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy. With Selections from the Objections and Replies, trans. and ed. John Cottingham, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), third meditation. See also Nehama Verbin, “Maimonides and Kierkegaard on fictionalism, divine hiddenness and the scope for interreligious dialogue,” in this volume for a discussion of the absolute transcendence of the divine. 26 Col 1:15. 27 1 Cor. 13:12.

140  John Cottingham 28 Second Vatican Council, Nostra Aetate [Declaration on The Relation of the Church to Non-Christian Religions], Vatican Website, 28 October  1966, sec. 2, accessed 12 February  2019, www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ ii_vatican_council/documents/vat-ii_decl_19651028_nostra-aetate_en.html. 29 Klaus Klostermaier, Hindu and Christian in Vrindaban, trans. Antonia Foneseca (London: SCM Press, 1969), 102–4. I am grateful to Keith Ward for drawing my attention to this book. 30 Compare Peter Jonkers, “How to break the ill-fated bond between religious truth and violence,” in this volume for a discussion of religious hospitality and epistemic humility as a way to respond to exclusivist truth-claims. 31 Rudyard Kipling, Kim (London: Macmillan), chapter XIV.

Bibliography Aquinas, Thomas. Summa Theologiae I, 1–49, edited by John Mortensen, and Enrique Alarcón, translated by Laurence Shapcote. Lander, WY: The Aquinas Institute for the Study of Sacred Doctrine, 2012. Augustine. Sermons on the New Testament III (51–94), edited by John E. Rotelle, translated by Edmund Hill. The Works of Saint Augustine: A Translation for the 21st Century III/3. Brooklyn, NY: New City Press, 1991. Augustine. “On Baptism, Against the Donatists.” In The Writings against the Manichaeans, and against the Donatists, edited by Philip Schaff, translated by John R. King, revised by Chester D. Hartranft. Nicene and Post-Nicene-Fathers, First Series, IV, 411–514. New York: Cosimo Classics, 2007. Baker-Hytch, Max. “Religious Diversity and Epistemic Luck.” International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 76 (2014): 171–91. Cottingham, John. Philosophy of Religion: Towards a More Humane Approach. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Cottingham, John. “The Spiritual and the Sacred: Prospects for Convergence between Religious and Non-Religious Accounts.” In Religion and Atheism: Beyond the Divide, edited by Richard Norman and Tony Carroll, 130–40. London: Routledge, 2017. Descartes, René. Meditations on First Philosophy. With Selections from the Objections and Replies, edited and translated by John Cottingham. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. Foot, Philippa. “Nietzsche’s Immoralism.” In Nietzsche, Genealogy, Morality. Essays on Nietzsche’s “On the Genealogy of Morals”, edited by Richard Schacht, 3–14. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1994. Heshel, Abraham Joshua. God in Search of Man. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1955. Hopkins, Gerard Manley. “The World is Charged with the Grandeur of God.” In The Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins, 4th ed., edited by William H. Gardner and Norman H. MacKenzie, 66. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970. Islamic Pamphlets. “What is the Qur’an?” Accessed 12 February  2019. http:// islamicpamphlets.com/the-quran-the-final-revelation-to-mankind. Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Pure Reason. Translated by Norman Kemp Smith. London: Macmillan, 1929. Kipling, Rudyard. Kim. London: Macmillan, 1901. Kitcher, Philip. “Challenges for Secularism.” In The Joy of Secularism: 11 Essays for How We Live Now, edited by George Levine, 24–56. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011.

Epistemic implication of religious diversity 141 Klostermaier, Klaus. Hindu and Christian in Vrindaban. Translated by Antonia Fonseca. London: SCM Press, 1969. Mill, John Stuart. “On Liberty.” In On Liberty; With the Subjection of Women, and Chapters on Socialism, edited by Stefan Collini, 1–116. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Plantinga, Alvin. “Pluralism: A Defense of Religious Exclusivism.” In The Rationality of Belief and the Plurality of Faith: Essays in Honor of William P. Alston, edited by Thomas D. Senor, 191–215. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995. Schellenberg, John L. Evolutionary Religion. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Second Vatican Council. Nostra Aetate [Declaration on The Relation of the Church to Non-Christian Religions]. Vatican Website, 28 October 1966. Accessed 12 February  2019. www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_council/documents/ vat-ii_decl_19651028_nostra-aetate_en.html Williams, Bernard. Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy. London: Collins, 1985.

8 Epistemic desiderata and religious plurality Oliver J. Wiertz

Introduction In the second part of Chapter 10 of his “Enquiry concerning human understanding”, David Hume mounts a posteriori arguments against the epistemic reliability1 of testimony about miracles. One of these arguments is based on the diversity of religions and the corresponding diversity of miracle reports. Miracles have an evidential function. They are used to legitimate the claims of particular religions. As the different religious belief systems all contradict each other on key topics, evidence for the truth of one religious system is evidence against the truth of all other ones. A miracle, which functions as a legitimation for one religious system, counts at the same time against the truth of all other religious systems, and therefore functions as a defeater for the testimony of miracles meant to legitimate those systems. Every religious system must therefore face a vast amount of contrary evidence, which comes from the testimony of miracles supporting other religions. This argument can be generalized and mounted against every religious truth claim. So Richard Feldman argues for a “modest skeptical” stance concerning matters of religion, because one should suspend one’s judgement about the truth of a proposition p, if one realizes that one is in a situation of “apparent reasonable disagreement” concerning p,2 a situation that appears in the case of religious truth-claims. In this way, religious diversity poses an epistemic problem for religious beliefs3 or religious believers. Although this is without question a fundamental problem, it is far less obvious what kind of problem this is. Hume himself argues that every wise man proportions his belief to the evidence, which seems to imply that religious diversity makes religious belief incompatible with wisdom. Since wisdom can be interpreted as an intellectual virtue,4 the problem that religious diversity creates according to Hume can be interpreted as a threat to the intellectual virtuousness of religious believers. But one can interpret wisdom in a very wide sense as well, as the proper functioning of cognitive mechanisms or as the fulfillment of one’s doxastic obligations or simply as a synonym for rationality.5 Because it makes a difference whether the religious skeptic argues that religious plurality threatens

Epistemic desiderata and religious plurality 143 the rationality of religious beliefs, the reliability of the believers’ cognitive mechanisms, or their doxastic integrity, it is important to ask which epistemic categories are useful for analyzing the epistemic problem of religious diversity. In the following I will use William Alston’s list of epistemic desiderata as a guide to different epistemic values which may be affected by religious plurality. Alston offers his epistemic-desiderata approach as an alternative to the traditional “justification-epistemology”, which centres around the concept of epistemic justification.6 Instead of participating in what he takes to be the futile search for a proper definition of justification, he proposes accepting a plurality of doxastic goods. These goods are desirable and valuable from an epistemic point of view, that is, with respect to “the acquisition, retention and use of true beliefs about matters that are of interest and/or importance”7 and the avoidance of false beliefs concerning these matters, which Alston construes as the central aims of cognition.8 Alston presents a list of features of beliefs that are candidates for epistemic desiderata; he arranges them in five groups: truth, directly truthconducive desiderata, desiderata helpful for the formation or discrimination of true beliefs, deontological features of beliefs, and finally, features of systems of beliefs. Alston has not applied his epistemic-desiderata approach to the epistemology of religious belief. But this list can be used as a guide in discussing whether or in which sense the plurality of religious beliefs creates epistemic problems for the religious believer. After some preliminary remarks I will go through the groups of epistemic desiderata and ask how they might be relevant to the question of the epistemic consequences of religious diversity. I will finish with some partly methodological conclusions.

Religious plurality and epistemic desiderata In the following I am presupposing the perspective of someone who is aware of the existence of religious traditions which are different from her own and who is not convinced that the religious Other can or should be ignored. My interest lies in the consequences of such a situation for the epistemic status of religious beliefs. I will make three assumptions which are admittedly controversial: First, I will take as starting point and example the Christian tradition (to be precise: its Roman-Catholic strand). One cannot talk about epistemic desiderata in the context of religious plurality in the abstract, i.e. without taking into account ontological-metaphysical, epistemic, moral and religious commitments of particular religious traditions (which does not require us to take these commitments to be true or epistemically legitimate).

144  Oliver J. Wiertz Second, I assume a cognitivist-realist theory for at least some kinds of religion. I  assume, that is, that there are religions that make or imply truth-claims concerning a transcendent being or the principal character of the world we live in, as well as concerning our own lives. The truth of these claims depends (at least partly) on a reality that is ontologically independent of religious believers themselves.9 Although some religious truth-claims are explicit, others are more or less implied in practices, such as praying to thank, praise or petition God. All serious acts of prayer (in the traditional Christian understanding) presuppose that there exists a divine being who can be addressed and who has certain attributes that make him worthy of praise or a possible recipient of petitions.10 The concept of a “worldview” is apt for coming to grips with the (cognitive side of the) phenomenon of religion without disregarding religions’ noncognitive aspects. Worldviews are bundles of fundamental beliefs, attitudes, habits and so forth that determine (and are determined by) the way in which one sees, interprets and values the world and one’s place in it. They constitute the horizon or background “to a person’s thoughts, feelings, and actions, and, indeed, to his or her life as a whole”.11 Third, I  assume that the basic epistemic principles governing religious beliefs are not radically different from those governing other kinds of beliefs, according to which, for example, truth is an important value and it is generally good to seek evidence for beliefs. In the following I will distinguish five sets of desiderata (following Alston) and deal with them one after the other. Truth If the acquisition of true beliefs is the central aim of cognition, then the most valuable feature of a belief is its truth. Alston endorses a realist theory of truth,12 according to which the proposition that grass is green is true if and only if grass is green. Accordingly, my belief that grass is green is true if and only if grass is green. If one advocates a broadly realist conception of truth (and a cognitivist account of religious language) it seems that the truth of religious beliefs is unaffected by religious plurality. If Jesus is God incarnate, then my belief that Jesus is God incarnate is true even if it is defeated or weakened by my experience of religious plurality. Yet religious plurality and its epistemic repercussions can motivate us to abandon or at least heavily modify a realist account of religious truth-claims.13 But even though there are connections between questions of an adequate theory of religious truth and questions of the assessment of religious truth-claims in a pluralist context, these questions are of a different kind and should be distinguished. Therefore and because my focus is religious epistemology, I  will simply assume a realist notion of religious truth.

Epistemic desiderata and religious plurality 145 Truth-conducive desiderata Truth-conducive desiderata are the most basic epistemic desiderata. The reason is that there can be nothing more epistemically valuable than doxastic features which make the truth of beliefs probable (next to truth itself). 1.  S has adequate evidence for B Alston’s first desideratum is the possession of adequate evidence for a subject’s belief B; he leaves it open whether S actually bases B on this evidence. According to traditional Roman-Catholic teaching, every human being has adequate evidence for the belief that God exists and has certain attributes. Furthermore, the Christian revelation is connected with legitimating signs14 which, according to certain interpretations, can only be denied on pain of irrationality.15 On this view, there is adequate evidence for the core truths of theism, indeed enough to make its truth certain; and there is adequate evidence for every Christian belief, at least enough to make it rational to hold them, even if it does not make their truth certain. If a given person does not acknowledge the truth of theism and the rationality of the Christian faith, something must have gone wrong according to this view (epistemically, morally or both). This view, therefore, delivers a potential explanation for religious diversity, namely epistemic or moral shortcomings on the part of founders or followers of other religions. If this view is right, then we are not in a situation of religious plurality but merely of religious diversity. Prima facie, however, this claim is not very promising. When I encounter seemingly rational and morally virtuous people who do not share my Christian beliefs, this view would commit me to thinking that this first impression is misleading and that followers of other religions are irrational or fail to be morally virtuous.16 Such strategies have the odor of ad hoc responses and hence appear fruitless. But this quick dismissal of the “irrationality or immorality” strategy may be over-hasty; I will return to it below. Things get even messier when one brings into play different kinds of evidence, for example personal in contrast to dialectical evidence.17 Dialectical evidence (DE) for p is evidence which can be used in a discussion with someone S who denies p. S accepts DE as reliable and acknowledges that DE could make p more probable. In contrast, personal evidence is subjective evidence to which only a particular subject has access (e.g., private experiences). Especially in religious contexts, personal evidence plays an important role, while it is often excluded from discussions of the epistemic worth of religious beliefs. But excluding personal evidence is overly strict: It is not only self-defeating but would lend an easy victory to hyper-sceptics who do not accept anything as evidence. Therefore it seems unreasonable to exclude

146  Oliver J. Wiertz personal evidence from the discussion of the rationality of religious beliefs. But if one allows personal evidence, then religious plurality seems to lead to a confusing multiplicity of incompatible beliefs for which all kinds of personal evidence are adduced. As a result, personal evidence seems to lose any truth-indicating quality at all. This would mean that the rationality of at least many religious beliefs is called into question (at least on evidentialist terms) – Hume’s ghost shows up again. Therefore, the best option seems to be to combine dialectical and personal evidence in a cumulative case for or against the truth or rationality of religious beliefs. Such a procedure supposes that one can find areas of agreement between some of the major religions.18 2.  B is based on adequate evidence Somebody bases a belief on a reason when she holds the belief for that reason. According to Alston, the basing relation is to be interpreted in causal terms and may be wholly unconscious to the subject whose belief is based on adequate evidence. So it is possible that I don’t have the faintest idea that my Christian beliefs are based on adequate evidence. Yet if I  have no ability to distinguish between adequately grounded and not adequately grounded beliefs, I  am at a loss when it comes to justifying my beliefs or regulating my belief-practices. As a result, this epistemic desideratum is of little use for investigating the rationality of beliefs or for comparing evidence for (and against) different traditions. Appeal to this desideratum, then, cannot ward off the suspicion of arbitrariness when it comes to determining the reasonableness of following one religion instead of another. This exact suspicion, however, is fuelled by the fact of religious plurality. So Alston’s causal conception of the basingrelation is less helpful in our current situation, where we aim to come to terms, epistemically, with our vivid consciousness of religious plurality. Achieving this aim thus seems to require a different kind of justification or rationality, a kind which at least in principle is cognitively accessible for the epistemic subject.19 3.  B was formed by a sufficiently reliable belief-forming process Some critics of religious beliefs argue that, because the processes (or types of processes) leading to religious beliefs generate incompatible results, they cannot be reliable. The critics thus conclude that religious beliefs are epistemically deficient.20 This argument reveals some difficulties yielded by religious plurality for the possibility of rationally justifying religious belief. Yet one can ask if it draws an accurate picture of the epistemic situation of an average believer. Even if such a believer draws mainly on her community in justifying her belief, this does not preclude the possibility that her faith is

Epistemic desiderata and religious plurality 147 rational in the sense of being formed by a sufficiently reliable belief-forming process. That would for example be the case if her community relied on “experts” who critically reflect on the rationality, consistency and coherence of the doctrines of that community. “Lay believers” would be justified in delegating to the “experts” the demanding work of rationally scrutinizing community doctrines and in trusting their intellectual competence. We can find such an epistemic division of labour and a corresponding reliance on the authority of experts in many areas of life. Unfortunately, however, our problem reemerges at the level of disagreement between the experts of the different religions. Leaving the question of the epistemic status of the beliefs of disagreeing experts aside, it is sufficient to mention that even if the trust of the lay believer in the expertise of the religious experts is misplaced, the believer’s trust in the doctrines of her community, that is her religious belief, may nonetheless be rational (although based on an epistemically deficient foundation). That the situation of the lay-believer is not epistemically optimal does not imply that her beliefs are epistemically irrational. Moreover, some religious traditions point to God’s loving activity as the ultimate ground of faith and as a reliable source of its belief component. Such a tradition-internal reason for the trustworthiness of religious traditions is prima facie called into question by religious plurality. But if one is willing to concede that God’s revelatory activity is directed to all human beings and can be detected in different religious traditions, the problem is at least mitigated. Religions which consistently allow for such a concession are ceteris paribus epistemically privileged in a situation of religious plurality. Resources to deal with religious plurality in a consistent and coherent way are an important aspect of a religion’s rational credibility.21 4. B was formed by the proper functioning of S’s cognitive faculties Alvin Plantinga’s (extended) A(quinas)/C(alvin)-model is a paradigmatic application of the fourth desideratum in the context of religious beliefs.22 Plantinga argues that, if theism is true, then it is highly probable that at least some theistic beliefs are products of a sensus divinitatis, which is a cognitive faculty that reliably produces true theistic beliefs and is implanted in every human being by God. Because these beliefs by hypothesis are products of a cognitive faculty properly functioning in accordance with a design plan that is (successfully) directed at the production of true beliefs, these beliefs have warrant (i.e., the epistemic feature that turns true beliefs into instances of knowledge). Religious plurality does not necessarily affect the epistemic reliability of beliefs produced by the sensus divinitatis; on the contrary, religious plurality itself can be explained as a consequence of the damage of the sensus divinitatis resulting from original sin. The idea, according to Plantinga,

148  Oliver J. Wiertz is that the noetic effects of original sin distort our natural knowledge of God and limit its scope.23 But the sensus divinitatis is restored in Christians by the work of the Holy Spirit, who brings forth faith, so that Christians can understand Christian teachings and recognize their truth. Therefore, even if religious plurality can have a negative influence on the warrant of Christian belief (due to the negative influence of original sin on the sensus divinitatis), it need not have this consequence – for the awareness of religious diversity “could bring about a reappraisal of one’s religious life, a reawakening”.24 However, the epistemic consequences of religious plurality are more dramatic than Plantinga thinks. Religious plurality can play the role of a defeater, as Plantinga himself acknowledges.25 A defeater is a belief that provides a reason to give up another belief that one already has.26 If a defeater cannot itself be defeated (i.e., if it cannot be neutralized by a so-called defeaterdefeater) it will reduce the warrant of the original belief. It is plausible to suppose that religious plurality is a defeater for the religious beliefs of many who are aware of it. Because the (extended) A/C-model is part and parcel of the religious tradition whose truth or epistemic legitimacy seems to be questioned by the existence of other religious traditions, religious plurality provides a defeater not only for some beliefs of a Christian, but also for her (usually implicit) higher-order belief that her religious beliefs are warranted because they are produced by her properly functioning sensus divinitatis. Plantinga might respond that this critique overlooks the existence of intrinsic defeater-defeaters: if a potential defeater D arises for a belief B, B itself can nonetheless defeat D, because B’s warrant outweighs D’s.27 Basic theistic beliefs, on Plantinga’s view, can act as intrinsic defeater-defeaters for the potential defeating effects of religious plurality; the reason is that they can have a high degree of non-propositional evidence.28 An important assumption behind Plantinga’s argument is that Christian belief enjoys such a high degree of basic warrant and psychological certainty. But according to the (extended) AC-model, the exact degree of warrant of Christian beliefs cannot be established with certainty, because it depends inter alia on the extent to which one’s sensus divinitatis is restored by the work of the Holy Spirit, but the extent of this restoration (at least partly) eludes human judgement. Christians, therefore, should maintain an almost agnostic stance concerning the exact amount of warrant that their Christian beliefs enjoy. But in this case they must also remain agnostic about whether their basic Christian beliefs function as defeater-defeaters and thus whether religious plurality offers a genuine threat to the warrant of their Christian beliefs. Worse, the degree of warrant of a belief also depends on that belief’s subjective certainty. Yet for many Western Christians, the certainty of their religious beliefs is impaired by their acute awareness of religious plurality. Therefore, in a situation of religious plurality, the beliefs of many Christians will lack the high degree of warrant necessary for functioning as intrinsic defeaterdefeaters. Religious plurality thus offers at least a potential defeater which cannot be countered by Christian intrinsic defeater-defeaters.

Epistemic desiderata and religious plurality 149 Plantinga’s A/C-model thus faces a difficulty in dealing with religious plurality. We thus have yet another case, in which religious plurality is especially problematic for externalist epistemic desiderata.29 If I  assume that my religious cognitive faculty works reliably, then what reason do I have for denying my non-Christian friend an equally reliable religious cognitive faculty? According to many religious traditions, a trustworthy judgement about the reliability of my own religious faculties presupposes that I am in a healthy spiritual state. But how can we gain at least moderate certainty about our spiritual state solely on the basis of an externalist stance? 5.  Intellectual virtues The difficulties in discerning the epistemic reliability of cognitive faculties do not apply to the desideratum that belief B was formed by the exercise of an intellectual virtue, because intellectual virtues are understood mainly in terms of the motives and certain character-traits of the epistemic agent. A virtue is a “deep and enduring acquired excellence of a person, involving a characteristic motivation to produce a certain desired end and reliable success in bringing about that end”.30 The desideratum of intellectual virtue has the advantage that we can judge the realization of epistemic virtues more easily than the proper functioning of cognitive faculties.31 For example, it is less controversial whether someone is diligently searching for truth than whether she has a properly functioning sensus divinitatis.32 Furthermore, since virtues (intellectual and non-intellectual ones) are interconnected,33 the realization of one virtue can function as a sign that other (less easily detectable) virtues are also realized. Therefore a virtue-theoretic account of positive epistemic status has the advantage of better accessibility to the epistemic status of beliefs. Surely, virtuousness does not guarantee truth,34 but it allows for (prima facie) reasonable trust that the virtuous person has reached the truth. On the whole, it is more probable that an epistemically virtuous person will gain true beliefs than a person who suffers from intellectual vices.35 How should a virtuous Christian believer react to religious plurality? First, she will treat the claims of non-Christian believers seriously and will not neglect their epistemic significance from the outset. This is due to the virtue of justice, because it would be a case of epistemic injustice to treat the beliefs of others differently than one’s own without reasons (and only due to prejudices). Second, she will thoroughly study the foreign traditions as well as her own and assess whether they are really as different as they seem. If there really are important differences, the believer should scrutinize her own beliefs, seeking reasons for them and paying attention to reasons that other religions adduce in support of their own doctrines. Such a procedure is called for by virtues such as open-mindedness and perseverance, and both of these virtues should be jointly employed in a diligent way.

150  Oliver J. Wiertz The relation between intellectual virtues and religious plurality is a dialectical one. The fact of religious plurality entails that believers of all stripes employ virtues such as religious openness  – because without such virtues one can neither take other religions seriously nor acknowledge them as possible alternatives. Instead, one will dismiss them from the outset. At the same time, however, religious plurality offers believers the chance to demonstrate and deepen their virtuous behaviour. The virtue of epistemic humility is a case in point. This virtue is a precondition of religious plurality, for acknowledging plurality requires a willingness and ability to grant believers of other religions at least minimal “religious competence”; for example, one will think that they have obtained some glimpse of the divine, perhaps even a glimpse that has thus far eluded one’s own religion. In addition to enabling the exercise of intellectual humility, the recognition of religious plurality also promotes the development of this virtue. When the religious beliefs and practices of many devout, well-educated people of moral integrity differ from one’s own tradition, this can (and perhaps should) foster modesty in one’s judgement of one’s own intellectual capacities in matters of religion. In addition, there are theological motives for intellectual humility about religion; these motives derive from God’s exalted metaphysical status as the perfect being than which no greater is logically possible. Finally, the encounter with other religious and spiritual traditions can offer spiritual resources which have the potential to enhance one’s own religious-spiritual virtue. In these and other ways, religious plurality can further the flourishing of intellectual and spiritual virtues. Unfortunately, though, in many cases religious diversity has favoured intellectual, moral and spiritual vices instead of virtues.36 Desiderata thought to be helpful for the formation or discrimination of true belief The desiderata of group C are higher-order beliefs concerning the (meta-) belief that our beliefs or cognitive skills are epistemically good. They are epistemically valuable because they are “favorable to the realization of truth”.37 Group C desiderata (S’s having high-grade cognitive access to the evidence for S’s belief B; S has a well-grounded belief that B has a certain positive epistemic status; S’s ability to carry out a successful defence of the probability of truth for B) play an important role in situations in which we need to judge the status of others’ beliefs and indirectly their epistemic status (i.e., their epistemic competence) concerning certain areas of knowledge  – for example in situations of disagreement. In such cases, whether an epistemic subject has some high-grade cognitive access to the evidence (desideratum 6) or a well-grounded meta-belief that belief B has a certain positive epistemic status (desideratum 7) is relevant. Unfortunately, in a situation of religious plurality the realization of these two desiderata is difficult. The reason is that plurality seems to call into question both beliefs:

Epistemic desiderata and religious plurality 151 either the belief that I  have a high-grade cognitive access to the evidence or the belief that my beliefs have a positive epistemic status. Surely, the fact that I (at a meta-level) believe that my grasp of the relevant evidence for and against B is excellent or that I have good reasons for viewing my belief B positively, enhances my epistemic standing in a controversy about B (because it gives me reason to trust my own judgements concerning the distribution of relevant evidence or the status of B). But such reasons are also called into question in a situation of religious plurality. The prominence of personal evidence further complicates matters. When I have a high-grade cognitive access to my subjective religious evidence or when my meta-belief concerning the positive status of B is based on subjective evidence, it is difficult to determine the effects of religious plurality on these desiderata. So it seems that these two desiderata are not (merely) part of the solution but (also) part of the problem posed by religious plurality. By contrast, the more internalist desideratum 8, the ability to carry out a successful defence of the truth of one’s belief, plays an important positive role in the context of religious plurality. For this desideratum does not permit me to dismiss the incompatible truth-claims of other religions, but compels me to take them seriously by defending my own beliefs. But what does it mean to defend one’s beliefs successfully? One obvious sign of the success of one’s defence would be the intellectual conversion of the religious other. Yet this conception of a successful defence would turn interreligious encounters into a situation of competition: If I want to keep my faith (and identity), I would have to convince the other believer to give up her faith (and identity), and vice versa. This perspective is not only unrealistic but also unfavourable for interreligious dialogue. Luckily, however, there are alternative criteria for a successful epistemic defence. Let us begin by asking what we expect from a successful defence in philosophy or theology. For example, I try to defend my realist-cognitivist account of religious language against charges from my Wittgensteinian friend. This is not the first time that we are discussing this topic. What do I expect and why do I continue the discussion with her? Three points are salient: First, I do not (strongly) hope to convince my friend. Yet I continue the conversation because, second, I  want to understand my friend’s (and my own) position and her (and my) reasons better, and the project of mutual defence calls on her to articulate her position and her reasons for it more precisely or at least in a way that I can understand better. Third, I want my position to be acknowledged. I want to be taken seriously in the sense that others recognize that my belief is a serious candidate for truth and that my reasons for it are relevant and not obviously false or irrational.38 One might think that these remarks belittle formal argumentation, rational procedures and rigorous discussions; but knock-down arguments are less common in philosophy than is sometimes supposed. So a defence that yields a better understanding of one’s own position as well as that of your interlocutor and that earns respect for your beliefs can be deemed successful. This conception of

152  Oliver J. Wiertz a successful defence is compatible with the persistence of rational disagreement in religious matters. So, even if the two more externalist desiderata 6 and 7 are not of much use in a situation of religious plurality the more internalist desideratum 8 is not only much more useful but also motivates such an important question as that after the nature or criteria of a successful defence. Deontological features of belief Another typoe of desideratum is deontological. Deontologial features are attributes of a belief whose descriptions involve deontological vocabulary like the permissibility of holding a certain belief. It seems possible that a believer S facing religious plurality could view her faith as epistemically permissible (or even as obligatory) while still fulfilling all of her epistemic duties – she may simply be unable to detect any grave violation of a major doxastic norm in connection with her religious beliefs. This leads us to the question which doxastic norms define epistemic responsibilities in a situation of religious plurality. The basic doxastic norm is a fundamental norm of all kinds of rationality, namely the norm of impartiality: to treat similar things in a similar way. This norm encompasses the duty that an agent should not treat others differently from herself for the sole reason that they are not identical with her. This has some consequences for the correct doxastic behaviour in cases of religious plurality. As reflective epistemic subjects, we must presume a basic epistemic trust in the general reliability of our cognitive capacities, in our principal ability to discern the truth. This presumption, in combination with the norm of impartiality, leads to the further presumption that our neighbours are ceteris paribus cognitively reliable subjects too.39 Widespread disagreement, for example concerning religious matters, raises the question how to judge epistemic conflicts between us and the others when there are no good reasons for assuming a cognitive deficiency on the side of the others or a cognitive advantage on our side. This leads us to the recent discussion of the topic of peer disagreement which concerns the epistemic consequences for my belief that p when I notice that I disagree about p with a person whom I have no reason to deny the status of an epistemic peer concerning p.40 When one detects that one disagrees about p with a person whom one views as a peer concerning p, there are roughly two different possibilities: To modify one’s doxastic attitude about whether p or to keep it. So-called conformists (or conciliationists) recommend the first alternative as the only epistemically rational, virtuous or blameless reaction, whereas nonconformists (or steadfasters) recommend the second alternative. Among conformists there are different positions which are more or less radical: According to the agnostic stance, the disclosure of peer disagreement about whether p rationally demands suspension of judgement, while a less radical position recommends finding a middle ground between your doxastic attitude and

Epistemic desiderata and religious plurality 153 your interlocutor’s (split the difference between the two incompatible doxastic attitudes to p). This suggestion will lead in most cases to a considerable reduction of confidence in one’s belief (and in some cases to epistemic abstemiousness or intellectual conversion in giving up one’s belief that p in favour of the belief that non-p). In addition to these fairly robust versions of conciliationism, Agnosticism and Splitting, a third conformist alternative recommends a certain amount of confidence-decreasing without any exact details (i.e., the recommendation of a rather small decrease of confidence). Robust conciliationist positions suffer from the problem that they themselves are the objects of peer disagreement, since there are many renowned epistemologists who do not share the conciliationist’s predilection for substantial epistemic revision in the face of peer disagreement. This gives rise to the charge of self-defeat against these stern versions of conciliationism, for they cannot allow the application of the conciliatory norm in their own case. The force of the self-defeat charge becomes most vivid when it is pressed against Agnosticism, as in the following argument: 1 Agnosticism demands: For every proposition p which is the object of disclosed peer disagreement: suspend judgement about whether p. 2 Agnosticism is the object of disclosed peer disagreement. 3 Therefore: One has to suspend judgement on Agnosticism. The conclusion, 3), requires both the defender and the opponent of Agnosticism to suspend judgement on this view. But in this case, the opponent of Agnosticism cannot be rationally required to obey Agnosticism in a situation of peer disagreement. This critique does not show by itself that Agnosticism is false; what it shows is that, in the current situation, we have no good reason to assume the truth of Agnosticism – that is, we would be irrational in doing so.41 As for Splitting, this view is not self-defeating in all scenarios, but only under certain conditions (specifically, when the confidence of the proponent of Splitting is not higher than the confidence of its opponent). In all other cases, however, it is self-weakening – that is, applying Splitting consistently to itself drastically diminishes the confidence that one is rationally allowed or required to put into Splitting. Another problem with Agnosticism concerns the problematic pragmatic consequence of applying it rigorously. Even when the proposition p is the object of peer disagreement, it remains the case that either p or not-p is true. If a person S believes that p, there is a certain probability that she is right and thus has a true belief; the same goes for believing that non-p. Therefore, believing that p or believing that not-p gives one a chance of having a true belief. But if S becomes agnostic concerning p there is no possibility that she gains truth. Assuming that cases of seeming peer disagreement are widespread, especially in areas which are of importance for us (religion, morality, politics, philosophy), Agnosticism forfeits any chance to get true

154  Oliver J. Wiertz beliefs about important matters (if one presupposes that many cases of peer disagreement are lasting). Therefore, it seems more prudent to bet on one of the two alternatives p or not-p, instead of generally withholding one’s bet – at least when this goes hand in hand with the willingness to perform further inquiries concerning the disputed topic. Religious plurality neither demands nor warrants strict religious abstemiousness. That said, since only robust forms of conciliationism are affected by the charge of self-defeat and since many examples actually show the need to modify one’s confidence in the face of a presumed peer-disagreement, this does not justify stern dogmatism. However, no precise amount of the demanded reduction of confidence can be given. Therefore religious scepticism is not justified either. Finally, the question arises as to whom to accept as a peer and on what basis. This question is especially delicate in religious contexts. As already mentioned, there are epistemological reasons for a general presumption of the epistemic peerhood of others. But only the general presumption of peerhood seems to be defensible as default position. This presumption can and often does get defeated. This is an important aspect especially in cases of religious disagreement, because many religious doctrines include secondorder doctrines about other religions and their epistemic and moral-spiritual value. Such doctrines may exert a strong influence over the judgements of believers regarding whom they should accept as an epistemic-spiritual peer. Moreover, it is not evident that this influence is irrational, even when it leads to a “demotion” of the religious other.42 Therefore, followers of at least some religious traditions could argue that their own religion gives them reason to overturn the peerhood-presumption in the case of disagreement with members of foreign religions. That means that the peerhood-presumption may be overthrown by “partial” reasons (reasons based on one’s home religion). Allowing such moves need not give free reign to complacent dogmatism. Instead, the rationality of judging the epistemic/religious peer-status of members of foreign religion with the help of partial evidence depends on the rational credibility of the respective doctrines of one’s home religion, which back the demotion of the epistemic status of the religious other and on whether these doctrines really back this demotion. The credibility of these doctrines in turn depends on the credibility of the religion of which they are part as well as on the quantity and strength of positive inferential relations between the core doctrines of one’s home religion and the doctrines backing one’s view of foreign religions.43 To put it briefly: the rational force of partial reasons for a potential religious-epistemic demotion of religious others is not independent of impartial reasons which are open to intersubjectivephilosophical criticism.44 As a provisional conclusion, I propose that it seems that religious plurality renders the fulfillment of epistemic duties more demanding, though it remains possible to hold religious beliefs in a situation of religious plurality without violating them. Living in a religiously homogenous world, I  may

Epistemic desiderata and religious plurality 155 lack strong epistemic reasons for scrutinizing my religious beliefs. But in a situation of religious plurality, I am faced by religious creeds whose truth implies that my creed is not completely true. Because doxastic obligations involve the duty to treat truth-claims which are prima facie epistemically on a par45 in a comparable way,46 I am (or the experts of my religious group are) under the obligation to scrutinize whether other religious traditions are epistemically comparable and how they in fact epistemically compare. Features of systems of beliefs that are among the goals of cognition The desiderata in this group are features of systems of beliefs. They do not further truth, but rather presuppose it. An example would be explanatory power or coherence.47 It should be clear by now that all intellectual (and practical) responses to religious plurality have an impact on the coherence of religious belief systems, because these responses are related to one’s understanding of God’s interactions with the world. We may subsume all desiderata in group E under the heading of understanding. It seems that religious plurality radically threatens the standing of religious belief systems when it comes to this desideratum. First, plurality shows that you can connect some core elements of belief-systems with rather different further beliefs. For example, in the Christian view, the monotheistic commitment to the belief in one God, which is shared by Muslims and Jews, allows the belief in a divine incarnation – but this belief is denied in the Jewish and Muslim traditions. It threatens the supposed coherence of these belief systems, since the inferential relations between the single doctrines which constitute the coherence of the whole system seem to be less strong than supposed – or these relations need further justification, showing that some doctrinal combinations are less coherent than others. Either way, religious plurality demands scrutiny of doctrinal systems in terms of consistency and coherence. This is also due to the fact that the different ways of dealing with religious plurality have consequences for the whole of the religious belief-system, as we have seen. The second reason why plurality threatens the epistemic standing of religious beliefs on the desideratum of understanding is that, from a theistic perspective, plurality is a rather astonishing fact. If God is the omnipotent, perfectly benign and omniscient creator of everything contingent and if Christianity is viewed as the religious system which comes closest to a true belief system and if you view the acquisition of important truths as an important epistemic and also religiously valuable thing, then it becomes natural to ask why God does not allow all human beings to acquire true beliefs about the triune God and God’s mighty deeds in history. This problem is aggravated for soteriologically exclusivist positions, according to which there is no salvation without an explicit commitment to Jesus Christ in earthly life. This idea seems on the face of it to conflict with God’s perfect

156  Oliver J. Wiertz love  – for a loving God would not set up conditions for salvation which most human beings cannot satisfy. But religious plurality may also prompt new religious insights because the difficulty of making the special soteriological role of Jesus compatible with the confession of God’s perfect and universal love can lead to a deeper reflection on Christ’s soteriological significance and to a more precise formulation of it. So coherence-problems posed by religious plurality are only one side of the coin. The other side of religious plurality is that it can help religious believers to understand their own tradition much better. It gives them an opportunity to detect new (positive) inferential relations between some of the elements of their own creed and generally to enhance the creed. One will understand characteristic peculiarities of one’s own tradition much better – or recognize them for the first time. The “look in the mirror” of other religious traditions, in which I can reflect on my own tradition gives me the opportunity to decide whether I want to accept what I see as a true image. If I do, then I have to decide whether I want to embrace all parts of my tradition that I now see from a new perspective.48 In this way, religious plurality and interreligious dialogues can help to become a more considered and reflective believer – willing to detect God’s voice and will in all things.

Conclusion To conclude these musings on religious plurality, let me point out some provisional results: 1 It seems doubtful that one can give a single answer to the question of the epistemic consequences of religious plurality. Too many epistemic values are in play and the circumstances under which individual believers face religious plurality are too diverse. But as a rough thumb rule, we may say that people are rationally allowed to retain their religious beliefs even when confronted by plurality, while the fact of religious plurality at the same time requires them to scrutinize their beliefs and even to lower their epistemic confidence. 2 The situation of religious plurality favours some (meta-)epistemological positions more than others. Strongly externalist stances are not of much use in dealing with its epistemic consequences, challenges and opportunities. More internalist approaches seem better suited to this task and should therefore be the preferred basis for our epistemological reflections.49 This observation is all the more urgent given that religious beliefs are deeply intertwined with the personality of the believers and therefore also with their biases which often affect our religious judgements in an unconscious way.50 Biases are not always bad from an epistemic point of view – but sometimes they are. If we want to deal critically with biases and attempt to resolve at least those religious disputes which are resolvable and if we want to understand our religious

Epistemic desiderata and religious plurality 157 stance better and by all this get nearer to truth (i.e., to a more adequate picture of God), then we should make our biases more explicit and reach a reflective state of religious consciousness. Epistemic externalism seems to be of less use in this regard since it leaves the religious subject “a victim of circumstances”.51 3 When reflecting on epistemological questions concerning religious plurality, religious doctrines must be taken into account because they determine the evaluation of the epistemic depth and seriousness of the consequences of religious plurality as well as the resources for dealing with them in a fruitful way (from the point of view of a particular tradition). Philosophical reflection on religious plurality cannot neglect these doctrines if it wants do justice to the concrete phenomenon of religion and gain insight into the resources religions have for dealing with religious plurality. This goes hand in hand with a call for more philosophical reflection on the potential of non-Christian doctrines in assessing religious plurality. 4 The preoccupation with potential “negative” epistemic consequences shouldn’t distract us from discovering new epistemic and spiritual chances in a situation of religious plurality. It directs attention to the complicated relations between different doctrinal and spiritual strands within one and the same religious tradition as well as between different religions. In this way, it helps believers to get a deeper understanding of their own tradition, which may be enriched by the encounter with other religions. Furthermore, it brings to the fore the question of philosophically and religiously adequate criteria for evaluating religions.52 5 The phenomenon of religious plurality reminds philosophers that religions are not neat systems of precise truth-claims which can be suitably judged one by one, but that one has to pay attention to their complex structure and their role as worldviews, providing orientation in a confusing world and in dealing with a transcendent divine being. Concerning religion in general and religious plurality in particular, things are more complicated and intractable than it may seem at first and than they are viewed by some proponents of an atheological argument from religious diversity (and also as viewed by some defenders of religion).53

Notes 1 “Epistemic reliability” is used in the sense of reliability concerning the realization of the basic epistemic aim of holding as much true beliefs and as few false beliefs (concerning important facts) as possible. That means that a source of knowledge is epistemically reliable if and only if the beliefs which are the offspring of this source are mainly true. 2 Cf. Richard Feldman, “Reasonable Religious Disagreements,” in Philosophers Without Gods. Meditations on Atheism and the Secular Life, ed. Louise M. Antony (Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 194–214.

158  Oliver J. Wiertz 3 The notion “belief” bears an ambiguity between referring to a certain mental state, the propositional attitude of viewing a certain proposition as true, and designating the object of this mental state, that is the proposition one views as true. In the following I will not always explicitly distinguish between these two senses for stylistic reasons. 4 That seems to be the case with Hume; cf. Don Garrett, “Hume On Testimony Concerning Miracles,” in Reading Hume on Human Understanding. Essays on the First Enquiry, ed. Peter Millican (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002), 328. 5 “Rationality” is a notoriously unclear concept. Epistemic rationality allows or demands certain ways of believing on the basis of formal criteria (like the principle of non-contradiction) and a well-trained faculty of judgement. Important rules of rationality are the maxim to treat similar things similarly and the principle of non-arbitrariness, which demands that a rational subject acts and cognizes on reasons which she views as truth-conducing, value-indicating or as maximizing effectiveness. 6 Cf. William P. Alston, Beyond “Justification”. Dimensions of Epistemic Evaluation (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005). 7 Alston, Beyond, 30. 8 Cf. Alston, Beyond, chapter 2. 9 Concerning the question of objective religious truth cf. also Åke Wahlberg, “Truth, meaning and interreligious understanding,” in this volume. 10 This does not rule out the influence of religious practices on the propositional content of a religion. For a critical discussion of “propositionalist” accounts of religion, cf. John Cottingham, “The epistemic implications of religious diversity,” in this volume. 11 David McPherson, “Cosmic Outlooks and Neo-Aristotelian Virtue Ethics,” International Philosophical Quarterly 55 (2015): 197. 12 Cf. Alston, A Realist Conception of Truth, chapter 1. Alston’s supposes a veritistic “minimalist Realism”, which does not spell out the exact relationship between propositions and facts. This minimalism should not be confused with Paul Horwich’s minimalism, according to which truth has no underlying nature and “all of the facts whose expression involves the truth predicate may be explained . . . by assuming no more about truth than instances of the equivalence schema” (Paul Horwich, Truth, 2nd ed. [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998], 23). 13 For a nonrealist construal of religious faith, which stresses its non-propositional character see Nehama Verbin, “Maimonides and Kierkegaard on fictionalism, divine hiddenness and the scope for interreligious dialogue,” in this volume. For a modification of a realist account of religious truth cf. Dirk-Martin Grube, “Respecting religious otherness as otherness versus exclusivism and religious pluralism: towards a robust interreligious dialogue,” in this volume, in particular his suspension of the principle of bivalence in the context of religious truth. 14 Cf. the third chapter of Vatican I. dogmatic constitution “Dei Filius”. 15 Cf. Joseph Kleutgen in the fourth volume of his Die Theologie der Vorzeit verteidigt, 2nd ed. (Münster: Theissing, 1873). 16 Another possible explanation of religious diversity is that non-Christians may be rational and of moral integrity but just don’t belong to the group of those who are graciously elected to receive the supernatural gift of Christian faith. But such a predestinarian account puts God’s perfect benignity and love to all creatures into question. 17 Cf. Timothy Williamson, The Philosophy of Philosophy (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publ., 2007). 18 That this presupposition is not a total fabrication is argued for in Wahlberg, “Truth”.

Epistemic desiderata and religious plurality 159 19 For a critical discussion of the awareness requirement on justification cf. Michael Bergmann, Justification without Awareness. A Defense of Epistemic Externalism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006). 20 Cf. Peter Cave, “Irrational Believings,” Think 6 (2008): 25f. 21 On the other hand new difficulties concerning other desiderata may show up. 22 For Plantinga’s A/C-Model cf. his Warranted. The model is named after Thomas Aquinas and John Calvin to whom Plantinga credits the core of his model. 23 Cf. Plantinga, Warranted, 184, 186. 24 Alvin Plantinga, “Pluralism. A Defense of Religious Exclusivism,” in The Philosophical Challenge of Religious Diversity, eds. Philip L. Quinn and Kevin Meeker (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 190. 25 Cf. Plantinga, “Pluralism,” 189. 26 Cf. Plantinga, Warranted, XIIf. Defeaters do not need to be products of a properly functioning cognitive faculty, i.e. they need not itself be warranted. 27 Cf. Alvin Plantinga, “The Foundations of Theism. A Reply,” Faith and Philosophy 3 (1986): 311. 28 Cf. Plantinga, Warranted, 485; 489f. These passages deal with the problem of evil but Plantinga also uses this strategy in connection with the problem of religious plurality; cf. Alvin Plantinga, “Replies to my commentators,” in Plantinga’s Warranted Christian Belief. Critical Essays with a Reply by Alvin Plantinga, ed. Dieter Schönecker (Berlin: DeGruyter, 2015), 254. 29 One does not need to construe desideratum 2 in an externalist way, but Alston does. 30 Linda Zagzebski, Virtues of the Mind. An Inquiry into the Nature of Virtue and the Ethical Foundations of Knowledge (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 137. 31 “We can typically tell whether someone is disposed to act responsibly, even though we do not know whether the dispositions that give rise to his actions are reliably truth conducive” (Catherine Z. Elgin, “Epistemic Agency,” Theory and Research in Education 11 [2013]: 139). 32 Although it has to be admitted that preferred methods of searching for truth, especially for religious truth, may vary from one religious tradition to another. 33 I only presuppose that virtues are interconnected, not that they are unified. 34 Alston, Beyond, 160f. 35 Also from a theological point of view the category of virtue seems to be apt since faith is traditionally viewed as a virtue in Christianity; cf. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae II-II, quaestiones 1–16. 36 For an especially vicious kind of reacting to religious diversity and for the possibilities of overcoming it and dealing with religious diversity virtuously with the help of scriptural reasoning and religious hospitality cf. Peter Jonkers, “How to break the ill-fated bond between religious truth and violence,” in this volume. 37 Alston, Beyond, 162. 38 Cf. Colin McGinn, Problems in Philosophy. The Limits of Inquiry Oxford (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), 1. 39 Cf. Richard Foley, Intellectual Trust in Oneself and Others (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 40 Peers concerning the proposition p are persons who are roughly similar in all epistemic respects relevant to the judgement on p. 41 The charge of self-defeat has evoked a lively discussion. For more on the charge of self-defeat, cf. Oliver J. Wiertz, Robust Conciliationism and the Charge of Self-Defeat, unpublished manuscript. 42 This kind of demotion often concerns the value of other religions directly and the peerhood of their followers only indirectly. Demotion comes in grades and

160  Oliver J. Wiertz may be rather modest, still allowing for a high esteem of the epistemic and soteriological value of other religions. For denying foreign religions or believers the status of religious peerhood, it suffices that they are denied the same epistemic, spiritual or soteriological worth as one’s home-religion. 43 If the epistemic demotion of followers of other traditions is backed by doctrines of a religion whose epistemic credentials are rather poor, the demotion is not justified. Even if the demotion is backed by doctrines of a religion with a strong epistemic standing, it can still be poorly justified if these doctrines are neither central to the creed of the religion nor implied (or justified) by central doctrines. 44 This position resembles in some respects that of Katherine Dormandy, “Resolving Religious Disagreements. Evidence and Bias,” Faith and Philosophy 35 (2018): 56–83. 45 That is, they don’t seem to be obviously different in terms of such epistemic aspects as reliability or plausibility. 46 That means that I don’t apply different epistemic norms, criteria and principles to them than to my own beliefs. 47 For these features to count as epistemic desiderata Alston has to stretch his account of epistemic desiderata. 48 Navid Kermani’s meditation on pieces of Christian art from a Muslim perspective is a case in point; cf. Navid Kermani, Ungläubiges Staunen. Über das Christentum, 13th ed. (München: C. H. Beck, 2016). 49 Internalism also seems more apt as a basis for dealing with the problem of religiously motivated violence; cf. Victoria S. Harrison, “Can religious diversity help with the problem of religiously-motivated violence?,” in this volume. 50 Biases are “unconscious, automatic tendencies to associate certain traits with members of particular social groups, in ways that lead to . . . judge members of stigmatized groups more negatively” (Jennifer Saul, “Scepticism and Implicit Bias,” Disputatio 37 2013]: 244). A biased person is “disposed to judge others according to a stereotyped conception of their social group (ethic, gender, class, and so on), rather than by their individual talents” (Keith Frankish, “Playing Double. Implicit Bias, Dual Levels, And Selfcontrol” in Implicit Bias and Philosophy, Volume 1: Metaphysics and Epistemology, eds. Michael Brownstein and Jennifer Saul [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016], 24). For the role of biases in religious disagreements see Dormandy, “Resolving”. 51 Elgin, “Agency,” 141. 52 The benefits of (rational) disagreement are dealt with by Katherine Dormandy, “ ‘In Abundance of Counsellors There is Victory’: reasoning about public policy from a religious worldview,” in this volume. 53 I am grateful to all members of the international group which has met regularly at Sankt Georgen College, Frankfurt/Main for their many valuable questions, remarks and advices. I  am especially indebted to Katherine Dormandy, Peter Jonkers and Åke Wahlberg who have commented extensively on an earlier draft of the chapter.

Bibliography Alston, William P. A Realist Conception of Truth. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996. Alston, William P. Beyond “Justification”. Dimensions of Epistemic Evaluation. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005. Bergmann, Michael. Justification without Awareness. A Defense of Epistemic Externalism. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006.

Epistemic desiderata and religious plurality 161 Cave, Peter. “Irrational Believings.” Think 6 (2008): 23–31. Dormandy, Katherine. “Resolving Religious Disagreements. Evidence and Bias.” Faith and Philosophy 35 (2018): 56–83. Elgin, Catherine Z. “Epistemic Agency.” Theory and Research in Education 11 (2013): 135–52. Feldman, Richard. “Reasonable Religious Disagreements.” In Philosophers Without Gods. Meditations on Atheism and the Secular Life, edited by Louise M. Antony, 194–214. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 2007. Foley, Richard. Intellectual Trust in Oneself and Others. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Frankish, Keith. “Playing Double. Implicit Bias, Dual Levels, And Selfcontrol.” In Implicit Bias and Philosophy, Volume 1: Metaphysics and Epistemology, edited by Michael Brownstein, and Jennifer Saul, 23–46. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. Garrett, Don. “Hume On Testimony Concerning Miracles.” In Reading Hume on Human Understanding. Essays on the First Enquiry, edited by Peter Millican, 301–34. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002. Horwich, Paul. Truth. 2nd ed. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998. Kermani, Navid. Ungläubiges Staunen. Über das Christentum. 13th ed. München: C. H. Beck, 2016. Kleutgen, Joseph. Die Theologie der Vorzeit verteidigt. 2nd ed. Münster: Theissing, 1873. McGinn, Colin. Problems in Philosophy. The Limits of Inquiry Oxford. Oxford: Blackwell, 1993. McPherson, David. “Cosmic Outlooks and Neo-Aristotelian Virtue Ethics.” International Philosophical Quarterly 55 (2015): 197–215. Peels, Rik. “Epistemic Desiderata and Epistemic Pluralism.” Journal of Philosophical Research 35 (2010): 193–207. Plantinga, Alvin. “The Foundations of Theism. A Reply.” Faith and Philosophy 3 (1986): 298–313. Plantinga, Alvin. “Pluralism. A  Defense of Religious Exclusivism.” In The Philosophical Challenge of Religious Diversity, edited by Philip L. Quinn, and Kevin Meeker, 172–92. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. Plantinga, Alvin. Warranted Christian Belief. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. Plantinga, Alvin. “Replies to My Commentators.” In Plantinga’s Warranted Christian Belief. Critical Essays with a Reply by Alvin Plantinga, edited by Dieter Schönecker, 237–62. Berlin: DeGruyter, 2015. Saul, Jennifer. “Scepticism and Implicit Bias.” Disputatio 37 (2013): 243–63. Wiertz, Oliver J. Robust Conciliationism and the Charge of Self-Defeat. Unpublished manuscript. Williamson, Timothy. The Philosophy of Philosophy. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publ., 2007. Zagzebski, Linda. Virtues of the Mind. An Inquiry into the Nature of Virtue and the Ethical Foundations of Knowledge. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996.

9 “In abundance of counsellors there is victory”1 Reasoning about public policy from a religious worldview Katherine Dormandy Introduction Religious communities are often active in the public sphere, aiming for influence in politics by getting their members and sympathizers elected to public office. Seeking to maximize one’s influence is part of the rough-and-tumble of politics in a democracy. But some religious communities pursue this aim not just for practical reasons, but also for epistemological ones. Their rationale is that their own religious worldview has a firm grasp on truths about right and wrong, whereas other viewpoints  – prominently secular ones – neglect important values and so are likely to yield public policy that is mistaken, not least because it is morally impoverished.2 One way to express this rationale is as the claim that certain sorts of discussion, dissent, or disagreement on public-policy matters should be suppressed, so that a particular viewpoint, one taken to be correct, can dominate.3 Expressed this way, the epistemic rationale of the religious communities that I have in mind butts up against a common tenet of scientific reasoning: that disagreement, far from being suppressed, should be actively encouraged.4 The idea is that lively disagreement from a diversity of perspectives promotes true beliefs and related epistemic goals, as differing viewpoints challenge and complement each other. Scientists claim this, of course, because they do not assume themselves to be in possession of the truth, and recognize that a measure of epistemic friction5 can spur them to improve their theories. But certain politically active religious communities will claim that, unlike scientists, they know that their beliefs are true, and moreover that their reasoning is subject to divine guidance, so they do not stand to gain epistemically from engaging in disagreement, certainly not about public policy.6 But I will argue that religious communities that take this view are mistaken. Even if their worldview is largely on track, they nonetheless stand to gain epistemically by engaging in disagreement about public policy with adherents of different large-scale worldviews, including secular ones. I will call this sort of disagreement foundational-worldview disagreement. The situation I  have in mind is something like this: Community

In abundance of counsellors there is victory 163 1 adheres to large-scale belief system B, from which it reasons to the policy recommendation P. Community 2, by contrast, adheres to largescale belief system B*, which is incompatible (in some significant way) with B and from which it reasons to public-policy recommendation notP. A  familiar contemporary example is the debate over abortion rights, where religious communities often argue on religious grounds that it should be illegal, and secular communities on secular grounds that abortion should be allowed. My claim can be summarized as follows: The plural-discourse claim: Engaging in foundational-worldview disagreement over public policy has the strong potential to yield epistemic benefits on public-policy matters. By “engaging in disagreement” I mean open-mindedly discussing public policy in a way that enables you to understand and critique your interlocutor’s view and him to understand and critique yours.7 The plural-discourse claim does not say that that foundational-worldview disagreement is always epistemically beneficial. On the contrary, sometimes it will be of little use, for example if the foundational worldview of one’s interlocutor is epistemically or morally beyond the pale  – think of white supremacists or flat-earthers.8 (Indeed, scientists limit their claims about the benefits of scientific disagreement too, to those with the requisite training.) What the plural-discourse claim says is just that, such cases aside, we stand to learn much about the right public policy for our society from people who disagree with us about it, even – or perhaps especially – when their disagreements stem from fundamental differences between our religious or secular worldviews. As a result, restrictions on the worldviews used in public-policy reasoning will typically (with a few exceptions) come with an epistemic cost. Even if a politically active religious community were to gain a big enough majority that they could legislate as they pleased, they would do well, from an epistemic point of view, to invite disagreement with adherents of other foundational worldviews. My argument for the plural-discourse claim will initially take an a fortiori form: in the next section, I  will argue that disagreement in general yields epistemic benefits, and thus that so does foundational-worldview disagreement about public policy. In the two sections thereafter, I will address two objections that a politically active religious community of the sort I have in mind might make, each to the effect that their community poses an exception. The first objection arises from the claim that their worldview beliefs are true, and the second from the claim that they are guided by divine cognitive influence. Even if the community is right about both of these things, I will argue, the plural-discourse claim applies. I will start with some setup.

164  Katherine Dormandy

Public-policy reasoning and disagreement Each person has an interlocking network of beliefs, concepts, and values that I  will call her belief system. Belief systems have subsets that pertain to different domains, and that relate to other subsets in complex causal, psychological, logical, and epistemic ways.9 Many people’s belief systems contain a subset comprising a foundational worldview, such as a religious or secular stance; and many contain, similarly, a subset pertaining to matters of public policy. I will be discussing how these subsets relate epistemically – in particular when it comes to using the resources of foundational worldviews to reason about public policy. Public-policy reasoning centres around two types of question. What I’ll call the question of ends concerns which public ends (e.g., income parity, poverty reduction, etc.) are the best to promote in the situation at hand, all things considered. The question of means concerns which policies are the best suited to realizing these ends. The latter question must take account of not only the causal efficacy of a given policy with respect to desired ends, but also the values and disvalues incurred by the policy itself. Public-policy reasoning, like reasoning of any sort, is done by situated agents within the context of their own belief systems. It will be useful to say more about the three elements – beliefs, concepts, and values – that these involve; I will do so by illustrating them as they might arise in belief systems about public policy, though similar remarks apply to religious belief systems.10 Beliefs about public policy concern the ends and means at issue, as well as any auxiliary matters needed to think about them – including what epistemic standards to use in evaluating the belief system itself. Beliefs bear all manner of epistemic relations to each other, such as entailing, making probable, supporting, and the like. Second, belief systems contain concepts. These are the building blocks for beliefs. Consider the belief that it is good to increase income equality. What this belief means depends on the particular concept of (or measure for) income equality that is at issue, as well as on the underlying notion of goodness. Third, public-policy reasoning involves values: the placing of things in preference orderings by some measure of importance, perhaps including, but not limited to, their moral goodness. Values determine our public-policy ends: do we value the reduction of income inequality more than the reduction of the national deficit, or vice versa? Values also help determine our beliefs about which means are best suited for bringing those ends about. For example, of two policies conducive to reducing income inequality, which brings more good and less bad into the world on balance? (Values also determine the concepts of “good” that we favour.) In addition to determining what beliefs we hold about ends and means and how we conceptualize them, values determine the topics on which we form beliefs and concepts to begin with. For it is our values that prompt us to care enough about a matter to articulate beliefs and concepts to describe it.

In abundance of counsellors there is victory 165 Beliefs, concepts, and values – about public policy and other matters – are subject to epistemic evaluation, and thus (if needed) to epistemic improvement. Beliefs can be true or false, epistemically justified, probable or improbable.11 Concepts can be accurate, or – if they aim to designate one aspect of a complex phenomenon to make it tractable – useful. Values too, at least if they track mind-independent goods, can be accurate or inaccurate; they can also be epistemically revealing or concealing, depending on which matters they prompt us to look into or ignore. I will use the term accurate to describe a belief system whose beliefs, concepts, and values are epistemically good (or useful) in these ways.12 We can understand the plural-discourse claim as saying that foundational-worldview disagreement can improve the accuracy of belief systems on matters of public policy. But what does accuracy with respect to public policy amount to? Very roughly, an accurate public-policy belief system is one that reflects a public policy that would meet the needs of people in the society across a plurality of social locations, such as income groups, ethnicities, religious or secular groupings, genders, and so forth. That is, it contains largely true beliefs – about what these needs are, which ends to pursue in order to meet them, and which means are best suited in the circumstances to achieving those ends (taking into account any disvalue incurred by the means themselves); and it contains concepts suitable for articulating those needs, ends, and means; as well as values that prioritize them. Given the manifold needs in a pluralistic society, there typically will not be a single optimal publicpolicy outcome, but rather several equally good possible outcomes. We may call the search for the best policy the search for an optimal outcome. Figuring out an optimal outcome is what I’ll call the epistemic aim of public-policy reasoning. There are three things that are subject to disagreement in this context. The first and most straightforward (because it is at least partly subject to empirical study) is which means are best for achieving certain ends. Second, there is the matter of disagreeing over which ends themselves to prioritize for the sake of meeting a plurality of needs; this question is less straightforward because of the role of values in determining the answer. Third, disagreement will concern what various segments of the population need to begin with. This too is not always a straightforward matter; a noteworthy feature of some religious belief systems is that they contain beliefs about what various segments of the population need that differ from what those parties take themselves to need. For example, a religious belief system might hold that people need to be saved from sinking too low into debauchery as the religious community construes it, whereas the people themselves might disagree about which behaviours constitute debauchery, or they might agree but think that they need the freedom to sink into it if they choose.13 With this background on belief systems (including on public policy), I’ll argue that disagreement in general can yield epistemic benefits. I’ll then respond to objections to the effect that foundational-worldview disagreement, including about public policy, is an exception.

166  Katherine Dormandy

The epistemic benefits of disagreement in general This section argues that disagreement is epistemically beneficial, including when it pertains to emotive matters like religion and public policy. It starts by defending the benefits of disagreement in general, then zeroes in on some distinguishing features of disagreement about emotive matters like religion and public policy.14 What shapes belief systems My argument for the plural-discourse claim is premised on a picture of what influences our belief systems. I will discuss three salient factors. The first is evidence, which (as I understand it) consists in a person’s representational experiences and her justified beliefs.15 Evidence is a causal but also a normative influence on her beliefs. It can help build her concept of a thing, and it influences what she values and disvalues. Second are psychological influences. These include affective states, which generate affective biases (e.g., fear of spiders generates a bias against spiders, a feeling of belonging generates a bias towards in-group members); and cognitive states, which generate cognitive or intellectual biases (e.g., we prefer our own data and experiences over other people’s).16 Finally, social influences include the stereotypes and biases that are prevalent in our community or society – say, in the media or the going forms of humour, as well as interpersonal pressures to believe in accord with our friends or co-workers.17 Psychological and social factors can influence a person’s reasoning directly, just by causing beliefs, concepts, or values. They also do so indirectly, operating through her experiential evidence. They influence, first, what she attends to or ignores;18 and second, how she perceives things when she does attend to them – for example, because she loves her brother, she may perceive people who resemble him as kind.19 Third, these factors influence how a person evaluates evidence: for example, whether she draws the simple but limited conclusion or the complex but explanatorily broad one, whether she believes or disbelieve a given person’s testimony, and so forth.20 Each influence on our reasoning can promote or impede accuracy. Evidence for its part is supposed to promote true beliefs. In many cases it does – but whether it does depends on whether the psychological and social factors that influence your evidence and evidence-evaluation are themselves sensitive to the truth in the case at hand. Many such factors are not truth-sensitive.21 Some are sensitive to other concerns, such as prolonging our survival. For example, we might be strongly biased to believe, of any snake, that it is poisonous, even if this is statistically highly unlikely. For another example, a tendency to believe the testimony of in-group members and disbelieve outsiders may once have been a similar, exaggerated, safety mechanism, even if it is today largely

In abundance of counsellors there is victory 167 outdated. Even many so-called “epistemic values”, such as a preference for simplicity over explanatory breadth, are not truth-sensitive as such, but are rather a priori preferences.22 That said, other influences on our belief systems are truth-sensitive; experts, for example, develop perceptual sensitivities from years of training. But even if an influence is truth-sensitive, it is highly unlikely to be perfectly responsive to the way things are. Experts can even commit certain errors because of their expertise. A  dietician may be biased towards nutritional explanations, whereas cardiologists may favour cardiological ones. So even truth-sensitive influences are prone to yielding certain sorts of false belief. I call a false belief brought about by an otherwise truth-sensitive influence a false-positive belief.23 A salient social influence is the tendency of group members to engage in groupthink: to conform their reasoning to the thought patterns of their whole group.24 Groupthink is not truth-sensitive as such, though if the group’s thought is truth-sensitive, it can be. But even then, groupthink can cause false-positive beliefs. Imagine for example that France reports a comparatively large proportion of gout sufferers, whereas Germany reports statistically excessive hypothyroidism – yet other indicators would predict similar proportions of each. Groupthink in the medical professions of the respective countries might be the culprit. The three influences on our beliefs (i.e., evidence, psychological factors, and social ones) are often implicit, occurring below our fully conscious awareness.25 This can hold even of evidence: although this is understood to be available on sufficient reflection,26 there are many questions for which we have too much evidence to reflect on all at once, and there are many questions for which we never try.27 This means that we are often unaware of what causes or justifies our beliefs, concepts, and values. Many of the influences in question may not be truth-sensitive, whereas others may be truth-sensitive but nonetheless prone to generating false-positive beliefs. Two epistemic worries mitigated by foundational-worldview disagreement The considerations just discussed yield three epistemic concerns, including but not limited to matters of public policy, for those with limited exposure outside of their epistemic community.28 According to the circularity worry, a group of like-minded people conversing only with each other is badly placed to epistemically evaluate its own belief system:29 members will be strongly disposed to give it a thumbsup regardless. One reason is that they will carry out any such evaluation by the standards of their own belief system, which will be biased to self-favour. Another is that groupthink tendencies ensure that most individual group members exhibit the same thought patterns, and so will be ill-equipped to offer independent criticism.

168  Katherine Dormandy The distortion worry says that a group’s belief system is prone to misrepresent some aspects of reality. First, truth-insensitive influences are apt to be in place. Second, even truth-sensitive influences are likely to generate certain false-positive beliefs. Third, the circularity just observed hinders group members from seeing these distortions. Foundational-worldview disagreement can help mitigate these worries, in three ways.30 First, it can provide constructive external criticism of your belief system. A  disagreeing outsider is well placed to notice implicit or unexamined foundational beliefs, concepts that miss important aspects of a phenomenon, or values that your belief system ignores. This helps mitigate the circularity worry, because it can alert us to aspects of our belief system that we took for granted and thus failed to evaluate, and it can provide a less sympathetic evaluation with which to triangulate our self-assessments. Of course, we will filter external criticism through our own beliefs, concepts, and values, but we will at least have more diverse data to run through the filter. As for the distortion worry, external criticism can provide clues about what our belief system may have missed or misconstrued, and in prompting us to nuance our belief systems it can rein in truth-insensitive biases and the false-positive effects of truth-sensitive biases. Importantly, your interlocutor need not be in better epistemic shape than you in order for his constructive criticism to benefit you in these ways; he need only notice weaknesses in your belief system or its influences. Second, engaging in foundational-worldview disagreement can expand your evidential basis. It delivers evidence that someone disagrees with you, but more importantly, when you discourse at greater length, it informs you of the particular evidence supporting your interlocutor’s belief system. That evidence will tend to differ from yours in two respects: First, it will arise from different types of event than the ones that you have experienced (since your interlocutors will tend to travel in different social and cultural circles than you); and second, your interlocutor’s psychological and social influences will prime him to experience even similar events differently to you. The additional evidence provided by disagreement can help mitigate the circularity worry, for outsiders’ evidence can be harder for our belief system to accommodate than our own evidence, and so can challenge positive epistemic self-evaluations. It can mitigate the distortion worry by supplementing our own evidence, which may be misleading because it is incomplete. Third, engaging in foundational-worldview disagreement will provide epistemic alternatives: It can help you understand your interlocutors’ beliefs, concepts, and values, and it will acquaint you with their evidence and reasoning. It will thus open possibilities for how things could be different than your belief system represents them. This may be an antidote to your community’s groupthink, which narrows your space of possibilities. The provision of epistemic alternatives can mitigate the circularity worry, since alternatives can present other means of evaluation on which our own

In abundance of counsellors there is victory 169 belief systems perform less well than on our own. And it can mitigate the distortion worry, since new epistemic alternatives can provide another way of reasoning that might complement, or be more fruitful than, the one that we have thus far been implementing by default. These three epistemic benefits  – external criticism, additional evidence, and epistemic alternatives – are especially important in discussions of public policy. Recall that the epistemic aim of public-policy reasoning is to figure out an optimal outcome for meeting the needs of people across a plurality of social locations, which of course includes locations other than one’s own religious community. It is to be expected that the needs arising from one social location may be hard to recognize or understand from within others. In figuring out the right public policy for your society, then, it is crucial to seek external criticism of your public-policy belief system, additional evidence drawn from the experiences and views of people in other social locations, and epistemic alternatives that might be occluded from your own social location, especially as these concern the public-policy needs of those very people.31 A third epistemic worry mitigated by foundational-worldview disagreement The circularity and distortion worries arise for our reasoning generally. But there is a third worry arising specifically for reasoning about existentially and personally important matters – including religion, public policy, and the application of the one to the other. The exacerbation worry, as I call it, says that, when we are reasoning about such topics, the circularity and distortion worries are worsened: We become less adept at evaluating our own belief systems negatively, and they are more susceptible to distortion. The reason is that thinking about such matters activates our psychological and community defences.32 Public policy tends to be of great practical relevance, and our foundational worldview creates an overall coherent picture of life and our place in it. We tend to feel frightened at the prospect of our belief systems on these matters being called into question. On top of this, we tend to identify with our religious (or secular) and political groups, and one way of signalling and policing belonging is by ensuring that one espouses the community belief system. When it comes to these matters, then, the social and psychological influences described above activate more strongly to protect our belief systems as they stand.33 To see how, we need a brief glance at a key mechanism that gives rise to exacerbation. This mechanism is bias. A  bias can be understood as a strong tendency to associate the object of your bias with some other object, concept, or emotion. A bias against alternative worldviews or public-policy belief systems manifests itself as a strong negative association with anything that represents that alternative to you, including the people who hold it. You perceive these things or people under a negative aspect, perhaps

170  Katherine Dormandy accompanied by negative emotions. This mode of perception in turn confirms and strengthens the bias itself, making you more apt next time round to have an even stronger negative perception or reaction when you consider alternative viewpoints or the people who hold them.34 I have said that foundational-worldview disagreement can mitigate the exacerbation worry. But this might appear to be exactly wrong: If we are primed to bias against things in seeming conflict with our own belief system, then surely a direct encounter with someone who disagrees with it will trigger our defensive biases and bring on exacerbation full throttle. We may agree that this is a danger in certain cases – but in others less so. What makes the difference? To answer this question, consider what it takes for a bias to be undone: The person who harbours it must come across enough counterinstances (i.e., things or persons who do not conform to it). In the case of foundational-worldview disagreement, a counterinstance would be an interlocutor who does not pose a threat to what she deeply believes and holds dear. What sorts of interlocutors are these? I suggest that an interlocutor who can act as a counterinstance to an exacerbating bias is one who respects a person when engaging in disagreement with her. That is, he treats her as valuable in accord with her status as a person, a Kantian end in herself.35 Respect, when manifested in foundational-worldview disagreements about public policy (or other sensitive matters), can help mitigate the exacerbation worry.36 How does respect do this? Being (and feeling) respected can put interlocutors at their ease. Treating someone respectfully signals that you are on his side and willing to take him seriously. This influences his negative biases to weaken against you, mitigating the exacerbation worry insofar as this is caused by biases against perceived threats to his foundational worldview and public-policy beliefs. Mutual respect, then, helps foundational-worldview disagreement about public policy yield epistemic benefits. One way in which it does so is by making it easier for your interlocutor to respect you in turn, which will help you combat your biases against her. And mutual respect influences each interlocutor’s perception and interpretation of the other to be more accurate. How? If your bias de-escalates, you will be less apt to perceive and interpret your interlocutor through its distorting lens; this will make room to perceive and interpret her as she is, in all her realistic nuance. This will put you in a better position to gain the epistemic benefits that disagreement with her can make available. This includes engaging constructively with and learning from each other specifically on matters of public policy. The improved perception and interpretation made possible by respect will help each party better understand the other’s public-policy needs and values. Supposing that your interlocutor’s public-policy beliefs are reasonable from the standpoint of her needs and values, you will be in a better position to see for yourself how this is so.37 The better the interlocutors understand each other’s needs and values,

In abundance of counsellors there is victory 171 the better a position each party will be in to think creatively with the other about the best public policy for their shared society. In summary, engaging in disagreement in general has the potential to mitigate the circularity and distortion worries, by providing external criticism of your belief system, expanding your evidential basis, and providing epistemic alternatives. And engaging specifically in foundational-worldview disagreement about public policy – assuming the parties are respectful – has the potential to mitigate the exacerbation worry, by enhancing the accuracy of each party’s perception and interpretation of the other.

The objection from true foundational-worldview beliefs Politically active religious communities might grant that the plural-discourse claim applies sometimes. But they may deny that it applies to themselves or to anyone else reasoning from their foundational worldview. For the beliefs contained in their foundational worldview, they will say, are true on the whole; all one need do is figure out their public-policy consequences. Moreover, people who do not subscribe to their foundational worldview are missing something crucial; so insofar as their public-policy opinions diverge from those of the community’s in question, these opinions will likely just mislead or confuse. As for information about the public-policy needs of people belonging to other social locations, this can be had by asking them. Nothing as involving as disagreement about how to translate these needs into publicpolicy ends, or about the means for achieving these ends, is needed. One response is to question whether a religious community can so easily identify its foundational-worldview beliefs to begin with in a way that is specific enough for them to serve as premises for public-policy reasoning as the objector envisions. For worldview beliefs (like any beliefs) come hand in hand with auxiliary beliefs and concepts, not least, for example, about the interpretation of scripture and tradition; as well as values. To the extent that the community’s foundational worldview itself remains up for grabs, it cannot provide a determinate bedrock from which to reason about public policy. But even supposing that a maximally specific interpretation can be found, an important problem looms: Foundational-worldview beliefs significantly underdetermine public policy. In other words, there are multiple publicpolicy positions that are compatible with any given set of such beliefs. The reason is simply that foundational-worldview beliefs, concepts, and values are silent on many matters of relevance to public policy.38 The adherents of the foundational worldview must supplement their worldview belief system with a public-policy belief system: a set of beliefs, concepts, and values concerning public policy itself, which concern matters that extend beyond a foundational worldview. Start with beliefs. We need empirical beliefs about cause and effect (e.g., whether a three-strikes policy will reduce crime rates). We need theoretical

172  Katherine Dormandy beliefs about explanatory principles, for instance, whether, in explaining a social phenomenon like poverty, simple explanations that focus on individual actors are better than complex ones that also bring in social, economic and historical factors. We need beliefs about how a given phenomenon is best measured statistically, about which corollary effects a given policy will have, and so forth. Matters such as these are not determined by foundationalworldview belief systems, no matter how specific the latter are. A similar point holds for concepts. There are manifold concepts that are relevant to public policy yet that play no role in foundational worldviews. Concepts are relevant to our descriptions of ends and means. Take for example the concept of unemployment.39 One might define an unemployed person as one who is not engaging in full-time paid work and is actively seeking such work; the idea would be to isolate a category that exerts downward pressure on wage rates.40 But this concept  – once regarded as standard  – ignores people who are not in full-time paid work and who (say because of discouragement) have given up the search; it thus ignores other important phenomena related to joblessness, such as divorce rates, mental illness, and so forth. Concepts can also affect the value that we assign to the publicpolicy means and ends under discussion. For example, whether we conceptualize prostitution as immorality, victimhood, or entrepreneurship affects whether we value polices for jailing, rehabilitating, or taxing prostitutes. And whether we conceptualize social welfare as a human right as opposed to a kind of charity41 may affect how we value a policy of leaving its provision to individuals or mandating its provision by the state. Yet not even a highly specific worldview belief system can determine a preference between one or another of these and other concepts. Finally, there are values of relevance to public policy. Should we value an outcome in which abortion is illegal, even if it is also one in which an industry of dangerous backstreet abortions thrives? Should we value the provision of jobs and the boosting of the oil economy (and the enhancements in economic wellbeing that this may bring about) over the religious freedom of First Nations whose sacred land would thereby be violated? There are many public-policy related values that a specific worldview belief system will leave underdetermined: One could argue in different ways from it. The need for a public-policy belief system in addition to the foundational worldview is a problem for the member of the politically active religious community I have in mind. To see why, recall her motivation in suppressing foundational-worldview disagreement to begin with: She takes her foundational-worldview beliefs to be true, and her concepts and values accurate or fitted to purpose; she thus regards those which are incompatible with hers as false, inaccurate, and unfit to purposes. But since her religious beliefs, concepts, and values do not suffice to determine public-policy positions, she will have to supplement them with beliefs, concepts, and values that cannot remotely be argued to follow from their worldview beliefs. Moreover, she will need to do more than simply figure out which

In abundance of counsellors there is victory 173 public-policy belief system is compatible with her worldview-belief system, for there will be multiple compatible ones to choose from. So even if her worldview beliefs are true (and her concepts apt, and her values maximally specified), the advantages that this brings fall short of what is needed to guarantee an optimal public policy in the circumstances. This means that the adherents of foundational worldviews, even if largely true, are stuck reasoning about public-policy matters from considerations that might be false, just like anyone else. But if this is so, then the accuracy of one’s foundational worldview provides no reason to eschew open discussion about public-policy matters. On the contrary: Pace the objector, my arguments from the preceding section apply here. In order to avoid the perils of circularity and distortion, which are exacerbated in our thinking about public policy and foundational worldviews, even the adherent of true foundational-worldview beliefs should engage in disagreement over public policy with people from differing religious and secular traditions. Disagreeing interlocutors can offer constructive criticism of the worldview adherents’ reasoning about public policy; they can offer additional evidence about public policy; and they can provide alternative viewpoints and patterns of reasoning on public policy. They can also – in the context of a relationship of mutual respect – offer counterexamples that help de-fuse one’s biases against things that strike one as incompatible with one’s foundational worldview. Moreover, none of this requires changing the community’s foundational worldview. The objector might still resist my conclusion. She may argue that, instead of engaging in foundational-worldview disagreement, her community should simply draw on its own public-policy experts. They will see the world through the perspective of the right foundational worldview, and they will know how to apply it; disagreement with outsiders is not needed after all. In response, securing the opinions of community experts is surely epistemically advisable; it is also important for the sake of being true to one’s values. But it is still advisable, on top of this, to solicit the opinions of outside experts. For even though community experts will know about the public-policy matters on which their opinions are needed, they will be susceptible to groupthink effects arising with fellow community members. Some of this groupthink might be truth-sensitive, but, since the worldview beliefs themselves underdetermine public-policy thinking, there is little reason to expect it to be truth-sensitive on public policy. And to the extent that it is, false-positive beliefs will still creep in. It is thus epistemically better to call on experts from all manner of religious and secular traditions to engage in foundational-worldview disagreement with each other. Finally, a response to the paternalism in the attitude of the politically active religious community I  have in mind. This paternalism takes two forms. The first arises in the idea that a religious policymaker need not engage in public-policy disagreement with occupants of various social locations, but can simply ask them what their needs are. The idea would be that

174  Katherine Dormandy she would determine, herself, which ends must be achieved in order to meet those needs, and which means are best suited to achieving those ends. In response, it should be clear by now that this suggestion, even apart from its problematic paternalism, is unworkable. I have argued that a foundationalworldview belief system is insufficient to achieve the epistemic aim of public-policy reasoning; a fortiori, it is all the less sufficient to achieve this aim on the highly specialized matter of meeting the needs of a socially situated group to which one does not belong. Surely members of that group should be included among the parties to the debate.42 The second form of paternalism goes a level deeper; it involves thinking that you know better than another group what their needs are to begin with – and that this is why engaging in disagreement with them will not help you legislate for them. My argument thus far furnishes two responses to this attitude. First, the circularity, distortion, and exacerbation worries give serious cause to doubt that we are often in a position to judge what others’ needs are better than they themselves. Second, however, we cannot exclude the possibility that one can sometimes – though rarely – be in such a position, for human flourishing has an objective component that other people may be in a better position to gauge than oneself. For example, it is possible to know better than a drug addict, whose judgement is sadly clouded, what is good for him (namely, not getting his fix). But even in rare cases like this, there is no reason to discount the views of others – such as addicts – in legislating how best to help them. On the contrary: There is positive reason to engage his disagreement about the matter. For the addict himself offers a unique viewpoint on how he (and those like him) wind up addicted, and on what factors would help him (and others) overcome their addictions. The addict example does not involve foundational-worldview disagreement. But consider an example that does, involving the abortion debate. To oversimplify, imagine that a secular community argues on secular grounds that abortion does not amount to murder, whereas a religious community argues on religious grounds that it does. Suppose for the sake of the example that the religious group happens to be correct about this. If this is so, it is also reasonable to argue that abortion should strongly be discouraged – because of the intrinsic human value of the foetus, and because it is an act of mercy to strongly discourage someone from bringing guilt upon herself. However, even if all this is true, it delivers more reason, not less, to engage in disagreement with those who argue for secular reasons that abortion does not amount to murder. Supposing that the latter cannot be convinced, the next-best option is to hear them out on what they dislike about the religious group’s public-policy recommendations, and on what they would recommend instead that would discourage people from having abortions. Ideas for the sake of illustration include various forms of practical, financial, social, legal, and psychological support for women who find themselves in difficult situations with unwanted pregnancies, to ensure that alternative options

In abundance of counsellors there is victory 175 are at least as easy as an abortion itself would be. The best way to acquire such ideas, however, is to engage in disagreement, in this case foundationalworldview disagreement, about how to discourage abortion. In summary, one cannot derive public policy from a worldview belief system alone  – one must supplement it with a belief system about public policy, and this is best done by engaging in, or having community experts engage in, foundational-worldview disagreement about public policy. This also applies in cases in which politically active religious policymakers might naturally tend to paternalistically discourage disagreement instead.

The objection from properly functioning religious-cognitive faculties The representative of the politically active religious community may have another objection. His community’s cognition, he will say, is powered by divine inspiration, and this ensures that the community’s internal discussion of public policy will yield true beliefs on this matter, as well as concepts and values that are fit to purpose. We cannot discuss all accounts of divine cognitive inspiration, so I will limit myself to the influential “sensus divinitatis” account developed by Alvin Plantinga.43 The sensus divinitatis is a cognitive faculty; it resembles a mechanism of sense perception in that it uptakes information from the person’s environment. But instead of yielding sensory experiences, it yields experiences of God’s traces in the world, including accurate intellectual seemings concerning religious matters,44 so that beliefs based on them are apt to be true. Plantinga says that, due to the noetic effects of sin, everyone comes into the world with a malfunctioning sensus divinitatis,45 rendering it epistemically unreliable. But he adds that the Holy Spirit repairs the sensus divinitatis of certain people, who are then equipped to perceive religious aspects of reality and on that basis form true religious beliefs.46 We may understand the objection, then, as the claim that each member of the objector’s community has a properly functioning sensus divinitatis; this means, says the objector, that the community’s public-policy reasoning is apt to be reliable as it stands – so engaging in foundational-worldview disagreement is otiose at best. This move, however, cannot vindicate politically active religious communities in suppressing foundational-worldview disagreement about public policy. For on any reasonable construal of the sensus divinitatis, this faculty does not help believers reason well about public policy in general. Its remit is to enable them to perceive religious aspects of reality, and as we saw in the preceding section, any insights that one might have into religious reality drastically underdetermine public policy.47 But even though a sensus divinitatis does not help believers reason well about public policy in general, it can help them in one sort of situation: when they are engaging in foundational-worldview disagreement about it.

176  Katherine Dormandy In other words, if there is such a thing as a sensus divinitatis, this faculty could help its possessors use foundational-worldview disagreement about public policy as an epistemic tool. But for this to happen, they would have to engage in such disagreement after all, vindicating the plural-discourse claim. My argument can be summarized like this: We saw that a properly functioning sensus divinitatis, if there is such a thing, helps a person perceive religious aspects of reality. This means that, if engaging with a disagreeing interlocutor about public policy has any religious dimensions, the person with a properly functioning sensus divinitatis will be in a good place to cognize them. I claim that, supposing that there is a religious reality, foundationalworldview disagreement about public policy does have religious dimensions – and that perceiving them can yield insight about public policy. To see the religious dimension of foundational-worldview disagreement, note that a disagreeing interlocutor is a person, and personhood is a religiously significant aspect of reality. Think of Jesus saying in Matthew’s Gospel that what you have done unto the least of these people, you have done unto him.48 Think also of Mother Teresa who, in her posthumously published letters, reveals that she felt Christ’s presence the most strongly in the people to whom she was ministering.49 It is a common religious idea that God made human beings in his image. So supposing that this sort of religious worldview is accurate (as the objector presumably takes it to be), personhood has a sacred value that is of a piece with the value of God himself. And if this is so, a properly functioning sensus divinitatis can help you perceive this sacred value in persons – that is, to see persons as valuable, indeed sacred. So there is a religious dimension to foundational-worldview disagreement. Can perceiving it yield insights about public policy? I propose that it can. To see how, recall from the subsection “A third epistemic worry mitigated by foundational-worldview disagreement” that foundational-worldview disagreement must, if the exacerbation worry is to be overcome, be carried out with mutual respect. I suggest that a properly functioning sensus divinitatis, supposing that there is such a thing, can help cultivate respect. After all, it helps you perceive your interlocutors as made in the image of God and hence deserving of infinite respect; this can surely motivate you to respond by respecting them.50 So a properly functioning sensus divinitatis, far from making foundational-worldview disagreement about public policy unnecessary, can promote the respect that helps this sort of disagreement secure the epistemic benefits on matters of public policy.

Conclusion I have argued that foundational-worldview disagreement over public policy has the strong potential to be epistemically beneficial. Discoursing over public policy with adherents of other religious or secular belief systems can combat the psychological and social pressures, including groupthink effects, that make us prone to seeing the world through the limited lens of those

In abundance of counsellors there is victory 177 who think as we do. As such it is a powerful tool for obtaining constructive criticism, gaining new evidence, and seeing new epistemic alternatives. And combined with mutual respect, foundational-worldview disagreement can also help overcome epistemically detrimental biases that would otherwise attach to interlocutors who disagree with us about sensitive matters like religion and public policy. My argument delivers a strong epistemological reason to reject the position of the politically active religious community whose aim is to suppress public-policy discussion with those outside of its narrow sphere. Recall that this community is motivated in part by the epistemic concern of ensuring that the public-policy insights of their own religious worldview not be diluted by “worldly” considerations. I  have argued, on the contrary, that true religious beliefs are not guaranteed to deliver good public policy, since public policy concerns matters that stretch far beyond the religious domain. I have also argued that the appeal to divine cognitive aid speaks for engaging in foundational-worldview disagreement over public policy, not against it.51

Notes 1 Prov. 24:6 2 This approach can arguably be found in the work of Cornelius van Til, who argues (after the fashion of the Dutch Calvinists) that all of a Christian’s thinking, including about matters other than religion itself, should be completely under divine authority since human reasoning on its own is totally depraved; cf. Cornelius Van Til, A Christian Theory of Knowledge (Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Co., 1969). Along similar lines, Harry Blamires writes: The “religious view of life” is “the view which sets all earthly issues within the context of the eternal, the view which relates all human problems – social, political, cultural – to the doctrinal foundations of the Christian Faith”; Harry Blamires, The Christian Mind: How Should a Christian Think? (London: S. P. C. K., 1963), 4. 3 See also Peter Jonkers, “How to break the ill-fated bond between religious truth and violence,” in this volume. 4 Helen Longino, The Fate of Knowledge (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002); Helen De Cruz and Johan De Smedt, “The Value of Epistemic Disagreement in Scientific Practice. The Case of Homo Floresiensis,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, Part A, 44, no. 2 (2013). 5 José Medina, The Epistemology of Resistance: Gender and Racial Oppression, Epistemic Injustice, and the Social Imagination (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). 6 See Dirk-Martin Grube, “Respecting religious otherness as otherness versus exclusivism and pluralism,” and Jonkers, “How to break the ill-fated bond,” both in this volume. 7 This notion of disagreement is similar to what Jonkers, in “How to break the ill-fated bond,” has in mind. Disagreement as I understand it can be construed, as Jonkers puts it, in terms of creating a “shared space” in which interlocutors can think from within their own frameworks and try to recognize the internal reasonableness of each other’s frameworks, rather than a “neutral space” in which interlocutors are expected to employ only considerations that are germane to others too.

178  Katherine Dormandy 8 We need criteria for which belief systems are epistemically beyond the pale; I cannot address this here. For further discussion of engaging in disagreement with beyond-the-pale belief systems, see Katherine Dormandy, “Disagreement from the Religious Margins,” Res Philosophica 95 (2018), 389–390. 9 John Cottingham, “The epistemic implications of religious diversity,” in this volume, similarly emphasizes the complex and interlocking nature in particular of our religious worldview. 10 The following account of belief systems and what influences them draws heavily from Katherine Dormandy, “The Epistemic Benefits of Religious Disagreement,” Religious Studies, forthcoming, which in turn draws on Elizabeth Anderson, “Knowledge, Human Interests, and Objectivity in Feminist Epistemology,” Philosophical Topics 23, no. 2 (1995). 11 Oliver J. Wiertz, “Epistemic desiderata and religious plurality,” in this volume, provides a comprehensive discussion of these and other epistemic desiderata. Grube, “Respecting religious otherness,” in this volume, rejects bivalent truth and falsehood for religious beliefs, whereas I assume bivalent truth for beliefs about religion and public policy alike, as well as a realist and cognitivist view of truth, in sympathy with the contributions of Åke Wahlberg, “Truth, meaning and interreligious understanding” and Wiertz, “Epistemic desiderata,” both in this volume. 12 Wiertz, “Epistemic desiderata,” discusses additional epistemic desiderata for evaluating belief systems as a whole. 13 I am assuming that there are mind-independent truths about people’s needs, even if people themselves play a role in determining what those truths are. 14 I draw the general aspects of the argument from Dormandy, “Epistemic Benefits.” 15 Conee and Feldman, Evidentialism. See also Wiertz, “Epistemic desiderata,” for a more detailed discussion of evidence. 16 Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011); Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons, The Invisible Gorilla and Other Ways Our Intuition Deceives Us (New York: Crown, 2011); Miriam Solomon, Social Empiricism (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001). 17 Irving Janis, Groupthink: Psychological Studies of Policy Decisions and Fiascoes, 2nd ed. (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1982). 18 Chabris and Simons, Groupthink, chapter 1; Arien Mack and Irvin Rock, Inattentional Blindness (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998). 19 Petra Vetter and Albert Newen, “Varieties of Cognitive Penetration in Visual Perception,” Consciousness and Cognition 27 (2014); John Zeimbekis and Athanassios Raftopoulos, The Cognitive Penetrability of Perception: New Philosophical Perspectives (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). 20 Kahneman, Thinking, pts. II and III; Chabris and Simons, Groupthink, chapter 5. 21 See Wiertz, “Epistemic desiderata,” for more on the reliability of belief-forming processes. 22 Solomon, Social Empiricism; Antony, Reflections. 23 Katherine Dormandy, “Resolving Religious Disagreements,” Faith and Philosophy 35 (2018): 60. 24 Janis, Groupthink. 25 See e.g., the contributions to Michael Brownstein and Jennifer Saul, eds., Implicit Bias and Philosophy, Volume I: Metaphysics and Epistemology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). 26 Conee and Feldman, Evidentialism. 27 Ibid. 28 Dormandy, “Epistemic Benefits.” 29 I will not distinguish explicitly between the belief system of a group member and that of the group itself. I will assume that these are similar and that they

In abundance of counsellors there is victory 179 influence each other, though the group belief system influences each individual more than each individual influences the group. 30 Wiertz, “Epistemic desiderata,” makes a similar argument, to the effect that engaging with adherents of other religious belief systems can help a person understand her own. 31 If my argument for the epistemic benefits of foundational-worldview disagreement for those with true religious beliefs is on target, then the claim made by Grube, “Respecting religious otherness,” that exclusivists have no reason to discourse with the religious Other has been shown to be overhasty. 32 Jonkers, “How to break the ill-fated bond,” discusses the emotive potential of religious worldviews and the implications thereof. 33 Sheldon Solomon, Jeff Greenerg and Tom Pyszczynski, “A Terror Management Theory of Social Behavior: The Psychological Functions of Self-Esteem and Cultural Worldviews,” Advances in Experimental Social Psychology 24 (1991). 34 For discussion of biases and their epistemological implications, see the contributions to Brownstein and Saul, eds., Implicit Bias and Philosophy. 35 Stephen Darwall calls this recognition respect and distinguishes it from appraisal respect, which is what you accord someone in proportion to her character or competencies; Stephen Darwall, “Two Kinds of Respect,” in Dignity, Character, and Self-Respect, ed. Robin S. Dillon (New York: Routledge, 1995). 36 See Grube, “Respecting religious otherness,” for a discussion of respect for the religious Other. 37 I am supposing that seeing someone as reasonable is compatible with disagreeing with her; for discussion see Richard Feldman, “Reasonable Religious Disagreements,” in Philosophers Without Gods: Meditations on Atheism and the Secular, ed. Louise Antony (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). 38 I realize that the notion of religion is contentious and that the boundary between religious and non-religious subject matters is vague. Nonetheless, all I need for present purposes is the fairly uncontroversial claim that there is such a boundary – and that many issues of relevance to public policy fall outside of the religious domain. 39 See Elizabeth Anderson, “Knowledge, Human Interests, and Objectivity in Feminist Epistemology,” Philosophical Topics 23, no. 2 (1995), 45–46. 40 This concept in fact doesn’t even effectively trace downward pressure on wage rates. The reason is that it ignores part-time workers seeking full-time work; cf. Anderson, ibid. 41 Nicholas Wolterstorff, “The Role of Religion in Decision and Discussion of Political Issues,” in Religion in the Public Square: The Place of Religious Convictions in Political Debate, eds. Robert Audi and Nicholas Wolterstorff (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1997). 42 Sandra Harding, Objectivity and Diversity: Another Logic of Scientific Research (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015). 43 Plantinga, Warranted. See also Wiertz, “Epistemic Desiderata,” in this volume, for discussion. 44 Plantinga, Warranted, 172–74. 45 Ibid., 203, 212. 46 Ibid., 278. 47 I discuss the epistemic limitations of the sensus divinitatis at greater length in Epistemic Benefits. 48 Matt. 25:40. 49 Mother Teresa, Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light: The Private Writings of the Saint of Calcutta, ed. Brian Kolodiejchuk (New York: Random House, 2007). 50 By no means is a properly functioning sensus divinitatis necessary for respecting others. It is just one of many means of seeing people as deserving of respect.

180  Katherine Dormandy 51 Many thanks to Oliver J. Wiertz and Peter Jonkers for valuable comments. Thanks also to an audience at the APA Central Division meeting in Chicago. I am grateful to the FWF (Austrian Science Fund) for funding this research.

Bibliography Anderson, Elizabeth. “Knowledge, Human Interests, and Objectivity in Feminist Epistemology.” Philosophical Topics 23, no. 2 (1995): 27–58. Antony, Louise. “Reflections on Saulish Skepticism.” In Implicit Bias and Philosophy, Volume 1: Metaphysics and Epistemology, edited by Michael Brownstein, and Jennifer Saul, 157–90. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. Blamires, Harry. The Christian Mind: How Should a Christian Think? London: S. P. C. K., 1963. Brownstein, Michael, and Jennifer Saul, eds. Implicit Bias and Philosophy, Volume 1: Metaphysics and Epistemology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. Chabris, Christopher, and Daniel Simons. The Invisible Gorilla and Other Ways Our Intuition Deceives Us. New York: Crown, 2011. Conee, Earl, and Richard Feldman. Evidentialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Cruz, Helen De, and Johan De Smedt. “The Value of Epistemic Disagreement in Scientific Practice. The Case of Homo Floresiensis.” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, Part A 44, no. 2 (2013): 169–77. Darwall, Stephen. “Two Kinds of Respect.” In Dignity, Character, and Self-Respect, edited by Robin S. Dillon, 181–97. New York: Routledge, 1995. Dormandy, Katherine. “Disagreement from the Religious Margins.” Res Philosophica 95 (2018): 371–95. Dormandy, Katherine. “Resolving Religious Disagreements.” Faith and Philosophy 35 (2018): 56–83. Dormandy, Katherine. “The Epistemic Benefits of Religious Disagreement.” Religious Studies, forthcoming. Feldman, Richard. “Reasonable Religious Disagreements.” In Philosophers Without Gods: Meditations on Atheism and the Secular, edited by Louise Antony, 194–214. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Harding, Sandra. Objectivity and Diversity: Another Logic of Scientific Research. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015. Janis, Irving. Groupthink: Psychological Studies of Policy Decisions and Fiascoes. 2nd ed. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1982. Kahneman, Daniel. Thinking, Fast and Slow. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011. Longino, Helen. The Fate of Knowledge. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002. Mack, Arien, and Irvin Rock. Inattentional Blindness. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998. Medina, José. The Epistemology of Resistance: Gender and Racial Oppression, Epistemic Injustice, and the Social Imagination. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Plantinga, Alvin. Warranted Christian Belief. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.

In abundance of counsellors there is victory 181 Solomon, Miriam. Social Empiricism. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001. Solomon, Sheldon, Jeff Greenerg, and Tom Pyszczynski. “A  Terror Management Theory of Social Behavior: The Psychological Functions of Self-Esteem and Cultural Worldviews.” Advances in Experimental Social Psychology 24 (1991): 93–157. Teresa, Mother. Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light: The Private Writings of the Saint of Calcutta, edited by Brian Kolodiejchuk. New York: Random House, 2007. Til, Cornelius Van. A Christian Theory of Knowledge. Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Co., 1969. Vetter, Petra, and Albert Newen. “Varieties of Cognitive Penetration in Visual Perception.” Consciousness and Cognition 27 (2014): 62–75. Wolterstorff, Nicholas. “The Role of Religion in Decision and Discussion of Political Issues.” In Religion in the Public Square: The Place of Religious Convictions in Political Debate, edited by Audi, Robert, and Nicholas Wolterstorff, 67–120. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1997. Zeimbekis, John, and Athanassios Raftopoulos. The Cognitive Penetrability of Perception: New Philosophical Perspectives. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015.

10 Respecting religious otherness as otherness versus exclusivism and religious pluralism Towards a robust interreligious dialogue Dirk-Martin Grube In this chapter, I take up the question of how to deal with religious diversity in such a way as to respect1 religious Otherness as Otherness. Respecting religious Otherness as Otherness is opposed to two competing views, viz. to exclusivism2 and to religious pluralism.3 Thus, it is opposed to the exclusivist view that religious Otherness should not be (cognitively) respected and to the pluralist view that it is not to be respected as Otherness but only as sameness-in-disguise. Exclusivism implies a particular kind of interaction with the religious Other. The exclusivist does not dialogue with the religious Other since she possesses the truth already. She engages in a monologue rather than a dialogue since she passes on the truth she possesses to those who do not (yet) possess it. Communication is for the exclusivist a one-way street rather than a two-way street. For the religious pluralist, the interreligious dialogue is driven by a particular, sometimes hidden, agenda: She wants to identify commonalities between the religions. She thinks that other religions can only be respected if their Otherness is “tamed” (i.e., reduced to sameness). Since on the face of it, the world-religions differ from each other, she looks for this sameness beyond the surface. This is why pluralists suggest that all religions share a common denominator, say, a concept of “eco-human justice” (Knitter), or something that underlies all of them, say, a “Real an sich” (Hick) to which they relate as the phenomena relate to the noumenon in Kant. I disagree with both exclusivism and religious pluralism. I think that the interreligious dialogue should be led neither along exclusivist nor along religious pluralist lines. We should have a dialogue rather than a monologue and we should respect religious Otherness as Otherness. I call the kind of dialogue I  have in mind a robust interreligious dialogue. I  explain what I mean by it in the following section.

A robust interreligious dialogue A robust interreligious dialogue is characterized, among others, by the following features: • The discourse between different religions is a true dialogue rather than a monologue-in-disguise. An implication of something being a “true

Respecting religious otherness as otherness 183 dialogue between different religions” is that the religious Other is taken to be a potential religious peer rather than being approached in a hierarchical manner. • The goal of the dialogue is to come to a meaningful exchange between partners-in-dialogue rather than to convert the religious Other or to be converted. An implication of something being a “meaningful exchange” is that particular kinds of reflection processes are triggered, including processes of self-reflection. An implication of processes of (self-)reflection is to take the Otherness of a different religion as a reason to reflect more seriously on one’s own religion. This I  take to be the rationale behind the often-used image of mirroring (one’s own religion in light of another religion). • A “meaningful exchange” implies that agreement among the discoursepartners is not the prime goal. To be sure, whenever possible, the partners may agree. But they should not force agreement, not try to achieve it at all costs. More important is that disagreement, where necessary, is of a fruitful or of a meaningful sort.4 A  meaningful disagreement is characterized, among others, by triggering the reflection processes alluded to above. An exchange is meaningful if the discourse partners reflect more thoroughly on the other’s views as well as on their own views. In this article, I will not argue for the desirability of such a form of dialogue. Rather, I take it for granted as being an implication of respecting religious Otherness as Otherness. My primary goal in this article is to raise the question what kind of theoretical framework allows us to engage in such a form of dialogue and to respect religious Otherness as Otherness. This procedure is broadly Kantian in that I take a certain practice for granted, in this case that of a robust interreligious dialogue and the respect for religious Otherness as Otherness, and ask what conditions need to be postulated in order for this practice to be possible. In sum, my goal is to unearth the “Bedingungen der Möglichkeit” of a robust interreligious dialogue and the respect for religious Otherness as Otherness. In particular, I will investigate how to deal with the issue of truth if we wish to get a robust interreligious dialogue off the ground. The reason that I focus on this issue is a straightforward one: The issue of truth is the greatest obstacle for a robust interreligious dialogue and for respecting Otherness (in cognitive ways). Yet, we cannot do without truth. I  will explicate the thesis that we cannot do without truth in the next section.

A realist concept of truth Oliver J. Wiertz has suggested a “minimal correspondence theory of truth”.5 According to it, “the truth of a proposition depends on the right relation of the proposition to reality”.6 I agree wholeheartedly. Truth is essentially a relation between language and reality. Terms are exchangeable, though:

184  Dirk-Martin Grube “Language” respectively “proposition” can be substituted by “thought” or something in that neighborhood, “reality” by “rei” (as in “adequatio rei et intellectus”). But whatever terms are chosen: Truth is essentially about getting the relation between pieces of language (thought.  .  .) and reality straight. This is the simple truth about “truth”. Although agreeing with Wiertz’s assertion, I have reservations about the nomenclature he uses: “Correspondence theory of truth” alludes to the classical philosophical discussions on the definition of truth. However, I think those discussions are often overly technical (at least, in the Anglo-American realm) and lose sight of the broader issues at stake. I would like to focus on those broader issues in the following, viz. on the question what kind of a function truth has. More precisely speaking, I will sketch what kind of a function truth has in human life. Truth in the sense of getting the relation between language and reality right is of crucial importance for human life. Acting largely without instincts, human beings need knowledge of reality in order to orient themselves adequately in their environment and in order to act rationally. For example, we need to know what the true causes for a disease are in order to cure it successfully. For the purposes of adequate orientation and rational action, this knowledge must thus portray reality in a proper fashion. Human beings have thus good reasons to value this knowledge highly. In order to show their appreciation for it, they call it “truth”. Please note that this appreciation of truth is a function of its capability to portray reality adequately. Thus, when Rorty and others reduce truth to being a recommendation, they tell only half the story. It is true that truth recommends. But it does so only by virtue of portraying reality adequately. We do not recommend false insights, say, on the causes of a disease. Nor do we recommend doctors who provide false diagnoses. I call the concept of truth that emphasizes its capability to portray reality adequately a realist concept of truth.7 Realist concepts of truth are also a “transcendental” presupposition for making sense of many of the practices which are dear to us humans. For example, the practice of providing arguments – as I do right now – presupposes that I am aiming at truth in the realist sense. If you would presuppose that I do not, you would have to assume that I am engaging in a different practice, say, that of entertaining. Thus, a realist concept of truth is a precondition for making sense of the practice of providing arguments – as well as for many other practices that human beings value highly. My point is thus that truth understood realistically is a “transcendental” presupposition of many valuable human practices and ingrained in our human way of life. This is why we cannot do without truth. This point is often lost in the highly technical discussions on the definitions of truth. In order to demarcate the genre to which I  wish to contribute from that of the definition of truth, I  call the thesis that truth is important for human life a meta-characterization8 of truth. This thesis is primary and the issue

Respecting religious otherness as otherness 185 of defining truth secondary: Whatever definition of truth is proposed must meet the conditions that are provided by the thesis that truth has important functions for human life. That truth is important for human life is the reason why many postmodernist and other attempts to discard it can be safely neglected. Truth is not so much anti-democratic, reducible to being a recommendation, superfluous . . . as it is deeply human. We are truth seekers if we are at our best. How we seek truth and what that means for dealing with different concepts of truth is a complex matter, though. Below, I will suggest that a particular way of conceptualizing truth realistically should be suspended in certain realms of inquiry. Although this implies a relaxation of truth, it should not be confused with postmodernist or other nonchalances. Truth is a serious matter and we should resist the temptation to mock it – particularly so if it is only for the purposes of coming across as radical as possible. Truth is a matter of life and death and should not be abused for the purposes of selling more books.

Realist concepts of truth and the equation between difference and falsity Yet, if we presuppose a realist concept of truth, the possibility of a robust interreligious dialogue is seriously jeopardized. This kind of dialogue was specified above as treating the religious Other as a potential peer and as taking her Otherness as a reason to reflect more seriously on one’s own beliefs. Yet, under a realist concept of truth, those dialogical capabilities are threatened, the dialogue is in jeopardy of becoming a monologue.9 The reason is that, according to a realist concept of truth, “truth is one”. This concept implies that, ideally, there is only one truth rather than many. This is a straightforward corollary of the characterization of truth in realist terms plus making a basic (and hardly contestable) ontological assumption: If it is truth’s function to portray reality (characterization of truth) and reality is one rather than many (basic ontological assumption) then truth must be one as well. Yet, if truth is one, two incompatible propositions or sets of propositions cannot both be true. In other words, if proposition A is true and B differs from A in relevant ways, B cannot also be true. Since the predicate “true” has been reserved for A and only A or B can be true, it is obvious on a priori grounds that B cannot be true as well. Please note that this is a logical conclusion that has nothing to do with the content of B nor our inclinations towards it. You can be as sympathetic towards B as you wish: As long as you think that A is true and B is incompatible with it, you have to assume that B is not true.

186  Dirk-Martin Grube How do we deal with B if it is not true? The standard answer is to suggest that B is false. If we presuppose the logical doctrine of bivalence and/or tertium non datur, B must be false. If there is only the choice between “true” or “false” B must be false if the truth predicate has been reserved for A. There is simply no other option left. That is, under bivalent schemes, that which differs from truth in relevant ways must be false. Bivalent schemes imply an equation between difference and falsity.10 If the interreligious discourse is pursued under the auspices of this equation, religion B must be considered to be false if it differs from religion A in relevant ways (provided that A is considered to be true). Yet, considering B to be false rules out a robust interreligious dialogue from the beginning on. There is nothing to learn from falsity – save learning from its mistakes. Yet, learning from the mistakes of another religion is hardly the sense in which we wish to learn in the interreligious dialogue.

The deficiencies of religious pluralism and exclusivism (as well as of tolerance) I take both religious pluralism and exclusivism to be responses to the equation between difference and falsity (or something in its neighbourhood). That does not necessarily mean to suggest that, historically speaking, the tripartite scheme of exclusivism/inclusivism/pluralism has been developed as an explicit response to this equation. Yet, it means to suggest that this equation has functioned as an (implicit) background assumption which has selected the options available. It has ruled out certain options from the beginning on. Most importantly, it has ruled out the option that a religion can genuinely differ from the true religion and not be false. Under the auspices of the equation between difference and falsity, only two options exist,11 viz.: either an exclusivism suggesting that all religions are false that differ in relevant ways from the true religion. Or a religious pluralism suggesting that the religions do not differ in relevant ways from each other. Neither of those options is satisfying, though. Regarding the religious pluralists, I have suggested elsewhere that their attempts are often contrived or philosophically implausible.12 And exclusivism cannot meet the requirements of a robust interreligious dialogue that were fleshed out above. It cannot respect the religious Other as a potential peer. After all, the religious Other holds false beliefs and people holding false beliefs cannot be respected as peers. At least, on cognitive grounds, they must be considered to be inferior. Nor do exclusivists have reasons to reflect self-critically on their own religious beliefs in the face of other religious beliefs. If those other beliefs are false, they do not provide a challenge that would lead to critical selfreflection. As we have no reason to reflect self-critically on our belief that the traffic light is red in the face of the colour-blind person having a different

Respecting religious otherness as otherness 187 belief, we have no reason to reflect self-critically on our religious beliefs in the face of other religious beliefs that are false. Exclusivists have thus no reason to “mirror” their own religion in light of another religion. After all, they possess the truth already. You may retort now that this is a caricature of exclusivism and that I have sketched it along the lines of what I have called elsewhere Dawkinsianism.13 Not all exclusivists lack a self-critical attitude in the way in which Richard Dawkins does. After all, respectable philosophers, such as Alvin Plantinga14 or Roger Trigg,15 are exclusivists in the sense specified above. Yet, my point is not so much to do justice to all existing species of exclusivism but to point to the basic logic that is implied in it: The exclusivist is logically compelled to some form of discursive hierarchy. “Being logically compelled” means that that has nothing to do with his personality, whether he is a chauvinist or intellectually humble, but with the nature of truth. The reason that he considers false religious beliefs to be inferior (in a cognitive sense) to his own (true) beliefs is simply that we consider false beliefs to be (cognitively) inferior to true ones in general. This is a consequence of acknowledging the function truth has in human life (see the section on “A realist conception of truth”). Suggesting that false beliefs would be cognitively on a par with true ones would mean to have misunderstood this function. Nor am I suggesting that the logic implied in exclusivism has to be followed all the way down in Dawkins’ radical ways. There exist ways to cushion the most serious effects of considering the Other to be cognitively inferior. In the same way in which you can admire the colour-blind person for being, for instance, a good father, exclusivists can admire the religious Other for her morality or whatever. But my point is to insist that all “cushioning after the fact”-strategies16 do not take away that, in important ways, the Other is inferior. Even if he is a good father, the colour-blind person is not a peer when it comes to judging colours. In the same sense, the religious Other is not a peer for the exclusivist when it comes to judging religion. Let it be added that the concept of tolerance does not provide any solace at this point. Whatever its merits in the political realm may be, in the realm of the interreligious dialogue it is just another of those “cushioning after the fact”-strategies. The reason is that tolerance seriously underdetermines a robust interreligious dialogue in the way specified above. If I tolerate the religious Other, I do not learn from her. Nor do I consider her beliefs to be a reason to reflect on my own beliefs in a self-critical fashion. Rather, I let her go her way because there are overriding reasons to do so. With tolerance in our hands, we will get no further than a modus vivendi between the different religions. But a modus vivendi is a different thing than a robust interreligious dialogue. Desirable as tolerance may be in, say, the political realm, it is of very little value for the interreligious discourse.17

188  Dirk-Martin Grube

Wiertz’s criticism of the scepticism regarding bivalence It seems that we have landed in an impasse: We cannot let go of truth in a realist sense. Yet, if we pursue the interreligious dialogue under the parameters of a realist concept of truth, we end up with two undesirable options, exclusivism and religious pluralism, and what seems to be our last hope, tolerance, does not deliver what it promises. Is there a way out of this impasse? I think there is if we restrict the applicability of bivalence/tertium non datur: We should acknowledge that there are certain realms of inquiry in which we cannot distribute the bipolar pair of truth values over pertinent statements and that religion is one of them. These are realms in which the strict alternative “either true or false (but no third)” is not applicable. My point is that we gain more conceptual space to deal with Otherness if we refrain from considering it to be false. Before I come to that, though, I will deal with a recent criticism regarding my scepticism about bivalence.18 Wiertz finds my suggestion to abandon bivalence “ingenious”19 but rejects it ultimately. He thinks that it is an ad-hoc suggestion, custom-tailored only for the purposes of getting an interreligious dialogue off the ground.20 He suggests that we should not abandon the principle of bivalence for external reasons such as this one. Yet, he admits the existence of truth value gaps, viz. in case future contingents are at stake: “[T]he nature of propositions about future contingents is such that they cannot be true or false and that therefore the nature of this kind of propositions neutralizes the principle of bivalence”.21 I would like to clarify that my suggestion is not to abandon bivalence tout court but only to abandon the doctrine of its universal applicability. Where bivalence/tertium non datur applies, let’s use them. But I  insist that there are cases in which we cannot apply them. And I think that there are many more cases than only future contingents. There are entire realms of inquiry which are not susceptible to bivalent treatment. The prime example are the humanities, respectively many subdisciplines within them, or, as Joseph Margolis has it, the realm of culture.22 Most prominent are obviously the arts. Other examples are foundational physics and even some natural scientific judgements (see the section on “Towards a theory of different kinds of disagreements”). My point is to acknowledge that considerations on the nature of truth are not independent of ontological considerations. The question how to construe the concept of truth depends on what objects are at stake. More precisely speaking, whether or not to apply bivalence depends on the nature of the objects at stake. To be even more precise: How we construe truth depends on ontology and epistemology. Whether or not to apply bivalence depends on what objects are at stake and how we think to have access to them. Thus, I  reject the suggestion that bivalence/tertium non datur applies always and everywhere. The reason is that this suggestion implies that we

Respecting religious otherness as otherness 189 are always and everywhere capable of deciding what is true and what is false. Yet, we are not and suggesting that we are is, in my view, an ideologically motivated exaggeration. It depends on two doctrines which are far from obvious but have their origin in a particular metaphysics. I mean the ontological doctrine of the transparency of the world and the epistemic doctrine of Prometheianism. The first is the doctrine that the world is always and everywhere ­transparent  – at least, sufficiently transparent to know which statements about it are true and which are false. The second, epistemic Prometheianism, is the idea that we are always and everywhere capable of deciding what is true and what is false. It is based upon the “man23 is the master”-ideology, viz. that, given only sufficient time and resources, we will always come to know what is true and what is false. Yet, I see no reason why we should buy into those metaphysical doctrines. Rather, I think that there are good theological and philosophical reasons to favour intellectual humility over Prometheianism. We should acknowledge that there are many propositions and even entire realms of inquiry in which we are incapable of distributing the bipolar pair of truth values. This is our human condition and we should not try to pretend to be able to overcome our limitations in the way the Enlightenment did. There are many instances in which we are incapable of distributing the bipolar pair of truth values either as a matter of contingent fact, say, because our current amount of knowledge does not permit us to (whereas it may permit us to do so in the future) or, else, as a matter of principle (as is the case with future contingents and also in much of the humanities). I do not mean to suggest that there would be no bivalent truth to the matter. Excluding that on a principled basis would be borrowing as heavily from metaphysics as the proponents of the universal applicability of bivalence do – which I do not wish to be guilty of. It cannot be excluded that when supercomputers will rule this world we will come to know what we do not know now. If that is all the proponents of bivalence insist on, I have no quarrel with them. My point is simply that, hic et nunc, there exist issues and even entire realms of inquiry in which we cannot definitely fix the issue of truth. In these realms, we cannot insist that a particular view is definitely false (although we may have reasons to reject it). The distinction between disagreement on the ground of truth proper and on other grounds is the basis upon which a robust interreligious dialogue is to be erected (see the section on “Towards a theory of different kinds of disagreements”). Interestingly, towards the end of his article, Wiertz introduces probabilities and suggests that the truth of certain propositions is more probable than their falsity.24 But can you really uphold bivalence/tertium non datur if you introduce probability considerations into your concept of truth? Can you uphold the position that there are always two truth-values – and never more than two – if you admit that truth comes in degrees? Can you exclude on a priori grounds that there are situations in which the probability for and

190  Dirk-Martin Grube against a proposition is so low that you cannot avoid introducing a third value, viz. undecidable (or something of that sort)? But be that as it may. The more important question in this context is at what point Wiertz and myself disagree. Frankly, I wonder whether we mean the same thing but just use a different frame of reference: He uses degrees in probability, I use the distinction between bivalent truth and justification. Yet, could our different frames be translated into each other? Could what I  call justification be translated into low probabilities in Wiertz’s scheme and what I call bivalent truth (very) high probability? The point I insist on is that our interaction with people with whom we disagree is different in both cases. Could this point be salvaged by distinguishing between different degrees of probabilities?

The concept of justification How do we proceed in cases in which we cannot distribute the bipolar pair of truth values over pertinent statements? Margolis suggests introducing a third value into logics, undecidable.25 I follow this suggestion. But then the question emerges how to proceed in cases of undecidability. My suggestion is to rely on the concept of justification in those cases. Thus, I suggest that we should ask the question whether we are justified to hold a belief when we cannot decide on its truth. This suggestion borrows from Rorty’s discussion on truth and justification.26 Yet, my goal is different from Rorty’s: Although I take over certain features of Rorty’s distinction between truth and justification, I do not wish to mock truth. Rather, I use this distinction with the same intention as Jeffrey Stout uses it in ethics and elsewhere,27 viz. to retain rationality. What characterizes the concept of justification as I understand it? Basically, it is geared towards portraying reality adequately in the same sense in which a realist concept of truth is. Yet, in order to do so, it shifts the grounds from semantics to pragmatics. Rather than focusing on beliefs, it focusses on people holding beliefs. Rather than focusing on properties of (pieces of) language (i.e., of propositions being true), it focuses on the question whether the person holding a proposition is entitled to do so. The shift to pragmatics is particularly helpful in religion. Asking whether the believer is justified to hold the religious beliefs she holds is more promising than asking whether those beliefs are true or false. Many religious beliefs are simply not truth-apt. That is, we cannot distribute the bipolar pair of truth values over them. For example, I do not know how to demonstrate that my Christian beliefs are true although I  think to be justified to hold them. Thus, turning to the concept of justification in the case of religious beliefs is “phenomenologically appropriate” (i.e., in line with the way in which those beliefs are held by at least some believers). By way of incorporating the pragmatic dimension, the concept of justification allows to introduce non-cognitive factors into our epistemic

Respecting religious otherness as otherness 191 deliberations. This distinguishes it from concepts of truth that focus only on the semantic relation between language and reality. Whereas truth is confined to purely cognitive deliberations, justification allows us to ask, for instance, the sort of questions William James has taught us to ask. An example of such a non-cognitive question is whether we have to decide on an issue or can “walk away” from it. The suggestion to incorporate non-cognitive factors into our deliberations may horrify classical epistemologists. Yet, I consider it to be an asset. After all, at the end of the day, we are not only after “good knowledge” but after finding our way in this world. Thus, the answer that we do not possess good knowledge and that the truth of a belief is undecidable is often insufficient – especially in cases in which we cannot “walk away from the issue”. In order to maintain our capacity to act rationally we sometimes have to incorporate non-cognitive factors into our deliberations. Let me spell out what I  mean by providing the example of the reasons why I hold the religious beliefs I hold. Among them are: •

The beliefs I hold are not false (if they were, the question whether I am justified to hold them would be superfluous. I would not be entitled to hold them no matter what). • I cannot escape from decision-making between faith and its opposites. This is essentially James’ point about (what he calls) “genuine options”: In some cases, refraining from deciding amounts to having decided already. In the case of religion, refraining from taking a decision on religious beliefs amounts to living one’s life without religion and the possible benefits it may provide. • The alternatives to my faith are either intellectually dubious – as many versions of atheism are – or do not provide a standpoint “to stand on” – as agnosticism fails to do in spite of its attractiveness on intellectual grounds. These are some of the reasons why I think to be justified to hold the religious beliefs I hold. Some of them are of a non-cognitive sort or presuppose noncognitive considerations (e.g., that humans cannot live a good life without a standpoint “to stand on”). The concept of justification allows us to integrate non-cognitive considerations of this sort into our deliberations and I regard that to be one of its strengths.

Justification and plurality With the concept of justification in hand, we are on the road towards plurality. Justification is pluralistic in a way in which truth is not. The discussion on the concept of justification in current epistemology28 and the discussion by Rorty and Stout referred to above have made that abundantly clear. The point of the former I take to be that justification is perspectival,

192  Dirk-Martin Grube the point of the latter that justification is context-dependent. Whether a person is justified to hold a belief depends on the cognitive (or even noncognitive) context she is in and the perspective she holds. Since contexts and perspectives can legitimately differ, what people are justified to hold can legitimately differ. Thus, a person can be justified to hold belief A, given her cognitive (or even non-cognitive) context and the perspective she holds, whereas another person can be justified at the same time to hold belief B, given his cognitive (or even non-cognitive) context and the perspective he holds. The concept of justification distinguishes itself from that of truth in that it allows for the possibility that both A and B can be justified although both differ in relevant ways. Theoretically, both can be justified even when A and B are contraries or even contradictories (although questions may be raised as to the practical consequences of considering two contradictories both to be justified). In sum, the concept of justification allows for legitimate plurality. This plurality of the concept of justification is the key to dealing constructively with religious diversity. It provides the basis for what I call the “justified religious difference”-approach.29 The core of this approach is as follows: Since justification rather than bivalent truth is the proper concept to deal with (some kinds of) religious beliefs and justification is intrinsically pluralistic it is legitimate to deal with those (kinds of) religious beliefs in a pluralistic fashion. Before fleshing out in what sense justified religious difference differs from other approaches to religious diversity, I need to explain my use of the term “pluralism”, though. I use it in a different fashion than it is used in the interreligious discourse. In this discourse, the theories of John Hick, Paul Knitter and others are called “pluralistic”. The reason is that they argue that a plurality of different religions is legitimate. As indicated in the section on “The deficiencies of religious pluralism and exclusivism”, their argument is that the differences between the religions can be reduced to some kind of unity, a common denominator, a “Real an sich”, etc. Yet, in philosophy and many other disciplines, the term “pluralism” is used differently. It is used for acknowledging the legitimacy of a plurality of genuinely different views. Thus, according to this usage, irreducible difference is legitimate. According to this usage, Hick et al. are not pluralists but monists because they think that legitimacy presupposes unity. I will follow the philosophical usage from now on and use “pluralism” for irreducible diversity. The people who are called “pluralists” in the interreligious discourse, I will refer to as “Hick et al.”.

Respecting religious otherness as otherness 193

Distinguishing “justified religious difference” from Hick et al. and from exclusivism Different from Hick et al., the “justified religious difference”approach I suggest does not attempt to reduce the plurality of religions to some kind of underlying unity. It does not suggest that this underlying unity provides the raison d’etre for the legitimacy of the religious Other. Religious Otherness is respected as Otherness, not as sameness-in-disguise. Let me safeguard this contention from a possible misunderstanding: There is nothing wrong with looking for similarities between different religions. If we find similarities, that is a reason to celebrate. Yet, if we do not, let us not despair. Above all, let us resist the temptation to create similarities where there aren’t. And let us avoid the related mistake of taking refuge to vast abstractions. Sure, if only we abstract enough from the empirical religions, we will almost certainly find some kind of commonality. Yet, this is not overly surprising since we will always find some kind of commonality if only we abstract enough from the particularities of the empirical phenomena. For example, if we abstract from the particularities of a humanist ethics and a racist ethics, we will probably find some kind of commonality between them. After all, both want the good for humankind. Thus, the issue is not so much whether some kind of commonality can be found but whether this commonality is a contrived one or a meaningful one. Some abstractions in the interreligious discourse belong in the former category and are thus not very helpful. My basic point is to divorce research on similarities between the religions from questions of legitimacy. The basic raison d’etre for there being a legitimate variety of different religions is the pluralism implied in the concept of justification, not that we are capable of finding (or inventing) some kind of overarching unity between the religions. Research on the similarities between the different religions should thus become an empirical issue and should be liberated from the normative associations it receives in the hands of Hick et al. The most salient difference between my justified religious differenceapproach and exclusivism is that the former does not pretend to possess the exclusive truth in religious matters. Rather, it makes the less pretentious claim that we are justified to hold the beliefs we hold. This is sufficient to legitimize holding the beliefs we hold without having to deny others the right to do the same (provided those other beliefs are justifiable).30 In the final section, I  will draw out the consequences of distinguishing between bivalent truth and justification for the dialogue. In my view, we can get a robust sort of dialogue as specified in the first section off the ground only on the basis of the latter, not the former. It makes a huge difference if we disagree with our dialogue partner because we assume her to hold straightforwardly false beliefs or if we disagree with her but think that she may have good reasons to hold the beliefs she holds. In the latter case, we

194  Dirk-Martin Grube will continue to disagree with each other but interact with each other in a different way than in the former case. Our disagreement will be a fruitful one. I will suggest at the end that a robust interreligious dialogue should be modelled on fruitful kinds of disagreements.

Towards a theory of different kinds of disagreements Wiertz suggests that substituting bivalent truth with the concept of justification does not provide more space for dealing constructively with religious diversity. The reason is, he explains, that justification is connected to truth. If I hold the belief that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, then “I must also maintain that the contradictory belief that Jesus Christ is not the son of God is probably false”.31 Although justification is indeed truth-geared, I think that there is a decisive difference between holding my beliefs to be true (in the bivalent sense) and considering myself to be justified to hold them. This difference has to do with the fact that justification allows for acknowledging genuine plurality in a way in which truth does not (see the section on “Justification and plurality”). By the same token, this acknowledgement allows for a different treatment of Otherness. It allows for a respectful treatment32 of the Other. And this respectful treatment is the basis upon which a robust interreligious dialogue should be erected. I  will explain this difference by sketching the essence of an example I have fleshed out elsewhere more extensively.33 The example stems from environmental ethics and the following background information is crucial for understanding its point: There is good evidence to suggest that the exhaustion of carbon dioxide is responsible for the current changes of the climate. Yet, the extent to which it is responsible for this change is contested to my knowledge: There is some evidence suggesting that it is responsible for it to a significant extent but this evidence is not (yet) conclusive.34 Say, somebody holds the belief A “The exhaustion of carbon dioxides is not responsible for the current climate-change”. Whereas another person holds the belief B “The exhaustion of carbon dioxides is not to a significant extent responsible for the current climate-change”. I disagree with both A and B. Yet, the reasons why I disagree with them are different. Regarding proposition A, I am prepared to hold that it is (or comes close to being) plainly false. Yet, I do not consider B to be false in the same sense and think that the person holding B could be justified to do so. Although I keep disagreeing with her, my reasons for doing so are different from the ones I have for disagreeing with the person holding A.

Respecting religious otherness as otherness 195 Here are some of the reasons why I disagree with the person holding B: As indicated, there is some evidence that B does not portray reality adequately but it is not conclusive. Yet, given how the discussion on this (and related) issues has been conducted, I expect more evidence for B’s falsity to surface when more research on the issue is done. Another important reason for rejecting B is that, given what is at stake, we can better err on being overly cautious than on being negligent.35 That is, we can better err by sacrificing some of our economic growth for the reduction of carbon dioxides than erring by continuing with the status quo (which is to exhaust massive amounts of carbon dioxides in order to secure economic growth). More reasons for rejecting B could be provided. Yet, my point is hopefully clear by now: It is that the reasons for rejecting B are much more complex than the straightforward rejection of A on the grounds that it is false. My attitude towards B and the person holding it differs thus greatly from my attitude towards A and the person holding it. I reject A straightforwardly and regard it to be cognitively inferior to my own beliefs. As a consequence, I  will occupy the (cognitive) high-grounds regarding the person holding A. I  will look down upon him. I  may, for instance, assume that he is illinformed or may even suspect him to be biased towards the exhaustionintensive industry. Thus, neither A nor the person holding it provide a potential challenge to my own beliefs. They do not provide reasons to reflect more carefully on them nor to re-consider them. Rather, I will disregard A straightforwardly (at least, I have prima facie reasons to do so). Nor will I wish to enter into a serious kind of dialogue with the person holding A. I do not wish to dialogue with ill-informed people nor with people who are biased towards the exhaustion-intensive industry (rather, I fight them). Thus, a robust kind of dialogue is impossible if I consider A to be false. The case is different with B, though. Although I disagree with B, I do not reject it as straightforwardly as I reject A. I will not assume that the person holding it is ill-informed or biased towards the exhaustion-intensive industry. I will not adopt the epistemological high-grounds that easily and will not consider her views to be cognitively inferior. Consequently, I will not disregard B as easily as I disregard A. Rather, I will regard it to be a potential challenge to my own position. For example, I may decide to read more on the issue, to read different kinds of literature than I have read thus far, listen and speak to different people than I have listened and spoken to thus far, etc. That I regard B to be a potential challenge to my own position does not mean that I will give up my own position in favour of it. Yet, it means that I  will reflect more (and, hopefully, more thoroughly) on my own beliefs. For example, I may reflect on the presuppositions of my own position and contrast them with the presuppositions upon which the deviant position rests. In this particular case, I may, for instance, assume that I have a different attitude towards the question how to act properly under uncertainty than the person holding B has. I may, e.g., assume that the person holding

196  Dirk-Martin Grube B is more of a risk-taker whereas I tend to act with greater caution under conditions of uncertainty. And/or I may assume that we have different value preferences: The person holding B values economic growth probably very highly whereas I  prefer sacrificing some of our economic growth for the hope that this will benefit the world’s climate. This example obviously does not do more than provide a sketch. Yet, I hope this sketch makes clear what my point is: It is that there are different kinds of disagreements. Disagreeing in the way in which I disagree with A is not fruitful. It rules out a meaningful disagreement on a priori grounds. Yet, disagreeing in the way in which I disagree with B keeps the option of a fruitful disagreement open. Obviously, a robust kind of dialogue implies fruitful or meaningful disagreements, not meaningless ones. And a robust interreligious dialogue requires fruitful interreligious disagreements. Thus, if we wish to enter into a robust interreligious dialogue, we should disagree with the religious Other in fruitful ways (an example being the way in which I have sketched my disagreement with the person holding the secular belief B). To that end, we • need to reject the equation between difference and falsity in favour of a concept that allows for acknowledging genuine plurality.36 The religious Other’s view is, above all, different, “other”, rather than false. • need a concept of justification or any other concept that allows for acknowledging plurality. Preferably, this concept allows also to incorporate non-cognitive considerations into our deliberations. These are the epistemic preconditions for a robust interreligious dialogue, its “Bedingungen der Möglichkeit”.

Notes 1 The notion of respect is analyzed, among others, by Saarinen, Recognition and Religion, 8 et al. In this chapter, “respect” is used not so much in a specific sense but signals a positive attitude towards religious Otherness. This positive attitude is restricted to cognitive matters (in the broad sense of the word). I am thus not referring to, say, moral respect. 2 In the following, I refer to an exclusivism regarding religious truth-claims (see also Sami Pihlström, “Truth, suffering and religious diversity: a pragmatist perspective,” in this volume. This exclusivism is different from an exclusivism regarding salvation (for the distinction between both kinds of exclusivism, see Robert McKim, On Religious Diversity (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2012). 3 “Religious pluralism” refers to John Hick, Paul Knitter et al. (but see the section on “Justification and plurality”, where I will question that label). 4 For the notion of disagreement, see Katherine Dormandy, “ ‘In abundance of counsellors there is victory’: reasoning about public policy from a religious worldview,” in this volume. 5 Oliver J. Wiertz, “Truth and Theology of Religions,” in Theology of Religions – Roman-Catholic perspectives (Washington DC: The Catholic University of

Respecting religious otherness as otherness 197 America Press, forthcoming). For a concept of truth that follows Donald Davidson’s suggestions on the matter, see Wahlberg, “Truth, Meaning and Interreligious Understanding,” in this volume. 6 Ibid. A proposition “is true if the predicate of the sentence ascribes a property to an object that the object that is identified by the singular term really possesses” (Wiertz, “Truth”). 7 In Dirk-Martin Grube, “Concluding Remarks  – Reply to the Respondents to ‘Justified Religious Difference: A  Constructive Approach to Religious Diversity’,” in Philosophical Perspectives on Religious Diversity, Bivalent Truth, Tolerance and Personhood, eds. Dirk-Martin Grube and Walter van Herck (London and New York: Routledge, 2018), 88–9, I have called this concept a “semantic” concept of truth. Yet, I would like to change that nomenclature to “realist” concept of truth. 8 Ibid. 9 The consequences of realism for dealing with religious Otherness are analyzed in Oliver J. Wiertz, “Epistemic desiderata and religious plurality,” and in Pihlström, “Truth,” both in this volume. 10 I have fleshed out that point in Dirk-Martin Grube, “ ‘Justified Religious Difference’: A  Constructive Approach to Religious Diversity,” in Philosophical Perspectives on Religious Diversity, Bivalent Truth, Tolerance and Personhood, eds. Dirk-Martin Grube and Walter van Herck (London and New York: Routledge, 2018), 49. 11 I neglect inclusivism in the following. The reason is that, under the perspective that is relevant here, viz. that of truth rather than salvation, inclusivism is a subspecies of exclusivism since it maintains that there is only one truth (although people not holding it explicitly may still be saved by virtue of holding it implicitly, by way of their conduct, or whatever). 12 See Grube, “Justified Religious Difference,” 48 and 52. 13 Grube, “Concluding Remarks,” 96–98. 14 See Alvin Plantinga, “ ‘Pluralism’: A  Defense of Religious Exclusivism (Selection),” in Reading Philosophy of Religion. Selected Texts with Interactive Commentary, eds. Graham Oppy and Michael Scott (Malden and Oxford: Wiley and Blackwell, 2010), 294–304. 15 See Trigg, Religious Diversity. 16 By “cushioning after the fact” I mean Donald Trump’s notorious strategy: After having imposed sanctions against, say, China, he then goes on to say that the Chinese president is a good friend of his. That is, after the major issue has been settled in unfavorable ways for the Other, the consequences of this settlement are downplayed by complimenting the Other. 17 For the full argument against (Peter Jonkers’ use of the notion of) tolerance, see Grube, “Concluding Remarks,” 98–102. 18 René van Woudenberg’s (56–63), Vincent Brümmer’s (64–66) and Sami Pihlström’s (67–72) criticisms of my view are all collected in Philosophical Perspectives on Religious Diversity, Bivalent Truth, Tolerance and Personhood, eds. Dirk-Martin Grube and Walter van Herck (London and New York: Routledge, 2018). My responses to them are in the same volume (90–91 and 94–95). 19 See Wiertz, “Truth”. 20 Ibid. 21 Ibid. 22 See Joseph Margolis, Historied Thought, Constructed World. A  Conceptual Primer for the Turn of the Millenium (Berkeley et al.: University of California Press, 1995) and Joseph Margolis, The Truth about Relativism (Oxford and Cambridge: Blackwell, 1991). Much of the following considerations on bivalence are indebted to Margolis.

198  Dirk-Martin Grube 23 “Man” is meant here literally since indecisiveness is classically considered to be a female characteristic whereas “a good man always knows what to do”. 24 See Wiertz, “Truth”. 25 See Margolis, The Truth about Relativism. 26 See Richard Rorty, Truth and Progress. Philosophical Papers, vol. 3 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 1–9. 27 See Jeffrey Stout, Ethics after Babel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004). 28 See e.g. Jonathan Kvanvig, “Propositionalism and the Perspectival Character of Justification,” American Philosophical Quarterly 40, no. 1 (2003): 3–16. 29 See Grube, “Justified Religious Difference,” 52–54. The core of the “justified religious difference”-approach is prefabricated in Lessing’s ring-parable already. In my reconstruction (see Dirk-Martin Grube, “Justification rather than Truth. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s Defence of Positive Religion in the Ring-Parable,” Bijdragen. International Journal of Philosophy and Theology 65, no. 4 [2005]: 357–78), Lessing argues that the truth of (the three Abrahamitic) religions is undecidable and that that is why we have the right to rely on justification, whereas justification allows for plurality. Lessing’s motivation for the plurality of justification is different from the one provided above and he does not criticize bivalence. But I owe the structure of the argument to Lessing. 30 In Grube, “Concluding Remarks,” 98–102, I have made clear against an excessive emphasis upon tolerance that not all religious beliefs are justified. 31 Wiertz, “Truth”. 32 Please keep in mind that I  have restricted the term “respect” to the cognitive domain. I  have it thus only over respecting the Other in cognitive ways, not moral or other ways. 33 See Grube, “Concluding Remarks,” 106–8. 34 See e.g., Dominic Roser and Christian Seidel, Ethik des Klimawandels. Eine Einführung (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2013). 35 Please remember that the concept of justification allows to incorporate noncognitive considerations into our deliberations. 36 To that end, we need to reject bivalence/tertium non datur (but see Grube, “Concluding Remarks,” 95–98, where I suggest that bivalence/tertium non datur can be substituted by the notion of “exclusivist competitions”).

Bibliography Grube, Dirk-Martin. “Justification Rather Than Truth: Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s Defence of Positive Religion in the Ring-Parable.” Bijdragen. International Journal of Philosophy and Theology 65, no. 4 (2005): 357–78. Grube, Dirk-Martin. “Concluding Remarks  – Reply to the Respondents to ‘Justified Religious Difference: A  Constructive Approach to Religious Diversity’.” In Philosophical Perspectives on Religious Diversity. Bivalent Truth, Tolerance and Personhood, edited by Dirk-Martin Grube and Walter van Herck, 86–114. London and New York: Routledge, 2018. Grube, Dirk-Martin. “ ‘Justified Religious Difference’: A Constructive Approach to Religious Diversity.” In Philosophical Perspectives on Religious Diversity. Bivalent Truth, Tolerance and Personhood, edited by Dirk-Martin Grube and Walter van Herck, 47–56. London and New York: Routledge, 2018. Kvanvig, Jonathan. “Propositionalism and the Perspectival Character of Justification.” American Philosophical Quarterly 40, no. 1 (2003): 3–16.

Respecting religious otherness as otherness 199 Margolis, Joseph. The Truth about Relativism. Oxford and Cambridge: Blackwell, 1991. Margolis, Joseph. Historied Thought, Constructed World. A Conceptual Primer for the Turn of the Millenium. Berkeley et al.: University of California Press, 1995. Plantinga, Alvin. “ ‘Pluralism’: A Defense of Religious Exclusivism (Selection).” In Reading Philosophy of Religion. Selected Texts with Interactive Commentary, edited by Graham Oppy and Michael Scott, 294–304. Malden and Oxford: Wiley and Blackwell, 2010. Rorty, Richard. Truth and Progress, Philosophical Papers, Vol. 3. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Roser, Dominic, and Christian Seidel. Ethik des Klimawandels. Eine Einführung. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2013. Saarinen, Risto. Recognition and Religion. A  Historical and Systematic Study. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. Stout, Jeffrey. Ethics after Babel. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004. Trigg, Roger. Religious Diversity. Philosophical and Political Dimensions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Wiertz, Oliver J. “Truth and Theology of Religions.” In Theology of Religions  – Roman-Catholic Perspectives. Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, forthcoming.

Part III

Practical questions concerning religious diversity

11 Introduction to Part III: practical questions concerning religious diversity Victoria S. Harrison

The final four chapters of this volume are united in their focus on practical questions concerning religious pluralism, truth and identity. They take up globally relevant topical issues that are of urgent concern to academics, religious leaders, and those involved in crafting social policy as well as to members of the general public. In this part of the volume we see the meeting point between the theoretical theological and philosophical questions discussed in earlier chapters and the challenges and opportunities religious diversity brings to both individuals and societies. As the following chapters demonstrate, the practical issues highlighted in this part of the volume cannot be fully analyzed at a general theoretical level, but our understanding of them can be greatly enhanced by detailed studies homing in on particular areas of friction. Here I provide a brief summary of each chapter, while introducing the broader scholarly debates to which they contribute. Spurred on by the work of John Hick and others, debate about the best theoretical approach to religious diversity became particularly vigorous in the Anglophone academic world from the 1980s.1 At the same time, the new discipline of comparative theology achieved a swell of popularity.2 Playing a causal role in these academic trends was an increase in popular awareness of diverse religions and their social impact. In particular, Buddhism was becoming an increasingly visible presence in many parts of the West. This began in the 1960s and 1970s, when Tibetan Buddhism gained important and lasting footholds both in the United States, with the foundation in 1974 of Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado, and in Scotland, with the foundation in 1967 of Kagyu Samye Ling. Despite the positive reception of Tibetan Buddhism into western culture and society,3 its popularity was eclipsed from the 1980s onwards by that of Zen. This form of Buddhism had originated in China and was adopted in Japan, from where it migrated again to North America and Europe.4 Its signature practice is Zazen, sitting in meditation. Unlike other forms of Buddhism, such as Tibetan Buddhism, Zen does not emphasize highly ritualized forms of spiritual practice or commitment to elaborate cosmologies. The theological and spiritual austerity of Zen struck a chord with many Europeans and North Americans who,

204  Victoria S. Harrison although to various degrees dissatisfied with their native religious traditions, still felt a need for serious spiritual practice. Not all of those who benefited from Zen practice were contemplating a move from one religion to another, however. While some Zen practitioners did make the switch, others – perhaps in some cases unconsciously – began the process of integrating Zen into their existing way of being religious. Importing elements from one religion into the practice of another did not, of course, only happen in the case of Zen. Yet the features of Zen mentioned above made it exceptionally well-suited to this kind of adaptation. That some people were simultaneously practising both Zen and Christianity or Zen and Judaism eventually came to the attention of scholars and resulted in the identification of a new area of research in religious studies: dual belonging.5 Debates over the limits and possibilities of dual religious belonging are ongoing,6 and one consequence of interest in them has been to highlight a third option standing between leaving one religion for another and belonging to two religious traditions simultaneously. This third option, dual practice, is the focus of Alexander Löffler’s contribution to this volume, “Christians and the practice of Zen”. Löffler’s entry point into the debate is the practical question of whether Christians can legitimately and authentically integrate elements of Zen into their practice of and commitment to the Christian faith. Although Löffler focuses on the specific issue of Christians seeking to integrate Zen, his treatment of the topic has implications that go beyond the encounter between these two traditions. Löffler begins by summarizing the Roman Catholic position on Zen, as this is found in key ecclesial documents on religious diversity, such as Nostra aetate. The general stance of these documents is to encourage Christians to adopt practices, like meditation, that are found in non-Christian religions, if these practices are helpful within the context of Christian life and faith. The idea that such practices might be helpful is theologically grounded in the conviction that they are the result of God’s active presence in the ancient cultures of the world. Löffler argues that, if it is indeed the case that divine providence had a shaping role on Buddhist methods and traditions, then they cannot be irrelevant from the point of view of a Christian. While a theologian from an earlier generation might have been tempted to conclude from this that a Christian could expect to find a familiar God revealed in the alien religious context, Löffler recognizes that such a response does not do justice to the profundity of the experience of those practising Christians who have opened themselves to Zen practice as a way of enriching their Christian faith. This level of openness to the practice of Zen, as Löffler is well aware, brings with it the threat of destabilizing the Christian identity of the practitioners. The delicate balance between maintaining one’s original religious identity while adopting the practices of another tradition is the focus of the second section of the chapter, where Löffler discusses the experience of Christian monastics who, with the approval of the Church, have

Introduction to Part III 205 been practising Zen for decades. Of especial interest here is his discussion of the theological and spiritual potential latent in the identity destabilization that the deep encounter with Zen Buddhism has brought to some of these monastic Zen practitioners. Löffler’s chapter provides a striking demonstration that the issues of religious truth and identity at the heart of this volume are not merely of intellectual interest, but have significant implications for how people might choose to express their faiths in practice. Interestingly, missionary activity was for a long time one of the forms in which Christian faith was expressed, and Löffler introduced his discussion of dual practice with the example of two missionaries, Henri Le Saux OSB (1910–1973) and Hugo Makibi EnomiyaLassalle SJ (1898–1990), whose Christian identity and practice came to be profoundly shaped by the religious practices of those they had set out to convert to the Christian faith. This provides a point of contact with the next chapter in this volume, “Reconsidering the concept of mission in the light of comparative theology”, by Klaus von Stosch. Like Löffler, von Stosch writes from a Christian perspective as he investigates the viability and current prospects for Christian missionary work today. Von Stosch argues that the future of Christianity depends on missionary work because if Christians do not engage in it they are failing in their most basic duty as Christians, namely, spreading and proclaiming God’s love to the world. He points out that the present times offer Christians many opportunities to concretely show God’s love to the world, for instance by assisting with the integration of refugees. Does the duty at the core of Christian missionary activity always involve asking those who are the recipients of the Christian’s practical expression of God’s love to be baptized and join the Catholic Church? Seeking to answer this question leads von Stosch into a nuanced engagement with the concept of mission that takes on board the complexities that arise at the borders of the three Abrahamic traditions with their long and interwoven histories. The Roman Catholic Church no longer supports any institutional missionary activities aimed at converting Jews to Christianity, and von Stosch explains the theological grounds for this stance. Namely that Judaism has a special and permanent role to play in God’s providential plan for the world. Can something similar be said about Islam? If Islam has a special role in God’s plan for the world, then, von Stosch avers, Christians should look for other ways to engage with Muslims than seeking to convert them to Christianity. This suggestion constitutes a practical recommendation for how to move beyond the impasse of Muslim-Christian dialogue and into a new pattern of engagement in which Muslims and Christians can work together to further God’s plan for the world. In some cases, this may lead to a fluidity of religious identity, as some Muslims may choose to become Christians without rejecting Islam just as some Christians, von Stosch speculates, may adopt Islam while remaining Christian. As von Stosch recognizes, although this scenario may be far from the reality experienced by most Christians and

206  Victoria S. Harrison Muslims in Europe today, it should not be unattractive to Christians given that the most serious challenge to Christianity is not Islam but a loss of hope in God. This crisis of hope might help people to recognize the complementarity between different forms of Abrahamic faith and make it easier to accept that they are permanently related to each other in God’s plan for the world. It might be argued, however, that before the irenic scenario envisaged by von Stosch can be actualized, another problem needs to be addressed. That problem is the tendency, under some circumstances, for deeply held religious convictions to become embedded in chains of reasoning that lead to acts of violence. The final two chapters in this volume deal with precisely this issue. In “How to break the ill-fated bond between religious truth and violence”, Peter Jonkers first carefully situates the problem against the background of increasing diversity in a number of areas, not just the religious field. He highlights the destabilizing effects on people’s socio-cultural identities engendered by increasing diversity in the ethnic, moral, linguistic as well as the religious fields. The identity destabilization that can lead individuals to countenance violence is thus not solely caused by religious diversity, in Jonkers’ analysis. Nonetheless, he opines that the involvement of religion in this unhealthy dynamic is sufficiently important and interesting to merit study in isolation from other factors. Jonkers argues that it would be too easy to dismiss the problem of the link between religion and violence with the claim that there is no intrinsic connection. Instead, he looks for reasons within religious traditions that might explain why it is that they sometimes foster intolerance and even violence. It turns out that such reasons are not hard to find, as he demonstrates in the case of Christianity by appealing to Augustine’s commitment to Christian exclusivism. If a religion presents a choice between eternal salvation and eternal damnation, believers are given a reason for forcing others, by violence if necessary, to adopt their faith. It is in his attempt to intervene in this ancient pattern of religious reasoning that Jonkers’ argument connects with another of the main themes of this volume, religious truth. He examines ways of interpreting religious truth-claims that do not support the pathway from exclusivism to violence. After dismissing the proposals of John Rawls and Jürgen Habermas, which are both framed within a liberal philosophical agenda and involve reducing religious claims to statements that would be acceptable in the secular, public domain, Jonkers discusses two perspectives that take religious truth-claims seriously yet do not support the movement from belief to violence. The first perspective is that of scriptural reasoning, this is a practical method of interreligious engagement that provides a platform for people of different faiths to come to a better understanding of one another by discussing their sacred texts.7 This approach takes the idea of truth in religion seriously, while seeking to show how religious truth emerges from deep engagement with sacred texts. The process is public, yet it does not attempt to reduce religious truths into secular truths or argue that all religions are

Introduction to Part III 207 saying the same thing in different ways. Such virtues render the process appealing and acceptable to religious thinkers keen to go beyond a mode of interreligious encounter based on assertion and denial. What makes this possible, Jonkers asserts, is the recognition that God is not bound by any religious tradition and may therefore be found through study of the texts of diverse faiths. We can note that this insight was also central to Löffler’s chapter on dual religious practice. The second perspective considered by Jonkers is that of religious hospitality. In a discussion indebted to Paul Ricoeur’s theory of translation, Jonkers develops an analogy between languages and religions which is grounded in the fact that both are heterogeneous symbolic systems. Neither languages nor religions can be collapsed into one perfect system nor understood perfectly through translation into another system. In this situation, the most promising attitude to adopt is hospitality, being open to what we might learn from people who speak different languages and practise different religions. Again, this notion would not have been out of place in Löffler’s chapter. Christian zen-practising monastics could be regarded as exemplars of people of faith who display the style of religious hospitality advocated by Jonkers. Despite the attractiveness of this last image, it alerts us to a limitation within Jonkers’ approach to which he is alert. Scriptural reasoning and religious hospitality are practices that tend to appeal to religious people who already have a high degree of reflexivity about their own faith. One might conjecture that these are the people who are least at risk of allowing their religious stance to lead them to intolerance or violence towards others. While Jonkers’ suggestions will not suffice to break the bond between religious belief and violence in all cases, they can nonetheless help us to understand why some religious people do not exhibit intolerance or resort to violence. They can also erode the view that the link between religion and violence is unbreakable. The final chapter in this volume investigates the sort of cases left out of Jonkers’ analysis, where the link between religion and violence is intact. In “Can religious diversity help with the problem of religiously motivated violence?” Victoria S. Harrison highlights cases in which religious conviction has been directly linked to acts of violence. She argues that, in certain cases, this can be regarded as a theological problem. Harrison makes the case that religious diversity, and especially intrareligious diversity, is a valuable theological resource that might help us to address at least some cases of religiously motivated violence. Both Harrison and Jonkers are contributing to a wide-ranging scholarly debate that has attracted considerable attention over the last several decades. This debate has been critically influenced by the seminal work of two figures, Bruce Lincoln8 and Mark Juergensmeyer,9 both of whom elaborated on and analyzed the many ways in which religious ideas can be employed to justify acts of violence. They have also both done much to support the view that religion and violence are intrinsically connected. What their work

208  Victoria S. Harrison tends to downplay are the numerous instances where religious beliefs do not nurture intolerance and violence, and they leave largely unexamined the question of why more religious people are not led to extremism by following the logic of their beliefs. Growing recognition of these limitations has opened more recent scholarship to a wider range of questions, such as those discussed in the chapters by Jonkers and Harrison. In particular, their chapters each discuss the practical issue of how to counter the tendency of some religious commitments to lead to intolerance and sometimes violence. In conclusion, the four chapters in this final part of the volume investigate highly topical issues concerning religious diversity, truth and identity that arise at the interface of theory and practice. In theoretical terms, they each contribute to areas of ongoing scholarly debate and, in practical terms, they discuss issues that are close to the experience of many people who are engaged with religious ideas and communities.

Notes See, especially, Hick, An Interpretation of Religion. 1 2 S. Mark Heim, “Comparative Theology at Twenty-Five: The End of the Beginning,” Modern Theology 35, no. 1 (2019): 163–80. 3 On the reception of Tibetan Buddhism in the West, see Ana Cristina O. Lopes, Tibetan Buddhism in Diaspora: Cultural Re-Signification in Practice and Institutions (Oxford: Routledge, 2015). 4 Henry C. Finney, “American Zen’s ‘Japan Connection’: A Critical Case Study of Zen Buddhism’s Diffusion to the West,” Sociological Analysis 52, no. 4 (1991): 379–96. 5 Catherine Cornille, ed., Many Mansions? Multiple Religious Belonging and Christian Identity (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2002). 6 Rose Drew, Buddhist and Christian? An Exploration of Dual Belonging (London: Routledge, 2011); Gavin D’Costa and Ross Thompson, eds., BuddhistChristian Dual Belonging: Affirmation, Objections, Explorations (London, New York: Routledge, 2016). 7 Scriptural Reasoning was pioneered at the University of Cambridge in the 1990s. The Journal of Scriptural Reasoning gives one an impression of the diverse contexts in which this technique is now applied: http://jsr.shanti.virginia.edu, accessed 17 February 2019. 8 Bruce Lincoln, Myth, Cosmos, and Society: Indo-European Themes of Creation and Destruction (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 1986) and Bruce Lincoln, Holy Terrors: Thinking About Religion After September 11 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003). 9 Mark Juergensmeyer, The New Cold War? Religious Nationalism Confronts the Secular State (Berkeley, Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993) and Mark Juergensmeyer, Terror in the Mind of God: The Global Rise of Religious Violence (Berkeley, LA: University of California Press, 2000).

Bibliography Cornille, Catherine, ed. Many Mansions? Multiple Religious Belonging and Christian Identity. Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2002.

Introduction to Part III 209 D’Costa, Gavin, and Ross Thompson, eds., Buddhist-Christian Dual Belonging: Affirmation, Objections, Explorations. London and New York: Routledge, 2016. Drew, Rose. Buddhist and Christian? An Exploration of Dual Belonging. London: Routledge, 2011. Finney, Henry C. “American Zen’s ‘Japan Connection’: A  Critical Case Study of Zen Buddhism’s Diffusion to the West.” Sociological Analysis 52, no. 4 (1991): 379–96. Heim, S. Mark. “Comparative Theology at Twenty-Five: The End of the Beginning.” Modern Theology 35, no. 1 (2019): 163–80. Hick, John. An Interpretation of Religion: Human Responses to the Transcendent. Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 1989. Juergensmeyer, Mark. The New Cold War? Religious Nationalism Confronts the Secular State. Berkeley, LA: University of California Press, 1993. Juergensmeyer, Mark. Terror in the Mind of God: The Global Rise of Religious Violence. Berkeley, LA: University of California Press, 2000. Lincoln, Bruce. Myth, Cosmos, and Society: Indo-European Themes of Creation and Destruction. Harvard: Harvard University Press, 1986. Lincoln, Bruce. Holy Terrors: Thinking About Religion After September  11. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. Lopes, Ana Cristina O. Tibetan Buddhism in Diaspora: Cultural Re-Signification in Practice and Institutions. Oxford: Routledge, 2015.

12 Christians and the practice of Zen Alexander Löffler SJ

One of the practical questions that arises when discussing religious diversity is whether Christians can integrate elements of other religions. As a matter of fact, this practice of integration is widely spread, but the question is whether it is legitimate and can be done in an authentic way. It is not unusual to meet Christians in the West who practise Zen in an authentic Buddhist way.1 These Christians seriously follow the path of the Buddha in order to attain enlightenment and awake to the true self. Often, they trust in the guidance of an authorized Zen teacher (or are themselves in such a position), consider Buddha (as well as Jesus) as their spiritual master and recite the Bodhisattva vows on a regular basis. Like Buddhist Zen disciples, they, too, practise long periods of Zazen (only-sitting) and undergo a special training of their minds – in the Rinzai tradition, for example, with the help of koans. The aim of the Zen training is to empty one’s mind and to free oneself from all attachment to things, concepts and to one’s own self in order to realize the true self and, thus, the true (i.e., empty and non-dual) nature of all reality. However, is it really possible for Christians to follow two masters – Buddha and Jesus – at the same time? Does such a dual practice (or even dual belonging)2 not inevitably lead to both a betrayal of Jesus and a dismantling of Christian beliefs, ending up in syncretism? After all, Buddhism does not recognize any personal creator such as God; and, it understands itself, especially in the Zen tradition, as a way of strict self-liberation. Moreover, realization of the true nature of things is all about capturing reality in its “primordial non-differentiation”, which means perceiving it as “the metaphysical Ground of all things before it is bifurcated into the ego-entity and the objective world”,3 so that the difference between absolute and phenomenal reality appears to be suspended. On the other hand, it is striking that many Zen-teaching Christians are people from the heart of the Church rather than from its periphery, or people with “patchwork religiosity”.4 So, if priests and ministers, religious and lay people from the midst of the Church feel spiritually nurtured by their practice of Zen, is it possible to absolutely deny the working of the Holy Spirit behind the attraction to and attractiveness of these Eastern forms of

Christians and the practice of Zen 211 meditations for Christians? Pioneers of religious dual practice, like Henri Le Saux OSB (1910–1973) and Hugo Makibi Enomiya-Lassalle SJ (1898– 1990), who, filled with missionary zeal, originally set out for alien religious cultures in India and Japan in order to proclaim Christ, over the course of time could not resist the attraction of local non-Christian religious beliefs and practices. Eventually, they were no longer able to live as Christians without the adoption of the newly discovered culture and traditions, which, in return, profited their Christian identity.5 Therefore, is it possible to make Zen practice among Christians theologically plausible or even to justify it on theological grounds? If so, is there a preferred form of Christian adoption of Zen? This two-fold question, which I will try to answer in this chapter, takes us right into the heart of one of the practical consequences of religious diversity and its relation to Christian identity. Again, Christian identity can be seen as the practical translation of religious truth. This explains why it is of so much concern to the Vatican, which safeguards the integrity of Catholic faith. We will start our enterprise with a look at a Vatican document dealing with these questions.

Zen from a Catholic theological point of view In 1989, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) published a “Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church on some Aspects of Christian Meditation”. In this letter, the CDF intended to highlight the “intimate nature of Christian prayer” in order to “see if and how it might be enriched by meditation methods which have been developed in other religions and cultures”.6 The document focused primarily on those “Eastern methods” that “are inspired by Hinduism and Buddhism, such as Zen, transcendental meditation or yoga”.7 Although the letter is clearly motivated by the concern for “syncretism”,8 it nevertheless displays a remarkable openness, as it does not forbid even one of the three forms of Eastern meditation mentioned. This is all the more striking because the letter can indeed link these methods to the quite dangerous or even erroneous view that “the personal self or the nature of a creature [is] being dissolved or disappearing into the sea of the Absolute”,9 and therefore emphasizes the dialogical, personal and community-related character of authentic Christian prayer again and again.10 Instead, the document breaks through, on two occasions, to a positive, albeit cautious appreciation of the Eastern forms of meditation. In No. 16, it reminds us of the following in reference to the Second Vatican Council’s declaration Nostra aetate (NA) regarding non-Christian religions: Just as “the Catholic Church rejects nothing of what is true and holy in these religions” (NA 2), neither should these ways [of prayer] be rejected out of hand simply because they are not Christian. On the contrary, one can take from them what is useful so long as the Christian

212  Alexander Löffler SJ concept of prayer, its logic and requirements, are never obscured. It is within the context of all this that these bits and pieces should be taken up and expressed anew.11 In No. 28, the positive assessment is even clearer. Here, the letter states “that genuine practices of meditation which come from the Christian East and from the great non-Christian religions, which prove attractive to the man of today who is divided and disoriented”, can “constitute a suitable means of helping the person who prays to come before God with an interior peace, even in the midst of external pressures”.12 In these two statements the CDF values the Eastern forms of meditation as “suitable means” for Christian worshippers and, in principle, allows their reflected adoption in the Christian context, with the restriction that the Eastern practices (or elements of it) adopted are to be integrated into Christian prayer practice without tension. By advocating a tension-free integration of non-Christian forms of meditation into the practice of Christian prayer, the CDF moves in a direction which Hugo Makibi Enomiya-Lassalle SJ, the pioneer of Christian Zen in the German-speaking world, had already shown decades previously. EnomiyaLassalle regarded Zen as an “excellent means”13 for the inner collection of the human and thus for the disposing of the human soul for the mystical union with God.14 At the same time, he was convinced that Zen, as a method (Zazen), could be easily removed from its Buddhist home soil and be practised effectively in the Christian context without compromising the integrity of the Christian path: “Zen – the total silence – is neither Buddhist nor Christian in itself. Only through the decision for a particular interpretation of the meditation experience [can] the exercise . . . form itself either as Christian or Buddhist.”15 Thus, Enomiya-Lassalle considers Zazen a kind of natural or transreligious method that allows Christians a deepening rather than a weakening of their faith.16 In addition, and due to its apophatic character, for him, Zazen even embodies a more direct and thus more efficient path to the union with God than the discursive prayer of the Christian tradition. He explains this in the following way: “Zen means drilling a well into one’s own soul to the groundwater of God. (. . .) Thus, if everything, including the Christ of our imagination, is set aside out of the negative path of Zen, this effort only creates a vacuum, which attracts the atmosphere – that is, Christ in itself, God in itself – all the stronger the more intensive the vacuum is.”17 However, is it possible to justify such an optimistic Christian view of Zen on theological grounds? At the Second Vatican Council, the Catholic Church recognized and appreciated in other religious traditions elements of the good, the true and the sacred (see Lumen gentium (LG) 16; NA 2). More precisely, in its declaration Nostra aetate on the Relation of the Church to Non-Christian Religions, the Council acknowledged not only in theistic religions but also in the non-theistic traditions of Hinduism and Buddhism – on the basis of the doctrine of the logoi spermatikoi – “a certain awareness of a hidden power” which Christians call “father”. In addition, it recognized

Christians and the practice of Zen 213 in their ways of teaching, praying and living “a ray of that truth” that has been revealed in all its fullness in Jesus Christ (NA 2).18 As a consequence of this positive evaluation of other religions, the Council even presumed a supernatural, divine origin of their forms of prayer and meditation. Therefore, in the decree Ad gentes (AG) on the Missionary Activity of the Church, the missionary religious institutes are explicitly called upon to “carefully consider how traditions of asceticism and contemplation, the seeds of which have been sown by God in certain ancient cultures before the preaching of the Gospel, might be incorporated into the Christian life” (AG 18). Thus, the process of implanting Christian monastic religious life in the Asian context must not lead to the mere import of Christian monastic contemplative heritage of the Western world. Rather, there must be room for careful examination of local contemplative methods, which are both formed and passed on by the Eastern religious traditions, so that these methods can be organically inculturated into Christian monastic life. It is striking, however, that the CDF, in its letter on Christian meditation, does not make any mention of this positive suggestion made by the Council, and thus completely ignores the question of a supernatural origin of the Eastern forms of contemplation, although Ad gentes suggests that these forms can indeed be due to a divine initiative. At another occasion in the same decree, the Christian missionaries are by all means explicitly encouraged in their encounter with non-Christian cultures and religions to “uncover with gladness and respect those seeds of the Word which lie hidden among them” in order to “learn of the riches which a generous God has distributed among the nations” (AG 11). Enomiya-Lassalle is firmly convinced that Buddhist Zen meditation can undoubtedly be counted among these riches coming from God. He sees in the “skillful use of natural powers” for the inner collection of the human, as it finds application and expression in Zen, “a special providence of God” at work. Therefore, he considers Zen a suitable replacement and compensation for divine revelation, which the non-Christian religions came into contact with much later and thus are regarded unprivileged from a Christian perspective. As he goes on, he expresses this conviction as follows: “God wants all human beings to be saved, and therefore there has never been a human being – and there will never be one – whom God does not pursue with such great love as if there were no other person in the world”.19 Such an optimistic view of Zen in terms of its origin is also shared by Franco Sottocornola and Maria De Giorgi, two Catholic experts in Buddhism. They, too, regard Zen as a special gift of God to humanity and Buddhism as a whole as “a spiritual movement born and grown under God’s loving providence”.20 In their opinion, despite all the differences on the doctrinal level, on the level of spirituality, Buddhism bears as many fruits as the Christian path.21 The fact that a supernatural, divine origin may be presumed for Zen is, above all, based on the impressive kenotic dynamics of Zen spirituality. At the heart of Zazen there is the realization of the “great death” (i.e., the dying of one’s own egoistic self), which is associated with

214  Alexander Löffler SJ the awakening (or resurrection) to the true self, manifesting itself in the realization of a new, selfless life. This transformation of the ego-self into the “selfless self” is, however, also essential to Christian discipleship, as Jesus himself understands when he says: “Whoever wants to be my disciple, deny himself, take up his cross daily and follow me. For whoever wants to save his life will lose it; but he who loses his life for my sake will save it” (Luke 9:23f). Paul’s understanding of Christian discipleship seems to be characterized by the same dynamic of self-emptying when he reminds the Christians in Philippi to imitate the kenotic (self-emptying) attitude of their Lord at all times of life in order to gain the authentic life, raised above and eternal (Phil 2:5–11). Consequently, it is essential, not only in Buddhism but also in Christianity, to gain true life (or self) through a life of selflessness; in this sense, both traditions come very close to each other in their practical and spiritual settings.22 Therefore, Sottocornola and De Giorgi recognize and acknowledge in the Buddhist Zen tradition a silent presence of the paschal mystery of Christ, that is, a seed of the Word that enlightened the Buddha and emptied itself so radically of its divinity that Buddhism appears as a godless, non-theistic spiritual tradition which, at its depth, is still able to anonymously give its followers a share in the saving mystery of Jesus Christ. For Sottocornola and De Giorgi, because of its kenotic spirituality, Zen is one of the most obvious and impressive examples of what the Second Vatican Council in its Pastoral Constitution Gaudium et spes (GS) is speaking about when it says: “For since Christ died for all (cf. Rom 8:32), and since all men are in fact called to one and the same destiny, which is divine, we must hold that the Holy Spirit offers to all the possibility of being made partners, in a way known to God, in the paschal mystery” (GS 22). However, if it is true, or at least very likely based on the aforementioned theological reasons, that the Buddhist tradition of Zen, and perhaps even Buddhism as a whole, owes its existence to the loving work of divine providence,23 then neither individual Buddhist methods nor Buddhism as a whole can be regarded as irrelevant from a Christian point of view. On the contrary, one has to expect that Buddhism does indeed contain in itself Godderived elements of truth and grace from which Christians cannot simply shut themselves off if the goal and mission of the Church is to grow deeper into the fullness of divine truth (Jn 16:13) and, thus, also into its promised fullness of Catholicity. Instead, it would be more appropriate to take up these elements or treasures and integrate them into one’s Christian practice, even if, at first sight, they appear to be quite “unchristian” and incapable of reception. Why should it not be possible for these elements of the true, good and holy, which derive from God, to have a completely different form from the familiar Christian one? Could God not have been revealed (and continue to reveal himself) in other religious contexts in a completely different way than in the Christian one? Is it inconceivable that what appears at first to be completely

Christians and the practice of Zen 215 foreign and unchristian to Christianity could, on closer inspection, give an idea of that familiar power behind the initial strangeness, which is manifested in Jesus of Nazareth in its full personal form, but elsewhere perhaps only in a distorted personal manner since this power has made it its purpose to become everything in all in order to be related to all, no matter how remote? Therefore, this power would apply in the same way to Christians in what John the Baptist called out to the people on the banks of Jordan: “He that stands in the midst of you, whom you do not know” (Jn 1:26). Roman Siebenrock has pointed out in his theological commentary to Nostra aetate that in the statement, “The Catholic Church rejects nothing of what is true and holy in these religions” (NA 2), the concepts “true” and “holy” are to be understood as “open categories” so that the Church in the position expressed here “does not simply recognize one’s own in the form of the other”. Rather the Church expects and must expect that from other religious traditions and “precisely in her difference” to the Christian, it will be able to meet the true and the holy, which signifies for the Church a divine enrichment, enabling it to grow more deeply into the promised Catholic fullness. It is not the Church that constitutes the criteria for the judgement of the true and the holy, but Jesus Christ himself, “in which men find the fullness of their religious life” (NA 2).24 Christ is the lumen gentium (light of the world), not the Church (see LG 1). In a very similar way, Hans-Joachim Höhn has pointed out that the purpose of interreligious encounter cannot exhaust itself in “discovering one’s own in the other and reducing it to a simple reflection effect” so that the other can be appreciated or appear as meaningful merely in a form of a recognized “duplicate copy of one’s own”.25 In his opinion, interreligious encounter depends on “transcending this conception and keeping oneself open to finding one’s own in the other as opposed to oneself” and, at the same time, letting others show their transcending otherness.26 If it is true that the salvific will of God revealed in Jesus Christ  – that means, God’s unconditional love towards human beings – applies to all people without exception, including to those who have never come nor will come into existential contact with the Christian message, then the reality of God’s unconditional love or salvific will towards those people must be thought of as being opened up in some other (i.e., a non-personal) mode not attributable to the Christian mode.27 Höhn is convinced that other religions have their “own original, irreducible mode of representing God’s salvific will which cannot be attributed to Christianity” and, therefore, precisely for this reason, “their originality is to be appreciated”.28 With regard to the question of what concrete manner Christians can or should practise Zen, this would mean that one applies and practises Zen neither in the Christian-adapted way that is theoretically demanded by the CDF, nor in a manner which was practically worked out by EnomiyaLassalle, fitting to Christianity. Rather, Zen is practised in a way that it is fully respected in its original Buddhist distinctiveness and is understood as

216  Alexander Löffler SJ a God-given challenge and opportunity, enabling Christian practitioners to re-explore previously unimagined facets of the Absolute Mystery. Thus, it is not about practising Zen in a Christian model, but in its distinctive Buddhist form, while, at the same, facing up to the challenging aspects of its Mahayana-Buddhist origin and design. Such a practice of Zen on the part of Christians, of course, would presuppose a mature faith and a deep rootedness in their own Christian tradition. On the other hand, with such a mode of reception of Eastern forms of meditation, something is finally realized on the level of religious (or spiritual) experience in interreligious dialogue that has been, for a long time, an ongoing practice on the level of theological exchange: that one can meet the other – and, in a new manner, can meet the Absolute Other – provided one respects and takes the other seriously in all its alterity and distinctiveness.29 Only such a truly dialogical attitude, which accepts distinctiveness and otherness, allows not only the Christian, but all those involved in dialogue, “to walk together towards [the fullness of] truth”,30 or to grow together in “a deeper conversion of all toward God”.31 The aim of such a Zen practice among Christians, which fully respects the Buddhist character of Zen, could then be seen in the formation of a truly dialogical spirituality (i.e., a spirituality that lets itself be catered and shaped not just by one, but two religious traditions). The interreligious dialogue that takes place between two or more persons would thus become an intrareligious dialogue, that is to say, a dialogue within a single person, a dialogue that has really reached the depths of the person, initiating in one’s heart a fruitful spiritual process of transformation. This intrareligious or internal dialogue will be further nurtured and fostered through the sustaining external interreligious dialogue.32 However, does such an option of Christian Zen practice represent a real Catholic possibility? Does this not lead to the corruption of Christian belief and identity? These two questions and the oppositional answers they seem to suggest show the concerns to maintain, on the practical level of interreligious encounter, the right balance between safeguarding Christian identity and accepting the possibility that religious practices from other religions can enrich the Christian practice of faith. As we will see in more detail in the next section, it is quite obvious that the prime concern of the Vatican magisterium is to safeguard Christian identity, even if that comes at the cost of recognizing the value of the religious practices of other religious traditions, especially if they are, or at least seem to be, incompatible with Christian faith. As a matter of fact, there are already Christians (like the Christian Zen practitioners and teachers mentioned earlier) who practise Zen in such a way and experience this as an enrichment to their Christian identity. Moreover, this kind of Zen has even been practised for decades with the official approval of church leaders by nuns and monks of the Benedictine religious family engaged in the Monastic Interreligious Dialogue.33 Since there exists a revealing, though not very well known, document that

Christians and the practice of Zen 217 has been prepared by the International Monastic Interreligious Dialogue Commission on behalf of the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue, which opts for the manner of Christian Zen reception that is under discussion here, some of the key points of this magisterial text should be discussed.

Zen and inter-/intrareligious dialogue In its original French version, this document, published in 1993, has the title “Contemplation et Dialogue Interreligieux – Repères et perspectives puisés dans l’expérience des moines”,34 and depicts one of the reactions against the letter of the CDF (1989) mentioned above. According to the monastics, who are engaged in Monastic Interreligious Dialogue (DIM-MID),35 the letter of the CDF points out too strongly the dangers and refers too seldomly to the opportunities and positive experiences, which arise from the reception of Eastern forms of meditations in the Christian context. In order to address this bias and to enter into a dialogue with the CDF,36 nuns and monks engaged in DIM-MID were consulted with regard to their concrete experiences with Eastern forms of meditation. Under the leadership of Pierre-François de Béthune OSB, the then secretary general of DIM-MID, the document was worked out based on the feedback received, offering – as the subtitle says – “orientations and perspectives” (repères et perspectives) for monastics who are interested in contemplative interreligious dialogue. Although the document itself avoids a direct confrontation with the letter of the CDF, it implicitly reacts to it in the introduction by first recalling the testimony of Pope John Paul II, “that every authentic prayer is called forth by the Holy Spirit, who is mysteriously present in the heart of every person”,37 and then by expressing the fundamental conviction of the monastics engaged in the Monastic Interreligious Dialogue as follows: [T]he forms of meditation, prayer or contemplation elaborated apart from the Christian tradition are not a priori a threat to Christian faith. The history of Christian prayer attests to this fact. If these influences have at times disturbed certain Christian communities, in other cases where they have been received with the necessary spiritual discernment, they have been positive and have even fostered the realization of the Gospel. Consequently, we can say that contemplation is not more Christian to the extent it is less influenced from without. Rather, what makes it Christian is the way in which the contemplative succeeds in entering into the spirit of Christ in order to make all things flow together towards the coming of the Kingdom.38 Whereas the letter of the CDF has in mind especially those aspects and elements of another religious tradition that are capable of being easily integrated, and thus advocates an assimilative reception of non-Christian forms of meditation into the Christian context, the document of the Pontifical

218  Alexander Löffler SJ Council for Interreligious Dialogue considers such an approach a “frequent temptation” to be resisted on the Christian side, since the fixation on similarities and congruencies inevitably “leads to a degradation of the process of dialogue”.39 Instead, the “differences and even the incompatibilities” could be a particular stimulus for deepening one’s faith in the face of the other, and thus could be a more promising and fruitful approach to dialogue as a whole.40 Based on empirically collected data, the document distinguishes three different ways in which nuns and monks concretely adopt the Eastern forms of meditation in the Christian monastic context, thereby favouring especially the third one because only the third mode of adoption makes the formation of a truly dialogical spirituality possible: (1) assimilation, (2) new synthesis, and (3) intrareligious dialogue.41 1

According to the document, the mode of reception of assimilation exists when practitioners “borrow certain elements of non-Christian spiritualities, but (. . .) do not wish to be influenced by the place of origin of these elements”.42 In this type of reception of non-Christian elements, only certain aspects will be borrowed from another religious tradition, which would support the promotion of one’s own Christian way of prayer and which allows itself to be merged with this way of prayer without any tension. This is the case, for example, when one adopts a certain sitting posture from Zen Buddhism (such as full or half lotus position), practises Zen exclusively as some kind of breath-focused awareness training, without paying any attention to the underlying Buddhist philosophy or worldview. Zen or other Eastern spiritual exercises (like Hatha-Yoga) are practised only as relaxation exercises, and as ways to help the Christian prayer be prepared and qualitatively deepened. 2 The second type of reception, the new synthesis, is practised by those “who adopt certain ways of prayer which have been influenced by Hinduism, Buddhism or Islam, but which have been already re-elaborated by Westerners such as K. Dürckheim, John Main, etc.”43 In contrast to the assimilative mode of reception, the accepted form of prayer or meditation is granted not only a merely preparatory function, but has in itself an independent salvific function, which means that the borrowed method as such depicts and enables its own access to the ultimate reality. Moreover, it is assumed that this method can easily be removed from its previous religious context and transferred just as easily into the Christian one without affecting the effectiveness of the method or the integrity of the Christian faith. According to this concept, for example, it is possible to practise Zazen without knowing anything about Buddhism. Zazen, then, is understood as a non-religious method of meditation. Something like this is characteristic of Enomiya-Lassalle’s and Dürckheim’s Christian Zen or for the Christian contemplation forms, which are also influenced by Eastern spirituality as developed by John Main

Christians and the practice of Zen 219 (Christian Meditation)44 and Thomas Keating (Centering Prayer).45 In contrast to the first (as well as to the third) mode of reception, in the second one there is a Christian master who was introduced to a certain form of Eastern meditation in Asia under the guidance of a recognized teacher and, then, based on his experience, created a synthesis of both in order to match the mentality of Western Christians. 3 Finally, the third type of reception lies with those “who enter personally into an interior experience of ‘intrareligious dialogue’ at the level of prayer, such as Frs. Henri Le Saux or Bede Griffiths. Their Christian practice of prayer is directly a contact with a non-Christian tradition”.46 In contrast to the first two modes of reception (assimilation and new synthesis), which focus on those alien elements that are capable of being easily integrated into the Christian context in order to collect them subsequently for one’s own purposes and goals, in this third mode, the meditation methods inherited from another religious tradition are fully preserved in their integrity so that the formation of a true dialogical spirituality becomes possible. Such a dialogical spirituality does not only refuse to assimilate the other, but is actually interested in the irreducible and impregnable elements of its otherness because a truly dialogical spirituality considers religious alterity not as a danger, but as “a fundamental condition for its growth”.47 As Pierre-François de Béthune points out, the methods of another religious tradition can offer Christians the opportunity to “discover other ways of experiencing the numinous” and thus contribute to a deepening of their own belief in God.48 Characteristic of this third mode of reception  – that is to say for intrareligious dialogue and the accompanying dialogical spirituality with it  – is thus the passing over to another religious tradition or, as Fabrice Blée puts it, the path into the “desert of religious otherness” in which the dialogue becomes an “authentic spiritual event”.49 The image of the desert – in reference to Lk 3f. – expresses the fact that the passing over to another religious tradition and the adoption of one of its meditation forms in its authentic shape represents, on the one hand, a place of temptation and crisis, but, on the other hand, also a privileged place of encounter with God and the deepening of faith. The passing over to another religious tradition depicts a place of temptation and crisis because one holds on to one’s own tradition while at the same time trying to commit oneself to the untouched totality of the other. This is experienced as an inner, existential tension, which can become so painful that one is tempted to dissolve it in two radically distinct ways: either by assimilating the other entirely or by converting entirely to the other’s tradition. Intrareligious dialogue means that nothing less than one’s own faith is at stake because the belief of the other in its attractive and impregnable otherness can shatter and call into question one’s own deepest religious convictions about God and the world.50

220  Alexander Löffler SJ On the other hand, the honest bearing of this painful tension, and the challenges posed by the other that are associated with it, is precisely what initiates a process of spiritual transformation, which liberates one from false idols and self-images and thus provides “opportunity for purification and greater openness to the divine and the others”.51 If it is true that the Holy Spirit dwells in the heart of every human being, and if it can be assumed that, as John Paul II says, with “[e]very authentic prayer” the Christian as well as the non-Christian “is under the influence of the Spirit”, then the religious other, with all its challenging otherness, is not just a meaningless stranger but, in a sense, also “a Messenger of our God”52 who in interpersonal encounters reveals that “our” God has “reveal[ed] himself in other ways”53 in other places. According to Blée, one has to understand the entering of such a desert of religious alterity not just as the mere result of a purely human initiative, but also as the work of God because one is “driven into it by the Holy Spirit”54 who lives in the heart of everyone and wants to communicate from there to others. The actual movens of the intrareligious dialogue would thus be the “mutual discovery of the spirit in the dialogue partner”55 as well as the concomitant recognition and realization “that the truth is greater than our heart and even greater than our theological systems”.56 The ultimate goal would be a “communion in this truth” that transcends the idiosyncrasies of the respective dialogue partners and their traditions “without rejecting or ignoring them”.57 That such a communion in truth  – or, as Blée aptly ambiguously puts it, such a “growing together in the Spirit”58 – is in fact possible is something that the monastics engaged in the monastic interreligious dialogue are convinced of, not just theoretically but also on the basis of their practical experiences. The knowledge that the nuns and monks draw from the experience of their own contemplative practice is that there already exists a fundamental unity between all human beings, since they all are one in God (see Gal 3:28f). The deeper one is able to descend to one’s own being, the closer one comes to the source from which all drink, and the stronger becomes the awareness of an essential unity between oneself and all others or the entire universe, which has its origin in this divine source.59 Thomas Merton OCSO (1915–1968), one of the founding fathers of the Monastic Interreligious Dialogue, was convinced of this essential unity of all human beings in God and its peace-making potential, which can be rediscovered and unfolded precisely through interreligious and intrareligious dialogue. In one of his addresses to religious people, held shortly before his death in October 1968 in Kolkata, he ends with the following words: “And the deepest level of communication is not communication, but communion. It is wordless. It is beyond words, and it is beyond speech, and it is beyond concepts. Not that we discover a new unity. We discover an older unity. My dear brothers, we are already one. But we imagine that we are not. And what we have to recover is our original unity. What we have to be is what we are”.60

Christians and the practice of Zen 221 For such a communion to occur in truth, it is necessary for all those involved to gain a heart that has become completely free of itself – biblically speaking, “a pure heart” (Matthew 5:8), a heart that no longer is looking for one’s own advantages but that, through years of contemplative practice, has discarded all selfish and self-assertive structures and needs and thus has found the freedom in which the losing of oneself will be experienced as the deepest realization of one’s real self. In the document of the International Commission for the Monastic Interreligious Dialogue this is aptly expressed in the following way: “Interreligious encounter is only truly fruitful if it takes place in a heart converted and unified by an experience, no matter how modest, of life in Jesus Christ. Whoever knows the Christ in this way knows that in ‘losing oneself’ in contemplation, under any of its forms, one allows oneself ‘to be grasped’ by the Lord”.61 So, when Zen is about training oneself into losing oneself or detaching oneself methodically in order to clear one’s own centre to make room for something greater, the true self, then it is not about dissolution of the self, be it one’s own self or that of Jesus Christ, into a nameless Absolute, as feared by the CDF. Rather, more precisely, it is about the self’s actual and deepest realization. At any rate, according to Hans Waldenfels, even for Christians, “the figure of Jesus is not primarily an object of contemplation” because an “object of contemplation remains something fixed and external that, in our desire to comprehend, we can train ourselves to get a hold of in ‘theory’, in sight, in fantasy. But Christ does not wish so much to be an ob-jectum [Gegenüber] for us as to take form within our very selves.” As Paul writes to the Galatians: “[I]t is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me” (Gal 2:20). As a consequence, this means: “When no distinction any longer remains between Christ and the one who believes in him . . . only then . . . does the full actualization of what it means to be a Christian take place”.62

Concluding remarks In this chapter, I have tried to show that the widespread Zen practice among Christians does not necessarily have to be considered a threat to the identity of Christian faith, which is the practical translation of the idea of religious truth. On the contrary, it can be understood as a God-given opportunity and challenge for Christians to discover new and yet unimagined facets of the Absolute Mystery and thus grow even deeper into the fullness of divine truth. However, even if there has been an option for a form of Christian reception of Zen that tries to respect the Buddhist distinctiveness of Zen fully or at least as much as possible, this does not mean that the distinctive elements of both traditions can be entirely reconciled with each other. There exist differences between Buddhism and Christianity in central points, which are not to be ignored or downplayed from a Christian point of view, but to be taken seriously. Nevertheless, it is necessary to be on guard and

222  Alexander Löffler SJ not to judge these differences as meaningless for the Christian quest for truth. It is precisely in their otherness that the distinctive Buddhist elements could draw attention to aspects of the Absolute Mystery, which turn up only weak or not at all present in the Christian tradition.63 Moreover, they can help to overcome possible constrictions of Christian ideas and concepts, or to re-adjust existing imbalances accordingly.64 Hence, what is demanded from Zen-practising Christians is nothing less than a proficiency of living in both religious worlds, which means to live a “religious bilingualism,”65 that respects the distinctiveness of both worlds and is able to create a relationship between them in the sense of fruitful tension. How this is to be imagined in detail is a matter of further investigation. The minimal version of such Buddhist-Christian bilingualism could appear similar to the way the former secretary general of DIM, Pierre-François de Béthune OSB, describes and lives his own Zen practice. According to de Béthune, there are central Buddhist doctrines that cannot be easily integrated into the Christian worldview, such as the doctrine of non-self, emptiness and dependent co-arising. At the same time, however, he points out that he, as a Zen-practising Christian, cannot simply ignore these teachings since he learned to appreciate them as the backbone of the Buddhist worldview and thus of his beloved practice of Zazen. As a result of this, he decided to simply accept them as “paradoxical truths” or koans. Since he is neither able to swallow these central teachings of Mahayana Buddhism entirely nor to spit them out again completely, he tries to keep them permanently in his mind, in the sense of a koan, with the positive effect that the constant “chewing” of these solid Buddhist teachings saves him from hastily and easily reaching an apparently safe end with his own Christian self-understanding and answers related to God and to the final questions of humanity.66

Notes 1 See, for example, Ruben L.F. Habito, Living Zen, Loving God (Boston: Wisdom Publications, 2004). 2 In the context of Christian Zen practice, there is sometimes talk of “BuddhistChristian dual belonging”. In contrast, I  consciously use the (weaker) expression “dual practice” in order not to insinuate linguistically more than to assert and testify in content. The question of whether it is possible to belong (in the strict sense of the word) to two religions or religious communities at the same time (by fulfilling the official criteria of full membership in both traditions) is a highly complex and controversial issue. See, for example, Drew, Buddhist and Christian?; Gavin D’Costa and Ross Thompson, eds., Buddhist-Christian Dual Belonging: Affirmations, Objections, Explorations (Farnham: Ashgate, 2016). 3 Toshihiko Izutsu, Toward a Philosophy of Zen Buddhism (Boulder: Prajna Press, 1982), 151–52. 4 See, for example, Michael Seitlinger and Jutta Höcht-Stöhr, eds., Wie Zen mein Christsein verändert: Erfahrungen von Zen-Lehrern (Freiburg i.Br.: Herder, 2004). Among the thirteen Christian Zen teachers who speak in this book and report on their Zen experiences, there are seven Catholic priests (five of whom belong to a religious order), two female Protestant pastors, two Catholic members of a religious order, and two professional theologians.

Christians and the practice of Zen 223 5 For more details see Harry Oldmeadow, A Christian Pilgrim in India: The Spiritual Journey of Swami Abhishiktananda (Henri Le Saux) (Bloomington: World Wisdom, 2008); Ursula Baatz, Hugo M. Enomiya-Lassalle: Ein Leben zwischen den Welten: Biographie (Zurich: Benziger, 1998). 6 Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, “Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church on some Aspects of Christian Meditation (October 15, 1989), No. 3,” in Interreligious Dialogue: The Official Teaching of the Catholic Church from the Second Vatican Council to John Paul II (1963–2005), ed. Francesco Gioia (Boston: Pauline Books, 2006), 1142. 7 Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, “Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church on some Aspects of Christian Meditation, No. 2,” in Interreligious Dialogue, 1141–42, note 1. 8 Ibid., No. 12, in Interreligious Dialogue, 1147: “With the present diffusion of Eastern methods of meditation in the Christian World and in ecclesial communities, we find ourselves faced with a pointed renewal of an attempt, which is not free from dangers and errors, to fuse Christian meditation with that which is non-Christian.” 9 Ibid., No. 15, in Interreligious Dialogue, 1148–49. 10 See Ibid., No. 1, 3, 15, in Interreligious Dialogue, 1141–42, 1148–49. 11 Ibid., No. 16, in Interreligious Dialogue, 1149. 12 Ibid., No. 28, in Interreligious Dialogue, 1154. 13 Hugo M. Enomiya-Lassalle, Zen – Weg zur Erleuchtung (Freiburg i.Br.: Herder, 1960), 101. 14 See Ibid., 112–13. 15 Hugo M. Enomiya-Lassalle, Kraft aus dem Schweigen: Einübung in die ZenMeditation (Freiburg i.Br.: Herder, 1988), 141. 16 Enomiya-Lassalle, Zen – Weg zur Erleuchtung, 103–4. 17 Enomiya-Lassalle, Kraft aus dem Schweigen, 143–44. 18 According to the ancient doctrine of the logoi spermatikoi “every human being (every rational soul) carries in itself a spark of divine truth (of the divine Logos)” (Jn 1:9). The difference between the ancient understanding of this doctrine and that of the Second Vatican Council is that the Council no longer restricts the working of the Logos to the individual, but now “accepts and acknowledges it in the concrete historical religions with their rites” (Andreas Renz, Die katholische Kirche und der interreligiöse Dialog: 50 Jahre “Nostra Aetate” – Vorgeschichte, Kommentar, Rezeption [Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 2014], 138). 19 Enomiya-Lassalle, Zen – Weg zur Erleuchtung, 105. 20 Franco Sottocornola and Maria De Giorgi, “A Christian-Catholic Appraisal of Buddhism,” in Catholic Engagement with World Religions: A  Comprehensive Study, eds. Karl J. Becker and Ilaria Morali (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 2010), 457. 21 See Sottocornola and De Giorgi, “A Christian-Catholic Appraisal of Buddhism,” 455–56. 22 This view is also shared by Hans Waldenfels when he writes: “Our God, the God with a human face, is a selfless, divesting God of love and a Christian is only the one who lets himself to be lured by him into the discipleship of self-emptying love and wins himself while losing himself. The great opening depicted by the great death in Buddhism applies also in Christianity: ‘If the grain of wheat does not fall into the earth and dies, it will remain alone: ​​if it dies, it will bring rich fruit’ (Jn 12:24). In the end, the law of practice is the same in both major world religions” (Hans Waldenfels, Faszination des Buddhismus: Zum christlichbuddhistischen Dialog [Mainz: Matthias Grünewald, 1982], 55). 23 For example, Jacques Dupuis also attributes the existence of Buddhism to an enlightenment effect of the divine Logos (see Jn 1:9), which is based on the enlightenment of the historical Buddha (see Jacques Dupuis, Toward a Christian

224  Alexander Löffler SJ Theology of Religious Pluralism [Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1997], 320 [also 298, 385]). 24 Roman Siebenrock, “Theologischer Kommentar zur Erklärung über die Haltung der Kirche zu den nichtchristlichen Religionen Nostra Aetate,” in Herders Theologischer Kommentar zum Zweiten Vatikanischen Konzil, vol. 3, eds. Peter Hünermann and Bernd J. Hilberath (Freiburg i.Br.: Herder, 2005), 657. 25 Hans-Joachim Höhn, Gott – Offenbarung – Heilswege: Fundamentaltheologie (Würzburg: Echter, 2011), 344 and 346. 26 Höhn, Gott – Offenbarung – Heilswege, 344 (italics added). 27 Cf. Höhn, Gott – Offenbarung – Heilswege, 347. 28 Höhn, Gott – Offenbarung – Heilswege, 345, note 294. 29 From a Catholic point of view, four types or levels of interreligious dialogue are distinguished: the dialogue of life, the dialogue of action, the dialogue of theological exchange, and the dialogue of religious experience (see Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples and Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue, “Dialogue and Proclamation: Reflections and Orientations on Interreligious Dialogue and the Proclamation of the Gospel of Jesus Christ (May 19, 1991), No. 42,” in Interreligious Dialogue, ed. Gioia, 1171. For a somewhat similar typology cf. Eric J. Sharpe, “The Goals of Inter-Religious Dialogue,” in Truth and Dialogue. The Relationship between World Religions, ed. John Hick (London: Sheldon Press, 1974), 77–95. 30 Pontifical Secretariat for Non-Christians, “The Attitude of the Church toward Followers of Other Religions: Reflections and Orientations on Dialogue and Mission (September 4, 1984), No. 13,” in Interreligious Dialogue, 1119. 31 Congregation for the Evangelization of the Peoples and Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue, “Dialogue and Proclamation, No. 41,” in Interreligious Dialogue, 1170. 32 For more detail, see Raimon Panikkar, The Intra-Religious Dialogue (New York: Paulist Press, 1999). 33 The official establishment of the Monastic Interreligious Dialogue, i.e., the institutionalized dialogue and exchange between Christian and non-Christian (especially Buddhist) nuns and monks in the late 1970s, was initiated by Cardinal Sergio Pignedoli, then Chairman of the Pontifical Secretariat for Non-Christians. Thus, the Monastic Interreligious Dialogue can be considered an official institution of the Catholic Church, concretely entrusted to the communities of the Benedictine tradition. On the genesis, history and a presentation of the central concerns of the Monastic Interreligious Dialogue see Fabrice Blée, The Third Desert: The Story of Monastic Interreligious Dialogue (Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 2011). See also Pierre-François de Béthune, “Monastic Interreligious Dialogue,” in The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Inter-Religious Dialogue, ed. Catherine Cornille (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), 34–50. 34 Published in Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue, Bulletin 84 (1993, XXVIII/3): 250–70. The document is also available in English translation: “Contemplation and Interreligious Dialogue: References and Perspectives Drawn from the Experiences of Monastics,” Bulletin of Monastic Interreligious Dialogue 49 (1994): 12–19. In the following, references will be made to the English version. 35 “DIM” stands for the (French-speaking) European sub-commission (“Dialogue Interreligieux Monastique”) and “MID” for the (English-speaking) American sub-commission (“Monastic Interreligious Dialogue”) of the Monastic Interreligious Dialogue. 36 The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith has consulted neither the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue nor members of the Monastic Interreligious Dialogue prior to the publication of its “Letter on some Aspects of Christian Meditation” (1989), who could have been able to aptly contribute to the letter. See Blée, The Third Desert, 122.

Christians and the practice of Zen 225 37 John Paul II, “Christmas Address to the Cardinals and the Roman Curia on December 22, 1986, No. 11,” in Interreligious Dialogue, 405. 38 International Commission for the Monastic Interreligious Dialogue, “Contemplation and Interreligious Dialogue,” 13–14. 39 Ibid., 15. 40 Ibid., 17. Here, the document also speaks of the “danger of concordism”, that should be avoided. 41 For this and the following, see the commentary remarks on “Contemplation and Interreligious Dialogue” by Fabrice Blée, “Die Wüste der Alterität: Spirituelle Erfahrung im intermonastischen Dialog,” in Handbuch Spiritualität: Zugänge, Traditionen, interreligiöse Prozesse, ed. Karl Baier (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2006), 249–66, especially 251–53. By favouring the third mode of reception, the document does not want to claim that the first two are without any value or even unacceptable to Christians, since they cannot be sharply separated from the third anyway. However, they favour mere assimilation and thus present an obstacle to dialogue and the formation of a dialogical spirituality (see ibid., 253). In any case, among many nuns and monks the Centering Prayer and thus the second mode of reception, the new synthesis, is very popular (see Blée, The Third Desert, 119). 42 International Commission for the Monastic Interreligious Dialogue, “Contemplation and Interreligious Dialogue,” 13. 43 Ibid. 44 See, for example, John Main, Word into Silence: A Manual for Christian Meditation (Norwich: Canterbury Press, 2006). 45 See, for example, Thomas Keating, Intimacy with God: An Introduction to Centering Prayer (New York: Crossroads, 2015). 46 International Commission for the Monastic Interreligious Dialogue, “Contemplation and Interreligious Dialogue,” 13. 47 Blée, Die Wüste der Alterität, 253. 48 Pierre-François de Béthune, “Christian-Buddhist Dialogue as Spiritual Experience,” Bulletin of Monastic Interreligious Dialogue 52 (1995): 17 (emphasis deleted). 49 Blée, Die Wüste der Alterität, 257. 50 See Blée, Die Wüste der Alterität, 256–57. As we know from the spiritual diary of Henri Le Saux OSB (Abhishiktananda), this tension can become extreme sometimes: “I  cannot be at the same time Hindu and Christian, and I  cannot either be simply Hindu or simply Christian” (Swami Abhishiktananda, Ascent to the Depth of the Heart: The Spiritual Diary [1948–1973] by Swami Abhishiktananda [Delhi: ISPCK, 1998], 19). 51 Blée, Die Wüste der Alterität, 257. 52 International Commission for the Monastic Interreligious Dialogue, “Contemplation and Interreligious Dialogue,” 16 (with reference to the Regula Benedicti 51, 1, 7, 15, 61, 4). 53 Blée, The Third Desert, 184. 54 Blée, Die Wüste der Alterität, 257. 55 Ibid., 259. 56 Ibid. 57 Ibid., 258. 58 Blée, The Third Desert, 141. 59 See Ibid., 140. 60 Thomas Merton, The Asian Journal of Thomas Merton, ed. P. Hart et al. (New York: New Directions, 1973), 308. This basic unity of all human beings in God is also prominently expressed in Nostra Aetate 1. Pope John Paul II was also convinced of this unity when he invited representatives of various religious traditions in October 1986 to the World Day of Prayer for Peace in Assisi. See John

226  Alexander Löffler SJ Paul II, “Christmas Address to the Cardinals and the Roman Curia on December 22, 1986, No. 1 and 3,” in Interreligious Dialogue, 398–400. 61 International Commission for the Monastic Interreligious Dialogue, “Contemplation and Interreligious Dialogue,” 15. 62 Hans Waldenfels, Absolute Nothingness: Foundations for a Buddhist-Christian Dialogue (New York: Paulist Press, 1980), 161. 63 As Peter Jonkers reminds us: “Precisely because the divine mystery is radically transcendent, (.  .  .) learning from the other implies that one is willing to let oneself be questioned by a truth-claim that cannot be integrated in one’s own religion.” From this follows, as a consequence, “the attitude of epistemic humility”, which in turn is “a very effective means to break the ill-fated bond between religious truth and violence”; Peter Jonkers, “How to break the ill-fated bond between religious truth and violence,” 259. 64 For example, if Zen-practising Christians prefer to speak of the transpersonal rather than the personal nature of the divine, then this does not necessarily imply a threat to the traditional Christian understanding of God. Rather, it can also be understood as the legitimate concern of protecting the traditional Christian understanding of God from overly anthropomorphic ideas and constrictions. 65 Ruben L.F. Habito, “Maria Kannon Zen: Explorations in Buddhist-Christian Practice,” Buddhist-Christian Studies 14 (1994): 154. 66 See Pierre-François de Béthune, Interreligious Hospitality: The Fulfillment of Dialogue (Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 2010), 156–57.

Bibliography Abhishiktananda, Swami. Ascent to the Depth of the Heart: The Spiritual Diary [1948–1973] by Swami Abhishiktananda. Delhi: ISPCK, 1998. Blée, Fabrice. “Die Wüste der Alterität: Spirituelle Erfahrung im intermonastischen Dialog.” In Handbuch Spiritualität: Zugänge, Traditionen, interreligiöse Prozesse, edited by Karl Baier, 249–66. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2006. Blée, Fabrice. The Third Desert: The Story of Monastic Interreligious Dialogue. Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 2011. Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. “Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church on Some Aspects of Christian Meditation (October  15, 1989).” In Interreligious Dialogue: The Official Teaching of the Catholic Church from the Second Vatican Council to John Paul II (1963–2005), edited by Francesco Gioia, 1141–56. Boston: Pauline Books, 2006. Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples and Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue. “Dialogue and Proclamation: Reflections and Orientations on Interreligious Dialogue and the Proclamation of the Gospel of Jesus Christ (May 19, 1991).” In Interreligious Dialogue: The Official Teaching of the Catholic Church from the Second Vatican Council to John Paul II (1963–2005), edited by Francesco Gioia, 1156–89. Boston: Pauline Books, 2006. D’Costa, Gavin, and Ross Thompson, eds. Buddhist-Christian Dual Belonging: Affirmations, Objections, Explorations. Farnham: Ashgate, 2016. De Béthune, Pierre-François. “Christian-Buddhist Dialogue as Spiritual Experience.” Bulletin of Monastic Interreligious Dialogue 52 (1995): 16–24. De Béthune, Pierre-François. Interreligious Hospitality: The Fulfillment of Dialogue. Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 2010.

Christians and the practice of Zen 227 De Béthune, Pierre-François. “Monastic Interreligious Dialogue.” In The WileyBlackwell Companion to Inter-Religious Dialogue, edited by Catherine Cornille, 34–50. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013. Drew, Rose. Buddhist and Christian? An Exploration of Dual Belonging. London: Routledge, 2011. Dupuis, Jacques. Toward a Christian Theology of Religious Pluralism. Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1997. Enomiya-Lassalle, Hugo M. Zen  – Weg zur Erleuchtung. Freiburg i.Br.: Herder, 1960. Enomiya-Lassalle, Hugo M. Kraft aus dem Schweigen: Einübung in die ZenMeditation. Freiburg i.Br.: Herder, 1988. Habito, Ruben L.F. “Maria Kannon Zen: Explorations in Buddhist-Christian Practice.” Buddhist-Christian Studies 14 (1994): 145–56. Habito, Ruben L.F. Living Zen, Loving God. Boston: Wisdom Publications, 2004. Hick, John, ed. Truth and Dialogue. The Relationship between World Religions. London: Sheldon Press, 1974, 77–95. Höhn, Hans-Joachim. Gott  – Offenbarung – Heilswege: Fundamentaltheologie. Würzburg: Echter, 2011. International Commission for the Monastic Interreligious Dialogue. “Contemplation and Interreligious Dialogue: References and Perspectives Drawn from the Experiences of Monastics.” Bulletin of Monastic Interreligious Dialogue 49 (1994): 12–19. Izutsu, Toshihiko. Toward a Philosophy of Zen Buddhism. Boulder: Prajna Press, 1982. John Paul II. “Christmas Address to the Cardinals and the Roman Curia on December 22, 1986.” In Interreligious Dialogue: The Official Teaching of the Catholic Church from the Second Vatican Council to John Paul II (1963–2005), edited by Francesco Gioia, 398–406. Boston: Pauline Books, 2006. Keating, Thomas. Intimacy with God: An Introduction to Centering Prayer. New York: Crossroads, 2015. Main, John. Word into Silence: A Manual for Christian Meditation. Norwich: Canterbury Press, 2006. Merton, Thomas. The Asian Journal of Thomas Merton, edited by P. Hart et al. New York: New Directions, 1973. Oldmeadow, Harry. A Christian Pilgrim in India: The Spiritual Journey of Swami Abhishiktananda (Henri Le Saux). Bloomington: World Wisdom, 2008. Panikkar, Raimon. The Intra-Religious Dialogue. New York: Paulist Press, 1999. Pontifical Secretariat for Non-Christians. “The Attitude of the Church toward Followers of Other Religions: Reflections and Orientations on Dialogue and Mission (September  4, 1984).” In Interreligious Dialogue: The Official Teaching of the Catholic Church from the Second Vatican Council to John Paul II (1963–2005), edited by Francesco Gioia, 1116–29. Boston: Pauline Books, 2006. Renz, Andreas. Die katholische Kirche und der interreligiöse Dialog: 50 Jahre “Nostra Aetate” – Vorgeschichte, Kommentar, Rezeption. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 2014. Seitlinger, Michael, and Jutta Höcht-Stöhr, eds. Wie Zen mein Christsein verändert: Erfahrungen von Zen-Lehrern. Freiburg i.Br.: Herder, 2004. Siebenrock, Roman, “Theologischer Kommentar zur Erklärung über die Haltung der Kirche zu den nichtchristlichen Religionen Nostra Aetate.” In Herders

228  Alexander Löffler SJ Theologischer Kommentar zum Zweiten Vatikanischen Konzil; Volume 3, edited by Peter Hünermann and Bernd J. Hilberath, 591–693. Freiburg i.Br.: Herder, 2005. Sottocornola, Franco, and Maria De Giorgi. “A  Christian-Catholic Appraisal of Buddhism.” In Catholic Engagement with World Religions: A  Comprehensive Study, edited by Karl J. Becker and Ilaria Morali, 443–58. Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 2010. Waldenfels, Hans. Absolute Nothingness: Foundations for a Buddhist-Christian Dialogue. New York: Paulist Press, 1980. Waldenfels, Hans. Faszination des Buddhismus: Zum christlich-buddhistischen Dialog. Mainz: Matthias Grünewald, 1982.

13 Reconsidering the concept of mission in the light of comparative theology Klaus von Stosch

The concept of mission: contested but necessary The concept of mission is very much disputed in the Western world today.1 In public opinion – inside and outside the churches – the idea of mission is so much under fire that the vast majority of Christians in the mainline churches at least no longer want to do missionary work. What are the reasons for this scepticism towards the idea of mission? It is certainly connected with the conquest and colonization of Latin America.2 In light of this negative example, mission is suspected of not taking seriously the fact that other cultures and religions also have something to offer to Christianity. Non-Christians appear like savages who are objects of mission and who, if necessary, have to be forced to their fortune. “ ‘Missionary work’ became the epitome of intolerance and a religious-political attitude branded as a colonial mentality”.3 Moreover, in Europe, scepticism towards missionary work has become stronger because of the memories of totalitarian regimes in the twentieth century. People in Europe have experienced too often and too lastingly how destructive the missionary conduct of a movement with claims to absoluteness and salvation can be. Hence, they are not willing to grant much credit to the churches at this point. Whereas interreligious dialogue is highly valued, the idea of mission has been greatly criticized and is embarrassing to many Christians themselves. There is an even deeper crisis hidden behind this denial of the concept of mission. Many Christians have forgotten how to talk about their faith. Some are not even sure whether their faith is worth communicating. Others simply do not know how to communicate their faith because it has become more and more unusual to talk about questions of faith openly. For these Christians, mission with the goal of converting non-Christians or winning over disciples of Jesus according to the formula of Mt 28:18–20 does not function as a model of faith anymore. This is a big problem for the future of Christianity because this religion is not possible without missionary work – at least in a wide sense. Let me

230  Klaus von Stosch briefly explain why I think that missionary work is so essential for Christianity.4 I will first try to show the structure of my argument: 1 The basic desire of most people is to love and to be loved. 2 According to Christian faith, God loves everybody unconditionally (in Christ) and enables everybody to respond to this love (in the Holy Spirit). 3 Christian Faith offers the fulfilment of the basic desire of most people (conclusion from 1 and 2). 4 If someone desires a higher good (as in 1) and is in need of this good and you know that this desire has already been fulfilled or can be fulfilled (as in 2), you have the ethical duty to bear witness to the fulfilment of the desire. 5 The truth of (2) can only be testified to through both concrete love and the articulation of this love. 6 The church (as the community of those who believe in 2) has the ethical duty to proclaim God’s love for everybody and to make this love concrete (conclusion from 4 and 5). 7 Missionary work can be defined by two elements: a) spreading God’s love to the world in the sense of spreading the kingdom of God (i.e., making God’s love concrete); b) proclaiming God’s love to everybody (i.e., inviting people to witness to the love of God to everybody). 8 Missionary work is an ethical duty of the church defined as those who believe in (2) (conclusion from 6 and 7). Premise 1 is meant as an empirical observation. As a theologian, I am even convinced that every human longs for love, but I do not want to make this stronger claim here because the weaker premise is sufficient for my argument. I personally have never met anybody who was not longing for love and I  have never met anybody who contradicted this premise. Hence, it seems reasonable to me to assume at least that many people long for love. Premise 2 is the basic truth claim of Christianity as reconstructed by modern theologians such as Thomas Pröpper.5 This claim says that Christian faith consists in confessing that Jesus Christ showed God’s unconditional love for God’s creatures and that God enables us through the Spirit to welcome this love and to bear witness to it through our deeds and words. As this kind of witness is exactly what people are waiting for, then if premise 1 is true, it has been demonstrated that one of the basic needs of humanity, or at least of most humans, is or can be fulfilled through Christianity. Premise 4 again has no direct connection to particular Christian truthclaims but tries to make a normative statement that should be accepted by everyone. Maybe the truth of this premise is easier to accept if we emphasize how much the premise is dedicated to the dignity of human desires of a higher good. Hence, the premise does not say that the fulfilment of any desire has to be proclaimed. For example, it is not necessary to tell

Reconsidering the concept of mission 231 somebody who is longing for chocolate that there is already chocolate for her available in the kitchen. Everybody knows that chocolate can have bad consequences for health. Hence, the necessity of talking about the accessibility of the fulfilment of this desire is not always helpful. But Christianity claims that the highest conceivable good is given as fulfilment of the most basic need of humanity. Again, I choose a weaker version of this premise to make it less questionable. I am not talking about something than which nothing greater be conceived, but only of a higher good. If it is good and urgent to fulfil a certain desire, it is always good and even necessary to make its fulfilment available if I am able to do this. Premise 5 states that showing somebody that she is loved by God unconditionally needs more than the proclamation of the abstract idea of love. Christians believe that God’s love wants to be testified to performatively. The life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ shows and performs God’s unconditional love to all creatures  – independently of their achievements and abilities. The church has the task to bear witness to this love through its own performance. That is why the church as the concrete everlasting body of Christ is necessary for salvation from a Catholic point of view. Salvation, which is the loving community of God and humans, is not possible abstractly but only through human love, which is inspired by the humanity of the Divine love in Jesus Christ. As the Second Vatican Council pointed out, this belief does not imply that non-Christians cannot participate in salvation. It simply wants to make clear that salvation has to be concrete and understandable and, in a Catholic perspective, this is only possible through Christ and his everlasting body, the church. Let me try to explain this point a bit. Parents can try to show to their children that their love is not dependent on certain conditions. They can show to their children that they will love them even when the children do not fulfil their wishes. However, even the greatest love of parents to their children only symbolizes the unconditional nature of God’s love. The parents’ love will still be conditional (i.e., dependent on contingent conditions), such as the mere existence of the parents.6 When the parents want to offer unconditional love to their children, they will need to refer to this love itself. In a similar way, the church’s ministry can and should try to offer charity without preconditions. That is why it is good that the church engages in so many social areas without paying attention to the question of whether its ministry reaches the baptized or the unbaptized. But if the church wants to make clear that the witness of love and charity is grounded in unconditional love for each person, the church has to speak of God’s selfcommunication in Christ. This love is unconditional because it is already realized within the life of the Holy Trinity. Humans are created within the love of the first person of the Trinity to the son and become part of the unconditional nature of this love through Christ. Thus, on the one hand, the church has to relate to the message of God’s love in Jesus Christ to make clear that love is really given to everybody and that it will succeed against

232  Klaus von Stosch death. On the other hand, the love of Jesus Christ today can only be concrete and understandable through the love of Christians who bear witness to this love. Time and again the Gospel insists that it is not enough just to talk of God’s love, but that it must be demonstrated in favour of those who are in need of it. Human love finds its limit at death. The resurrection of Jesus Christ stands for the hope of escape even from death. The incarnation of God in Christ testifies to the lasting, unbreakable devotion of God precisely in the form of the weakness of a human being. By interpreting the testimony of one’s own gift of life in the light of God’s self-surrender in Jesus Christ, it thus becomes a testimony of a love stronger than death and capable of redeeming even the worst suffering. This does not mean that love becomes stronger through the explicit reference to Christ, but only that it becomes explicitly understandable as such (i.e., as the unconditional love of God which is stronger than death). Hence, it is the Christian message of God’s self-communication as love in Jesus Christ that is needed to respond to the fundamental concern of so many people that love might be absurd. The fundamental longing of humans to love and to be loved is filled with it. By the power of the Holy Spirit, we can surrender ourselves to love in ultimate trust and we can follow the movement of the unconditional love of God. It remains the task and the fulfilment of the church’s essence to make God’s love tangible to every human being – especially to the weak. In our present situation, this means, for example, that God’s love can also be testified to the many refugees who have come to us in recent years – among them also many Muslims. The church has to help them concretely to integrate into our society and to build up their existence. It is also important to show them that they are loved unconditionally and that they can trust in the mercy of God when human power can no longer do anything. It seems to be the task of the church to work for justice and, at the same time, to bear witness that the greater justice of God can fulfil our desires much more deeply than we suspect and understand. Muslims, too, are to be told of God’s mercy and justice; they also have to be confronted with the message of hope of a God of love who promises the Word in Jesus Christ to every human being and wants to change their situation. They, too, are invited to help to build up the kingdom of God, which began in Jesus Christ. Does this mean that the church should also explicitly ask them to be baptized in order to become members of the Catholic Church? There are two lines of thinking which make it difficult for me to say “Yes” here. The first line of thinking, which I develop in the following section, has to do with the concept of mission for today in general. This part will be my justification of premise 7. The second line of thinking, which I develop in the two sections thereafter, is founded in the peculiarity of the relationship of Christianity towards Judaism and Islam.

Reconsidering the concept of mission 233

Approaches to recover the concept of mission for today If mission aims at convincing other people to become members of the church, it is in tension with the basic attitude of many people in the church today, as we pointed out above. It also contradicts the basic idea to bear witness to the unconditionality of God’s love to the world, because unconditionality goes beyond all mission strategies. However, the situation is different when one conceives of mission not as the spreading of the church, but as the spreading of the love and the kingdom of God. Franz Gmainer-Pranzl, for example, pleads for such an understanding of mission when he writes: “The source of any mission of the church consists in the proclamation of the kingdom of God”.7 As the central characteristic of this kingdom he mentions the liberation of humans.8 In this approach, the liberation and humanization turn out to be the decisive goals of missionary work. With such an understanding, mission ultimately aims at bearing witness to God’s incarnation by creating space for more humanity in the world. In this understanding, missionaries have the task of working in every corner of the world to ensure that the marginalized receive more attention and that the oppressed can assert their rights. In this understanding – which is widespread among the mainline churches today – missionary work is a service to all people, and it is understood as a mission of solidarity to support those people who need help. In the end, mission in this perspective is understood as the common journey in the Missio Dei. Based on texts like Lk 4:18f., mission deals with the unselfish commitment in favour of the people9 and with the struggle for the liberation of the oppressed. Particularly since the 1990s, special emphasis has been placed on “mission as a ministry of reconciliation”.10 Missionary work can help to cross borders and create an atmosphere that attracts people.11 It can be understood as “the art of keeping together a wide horizon open for the greater life and hope which the church also needs”.12 What is important in this understanding is how the relation between the church and the world is conceived. The church no longer faces the world as the only authority of salvation and no longer tries to save as many people as possible from the world into the church. Rather, the church tries to cooperate with the world in working for the kingdom of God. Moreover, the church tries to create a “coalition of the willing” to make the human kindness of God (which can be experienced in Jesus of Nazareth) tangible in the world. Thus, people can work for the kingdom of God also outside the church by following the traces of the Logos in humankind. In its service to people, the church can try to keep them open to the greater longing for ultimate fulfilment for their respective lives – without pretending always to already know how the fulfilment of this longing will be. Ultimately, the kingdom of God remains something which cannot be exhausted on earth. Hence, missionary work always remains in a tension between the already achieved presence of the liberating Spirit of God in the concrete church and the still unrealized

234  Klaus von Stosch fullness of this presence. Here, missionary work, on the one hand, can work to make the church more the place of the presence of the kingdom of God. On the other hand, the church has to encourage all people outside the church that open themselves to the Spirit of God (i.e., the church cooperates with everybody who stands up for the good of all people). From a Christian point of view, it is precisely the imitation of the practice of Jesus and the narration of the biblical stories that can lead into the greater freedom of the kingdom of God. At the same time, however, the kingdom of God will not be identified with the church and will always be kept open to the greater truth and presence of God. Even if we believe that God is revealed in our tradition, we will carry this treasure of Divine presence in “jars of clay” (2 Cor 4:7). Humans will never succeed in grasping the unconditional as the absolute in all its dimensions; thus, humans will always remain learning throughout their lives  – in interreligious dialogue and also in missionary commitment. In epistemic terms, every human being is so strongly influenced by his or her cultural and life-world background that encounters with other cultures and forms of life can always help to understand one’s own truth in a new and deeper way. God is always greater than our understanding and human cognitive capacities are always limited and fallible.13 The epistemic humility14 that follows from this insight should shape people of all religious traditions in their mutual relations. Humans have to testify together that they can only express and bear witness to the gift of the unconditional in a conditional, symbolic and thus, possibly, misleading way. The missionary, too, can therefore never appear only in the attitude of giving and proclaiming, but also needs to listen carefully to others. Thus, on the one hand, missionaries will be humble and ready to learn from their interlocutors  – even in their understanding of Christ. On the other hand, interreligious dialogue needs loyalty to one’s own tradition, and missionary work has to bear witness to Christ explicitly. If we are not prepared to introduce a certain, denominational conviction into the dialogue, then “a decisive element of the dialogue is missing”.15 And if we do not refer explicitly to Christ, the claim to the unconditionality of love cannot be founded. Hence, every authentic dialogue necessarily contains a missionary dimension. Dialogue and mission are difficult to separate16 and they should not be separated. Nonetheless, missionary work and dialogue have to be distinguished.17 They are not merely identical; rather, every form of authentic testimony of one’s own faith and every form of dialogue also imply a missionary dimension.18 As we explained above, missionary work implies, on the one hand, bearing witness to God’s unconditional love in Jesus Christ. On the other hand, it wants to build the kingdom of God – without knowing beforehand how people of other religions and worldviews relate to this kingdom. Therefore, being a witness and being humble belong together inseparably, both in mission and in dialogue. It is precisely the concept of testimony, despite all the

Reconsidering the concept of mission 235 emphasis on existential commitment, that draws attention to the limitations of one’s own point of view: But the emphasis on giving testimony also brings an element of humility into the dialogue between religions, because it refers to the fact that one can always only bear witness to one’s own experience and insight. This creates an openness for the other and thus a space in which the other can in turn bear witness to the truth of his tradition.19

The special relationship between Christianity and Judaism We have seen so far how important it is that we link the necessity of missionary work with the task of spreading the kingdom of God. Missionary work primarily wants to make God’s love concrete with the means of love. Such an understanding might help people today overcome their worries with the concept of mission because it makes clear how much the church can learn from people and ideas outside the church and how important epistemic humility is. It can encourage the church to bear witness to the presence of Christ everywhere and to bear witness to every form of humanity, which actually helps humans become more human. It has also become clear that we should not restrict missionary work to engagement for love and humanism. The unconditionality of love requires the reference to Christ to be able to convince people that love is stronger than death and that it makes sense to have ultimate trust in it. From a Christian perspective, humanism is not merely a challenge that has to be met. Incarnating humanistic values and seeking for unconditional love are more than pure ideas; the ideal of humanistic values and unconditional love can become reality with the help of God. This help of God has already become reality in Christ. Therefore, this help has to be proclaimed to understand why we are allowed to have hope. The proclamation of the unconditional love of God in Jesus Christ always has to be linked to a practice that wants to put people in service to realize this love – especially for those who are oppressed. God appreciates all human beings; God’s love of all creatures wants to become reality. The basic idea of Christianity consists in the hope that this unconditional love has already been realized in Christ and that it therefore can be proclaimed by the church. That is why we need this explicit proclamation to give a ground to the human trust in love. It remains a Christian idea that God also wants to call people through the church – especially through the ministry in it. It also remains a Christian requirement to invite people to the service of the kingdom of God. This can mean that these people are baptized and become members of the church. As members of the church they will be able to help to establish and to bear witness to the kingdom of God and to the unconditional philanthropy of God that applies to all human beings.

236  Klaus von Stosch I have tried to explain how important it is to bear witness to God’s selfcommunication in Jesus Christ if we want to stick to the universality and concreteness of Christian hope. But the election of Israel seems to be a counter argument against this insistence on explicit missionary work. The permanent and irrevocable election of Israel seems to make it clear that the philanthropy, justice and mercy of God can also be testified to without explicit reference to Jesus of Nazareth. Israel obviously proclaims the God of Jesus Christ without accepting Christ. The Old or First Testament speaks of the unconditional faithfulness and love of God without explicitly mentioning Jesus Christ. This fact leads Paul to the insight that the permanent election of Israel has to be respected (Rom 9–11), and the Catholic Church has also recognized this election as permanent. Israel, too, is involved in the ministry of testifying to the love of God that takes shape in Jesus Christ. Thus Israel – from a Catholic perspective – remains oriented towards God’s self-communication, which is embodied in Christ. However, Paul is sensible enough to articulate Christian hope in this context in Old Testament images of hope (Rom 11:26). Hence, Paul’s intervention can be understood in a twofold way: On the one hand, it is Jesus Christ who all people (including Jews) will eschatologically recognize as their Saviour. This is the reason why Paul continues to bring his understanding of Christ to his people and convince them that he was the Messiah. On the other hand, Israel’s unfulfilled hopes remain valid – even after Christ’s coming. That is why Paul articulates them in their original form. Many of these hopes – such as those for a concrete social visibility of salvation – are permanently virulent and challenge the testimony of the church permanently. I understand this to mean that the encounter with Jesus Christ at the end of times will not happen in a way that Christians are triumphantly confirmed in their faith. Rather, it has to be conceived in a way that Jews and Christians alike will be surprised by the reality of Jesus Christ. Both will equally recognize in him aspects that correspond to their own shape of hope (and thus prove them right), and other ones that surpass their own shape of hope in unexpected ways (and thus show the lasting right of testimony to each other’s religion).20 Paul’s concept allows us to approach the issue of the mission of Jews with extreme caution. From this point of view, Israel has a lasting role in the history of salvation which has not been made obsolete by the church. Israel has to remind Christians of many things that they might forget in their enthusiasm for Jesus Christ. Even if Jesus Christ himself is “God’s body language”21 and the fully valid incarnation of God’s self-surrender, which implies the necessity of all people to bear witness, the testimony of the church is provisional and, in many places, deficient. Israel has obviously been chosen to bear witness, even after Jesus Christ, to the faithfulness of God and the covenant with Israel and all people. Although the church has lasting questions for Israel, it must also learn from Israel permanently. The true Messiah is just as different from their own Messianic hopes as the figure of Jesus Christ is – at least if we look at Christ as he is proclaimed by

Reconsidering the concept of mission 237 the church. Thus, although the church as the body of Christ is in a clear ontological and historical connection with him and will recognize him in the end of times, it is true at the same time that the church has to learn decisive things from Jewish hopes of the Messiah. Many other aspects of Jewish life also pose a permanent challenge to the church, from which more can be learned. Therefore, there are good theological reasons for being reticent with the mission of Jews. It must be in the church’s interest that the Jews, in their faithfulness to the covenant of God, bear lasting witness to the God of Israel and of Jesus Christ, who also broadens and challenges their own understanding of Christ.22 Probably up until this point, most Catholic theologians will agree  – at least in Germany. The special appreciation of Judaism by the church has a solid fundament in the common Bible of both religions and in the Jewishness of Jesus, which has been discovered again especially after the Shoah. The teaching of the church towards Judaism has obviously changed and makes it clear that institutional missionary work has to be avoided here because of the everlasting mission of Israel also for the church.23 Even Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI in his last controversial article makes clear that he is against the idea of missionary activities towards Judaism.24

Explicit missionary work among Muslims: an implication of Christian faith? Can this special relationship between Christianity and Judaism be applied in some sense to Islam? Are some features of the special relationship between Judaism and Christianity transferable to Islam? On the one hand, the Qur’an quite obviously places itself in the Biblical tradition and offers a surprisingly clear respect for Jesus Christ that goes far beyond appreciations found in any other religion. Thus, the Qur’an recognizes Jesus not only as a prophet and messenger, but also as the Word and Spirit of God, and repeatedly calls him the Messiah.25 The Qur’an also speaks of Christians time and again with great respect and takes up a great abundance of biblical motifs. On the other hand, there are also clear movements of the Qur’an away from Judaism and Christianity. Biblical traditions are creatively reinterpreted and the biblically testified history of salvation is further developed. Jesus Christ is not recognized as the Son of God, and – despite all the appreciation of his uniqueness – he tends to be integrated in the Qur’anic prophetology.26 The death of Jesus on the cross plays no role for the Qur’an and is even rejected according to traditional interpretations.27 Other characteristics of the ecclesiastical testimony of Christ are also not appreciated in the Qur’an and the tradition that follows it. It is unclear how this ambivalent picture has to be assessed. Are there contradictions between Islam and Christianity that make it impossible for Christians to see any permanent value in Islam? Or is it possible to give a lasting significance to Islam from a Christian point of view? I have tried to

238  Klaus von Stosch argue for this positive significance at length in my recent publications.28 In these publications I try to show how the Qur’an inscribes itself in the Biblical history – without any direct contradiction to the current teaching of the church.29 In particular, I  argue that the Qur’an offers a foreign prophecy for Jesus Christ, which has something to say to Christians permanently. Therefore, I try to explore the possibility that Islam might represent a lasting enrichment for the church – in a similar sense as explained for Judaism in the last section. Nonetheless, it is not part of the church’s teaching that there will be such a lasting positive interaction between Islam and Christianity. Whereas the permanent esteem of Israel has become part of the teaching of the magisterium, the relationship to Islam is open to different interpretations and can always be determined anew. As Islam is the younger religion, the relationship is also very much dependent on how Muslims relate to Christianity. In this respect, things are about to change. Especially in Europe, there is an increasing number of Muslim scholars who are revaluating the intertextual references between the Qur’an and the Bible and are calling for a greater appreciation of the monotheistic sister religions. At this very moment it is important to be open for a positive development of Muslim–Christian relations and to react constructively to the new readiness for dialogue. Muslim theologians today are seriously discussing the question of whether they can abandon the classical hierarchical definition of their relationship to Judaism and Christianity.30 They are asking whether they can acknowledge a lasting value of the Bible. The current debates of Muslims in Germany remind me of the new awakening that the Catholic Church achieved in its relationship with Israel after the Shoah. Many Muslims explore today whether they can reinterpret the Qur’an in such a way that it overcomes their traditional supersessionism towards Christians and Jews. If Muslims succeed in reading the Qur’an in a non-supersessionist way and if they discover how deeply Christ is appreciated in the Qur’an, this might lead to a deep love of Christ and of Christians. If the Qur’an does not explicitly contradict the current teaching of the church, it might even be possible for a Muslim to become a member of the church without leaving Islam. The history of Christianity shows us that Jews could remain Jews and follow the Torah after becoming Christians. Gavin D’Costa in one of his recent articles31 reminds us of the fact that it can be enriching for the church to welcome Jews as Jews within the church and he argues for a special catechumenate for Jews in the church. He wants to make clear how enriching the peculiarity of Judaism can be for the church. Along these lines of thinking, Muslims might be welcomed as Muslims in the church. Perhaps they could be encouraged to bring some of their Muslim identity into the church and thus strengthen the Catholicity of the church.32 However, I  would add that this enriching nature of Judaism and Islam is not only true for those parts of our sister religions that can be integrated into the church. The Jewish rejection of Christ is also something that can be

Reconsidering the concept of mission 239 important for the church because it reminds Christians of the fact that many messianic hopes have not been fulfilled yet. Hence, it makes Christians more sensible of the fact that the reality of Christ is much more than the church’s teaching of him. In a similar respect, the critique of Muslims today and the critique of the Qur’an can encourage Christians to see the weakness of their own witness and to work more intensely to cultivate Christ’s body through their witness. It can be shown that the Qur’an has intelligible and good arguments against the shape of Christianity of Christ’s time. It is obvious that there are multiple arguments against Christianity today. Criticizing the church is not a sign of being either irrational or a sinner. Sometimes this critique is even necessary for somebody who wants to stay rational and a person of integrity.33 Thus, the solidarity of critique by those who believe in the one God, and even in some sense in the particularity of Christ, will be very helpful for the church and for its work. In some way it might be possible for Muslims to cultivate their relationship with Christ without leaving their faith. Maybe they will even be able to recognize the church as the body of Christ and they will find respect and appreciation for it. In such a situation it might not be helpful to invite Muslims to convert, and it might be better to invite them to work for the kingdom of God. Muslims who are reconciled with themselves and with the church can take sides for the God of Jesus Christ in a much more effective way than new converts who have not yet completely grasped their new faith and who have negativity towards their own past. It would be sad if the church took advantage of the weakness of Muslim refugees in the West by trying to persuade as many as possible to join the church. The treatment of refugees in the West can serve as a good case study of how the church understands its own task in relation to Islam. If it is true that Muslims can be enriching for the church and that some Muslims might even become part of the church’s mission as Muslims, it is questionable whether it should be the general aim of the church to convince every Muslim to give up Islam. Hence, without giving up missionary visions, the church should seek to build bridges to a new appreciation of Islam that would allow Muslim refugees to look positively at their own heritage as part of their biography. Even if Muslims want to convert to Christianity, it is important to seriously examine together with them whether their newly found love for Jesus Christ and the church really contradicts Islam. Through such an attitude of estimation the church can help those Muslims who convert to Christianity to become bridges between both religions. The church can also help those many Muslims who do not convert have positive experiences with the church so they will be encouraged to change the shape of Islam in a productive and positive way – especially as regards the relationship of Islam towards non-Muslims and as regards the relationship of Muslims towards Christ. The fact that so many refugees from Muslim countries have been welcomed with solidarity and hospitality in some Western countries can still

240  Klaus von Stosch help to create a new coexistence of the monotheistic religions. Instead of consuming ourselves in the agonal logic of the market, we should see the historical chance of a common building of the kingdom of God through a common endeavour of the largest religions of humankind. Especially in a time when more and more people try to argue against Islam in Europe and try to destroy trust in foreigners, it is the task of the church to create an atmosphere of love for strangers and refugees. This atmosphere will be the best testimony to the spirit of Christ in our world of conflict, mistrust and fear. Let me conclude with a pragmatic argument which does not want to argue against any missionary work towards Muslims but, rather, against too much emphasis on it. Although some Evangelicals continue to dream of world mission, every somewhat sober observer of world history should realize that Christianity will not replace Islam, nor will Islam replace Christianity as a religion. If one considers the situation in Europe, it also becomes clear that the real challenge of the church is not Islam, but the increasing number of people who have left and are leaving the church because they have lost all hope in God. More and more people no longer trust in a historically powerful God who transforms the world into greater righteousness. They no longer believe in the justice and mercy of something higher than themselves. They have become more and more sceptical towards the promises of unconditional love. At this point, Christians should discover Muslims as allies in their testimony to the justice and mercy of God. Christians and Muslims can mutually see each other as exemplifying a path of selfless piety and active charity that can enrich themselves and our time. We simply have to keep in mind how much the agonal and often violent competition between religions contributes to people losing confidence in them altogether. Then we will see how much Muslims and Christians in the West, at least, are in a community of destiny. Only if Muslims and Christians together with Jews succeed in developing a new culture of mutual respect and estimation can the situation of religions in European societies change.

Conclusions If we look back at the two ways to understand missionary work, which I have tried to explain in this chapter, my conclusion is the following. The church will always be obliged to bear witness at all times and to all people to the God who is revealed as love in Jesus Christ. Therefore, the church will always carry out missionary work in an implicit sense. This sense does not only imply establishing the kingdom of God with all people who are willing to help. Moreover, the church will also bear witness to how much all this commitment is founded in God’s grace which has been incarnated in Jesus Christ. Hence, it is not enough for the church to do social work, but the church will always have to proclaim explicitly God’s love in Jesus Christ.

Reconsidering the concept of mission 241 At the same time, the church should be extremely reluctant to invite Muslims or even Jews to conversion. The above-mentioned decision of the Catholic Church not to support any institutional missionary work among Jews might be helpful also as regards Muslims. This does not mean that it is not possible in individual cases for Jews or Muslims to become part of the church by God’s will – just as it might also be possible for Christians to be invited by God to Islam or Judaism. I was very much impressed by a good friend of mine who converted from the Catholic faith to Islam as a young man. Today, he is an important Muslim theologian and he says that he has never loved the church as much as he does now. For me, he is an example of a redeemed convert who did not get his new home at the expense of his old one, but who succeeded in establishing a reconciled integration of both sides. His love for Jesus Christ and the church will be shown today in the way he builds bridges between both religions through his theology and his personal witness. He does not have multiple religious identities, but in the Muslim country in which he lives and teaches, he does much more for the recognition of Christianity and the church than many missionaries. Hence, the primary goal of mission with regard to Islam can sometimes be not to persuade Muslims to get baptized, but to encourage them to change the relationship of Islam to the world and to Christianity. Eschatologically speaking, there is not only the possibility that one faith proves to be true and the others misleading. Rather, it is also possible that different forms of faith can be connected in a complementary way and are permanently referring to each other. Therefore, the eschatological encounter with Jesus Christ could also be an encounter with the Jewish Messiah, so that it has a stronger political dimension than Christians usually expect. Once one has considered this possibility, it also seems possible to conceive the Second Coming of Jesus Christ not in contradiction to the coming of the Mahdi. Maybe here we can also see unrealized hopes of fulfilment from Muslim tradition, which can be inspiring for Christian hopes. Some of my Iranian colleagues have told me about a very nice quote by Alvin Plantinga in this context. He is supposed to have said in Iran: “If Jesus Christ comes again and then the Mahdi comes along and wants to join him in his work for comprehensive justice, I would know no reason why Jesus should refuse that.” Despite all sympathy for the openness that is emerging here, I  want to conclude with a reminder that there are still many unresolved problems for Muslim–Christian encounters. Therefore, it continues to be important to look for possibilities of appreciating differences even where it initially hurts and cannot yet be translated into a reconciled difference. The vision of a mutual recognition of both religions that has been outlined here is not more than a possibility of thinking. This possibility has to be turned into concrete hope through dialogical work. In some sense, this kind of dialogical work is not so far away from the understanding of missionary work which I tried to defend here. If we follow this line of thinking in relation to the main topic

242  Klaus von Stosch of this book, it might become clear that a religious identity which is characterized through missionary work and universal truth-claims can be coherent with the appreciation of some religious diversity.

Notes 1 In the first two sections of this chapter, I  want to repeat some insights which I developed already in: Klaus von Stosch, “Missionarisch Kirche sein? Eine Verhältnisbestimmung im Blick auf den Islam,” Lebendiges Zeugnis 67 (2012). But during the fascinating process of discussing this chapter my thought changed a lot. 2 See ibid., 47; Arnd Bünker, “Welche Mission(en)? Welche Missionswissenschaft(en)?” in Mission im Kontext Europas. Interdisziplinäre Beiträge zu einem zeitgemäßen Missionsverständnis, eds. Martin Stowasser and Franz Helm (Wien: V&R unipress, 2011), 35. 3 Franz Gmainer-Pranzl, “Das Reich Gottes und seine Gerechtigkeit als zentrale Dimension der Mission: Eine responsiv-theologische Perspektive,” in Mission im Kontext Europas. Interdisziplinare Beiträge zu einem zeitgemäßen Missionsverständnis, eds. Martin Stowasser and Franz Helm (Wien: V&R unipress, 2011), 115f. 4 Some of my thoughts here at the end of this section and then also in sections 3 and 4 can already be found in: Klaus von Stosch, “Mission unter Muslimen? Eine Positionsbestimmung aus katholischer Sicht,” in Verlorene Strahlkraft: Welches Glaubenszeugnis heute gefragt ist, eds. Thomas Marschler and Klaus von Stosch (Freiburg, Basel, Wien: Herder, 2018). 5 Cf. Thomas Pröpper, Erlösungsglaube und Freiheitsgeschichte: Eine Skizze zur Soteriologie, 2nd ed. (München: Kösel, 1988), 194–98. 6 It is true that love of a necessary being to a contingent being is also contingent in the respect that it is dependent on the existence of the contingent being. But it cannot fail and it is not dependent on any other condition than the mere existence of the contingent being. That is why I  think that it makes sense to call it unconditional. My point is that God will always love creation because God’s nature is pure love and is determined to love humans for all times. Such an unconditional love is not possible for mere humans. Human love can only symbolize or represent unconditional love. Humans can only start to perform it, but will still need eschatological fulfillment and reference to God’s unconditional love to be understandable. 7 Gmainer-Pranzl, “Reich Gottes“, 117. 8 See ibid., 121–25. 9 See Henning Wrogemann, “Was ist Mission? Einige Beobachtungen zu globalen Trends und lokalen Herausforderungen,” Praxis Gemeindepädagogik 64 (2011): 40. 10 Ibid. 11 Cf. ibid., 41f. See also Henning Wrogemann, Den Glanz widerspiegeln: Vom Sinn der christlichen Mission, ihren Kraftquellen und Ausdrucksgestalten (Frankfurt a.M.: Lembeck, 2009). 12 Hermann Schalück, “Verstehen und verstanden werden: Mission im Zeichen von Interkulturalität, Pluralismus und Dialog,” HerKorr Spezial 2 (2010): 12. 13 Cf. John Cottingham, “The epistemic implications of religious diversity,” in this volume. 14 Cf. Peter Jonkers, “How to break the ill-fated bond between religious truth and violence,” in this volume, who is right in arguing that “the attitude of epistemic

Reconsidering the concept of mission 243 humility is a very effective means to break the ill-fated bond between religious truth and violence”. 15 Christiane Tietz, “Dialogkonzepte in der Komparativen Theologie,” in Komparative Theologie: Interreligiöse Vergleiche als Weg der Religionstheologie, eds. Reinhold Bernhardt and Klaus von Stosch (Zürich: TVZ, 2009), 326. 16 See Hans Waldenfels, “Dialog und Mission  – ein Widerspruch?” ZMR 94 (2010). 17 See Catherine Cornille, The Im-possibility of Interreligious Dialogue (New York: Crossroad, 2008), 71f. 18 See Paul Tillich, “Theologische Grundlagen der Mission,” in Offenbarung und Glaube: Schriften zur Theologie II, ed. Renate Albrecht. Paul Tillich: Gesammelte Werke VIII (Stuttgart: de Gruyter, 1970), 280. 19 Catherine Cornille, “Das Zeugnis und seine Bedeutung im interreligiösen Dialog,” Concilium (D) 47 (2011): 56f. 20 It is true that Christians know already that the Messiah is Jesus, which is something that Jews still have to learn. But, on the other hand, there are so many aspects of Christ that are neglected in Christianity that I do not see any reason for the claim of an epistemic superiority here. For example, Christians will have to understand the political dimensions of their hopes and how they are connected with Israel and how ambiguity can be part of revelation and many other things. Cf. for some reflections on the question what Christians can learn from Jews Klaus von Stosch, Offenbarung (Paderborn: UTB, 2010), 120–22. 21 I borrow this expression from Daniel Madigan. 22 This is something which can also be done by Jews within the church, i.e., by people who were called Jewish Christians in ancient times. That is why it makes sense to invite Jews who want to convert to Christianity to stay in some connection to their Jewish roots or even to stay observant to the Torah. I will develop this point a bit more in conversation with Gavin D’Costa in the next section. 23 I fully agree here with the Vatican reflections on the Catholic–Jewish relations from 2015: “In concrete terms this means that the Catholic Church neither conducts nor supports any specific institutional mission work directed towards Jews. While there is a principled rejection of an institutional Jewish mission, Christians are nonetheless called to bear witness to their faith in Jesus Christ also to Jews, although they should do so in a humble and sensitive manner, acknowledging that Jews are bearers of God’s Word, and particularly in view of the great tragedy of the Shoah”; “ ‘The Gifts and the Calling of God are Irrevocable’ (Rom 11:29): A  Reflection on Theological Questions Pertaining to Catholic–Jewish Relations on the Occasion of the 50th Anniversary of ‘Nostra Aetate’ (No. 4),” Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews, accessed 18 December 2018, www.vatican.va/roman_curia/pontifical_councils/chrstuni/relations-jews-docs/ rc_pc_chrstuni_doc_20151210_ebraismo-nostra-aetate_en.html. 24 See Joseph Ratzinger/Benedikt XVI., “Gnade und Berufung ohne Reue,” IkaZ 47 (2018). In this article the Pope Emeritus makes clear that  – according to Paul’s teaching in Rom 11:26 – all Israel will be saved, not only those Jews who converted to Christianity. Hence, he opens a door for salvation without explicit acknowledgement of Christ in this life. In his last article, he emphasizes now that missionary work towards Judaism has to be stopped. Cf. Joseph Ratzinger/Benedikt XVI., “Nicht Mission, sondern Dialog,” HerKorr 72 (2018): 14: “Deswegen ist der Missionsauftrag universal – mit einer Ausnahme: Eine Mission der Juden war einfach deshalb nicht vorgesehen und nicht nötig, weil sie allein unter allen Völkern den ‚unbekannten Gott‘ kannten. Für Israel galt und gilt daher nicht Mission, sondern der Dialog”.

244  Klaus von Stosch 25 See Mouhanad Khorchide and Klaus von Stosch, Der andere Prophet: Jesus im Koran (Freiburg: Herder, 2018), 136–41. 26 Cf. Ibid., 176–226. 27 Cf. Ibid., 147–56. 28 See Ibid. and Klaus von Stosch, Herausforderung Islam. Christliche Annäherungen, 3rd ed. (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2019); all arguments of my chapter here are based on the insights of these two books. 29 It is clear that many verses of the Qur’an seem to imply something else. But I think that it can be shown that the Qur’anic interventions are always directed against an understanding of Christianity which has to be challenged not only from a Muslim point of view, but also from the perspective of the magisterium today. However, I  cannot prove this point in this short chapter and I  have to point to my above-mentioned books again. 30 This is not only obvious in Germany and some other Western countries. I also encounter these new tendencies at universities in Iran, Tunisia and other Muslim countries. Cf. as a recent example the forthcoming article of Vahid Mahdavi Mehr, “Can there be an Islamic Comparative Theology?” in Handbook of Comparative Theology, ed. Pim Valkenberg (Leiden: Brill, forthcoming). 31 See Gavin D’Costa, “God’s Irrevocable Covenant to His People. Towards a Tentative Minimalist Catholic Zionism,” in Theology of Religions  – RomanCatholic perspectives. (Washington DC: The Catholic University of America Press, forthcoming). 32 Please note that I  only argue for a possibility concerning Islam (“perhaps”!), whereas there is strong evidence for this concerning Judaism because the Jewish heritage is part of Christian identity. Hence, I do not want to neglect the difference regarding the relation of Christianity towards Judaism and towards Islam. I just suggest leaving the possibility open that Islam might have a similar function for the church as Judaism. 33 Just to be clear: As a Catholic I believe that all normative teachings of the church are rational and have to be respected, and that the Catholic Church actually is the body of Christ. But if you consider the reaction of some bishops to child abuse, for example, it becomes clear that the loyalty to Christ and to the Catholic Church sometimes makes it necessary to criticize the Church. Moreover, there are situations in the history of the Church where the teaching of the Church is not helpful for understanding Christ. For example, the Qur’anic critique of the Christological theory that Jesus had no need to eat something (Q 5:75) is a sound critique of a kind of Christology which was mainstream in the time of the early Church, cf. Khorchide and von Stosch, Prophet, 168f. Hence, this is an example how Muslims can help Christians to see a truth which is not part of their conscience.

Bibliography Bünker, Arnd. “Welche Mission(en)? Welche Missionswissenschaft(en)?” In Mission im Kontext Europas: Interdisziplinäre Beiträge zu einem zeitgemäßen Missionsverständnis, edited by Martin Stowasser, and Franz Helm, 33–55. Wien: V&R unipress, 2011. Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews. “ ‘The Gifts and the Calling of God are Irrevocable’ (Rom 11:29): A  Reflection on Theological Questions Pertaining to Catholic  – Jewish Relations on the Occasion of the 50th Anniversary of ‘Nostra Aetate’ (No. 4).” Accessed 18 December  2018. www.

Reconsidering the concept of mission 245 vatican.va/roman_curia/pontifical_councils/chrstuni/relations-jews-docs/ rc_pc_chrstuni_doc_20151210_ebraismo-nostra-aetate_en.html. Cornille, Catherine. The Im-possibility of Interreligious Dialogue. New York: Crossroad, 2008. Cornille, Catherine. “Das Zeugnis und seine Bedeutung im interreligiösen Dialog.” Concilium (D) 47 (2011): 49–58. D’Costa, Gavin. “God’s Irrevocable Covenant to His People. Towards a Tentative Minimalist Catholic Zionism.” In Theology of Religions – Roman-Catholic Perspectives, Washington DC: The Catholic University of America Press, forthcoming. Gmainer-Pranzl, Franz. “Das Reich Gottes und seine Gerechtigkeit als zentrale Dimension der Mission: Eine responsiv-theologische Perspektive.” In Mission im Kontext Europas. Interdisziplinare Beiträge zu einem zeitgemäßen Missionsverständnis, edited by Martin Stowasser, and Franz Helm, 115–30. Wien: V&R unipress, 2011. Khorchide, Mouhanad, and Klaus von Stosch. Der andere Prophet: Jesus im Koran. Freiburg: Herder, 2018. Mahdavi Mehr, Vahid. “Can There be an Islamic Comparative Theology?” In Handbook of Comparative Theology, edited by Pim Valkenberg. Leiden: Brill, forthcoming. Pröpper, Thomas. Erlösungsglaube und Freiheitsgeschichte: Eine Skizze zur Soteriologie. 2nd ed. München: Kösel, 1988. Ratzinger, Joseph/Benedikt XVI. “Gnade und Berufung ohne Reue.” IkaZ 47 (2018): 387–406. Ratzinger, Joseph/Benedikt XVI. “Nicht Mission, sondern Dialog.” HerKorr 72 (2018): 13–14. Schalück, Hermann. “Verstehen und verstanden werden: Mission im Zeichen von Interkulturalität, Pluralismus und Dialog.” HerKorr Spezial 2 (2010): 9–13. Stosch, Klaus von. Offenbarung. Paderborn: UTB, 2010. Stosch, Klaus von. “Missionarisch Kirche sein? Eine Verhältnisbestimmung im Blick auf den Islam.” Lebendiges Zeugnis 67 (2012): 45–53. Stosch, Klaus von. “Mission unter Muslimen? Eine Positionsbestimmung aus katholischer Sicht.” In Verlorene Strahlkraft: Welches Glaubenszeugnis heute gefragt ist, edited by Thomas Marschler, and Klaus von Stosch, 69–83. FreiburgBasel-Wien: Herder, 2018. Stosch, Klaus von. Herausforderung Islam: Christliche Annäherungen. 3rd ed. Paderborn: Schöningh, 2019. Tietz, Christiane. “Dialogkonzepte in der Komparativen Theologie.” In Komparative Theologie: Interreligiöse Vergleiche als Weg der Religionstheologie, edited by Reinhold Bernhardt, and Klaus von Stosch, 315–38. Zürich: TVZ, 2009. Tillich, Paul. “Theologische Grundlagen der Mission.” In Offenbarung und Glaube. Schriften zur Theologie II, edited by Renate Albrecht. Paul Tillich: Gesammelte Werke VIII, 276–84. Stuttgart: De Gruyter, 1970. Waldenfels, Hans. “Dialog und Mission  – ein Widerspruch?” ZMR 94 (2010): 65–73. Wrogemann, Henning. Den Glanz widerspiegeln: Vom Sinn der christlichen Mission, ihren Kraftquellen und Ausdrucksgestalten. Frankfurt a. M.: Lembeck, 2009. Wrogemann, Henning. “Was ist Mission? Einige Beobachtungen zu globalen Trends und lokalen Herausforderungen.” Praxis Gemeindepädagogik 64 (2011): 38–42.

14 How to break the ill-fated bond between religious truth and violence Peter Jonkers

Introduction Our age is marked by a growing diversity in various socio-cultural fields: ethnic, moral, linguistic, religious, etc. This development is not something purely theoretical, but has a major impact on the lives of individuals and societies, because ethnicity, substantial moral values, language and, last but not least, religion are inherent aspects of people’s socio-cultural identities. Especially because this growing diversity goes hand in hand with processes of individualization, resulting in the gradual evaporation of many traditional “identity-marking organizations”, like churches and their affiliated organizations, trade-unions, political parties, cultural organizations, etc., people’s socio-cultural identity has lost its stability, thus affecting their basic sense of belonging. This combination of growing socio-cultural diversity, individualization, and the loss of many stable reference-points defines the background, against which religious diversity needs to be situated.1 It has to be noted that socio-cultural  – including religious  – identity is not by itself conflictual, since there are numerous examples of peaceful co-existence of heterogeneous ethnic, linguistic and religious groups. Yet, because socio-cultural diversity often goes hand in hand with inequalities of all kinds, for instance, between the ethnic majority and minorities, the dominant or even official religion or language and the many local religions and languages, and since these inequalities have been exacerbated by the impact of economic globalization, social tensions and conflicts can easily arise. Depending on whether people are winners or losers in these developments, their reactions to socio-cultural diversity go into two opposite directions: indifference towards the socio-cultural other versus an exclusivist definition of socio-cultural identity, political liberalism versus an oppressive law and order policy.2 Although socio-cultural diversity has a lot of common characteristics with religious diversity, I nevertheless think that religious identity (often in combination with substantial moral values) presents a specific case, which deserves closer examination. Generally speaking, people’s deep attachment to most expressions of their socio-cultural identity, such as language or

Bond between religious truth and violence 247 ethnicity, rests on psychological rather than on rational grounds: people are not attached to their native language or ethnicity because it would be better than other ones, but simply because it is ‘theirs’, because they are familiar with it. Hence, no one seriously wants to upgrade her native language, let alone her ethnicity to the (one and only) “true” one. However, it seems that people’s attachment to religion is different in this respect. Most religions rest on the revelation of a divine, infallibly true message to those who are open to receive it. Precisely because the truth of this message is transcendently guaranteed and justified, it can easily incite faithful to adopt an attitude of superiority and exclusivism with regard to other religions or secular worldviews. In extreme situations, this attitude gives faithful the motivational potential to enforce their religious truth upon the infidels or the heretics, and they underpin their behaviour rationally by arguing that it is obviously for the latter’s own salvation. In sum, religious exclusivism can spur on to all kinds of religious violence. There is abundant empirical evidence of faithful around the world who make themselves guilty of these practices, justifying them by referring to a superior and exclusive idea of religious truth. In their view, the one and only true religion cannot permit the existence of heresy, atheism and paganism next to it, so that there is no other option than to eradicate it.3 From a religious perspective, there are good reasons to argue that religious violence is a non-intended perversion of religion. Yet, at the same time one has to admit that the frequency, and intensity with which ordinary faithful and religious leaders have taken recourse, both in the past and in our times, to violence and have justified it, gives ample indications to suspect that there are reasons internal to the religious impulse itself that make it possible that religion becomes violent or at least militantly intolerant towards the adherents of other faiths.4 In the final chapter of this book, Victoria S. Harrison gives an extensive analysis of the path that can lead from religious fundamentalism to violence, especially when a religion employs an apocalyptic language to justify acts of violence, as is typically the case among some fundamentalist Protestant movements in the United States.5 I  want to complement her contemporary example by a notorious and very influential historical one, viz. Augustine’s letter to Vincentius (408 A.D.). Although there are fundamental differences between the religious and societal situations then and now, the arguments that are used to justify violence when religious truth is at stake are quite similar. In the second chapter of this letter, Saint Augustine writes the following: You think that no one ought to be forced into righteousness, though you read that the head of the household said to his servants, Whomever you find, force them to come in (Lk 14:23), though you read that he who was first Saul and afterwards Paul was forced to come to know and to hold on onto the truth by the great violence of Christ who compelled him, unless you perhaps think that money or any possession is dearer to

248  Peter Jonkers human beings than this light that we perceive by these eyes. Laid low by the voice from heaven, he did not recover this light that he lost suddenly, except when he was incorporated into the holy Church. And you think that one should employ no force upon a man in order that he might be set free from the harmfulness of error, though you see that God himself, than whom no one loves us more to our benefit, does this in the most obvious examples and though you hear Christ saying, No one comes to me unless the Father has drawn him (Jn 6:44). This takes place in the hearts of all who turn to him out of fear of God’s wrath. And you know that at times a thief scatters grain to lead cattle away and that a shepherd at times calls wandering cattle back to the herd with a whip.6 My reasons for quoting this text are not only that it was written by the most prominent Father of the Church, who has shaped Christian faith in a fundamental way, but also the fact that it has been used, a few centuries later, as a justification for an extreme outburst of religious violence, viz. the crusades. The argumentative force of the text lies in that human salvation is made dependent on faith in a truth, which is founded in God, the ultimate source of all truth and salvation, mediated by Christ and passed down by the holy Church. This follows from Augustine’s conviction that only those who belong to the holy Church can know the truth and, hence can be saved. Moreover, there is no middle way between the salvific nature of eternal truth and the utter harmfulness of error. This radical, apocalyptic opposition between eternal salvation and total damnation is the ultimate justification for forcing people into the truth of faith, if need be by means of violence. All this manifests Augustine’s exclusivist attitude towards other faiths. Augustine underpins the use of violence in situations like these by quoting several passages from the most authoritative source of divine truth, the Bible: first, he refers to the parable of the head of the household, who tells his servants to force unwilling people to come into his house; second, he recounts the story of the conversion of Paul, who was struck by blindness through the great violence of Christ, and who did not recover until he was incorporated into the holy Church; third he quotes a saying from the Gospel of John that God “draws” people to him. In addition, he makes a comparison between God’s violent way to force wandering people to righteousness and a shepherd’s use of the whip to call wandering sheep back to the herd. The aim of all this is to show that God’s only reason to use violence against humans is that it is in their own benefit, especially in the apocalyptic situation of a radical and exclusive choice between truth and error, righteousness and evil. Thus Augustine gives an absolute, irrefutable justification to the use of violence in the name of God, which bears striking similarities with the contemporary examples that Victoria S. Harrison analyzed in her chapter: the interpretation of a given time as apocalyptic, requiring a radical, exclusive choice, the direct link between belonging to the one and only true

Bond between religious truth and violence 249 Church and the possibility of eternal salvation, and the claim that the use of violence is justified for the sake of this absolute goal. Against this background it is timely to examine the ill-fated bond between religion and violence, and ask how this bond can be broken. I will thereby focus on the link between religious truth and exclusivism, because it plays such a crucial role in the justification of religious violence. In the following section, I will start with examining the suggestion of Rawls, Habermas, and many other liberal thinkers that religions should drop their truth-claims when entering the public sphere, and show that such a demand is unacceptable on philosophical and religious grounds. In the section thereafter, the question will be discussed if and how religions can interpret their truthclaims in such a way that they don’t lead to exclusivism and violence. In this section, I  will explore the suggestion that Harrison makes in her chapter that a criticism of beliefs held by religious extremists can be more effective if it is launched from the perspective of a worldview with which they share a sufficient number of common beliefs, in other words by interpreting religious violence primarily as a theological problem. In order to do so, I will concentrate on the practice of scriptural reasoning and the idea of religious hospitality, resulting in a plea for “epistemic humility” as an intellectual and practical virtue.

Can religions dispense with their truth-claims? Because religious truth-claims are incompatible with the pluralist and deliberative character of modern democracies, and especially because these claims can easily lead to religiously inspired violence, prominent advocates of political liberalism, such as Habermas and Rawls, argue that we would be better off without the notion of religious truth in the public sphere. Habermas distances himself from the idea that a transcendent, metaphysical concept of truth could serve as a pre-political normativity of liberal democracies, because it is by definition authoritarian and contradicts pluralism. Instead, when religions enter the public sphere, they need to translate their teachings into a generally accessible language of reason, so that they can be introduced on an equal footing with secular doctrines into the forming of public opinion, thus contributing to an unforced consensus about the core values of liberal democracies.7 Rawls too refuses to “upgrade” the reasonableness of (religious or secular) “comprehensive doctrines” to a transcendent idea of truth, since this would give a preferential treatment to one comprehensive doctrine (the true one) over all others, and thus inevitably lead to authoritarianism and the exclusion of pluralism. Instead, he proposes “that in public reason comprehensive doctrines of truth or right be replaced by an idea of the politically reasonable addressed to citizens as citizens”.8 Also in this case, the distinction between reasonableness and truth is inspired by the fact that the former concept accepts that all people have very good reasons to believe in different comprehensive doctrines, and affirm diverging ideas

250  Peter Jonkers about truth and goodness. Hence, fundamental political questions cannot be decided by the idea of truth, but only by reasons that might be shared by all citizens as free and equal. Although Habermas and Rawls are not of the opinion that religious truth-claims necessarily lead to violence, it is obvious that their critique of religious truth is inspired by the fear that this might happen, and more in general that these truth-claims endanger the pluralist character of liberal democracies. In my view, Habermas’ and Rawls’ critique of religious truth in the public sphere is problematic on two grounds. From a religious perspective, the idea that religions should give up their idea of truth, and translate their doctrines, when entering the public debate, into the generally accessible language of public reason confronts them with an unfair and even impossible demand. First, it puts an essentially heavier burden on religious people than on secular ones, since the requirement of such a translation only concerns the convictions of the former, not those of the latter. Admittedly, Habermas introduces the idea of a mutual learning process of religious and secular citizens,9 and Rawls limits the “proviso” of translation to judges passing judgements, members of government and candidates for public offices,10 but this does not change the fact that the burden put on religious people is a heavier one.11 Second, one can ask whether such a translation is even possible: can the thick language of religious truth be translated into the thin language of public reason? And is this thin language indeed the only common ground and the sole arbitrator to reach overlapping consensus in a pluralist society, or is it rather a thick secular language in disguise?12 Furthermore, the idea of religious truth is so closely connected with divine revelation and a sacred tradition that committed faithful perceive the requirement to translate it in the language of public reason as a betrayal of everything they stand for and as undermining the missionary vocation of their church,13 while religious leaders see it as an illegitimate intrusion upon their authority. Hence, it is no wonder that most religions are unwilling to comply with Habermas’ idea of translating essential religious doctrines into a secular language or with Rawls’ idea of the proviso. From a philosophical perspective, the problem of Habermas’ and Rawls’ proposal is that it presupposes that the universe of discourse, within which the pros and cons of religious ideas and values are discussed, is a homogeneous one: in their view, reason and reasonableness, serve indeed as a neutral and universal point of reference in the public sphere, thus offering a common ground to individual religions and secular worldviews. Although both authors criticize the reductionism of the Enlightenment reason, because it negates the specific character of religion and privileges secularism, they acknowledge that they are tributary to the Kantian idea of reason, especially its formal and universalizing character, and interpret the nature of the public debate about these issues from this perspective. In a similar Kantian vein, they think that the rational essence of religions can be separated from their specific doctrines, ethical norms, and ritual practices. According to this

Bond between religious truth and violence 251 approach, reasonableness as the common ground for the debates about the role of religious and secular values in the public sphere is the most important condition for an “overlapping consensus” between the participants in these debates. However, a closer look at the nature of today’s religious pluralism and in particular at the Babel-like confusion, in which most debates between different religions and secular worldviews are ending, shows that the public domain is becoming increasingly heterogeneous.14 As will be developed in more detail in the next section, one of the most unsettling consequences of this development is that reason is not accepted anymore as a universal “Esperanto”, into which all singular religious languages can be translated without any substantial loss of meaning. As regards Habermas, this problem becomes especially manifest when one realizes his complete silence regarding non-Jewish-Christian religions in his analysis of religious pluralism. The above shows that it is impossible for religions to dispense with their truth-claims, because living in the light of a divinely revealed truth is a crucial internal element of religious doctrines, since it is essential for justifying their claim to human salvation, and serves as a legitimation for sharing their message with the whole world. Moreover, requiring religions to give up their truth-claims in the public sphere is unfair, because such a requirement erroneously presupposes the universal validity of a typically secular idea of rationality and a formal idea of truth, and the idea that a supposedly rational core, common to all religions, can be separated from religion as a specific, encompassing way of life.

Taking religious truth-claims seriously while avoiding violence Having shown that religions cannot dispense with their idea of truth, the question is whether it is possible to develop a perspective that respects religious truth-claims, while at the same time avoiding that these claims become exclusivist and a justification for the recourse to violence. In this section, I will examine two possible answers to this question. Scriptural reasoning A first, practical answer to the above question is scriptural reasoning. It is a positive, religious engagement between the readers of the sacred scriptures of different religious traditions, in particular Jewish, Christian, and Muslim. The practical character of scriptural reasoning lies in that it refrains from theorizing its own bases, but consists of bringing together faithful of different religions to meditate and discuss each other’s sacred texts.15 In contrast to liberal political philosophy, scriptural reasoning does not require its participants to give up the sacredness or the truth of their scriptures or to translate them into the language of secular reason.16 Instead, participants have

252  Peter Jonkers to “acknowledge the sacredness of the others’ scriptures to them (without having to acknowledge its authority for oneself)”, as well as acknowledge that “they do not exclusively own their scriptures – they are not experts on its final meaning”.17 This means, first, that all participants recognize that the Torah, the Bible, and the Qur’an are sacred for Jews, Christians, and Muslims respectively, and have to be respected as such, even though these scriptures do not have the same sacred status and, hence, not the same authority for the members of other religious communities. Respecting the sacredness of these scriptures is essential because they are constitutive for the identity of a religious community. However, recognizing the sacredness of sacred scriptures does not give (the leaders of) a religious community the right to claim an exclusive ownership of (the interpretation of) these sacred scriptures, so that other people would a priori be refused interpretative access to it. Such an attitude would ossify sacred scriptures, and make scriptural reasoning, just like interreligious dialogue as such pointless. From the perspective of Christian theology, this second presupposition of scriptural reasoning comes down to the principle of eschatological restriction or reservation, according to which no human can lay hold of the final meaning of sacred scriptures or any other revelation of the divine.18 Sacred scriptures are at the heart of each religious tradition’s identity, because they are formative for understanding God and God’s purposes, for prayer, worship and liturgy, for normative teaching, for imagination and ethos, etc. Sacred scriptures contain also long chains of reasoning, argumentation and conclusions, where communal identities are expressed at a profound level. At a theoretical level, these identities constitute the orthodoxy of a religious tradition. Therefore, directly or indirectly, sacred scriptures are expressions of essential doctrinal, ritual and moral truth-claims. Because it takes these truth-claims seriously, scriptural reasoning prevents sacred scriptures and the truth-claims built on them from being treated as contingent social constructions. In order to show how these chains of deep reasoning and their related truth-claims can effectively orientate the lives of people they have to be made public, so that others may learn to understand them and discover why particular trains of reasoning are reasonings, and why they are attractive or problematic.19 Scriptural reasoning contributes to this goal by bringing together the interpretation of sacred scriptures, the practices of philosophical and theological reasoning, and “public issue” questions, thereby showing how the truth-claims of a religious tradition concerning all kinds of topical issues are related to (a reasonable interpretation of) its sacred scriptures.20 The purpose of making religious reasonings and truth-claims public is that others can in principle understand these reasonings and truths, although they do not have to agree with them. In a negative way, scriptural reasoning shows how each of these scriptures can be used to frame the identity and the truth-claims of a tradition in an exclusivist way, that is by opposing them to

Bond between religious truth and violence 253 other identities and truths, thus legitimatizing violence, claiming superiority, pronouncing blanket condemnations, etc.21 On the positive side however, scriptural reasoning shows how its participants can avoid this pitfall, namely by acknowledging the sacredness of these scriptures to the members of each tradition, but without requiring them to acknowledge their authority to themselves.22 In other words, scriptural reasoning enables religious truth-claims to be recognized by people who do not belong to this specific tradition, but without requiring them to accept any claim for exclusive recognition. The result of this approach is a polyphonic and non-exclusivist discourse, which cannot be reduced to an authoritarian monologue of one tradition, distorting all the other ones. Hence, scriptural reasoning is able to understand religious truth-claims in their own right. As Adams has shown, scriptural reasoning offers a promising alternative to the views of Habermas and Rawls on the need to translate religious truthclaims into the language of public reason.23 As noted above, all participants in scriptural reasoning acknowledge the sacredness of the others’ scriptures to them without necessarily acknowledging its authority for themselves. This dissociation of sacredness and authority is puzzling for Habermas and Rawls; they stress, instead, that these two characteristics of religious scriptures are two sides of the same coin, and infer from this the intrinsically authoritarian and exclusivist character of religious truth-claims. Since this authoritarianism leaves no room for tolerable disagreement, recognizing the sacred character of these scriptures and the truth-claims that follow from them automatically leads, in the opinion of these two authors, to exclusivism and the justification of religious violence, which are at odds with the liberal character of modern democracies. How, then, can scriptural reasoning realize the recognition of the sacred character of religious scriptures, while avoiding that this recognition becomes exclusive and a justification for religious violence? The answer is that it only coordinates discussions between members of different traditions without requiring a commitment to a universal, rational sphere that transcends those traditions. Participants engage in scriptural reasoning only as members of a particular tradition, and acknowledge no authority above that of their own tradition than the authority of the divine mystery. But by doing so, they acknowledge that this mystery cannot be circumscribed by their tradition, but is the non-circumscribable possibility of its very existence.24 Moreover, in contrast to the neutral space of secular reason, scriptural reasoning prepares a shared space, which means that the members of religious traditions accept the claim that the other belongs there without stating further conditions as to the nature of their reasonings. This shared space is the result of the fact that all religions are dealing with the same existential issues, although their answers to them differ widely. In this context, it is also important to note that the fact that scriptural reasoning is aimed at a shared space by making the reasonings of religious traditions public, does not mean that it strives after consensus, but rather after friendship, that is,

254  Peter Jonkers the recognition of the sacred nature of each other’s scriptures and a shared desire to study them. A final reason why scriptural reasoning offers a promising alternative to the requirement to translate religious insights into secular rationality is that it does not make a strong contrast between argumentation and narrative. Again, this approach is contrary to that of Habermas and Rawls, who focus on the argumentative value of non-public, religious reason and neglect the narrative nature of sacred scriptures. Yet, because scriptural reasoning brings together the interpretation of sacred scriptures, the practices of philosophical and theological reasoning and their connected truth-claims, and “public issue” questions, there is argumentation at every stage of it. This is so because scriptural reasoning is an expression of religious wisdom, which is a unity of faith and reason, and is practised in a shared, not in a neutral, space. In other words, through its origin in religious wisdom, scriptural reasoning manifests a broader kind of reasonableness and truth than scientific reason and the reductionist, secularist idea of truth that results from it, and is therefore able to include argumentation and narration.25 In sum, “the crucial feature of scriptural reasoning . . . is that it does not require participants to bracket or suspend or conceal their traditional identities for the purpose of conversation and argumentation”,26 as secular reason does. Instead, by making deep religious reasonings public, scriptural reasoning enables the participants to see the truth embedded in their own and others’ traditions, while at the same time avoiding that this truth becomes exclusivist and can serve as a justification for religious violence. Religious hospitality Another way to break the ill-fated bond between truth-claims and violence is offered by the idea of religious hospitality. In order to develop it, I build on Paul Ricoeur’s theory of translation, resulting in his proposal of linguistic hospitality, and apply it to the domain of religious diversity.27 As will become clear below, religious hospitality manages to avoid, just like scriptural reasoning, the homogenizing tendency of Enlightenment rationality. It is also critical of the rather naive expectation that interreligious dialogue would result in harmony between the religions and a fusion of horizons. Instead, religious hospitality accepts the heterogeneity of religions as irreducible, but is at the same time also convinced that communicating with other religions about their most precious truth-claims is not only possible, but also enriching for all participants. In order to understand the intellectual and ethical challenges and opportunities of religious hospitality it is helpful to start with comparing the communication between adherents of different faiths with that between speakers of different languages. My main reasons for taking this detour are, first, that empirical research shows that language and religion, including substantial (moral) values, are the most important determinants for socio-cultural

Bond between religious truth and violence 255 identity. Second, language and religion are characterized by an irreducible heterogeneity: there are only individual languages and no universal language that everyone masters as her mother tongue, and in a similar vein there are only individual religions (and secular worldviews) and no universal, natural religion, of which all individual religions would only be particular manifestations. In other words, languages, just like religions are fundamentally heterogeneous symbolic systems. Third, and in spite of the previous point, communication between people who speak different languages, just like between adherents of different religions or worldviews is widespread, and so is the awareness of the challenges and opportunities of communicating with the linguistic and the religious other.28 Yet, fourth, and paradoxically, “inter-linguistic” communication is far less conflictual than interreligious communication. When communicating with speakers of a different language, people simply try to make the best of it, taking the gap that separates them from the speakers of other languages for granted. By contrast, in the case of interreligious communication, people are far more tempted to defend their religious convictions as true and even impose them upon others. As already argued in the introduction of this chapter, the reason for this is precisely the different role that truth-claims play in these two cases: in contrast to language, people are not only attached to their religion because they are familiar with it and because it is constitutive for their socio-cultural identity, but they also think that they have good reasons to claim the truth of their religion against other religions. Especially when these truth-claims become exclusivist, this can lead to a militantly intolerant attitude towards the religious other and in extreme cases even to violence against the religious other. In order to make communication possible in a context of linguistic heterogeneity, in other words in a world “after Babel”, translation is crucial, since we have no immediate access to the linguistic other. This is not only true for translation in a narrow sense (i.e., translating the language of the other), but also for translation in a broad sense (i.e., when we want to understand the ideas and practices of the other), since we have no immediate access to these either, even if she speaks the same language as ours. In other words, in a world after Babel, to understand is to translate.29 Yet, the opportunities of translation go far beyond their obvious utility in all kinds of ordinary circumstances; they enable us to avoid the bitter fate of self-enclosure in a monologue and solipsism. Last but not least, translation is not only necessary for the understanding of the other, but also for understanding ourselves, since what is our own has to be learned just as much as what is foreign.30 Therefore, in order to understand our own language and ourselves we have to take the detour of (the language) of the other. Ricoeur summarizes the opportunities and challenges of translating the linguistic other with the catchword “linguistic hospitality”: it carries the double duty “to expropriate oneself from oneself as one appropriates the other to oneself”.31 By fulfilling this duty, linguistic hospitality offers a

256  Peter Jonkers pragmatic way out of the ruinous alternative of complete untranslatability or incommensurability versus perfect translatability or homogeneity. However, replacing this alternative by the complex dialectic of expropriation and appropriation also implies that translation is always a risky business, since one has to serve two masters: one’s own mother tongue and the foreign language. Being bound by conflicting loyalties inevitably means that translation is situated somewhere between faithfulness and betrayal.32 When translating, people try to salvage meaning. Therefore, this practice is a work of remembering: remembering a world “before Babel”, prior to the multiplicity of translations, characterized by an immediate access to an original language. In other words, what drives translation is the attempt to retrieve a completely transparent language. This explains why people feel a kind of resistance when they permit foreign languages access to the symbolic world of their native language. In situations like these, they spontaneously experience what is strange to them as a threat to the ideal of self-sufficiency and transparency. From this perspective, all translations are inevitably bad ones, by definition as it were. Nevertheless, there is translation: people have always translated, since it is a “remedy for plurality in a world of dispersion and confusion”.33 In other words, engaging in translation is not only a work of remembering, but also of mourning over what is irrevocably lost: the self-sufficiency of one’s native language, the feeling of omnipotence, of a perfect translation, which would rest on a perfect homology between our concepts and the world. Thus, translation always takes place in a world “after Babel”, meaning that it is forever compelled to acknowledge the limits of language and the heterogeneity of languages.34 Because every language has a different way of carving things up phonetically, conceptually and syntactically, none of the existing languages can legitimately claim to include all these linguistic possibilities, and qualify as a perfect language. Moreover, no one knows how the specific languages, with all their linguistic peculiarities, are or even can be derived from a presumably original, universal language. Therefore, there is no original language that could serve as an unambiguous criterion of a good translation. This implies that every language is prone to mistranslation by a non-native speaker.35 In a similar vein, within the same linguistic community, each word is marked by polysemy. In order to find the “right” meaning, we have to take into account the meaning that a word takes on in a sentence, and in the wider context of a discourse, both patent and hidden, intellectual and emotional. A sentence introduces a further degree of polysemy, related to the world as the referent of the sentence. A final level of polysemy occurs on the level of the narrative, referring to the fact that it is always possible to say the same thing in a different way. These insights into the fundamental heterogeneity of languages and the polysemy of each individual language lead to the conclusion that one has to accept the loss of a perfect translation and a universal meaning. Therefore, “we can only aim at a supposed equivalence, not founded on a demonstrable

Bond between religious truth and violence 257 identity of meaning”.36 This equivalence without identity calls for multiple translations and retranslations, which can be compared with each other, but also for acknowledging that there will always be something untranslatable. Moreover, although the words, phrases, and narratives to be translated have a priority over the translation, they cannot serve as an objective and unambiguous criterion for a good translation, since, then, there would be no translation at all. From the perspective of the translations, none of them can claim to grasp the meaning of the original words or text perfectly, since there is no third text that could demonstrate this identity of meaning.37 The result is that “we can translate differently, without hope of filling the gap between equivalence and adequacy” (i.e., perfect correspondence).38 In sum, by accepting translations of our native language, we expropriate ourselves from ourselves (i.e., we give up our longing for linguistic selfsufficiency). Yet besides this challenge, translation also offers an opportunity, as we appropriate the other to ourselves, meaning that she makes us aware of the specific expressive possibilities and idiosyncrasies of our native language as well as those of the foreign language. This explains why there is a desire to translate, which goes beyond constraint and utility. This situation comes down to a call for linguistic hospitality, “where the pleasure of dwelling in the other’s language is balanced by the pleasure of receiving the foreign word at home, in one’s own welcoming house”.39 What can we learn from the insights about translation and understanding for the central question of this book, viz. the relation between religious truth, identity and pluralism? In particular, can these insights help us to avoid that religious truth-claims become exclusivist, and thus serve as a justification for violence? The starting-point to answer this question is the acknowledgement that religions, just like languages, are constitutive for our socio-cultural identities. Yet, at the same time it is clear that we can never reach a completely transparent understanding of our own religious identity and even less of the religious other; there will always be a gap that separates her religion from mine, since religions are, just like languages, fundamentally heterogeneous symbolic systems. Although we can try to see things from the perspective of the religious other, we are unable to put ourselves completely in her shoes. The heterogeneity of religions also implies that we do not have an indubitable criterion to judge the religion of the other, nor can we assess whether an existing religion would be closer to the true nature of the divine than other ones. In other words, although the notion of religious truth is crucial for all religions, it can only serve as an intrareligious criterion, and never as an interreligious one, that is as a means to argue for the truth and hence for the superiority of one religion over another. Hence, the insights of religious hospitality are essential to keep at bay the lure of interpretative omnipotence, that is to interpret other religions by our own standards or to impose our own religion as the standard for any true religion.40 This means that we have to realize that every understanding of the religious other is, just like translation, a work of remembering the past of a

258  Peter Jonkers homogeneous religious identity, prior to any religious diversity, as well as of mourning over the irretrievable loss of such an original homogeneity. Just like all people have a deeply embedded longing for a stable, untroubled personal and socio-cultural identity, religious people too long for a religiously homogeneous world. From this perspective, it is understandable that the intrusion of the religious other raises resistance, since it is experienced as a threat to their original identity. However, an excessive focus on remembering this hypothetical past can lead to religious self-sufficiency. Therefore, it has to go together with a work of mourning over the loss of religious homogeneity by admitting that they have never actually existed. The result of the work of remembering and mourning is the acceptance that we live in a world after Babel, not only linguistically, but also religiously. It is also the awareness that religions are in a relation of equivalence without a demonstrable identity of meaning with regard to each other concerning the divergent ways of giving shape to the divine mystery. In other words, the relation of equivalence highlights the fundamentally heterogeneous character of religious diversity. Yet at the same time, the fact that no religion can legitimately claim to serve as a paradigmatic exemplification of the divine mystery or as the depositum of religious truth creates the desire for understanding the religious other beyond the needs of a pragmatic modus vivendi. By opening ourselves up to the religious other, we expropriate ourselves from ourselves (i.e., we give up our, longing for, religious self-sufficiency). Yet we also appropriate the religious other to ourselves, since she makes us aware of the specific characteristics of our own religion, just like we become familiar with those of the other. The result is religious hospitality, which enables individual religions to learn from each other without lapsing into a kind of superiority, let alone imperialism. Only by accepting the test of the foreign, in other words by accepting the idea of religious hospitality, we become aware of the possibilities and limits of our religion and those of the religion of the other. By contrast, if we opt to stay in the space, with which we are familiar and in which we feel at home, we certainly will not be threatened in our religious identity, but we will also miss the opportunities that the understanding of the religious other offers, and it will inevitably result in an impoverished religious self-understanding. Religious hospitality has far-reaching consequences for the idea of religious truth: it does not require faithful to give up this idea altogether, including in the public sphere, in favour of an unqualified pluralism or relativism. Rather, it urges them to abandon their longing for religious self-sufficiency, which inevitably leads to religious exclusivism, and to take an attitude of “epistemic humility” with regard to other religions.41 This means that religious hospitality requires faithful to accept the possibility that they discover in someone else’s faith a truth that is not thought in their own religion.42 What is more, thanks to the encounter of the other, we become aware of what is essential in our approach of the divine. Phrased in the vocabulary of Habermas, epistemic humility fosters the willingness of religions and

Bond between religious truth and violence 259 (secular) philosophies of life to engage in a mutual learning process.43 Such a willingness does not at all require faithful to give up their truth-claims in favour of relativism. Rather learning from the other implies that one is willing to let oneself be questioned by a truth-claim that cannot be integrated in one’s own religion. Hence, the awe for the divine mystery does not ex-, but rather include respect for other religions as well as a positive interest in them, so that it is not only unjust, but also counterproductive to adopt an exclusivist attitude towards people belonging to other religious or secular traditions. Obviously, the attitude of epistemic humility is a very effective means to break the illfated bond between religious truth and violence. The above arguments for such an attitude are not only philosophical, but also theological. Precisely because the divine mystery is radically transcendent, religious people can only hope to live “in the Truth”, but can never claim to possess it. It goes without saying that the idea of religious hospitality presents an ideal picture of the relationship between religious diversity, truth and identity, and that the reality of religious plurality does most of the times not correspond with this ideal. All of us know that there are intellectual and practical limits to religious hospitality, just like there are limits to linguistic hospitality (i.e., to our capacity to understand foreign languages). Yet in my view, the idea of religious hospitality offers a valuable way to avoid religious self-sufficiency, which can so easily turn into violence against the religious other.

Conclusion In this chapter, I tried to show that scriptural reasoning and religious hospitality offer ways to break the ill-fated bond between religious truth and violence. Both of them are characterized by epistemic humility: it is an attitude that fosters self-reflexivity, since it stimulates people to become aware that there are more perspectives on the divine than the one with which they are familiar. It thus helps to prevent religions from becoming self-sufficient and exclusivist. Yet, the weakness of this plea for religious self-reflexivity is that it can be blamed to be elitist, only within reach for highly educated faithful. Unfortunately, the dynamics of religious exclusivism and violence are anything but reflective, but are rather fuelled by people’s immediate feeling that their socio-cultural identity is threatened by increasing pluralism, as argued in the introduction of this chapter. In the case of religious diversity, people’s exclusive view of religious truth is motivated by their refusal to accept that the idea of a homogeneous religious past is illusory, or, phrased positively, by an unreflective longing to make this religious homogeneity come true again, if need be through violence. Yet, scriptural reasoning and religious hospitality do not only refer to epistemic humility as an intellectual virtue, but also foster humility as a practical, moral virtue. A moral virtue is a long-standing commitment to a specific practice, it cannot be learned

260  Peter Jonkers by the reflective study of moral theories, but consists primarily in following exemplary behaviours of virtuous people, so that it cannot be accused of being intellectually elitist. Moreover, all religions demand that faithful adopt an attitude of humility in the face of the divine. Treating people from other religions respectfully by recognizing the sacredness of their scriptures, and being hospitable to the religious other, even though there remains an unbridgeable gap between these two religious identities, are practical ways to deal with one’s own and the other’s religious truth-claims in a nonexclusivist, and hence non-violent way.

Notes 1 In her chapter, Elena Kalmykova also points to the close connection between religion/religious doctrines and socio-cultural identity. See: Elena Kalmykova, “Belief as an artefact: implications for religious diversity,” in this volume. 2 For a general overview of these developments in Europe see: Wil Arts and Loek Halman, eds., Value Contrasts and Consensus in Present-Day Europe (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2014). 3 Many chapters of this volume discuss the problem of religious exclusivism from a metaphysical (Part I) or epistemological (Part II) perspective. Yet, it is crucial to keep in mind the deep anthropological roots of exclusivism too. For an extensive analysis of the anthropological link between religious exclusivism and violence, see Peter Jonkers, “Religion as a Source of Evil?,” International Journal of Philosophy and Theology 78, nos. 4–5 (2017): 419–31. 4 Paul Ricoeur, “Religion and Symbolic Violence,” Contagion 6 (1999): 1. See also: Jean-Pierre Changeux and Paul Ricoeur, What Makes Us Think? A Neuroscientist and a Philosopher about Ethics, Human Nature, and the Brain. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 265. 5 Victoria S. Harrison, “Can religious diversity help with the problem of religiouslymotivated violence?,” in this volume. 6 Augustine, “Letter 93,” in Letters I (1–99), ed. John E. Rotelle, trans. Roland Teske, The Works of Saint Augustine: A Translation for the 21st Century II/1 (Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 2001), II, 5. 7 Jürgen Habermas, “Pre-political Foundations of a Democratic State,” in The Dialectics of Secularization: On Reason and Religion, eds. Jürgen Habermas and Joseph Ratzinger (San Francisco: Ignatius, 2006), 24ff. See also: Jürgen Habermas, “Religion in the Public Sphere: Cognitive Presuppositions for the ‘Public Use of Reason’ by Religious and Secular Citizens,” in Between Naturalism and Religion. Philosophical Essays, ed. Jürgen Habermas (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2008), 131, 143. 8 John Rawls, “The Idea of Public Reason Revisited,” in Political Liberalism. Expanded Edition, ed. John Rawls (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 441. See also: Rawls, Political Liberalism, 216f. 9 Habermas, “Religion in the Public Sphere,” 131. 10 Rawls, “The Idea of Public Reason,” 444. 11 See the contributions of Weithman, March and Jonkers in: Tom Bailey and Valentina Gentile, eds., Rawls and Religion (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), 75–96, 97–129, 221–41, as well as those of Wolterstorff, Lafont and Cooke in Craig Calhoun, Eduardo Mendieta, and Jonathan Van Antwerpen, eds., Habermas and Religion (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013), 92–111, 210–48, 249–74.

Bond between religious truth and violence 261 12 Gavin D’Costa, Christianity and World Religions. Disputed Questions in the Theology of Religions (Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2009), 113. 13 Gavin D’Costa has analyzed, from a Christian perspective, the problems of an unqualified religious pluralism in Gavin D’Costa, ed., Christian Uniqueness Reconsidered. The Myth of a Pluralistic Theology of Religions (New York: Orbis Books, 1990). In his chapter, Klaus von Stosch defends the legitimacy of mission. See Klaus von Stosch, “Reconsidering the concept of mission in the light of comparative theology,” in this volume. 14 In a similar vein, John Cottingham points in his contribution to this volume to the fact that religious diversity is characterized by a fundamental incommensurability. See John Cottingham, “The epistemic implications of religious diversity”. 15 For a description of this practice see: David Ford, Christian Wisdom. Desiring God and Learning in Love (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 275–78, and Nicolas Adams, Habermas and Theology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 239–43. 16 Ford, Christian Wisdom, 273. 17 Ford, Christian Wisdom, 279f. See also Adams, Habermas and Theology, 243. 18 In a similar vein, the chapters of John Cottingham and Klaus von Stosch in this volume also highlight the inexhaustible character of the divine. See: Cottingham, “The Epistemic implications” and von Stosch, “Reconsidering”. 19 Adams, Habermas and Theology, 242; see also Ford, Christian Wisdom, 281. 20 Ford, Christian Wisdom, 277, 279; Adams, Habermas and Theology, 242. 21 Ford, Christian Wisdom, 274. 22 For the importance of acknowledgement for the understanding of and dialogue with the religious other, see also in this volume the chapter by Sami Pihlström, “Truth, Suffering and Religious Diversity: a Pragmatist Perspective”. 23 Adams, Habermas and Theology, 243–46. 24 In a far more radical way, Nehama Verbin also stresses the ineffable, radically transcendent character of the divine. See Nehama Verbin, “Maimonides and Kierkegaard on fictionalism, divine hiddenness and the scope for interreligious dialogue,” in this volume. 25 For an analysis of the connection between scriptural reasoning and wisdom see Peter Jonkers, “From Rational Doctrine to Christian Wisdom,” in A Catholic Minority Church in a World of Seekers, eds. Staf Hellemans and Peter Jonkers (Washington, DC: Council for Research in Values and Philosophy, 2015), 183–88. 26 Adams, Habermas and Theology, 252. 27 See: Paul Ricoeur, On Translation (Abingdon: Routledge, 2006). For an excellent introduction to Ricoeur’s philosophy of translation see: Richard Kearney, “Paul Ricoeur and the Hermeneutics of Translation,” Research in Phenomenology 37 (2007): 147–59. For another example of the application of linguistic hospitality to religious diversity, see Marianne Moyaert, In Response to the Religious Other. Ricoeur and the Fragility of Interreligious Encounters (Lanham, Boulder, New York and London: Lexington Books, 2014), 143–49. 28 From a different perspective, John Cottingham makes the same point in his contribution to this volume. See Cottingham, “The Epistemic implications”. 29 Ricoeur, On Translation, 24. 30 Ibid., 29. 31 Ricoeur, On Translation, 10; Kearney, “Paul Ricoeur and the Hermeneutics of Translation,” 150f. 32 Paul Ricoeur, Reflections on the Just (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2007), 26. 33 Ibid., 28.

262  Peter Jonkers Ricoeur, On Translation, 3–5, 8. Ibid., 15–8. Ibid., 33. Ricoeur, Reflections on the Just, 26; Ricoeur, On Translation, 27. In this context, Ricoeur refers to the problem of ‘the third man’ in Plato’s Parmenides. 38 Ricoeur, On Translation, 10. 39 Ibid.; see also 26–9. 40 Richard Kearney, “Introduction: Ricoeur’s Philosophy of Translation,” in On Translation, ed. Paul Ricoeur (Abingdon: Routledge, 2006), xvif. 41 John Cottingham and Klaus von Stosch also use the expression “epistemic humility” in their contributions to this volume. See Cottingham, “The Epistemic implications,” and von Stosch, “Reconsidering”. 42 In his contribution to this volume, Alexander Löffler shows a keen awareness of the complex dialectic between the self and the religious other. In particular, in his discussion of the fundamental differences that separate Christian from Buddhist spirituality, he highlights the irreducibility and impregnability of the religious other, but also recognizes that accepting the challenge of the religious, in particular Buddhist, other leads to a transformation of the original Christian religious identity. See Alexander Löffner, “Christians and the practice of Zen,” in this volume. 43 Jürgen Habermas, “Faith and Knowledge,” in The Future of Human Nature, ed. Jürgen Habermas (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2003), 108ff.; Habermas, “Religion in the Public Sphere,” 131f. 34 35 36 37

Bibliography Adams, Nicolas. Habermas and Theology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Arts, Wil, and Loek Halman, eds. Value Contrasts and Consensus in Present-Day Europe. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2014. Augustine. Letters I (1–99), edited by John E. Rotelle and translated by Roland Teske. The Works of Saint Augustine: A  Translation for the 21st Century II/1. Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 2001. Bailey, Tom, and Valentina Gentile, eds. Rawls and Religion. New York: Columbia University Press, 2015. Calhoun, Craig, Eduardo Mendieta, and Jonathan VanAntwerpen, eds. Habermas and Religion. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013. Changeux, Jean-Pierre, and Paul Ricoeur. What Makes Us Think? A Neuroscientist and a Philosopher about Ethics, Human Nature, and the Brain. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000. D’Costa, Gavin, ed. Christian Uniqueness Reconsidered. The Myth of a Pluralistic Theology of Religions. New York: Orbis Books, 1990. D’Costa, Gavin. Christianity and World Religions. Disputed Questions in the Theology of Religions. Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2009. Ford, David. Christian Wisdom. Desiring God and Learning in Love. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Habermas, Jürgen. “Faith and Knowledge.” In The Future of Human Nature, edited by Jürgen Habermas, 101–15. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2003. Habermas, Jürgen. “Pre-political Foundations of a Democratic State.” In The Dialectics of Secularization: On Reason and Religion, edited by Jürgen Habermas, and Joseph Ratzinger, 19–52. San Francisco: Ignatius, 2006.

Bond between religious truth and violence 263 Habermas, Jürgen. “Religion in the Public Sphere: Cognitive Presuppositions for the ‘Public Use of Reason’ by Religious and Secular Citizens.” In Between Naturalism and Religion. Philosophical Essays, edited by Jürgen Habermas, 114–208. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2008. Jonkers, Peter. “Contingent Religions, Contingent Truths?” In Religions Challenged by Contingency. Theological and Philosophical Perspectives to the Problem of Contingency, edited by Dirk Martin Grube, and Peter Jonkers, 161–81. Brill, Leiden, 2008. Jonkers, Peter. “A Purifying Force for Reason. Pope Benedict on the Role of Christianity in Advanced Modernity.” In Towards a New Catholic Church in Advanced Modernity. Transformations, Visions, Tensions, edited by Staf Hellemans, and Josef Wissink, 79–102. Münster: Lit Verlag, 2012. Jonkers, Peter. “Living as if God Exists: Looking for a Common Ground in Times of Radical Pluralism.” European Journal for Philosophy of Religion 6, no. 1 (2014): 111–32. Jonkers, Peter. “From Rational Doctrine to Christian Wisdom.” In A Catholic Minority Church in a World of Seekers, edited by Staf Hellemans and Peter Jonkers, 163–91. Washington, DC: Council for Research in Values and Philosophy, 2015. Jonkers, Peter. “What about Unjustified Religious Difference? Response Paper to Dirk-Martin Grube’s ‘Justified Religious Difference’.” International Journal for Philosophy and Theology 76, no. 5 (2015): 445–52. Jonkers, Peter. “Religion as a Source of Evil?” International Journal of Philosophy and Theology 78, nos. 4–5 (2017): 419–31. Kearney, Richard. “Introduction: Ricoeur’s Philosophy of Translation.” In On Translation, edited by Paul Ricoeur, vii-xx. Abingdon: Routledge, 2006. Kearney, Richard. “Paul Ricoeur and the Hermeneutics of Translation.” Research in Phenomenology 37 (2007): 147–59. Kearney, Richard. “Beyond Conflict: Radical Hospitality and Religious Identity.” In Philosophy and the Return of Violence. Studies from This Widening Gyre, edited by Nathan Eckstrand and Christopher Yates, 101–11. New York and London: Continuum, 2011. Moyaert, Marianne. In Response to the Religious Other. Ricoeur and the Fragility of Interreligious Encounters. Lanham, Boulder, New York and London: Lexington Books, 2014. Rawls, John. “The Idea of Public Reason Revisited.” In Political Liberalism. Expanded Edition, edited by John Rawls. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005. Rawls, John. Political Liberalism, Expanded Edition. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005. Ricoeur, Paul. “Religion and Symbolic Violence.” Contagion 6 (1999): 1–11. Ricoeur, Paul. On Translation. Abingdon: Routledge, 2006. Ricoeur, Paul. Reflections on the Just. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2007.

15 Can religious diversity help with the problem of religiously motivated violence? Victoria S. Harrison Introduction Despite the fact that acts of violence that are explicitly linked to religious convictions are responsible for a relatively small number of deaths and injuries compared to those caused by violence that is otherwise motivated, acts of religiously motivated violence against people have become increasingly prominent worldwide during the twenty-first century.1 Such acts, and the ongoing threat of them, affect many people’s daily lives in concrete and visible ways. Even those who are not directly affected can experience fear and insecurity on account of this threat and the way it is often presented in the media. Religious diversity is thought by many to be a key factor contributing to the problem. People from diverse religious traditions live side by side in densely populated and complex modern urban societies where their different religious beliefs seem to yield parallel streams of life that rarely touch one another. A situation such as this does not foster a mutual sense of civic responsibility, shared identity, or belonging. This line of analysis can give rise to social and political pressure to make religion as invisible and nonintrusive as possible within modern societies on the grounds that, if religious differences cannot be overcome, religion in all its forms should be pushed into the background of civic life. However, it is becoming increasingly evident to many that, as a proposed solution to the problem of religiously motivated violence, this strategy is unlikely to succeed; largely because religion, in many of its forms, is resistant to invisibility. In this chapter, I consider a response to the problem of religiously motivated violence that is distinctive in regarding religious diversity not as a problem, but as a civic resource that might help us to obstruct the pathway from religious extremism to violence. I begin by characterizing the problem and reviewing some of the factors that might facilitate the movement from religious convictions to violence. I then observe that many acts of religiously motivated violence are neither random nor irrational, and our best chance of understanding them lies in scrutinizing the theological worldview that underlies them. I  suggest then that it can be helpful to regard religiously motivated acts of violence as a problem requiring a theological

Problem of religiously-motivated violence 265 solution. Indeed, in many cases, a theological solution is more likely to be effective than one that targets social change through political means. If this is correct, then the diverse theological and religious beliefs that naturally seem to flourish in any healthy society with a tradition of public discussion are a valuable resource for the arguments and ideas that might provide a counter-weight to interpretations of religious ideas that have violent acts as their conclusion. My analysis mostly focuses on the link between fundamentalism, extremism and violence among Christians in the United States. The choice to focus on this group was made for several reasons. First, there is enough publicly available documentation to allows us to track the theological arguments that are happening in the background of the outbreaks of violence. Second, the link between Islam and violence is very much in the public eye currently, especially in Northern Europe. This can obscure the fact that the constellation of religious ideas that can lead to intolerance and violence can be recognized, with certain variations, within each of the Abrahamic faiths.2

Extremism and fundamentalism The Global Terrorism Database, maintained by the University of Maryland, records terrorist acts worldwide and notes the ideological motivation behind them. This data was used by the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism in a report on terrorism in the United States that was published in 2016.3 The report notes a sharp increase in the proportion of terrorist attacks carried out by religious extremists from 9 per cent in the 2000s to 53 per cent between 2010 and 2016. The definition of religiously motivated terrorism used in the report, and in the Global Terrorism Database, is: Violence in support of a particular faith-based belief system and its corresponding cultural practices and views, sometimes in opposition to competing beliefs systems. Characterized by opposition to purported enemies of God, nonbelievers, or perceived evildoers; striving to forcibly insert religion into the political or social sphere through the imposition of strict religious tenets or laws; and/or bring about end times. In the previous chapter of this volume, Peter Jonkers drew attention to the chain of reasoning that can lead from the traditional Christian belief that humans are either eternally saved if they accept Christ and the Church or permanently damned if they do not, to the conviction that non-Christians can be forcibly compelled to adopt the faith.4 We can note here, as Jonkers has elsewhere, that other features of the Abrahamic traditions have a similar potential to promote intolerance and, in the worst cases, violence.5 Religious fundamentalists within Judaism, Christianity and Islam, typically hold that their respective scriptures are literally and timelessly true. The problematic

266  Victoria S. Harrison connection between this sort of conception of religious truth and the exclusivist tendencies that can lead to intolerance and violence has been discussed earlier in this volume by Åke Wahlberg.6 In addition to adhering to what they regard as the literal truth of their sacred texts, many fundamentalists hold that these texts provide the basis for an interpretation of history as well as of current events.7 But it is easy to see that this religiously imbued method of historical and political interpretation is fraught with perils. As the former Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth, Jonathan Sacks, comments: Seen through sacred texts, present conflicts can become cosmic drama, rich in images of apocalypse: the holy war against the infidel, the global confrontation before the end of days, the pursuit of the imminent millennium. And once we have reached this point, fundamentalism can, in certain circumstances, move from spiritual vision to extremism and ultimately violence.8 The idea that the present is charged with religious meaning can have extremely dangerous implications. And this idea is prominent within many fundamentalist worldviews, as is evident from the apocalyptic language that fundamentalists characteristically employ. While it is certainly not my intention to suggest that all religious fundamentalists are prone to intolerance and violence, it does seem reasonable to conjecture that religiously motivated violence is more likely to be associated with fundamentalist attitudes than with other stances vis-à-vis faith. Below, I consider the path that can lead from religious fundamentalism to extremism and violence, and I suggest strategies for obstructing that path. In the following section, I examine more closely the typically fundamentalist language that gained wide currency in the United States in the 1970s and had a lasting impact on politics in that region.

Fundamentalist language in the public domain In the twentieth century, apocalyptic language seemed to acquire a new potency within many fundamentalist North American Protestant communities. Perhaps this is because it was suddenly being employed within a world that, for the first time, did face the threat of annihilation. Several nation states had acquired their own nuclear arsenal, and it was widely recognized that only a fraction of the world’s nuclear stockpile was needed to make the planet uninhabitable. Moreover, the nuclear weapons under the control of the Soviet Union and aimed at the United States posed, to North Americans, the menacing threat of imminent destruction, especially as the nuclear forces of both the United States and the Soviet Union seemed poised on a hairtrigger. Indeed, many came to fear that a flock of birds flying over the North Pole could provoke a nuclear strike.

Problem of religiously-motivated violence 267 The anticipated global devastation was typically spoken of in terms drawn from the Judaeo-Christian Scriptures, such as “Armageddon” and “apocalypse”. In Revelation, the last book of the Christian Scriptures, there is a vivid “description” of the final battle that will result in the destruction of the world (see Revelation, chapter 16). The text claims that this battle will take place at Armageddon – a name which, in ancient Hebrew, may have denoted “the hill of Megiddo”. Megiddo, although not mentioned by name in the Biblical literature, is thought to be a famous battlefield in ancient Palestine. Given that humanity had come to possess, for the first time, weapons powerful enough to wreak the kind of devastation that could plausibly be viewed as the end of the world, many Christian fundamentalists were persuaded that the end was nigh. That this belief had become widespread by the 1970s and 1980s is evidenced by the enormous popularity, during this period, of books by fundamentalist authors promoting it. In 1970, for example, Hal Lindsey’s The Late Great Planet Earth appeared on the market.9 Referring to Israel as the fuse of Armageddon, Lindsey declares: “What has happened and what is happening right now in Israel is significant in the entire prophetic picture. Men who have studied events that were to occur shortly before the great holocaust known as Armageddon are amazed as they see them happening before their eyes”.10 By the early 1980s, Lindsey’s book was a best-seller, with sales exceeding 18 million copies. The Late Great Planet Earth was not, moreover, a oneoff success. Lindsey went on to write, and gain a substantial readership for, several other books in which he further developed the claims made in the earlier one. Lindsey continued to deploy the Judaeo-Christian Scriptures as a means of interpreting current political events, especially those that he believed to be signs of the end of the world. On the speculations of Lindsey and, one of his co-writers, David Wilkerson, Gerald Larue remarks: Basing their predictions on passages found primarily in the books of Ezekiel, Daniel, and Revelation, they inform their readers that the Bible foretells an attack on Israel from the north by the Russians and from the east by the Arabs and the Chinese. The United States will come to Israel’s defense. The invasion will be triggered by the Israeli attempt to rebuild the ancient Jewish temple that the Romans destroyed some 1,900 years ago, on the site of the Dome of the Rock mosque, one of the three holiest shrines in Islam. The conflict will be a nuclear war which evangelistic voices hail as part of the divine plan for bringing human history to its termination.11 It is easy, perhaps too easy, for modern Western liberals to treat with ridicule the sort of speculation engaged in by Lindsey and his colleagues. For the very idea of ancient biblical scribes predicting events concerning twentieth- and twenty-first-century world powers and modern technological innovations seems quite outrageous to many modern minds. Indeed, many are

268  Victoria S. Harrison tempted to dismiss such “interpretations” of current events as laughable nonsense. But such a response fails to recognize both the deep religious conviction that underlies this way of thinking and the way in which such ideas can seem reasonable when set in the context of a religious worldview. As Larue points out: if one believes that the Bible is the inspired word of God which gives clues to the end of the world, then what is nonsense to the skeptic is pure truth to the believer, who can argue that the Holy Spirit gave the inspired words one meaning in ancient times but the true meaning for our day.12 While the notion of a final battle which will bring the world to an end is at home within certain kinds of religious discourse, it can become especially disquieting when the language used by prominent politicians betrays its influence. In the last few decades of the twentieth century, high-ranking government officials did draw extensively on this notion and on a range of other religious images and allusions commonly associated with it. For example, during his presidency of the United States, which ran from 1981 to 1989, when discussing world affairs Ronald Reagan frequently used biblical imagery of the type favoured by Christian fundamentalists. He is reported to have claimed: “Everything is falling into place. It can’t be long now. Ezekial says that fire and brimstone will be rained upon the enemies of God’s people [i.e., the USSR]. That must mean that they’ll be destroyed by nuclear weapons. They exist now and they never did in the past.”13 And, [y]ou know, I turn back to your ancient prophets in the Old Testament and the signs foretelling Armageddon, and I find myself wondering if – if we’re the generation that’s going to see that come about. I don’t know if you have noted any of these prophecies lately, but believe me, they certainly describe the times we’re going through.14 There is disagreement about the degree to which Reagan’s religious beliefs influenced his assessment of political affairs and his consequent political decisions. It is well known, however, that he had been a committed Christian of fundamentalist stripe since his youth. Moreover, Reagan was not the only person in his administration to be deeply imbued with Christian fundamentalist ideas. His secretary of the interior, James Watt, was a member of the Pentecostal Assembly of God. Watt held that environmental deterioration should not be prioritized as a matter of concern to the Government of the United States because God would surely intervene and end the world before the environmental catastrophe arrived.15 It is widely agreed that Watt was the single-most important shaper of environmental policy in Reagan’s administration, and he was directly in charge of its implementation.

Problem of religiously-motivated violence 269 It seems highly unlikely that the mixture of political and religious language typically employed in Reagan’s and Watt’s public addresses was mere rhetoric. Indeed, it could be argued that such politicians, by accustoming the North American public to a heady mixture of the discourses of politics and religion, bear some responsibility for creating a climate favourable to the transition from religious fundamentalism to religious extremism.

The social and theological context of religiously motivated violence Against the backdrop of the political climate briefly described in the previous section, religiously motivated public acts of violence became increasingly prominent in the late twentieth century. These acts ranged from the murder of individuals deemed to be enemies of religion, such as the former Israeli premier President Yitzhak Rabin (1922–1995), to acts of large-scale public terrorism, such as the bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building in 1995. Prior to the 1980s, religiously motivated terrorism was virtually unheard of, especially in North America. In the 1990s, however, it became difficult to ignore, even though, as mentioned earlier, the number of people directly impacted was relatively low. During this decade, in the United States, Christian militia groups increasingly came to be seen as a threat to public safety, as did extremist Jewish groups in Israel, and Muslim groups in various parts of the world. Religiously motivated violence became a focus of attention in the United States in 1993, when a Christian anti-abortionist, Michael Griffin, murdered Dr David Gunn at the abortion clinic where he worked in Penascola, Florida. Gunn’s murder attracted a lot of public attention as it was the first, of what was to become a series, murder on record committed with the intention of preventing the victim from performing abortions. In 1994, Paul J. Hill, a Christian minister who had been outspoken in his defence of Griffin, murdered Dr John Britton and his escort, James Barrett, as they were approaching an abortion clinic in Florida.16 Hill was executed by the state for his crimes in 2003. He has subsequently become a religious hero to those who share his beliefs and sympathize with the theological argument he gave in support of his own and Griffin’s recourse to extreme measures to prevent what they perceived to be an even greater evil, namely, the murder of unborn children. Michael Bray, a Lutheran minister, has attempted to justify the actions of those such as Griffin and Hill by appealing to the precedent set by the widely respected anti-Nazi dissident Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906–1945).17 Bonhoeffer, a theologian and Lutheran pastor, came to believe that, given the desperate situation in Europe during the Second World War, it would be religiously and ethically justifiable to assassinate Adolf Hitler. Bray portrays the killing of foetuses by those working in abortion clinics as a crime against humanity comparable to that perpetrated by Hitler. On the basis of this comparison,

270  Victoria S. Harrison he proceeds to argue that if it were indeed religiously and ethically justifiable to assassinate Hitler, as Bonhoeffer had concluded, then it must also be justifiable to assassinate those who work in abortion clinics. In both cases, Bray avers, the violence is justified by the end it aims to promote.18 But Bray goes much further than Bonhoeffer, insofar as he refuses to acknowledge the legitimacy of the separation between Church and state that Bonhoeffer respected. For Bray argues that the state has no right to determine social practices, such as abortion, and that religious people must reassert their control over such matters.19 In support of this conclusion, he appeals to a form of theology that, by the late twentieth century, had become popular among many right-wing conservative Christians within the United States: dominion theology. Dominion theology claims that Christians should assert control over the whole of God’s creation, including the machinery of state.20 Dominion theology is not the exclusive preserve of any particular church, but it is closely aligned with the so-called “Reconstruction Movement” that has sympathizers within a number of Christian denominations in the United States.21 Reconstructionism, which began as an offshoot of Calvinism, is not, as one might assume, a movement possessing a well-defined organizational structure; it is, rather, a loose affiliation between individuals and groups who are united in their commitment to a common message. The core of this message is that the United States should be a Christian nation. A leading figure behind reconstructionism is a Texan economist from the Presbyterian tradition, Gary North.22 North, like other reconstructionists, such as Rousas John Rushdoony, points to the urgency of Christians preparing to take control when God causes the modern state to crumble. Reconstructionists typically object to such features of secular society as “abortion on demand, fornication, homosexuality, sexual entertainment, state usurpation of parental rights and God-given liberties, statist-collectivist theft from citizens through devaluation of their money and redistribution of their wealth [i.e., taxation], and evolutionism taught as a monopoly viewpoint in public schools”.23 They do not, however, advocate violence in order to rid the world of these objectionable features. North was, in fact, outspoken in his condemnation of Paul Hill. It is significant that dominion theology, with which, as we have noted, the Reconstruction Movement is aligned, is postmillennialist insofar as it holds that the thousand-year reign of the righteous will precede the Day of Judgment. Postmillennialism has also been embraced by reconstructionists. For example, as the prominent reconstructionist Rousas John Rushdoony claims: “The creation mandate was precisely the requirement that man subdue the earth and exercise dominion over it. There is not one word of Scripture to indicate that this mandate was ever revoked.”24 In other words, God has ordered “man” to “exercise dominion” over the earth. The implication, according to Rushdoony, is that “man” should do this in order to satisfy God so that “He” will move history onto the next stage. Thus, there

Problem of religiously-motivated violence 271 is a sense in which God is thought to be waiting for “man” to do what is required. And this means that those who hold such ideas perceive the project of Christianizing the United States and of establishing Christian rule in place of secular government to be very urgent: for they believe that Christ will not return until a truly Christian government has been in place for a thousand years. It is noteworthy that thinkers associated with these ideas tend to be just as critical of premillennialist Christians, who hold that the thousand-year reign of the righteous will begin after the Day of Judgement, as they are of secularists. They accuse premillennialists of misreading the Bible and thus colluding in Satan’s control over the world.25 Postmillennialist Christians are faced with the difficult hermeneutical task of determining what they might legitimately do, and what they should not do, to help bring about the era of dominion. As we have seen, North and Rushdoony advocate non-violence, yet others who are persuaded by dominion theology are not prepared to wait for an act of God to bring about the reign of the righteous, and they seek, instead, to destroy the modern state through actions of their own. This mandate for establishing Christian dominion has led some who have been influenced by this theology, such as Michael Bray and Paul Hill, to argue that acts of violence are justified if they serve to hasten Christ’s second coming. Indeed, Bray and his associates hope that the United States will experience a Christian revolution that will make Christian morality, values and laws the foundation of society and its politics.26 A plethora of Christian groups exist in the United States that harbour similar hopes. Many of them are associated with an offshoot of Christianity known as the Christian Identity movement.27 This movement, which is ideologically indebted to British Israelism, unites otherwise disparate groups and individuals who are committed to three core ideas: first, that Jews are impostors, and that white “Aryans” are the genuine descendants of the original tribes of Israel; second, that Jews are literally children of Satan, spawned as a result of Satan’s seduction of Eve in the Garden of Eden; and third, that history is very close to its consummation, and that the Last Days are about to begin.28 Not surprisingly, given their shared debt to dominion theology, the theology of the Christian Identity movement and that of reconstructionism are markedly similar in many respects. Both are nationalist and theocratic, but the Christian Identity movement adds racism to this package.29 They further differ insofar as the Christian Identity movement explicitly avows that the onus is on militant Christians to bring down the secular state. It is beliefs such as these that seem to have motivated Timothy McVeigh to plan and execute his attack on the Oklahoma City federal buildings.30 McVeigh appears to have believed that the bombing would spark the longawaited revolution that would turn the tide against secularization. Extremists like McVeigh regard their actions as performed within the context of war – a war, moreover, that is being conducted between the forces of good

272  Victoria S. Harrison and evil. And they regard the magnitude of this conflict as justifying the use of violence. Those who do not share this vision, unsurprisingly, tend to find the actions of those who do wholly incomprehensible. However, before the thinking of such extremists is simply dismissed as too marginal to religiosity within North America to merit attention, it is worth noting that their beliefs are not as alien as one might think when considered in the light of popular evangelical and fundamentalist Protestant thought within the United States. For this is a country in which, as we have seen, prominent public figures portray themselves as involved in an apocalyptic struggle against the forces of evil (for example, Ronald Reagan) or as standing up against Satanic forces (for example, George Bush, Jr, after the attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon on the 11 September 2001).31 In a country that tolerates this kind of rhetoric from its political leaders, and even re-elects those who indulge in it, it is perhaps less surprising than it might otherwise seem that the kind of religious extremism considered above flourishes. Indeed, it may be that the rigid two-party political system of the United States contributes to a polarized vision in which both individuals and groups are deemed to be either for or against the “good”, and if they are not for the “good”, then they are pitted against “us” in “war”. In other words, the mainstream political system might also encourage extremist thinking, which could smooth the path from fundamentalism to violence. Moreover, the leaders of extremist Christian groups within the United States, despite some obvious differences between their views and those of the mainstream churches, do not regard themselves as departing from the Christian tradition. In fact, the members of such groups typically assert, just like extreme Islamic fundamentalists claim with respect to Islam, that they are returning to the original form of the Christian tradition. And no less parallel with extreme forms of Islamic fundamentalism is their insistence that the “Christianity” which has become dominant in the United States is an etiolated version of the original. In fact, this latter claim would seem to be typically made by leaders of extremist movements in all of the major religious traditions. With respect to this strategy of legitimizing their religious worldviews by appealing to a supposed continuity with past traditions, Mark Juergensmeyer comments that such religious thinkers, although they perceive themselves as “defenders of ancient faiths”, have actually created new religious forms: like many present-day spiritual leaders, they have used the language of traditional religion to build bulwarks around aspects of modernity that have threatened them and to suggest ways out of the mindless humiliation of modern life. It is vital to their image of religion, however, that it be perceived as ancient.32 It seems clear that acts of religiously motivated violence can only be understood by reference to the worldview of the perpetrators. Commonly, this

Problem of religiously-motivated violence 273 consists in an image of the “forces of evil” pitted against the “forces of good”, with the religious community being regarded as engaged in a war on behalf of the good against the secular realm, which is often regarded as the province of evil.33 Those people who do not belong to the religious community – the “unsaved” (such as the doctors who perform abortions, and the women who have them) – inhabit the secular realm, and can thus be seen as agents of evil. Consequently, those who, from a secular perspective, appear to be the innocent victims of violence, are, from the perspective of the religious extremist, not innocent at all. Within the extremist’s worldview, then, there is a clear justification for killing. The victims of their violence are engaged in a war, and they are fighting on the side of evil. And this structure of justification seems to be at work in the thought of those who commit religiously motivated acts of violence irrespective of whether they are Jews, Christians or Muslims. Mahmud Abouhalima, for example, who was convicted for his alleged involvement in an earlier attack on the World Trade Centre that took place in 1993, illustrates precisely where this sort of thinking can lead: Secular people (whom he defines as those who have no religion) move “like dead bodies”.34 They are without a soul, and so merely give the impression of being alive. Clearly, such people are being regarded here as less than fully human – more dead than alive – and, thus, killing them would appear to lack the moral significance that killing a genuine Muslim, for example, would possess. Abouhalima would thus seem to acknowledge that some justification is required for killing people. And he would appear to hold that his convictions regarding “secular people” provide him with such a justification, which suggests that it is important for those who commit acts of religiously motivated violence to perceive themselves as acting rationally – at least in the sense of having a rational justification for their actions. In the next section, I consider whether or not such beliefs might indeed be rational.

The rationality of belief In view of some of the stranger ideas discussed above (at least from the perspective of one not accustomed to fundamentalist thinking), it may be tempting to regard fundamentalist beliefs as symptomatic of, at best, irrationality and, at worst, some psychological disturbance. However, a different picture may emerge if we consider individual beliefs within the overall religious worldview in which they are lodged. Adopting this approach, Steve Bruce argues against dismissing fundamentalist beliefs as abnormal. And he does so on the grounds that the crucial test for abnormality is not whether a person’s reasoning fits with ours but whether it fits with their own. Bizarre though it may seem to an outsider, fundamentalism is perfectly consistent with the logic of the religious tradition from which it grows. The idea that everything in the

274  Victoria S. Harrison world must have been caused by somebody who wanted it to happen may be strange for the sociologist used to the frequency of unintended consequences, but it is a perfectly reasonable view for someone who believes that there is a creator God and a divine providence. It may seem strange for us to suppose that the history of the world (past, present and future) is divided into distinct “dispensations”, each with its own divinely ordained logic, but it is of a piece with the belief that God created the world in six days. Similarly, conspiracy thinking may seem odd to the secular rationalist, but that a multitude of enemies is really a single agent is perfectly reasonable for someone who believes in Satan. That the mysteries can be decoded by the perceptive person with the hidden keys is not such a strange notion to people who spend their time pondering the Revelation of John.35 In assessing the rationality of any particular belief, then, we need to consider it within the context of the religious belief system within which it has arisen. This raises a problem, however. If fundamentalist beliefs are deemed to be rational relative to fundamentalist worldviews, is it possible to offer any meaningful criticism of them? Must one concede, for example, that there are no rational grounds for criticizing those religious beliefs that tend to encourage intolerance and violence? This issue is particularly pressing in modern Western societies, such as that of the United States, which have cultural diversity written into their fabric (not to mention, in the case of the United States, their constitution). For it would seem that there is an inherent tension within a society committed to protecting cultural and religious diversity if that society actually engenders extremist groups that are prone to violence (Christian Identity groups, for example), and especially if such groups are dedicated to the overthrow of that society. The existence of such groups and the persistence of their ideologies seem to threaten culturally diverse secular liberal democracies at their very core. In the following section, I consider what resources are available to combat this threat.

Inter- and intrareligious diversity as resources for combatting extremism It seems that direct government intervention can often heighten conflict rather than reduce the threat, for religious extremists will tend to view it as corroborating their worst fears regarding secular intrusions. Moreover, increased surveillance can give the impression to members of an extremist religious group that their view of the world is vindicated. An armed guard around one’s encampment could plausibly be taken as grounds for believing that Satan’s forces are encroaching, and that the Final Battle is nigh. Indeed, heavy-handed approaches to such groups have already issued in tragedy within the United States – for example, in the 76 deaths at Waco, Texas, in 1993.

Problem of religiously-motivated violence 275 Such considerations suggest that if criticism of an extremist worldview is to be effective, then it cannot simply be launched from a perspective that is wholly alien to that worldview. Indeed, criticizing such worldviews from a secular standpoint, for example, might simply turn out to be counterproductive. However, there is another alternative. Criticism of beliefs held by religious extremists can, perhaps, be effectively launched from the perspective of a worldview with which they share a sufficient number of common beliefs. A  healthy diversity of interreligious and, especially, intrareligious views can thus be a vital resource for effectively responding to extremist perspectives.36 Constructive debate between those operating with cognate worldviews (some of which might lead to religiously motivated violence) is surely not impossible. One example of such debate is provided by the exchange that took place between Paul Hill and Gary North. As mentioned above, Hill and North shared similar religious worldviews. They differed, however, in their assessment of the justification for violent action. When Hill appealed to North to support Michael Griffin’s murder of Dr Gunn, North declined on theological grounds. Indeed, North, an advocate of non-violent resistance, proceeded to excoriate Hill for claiming that he was acting in accordance with God’s will, when it should have been obvious to him that God had never appointed him as a legitimate representative – and the fact that Hill’s Lutheran congregation had excommunicated him should have made this abundantly clear. There is nothing in God’s Law, North argued, that authorizes individual Christians to become lone gun-slinging vigilantes.37 In short, North was able to respond to Hill in a way that Hill could – in principle, at least – understand and relate to because they shared enough common ground to enable meaningful discussion of their differences. What made debate between Hill and North possible, then, was that their disagreement concerned the relatively specific theological issue of what God required at a particular juncture in history.38 This disagreement actually presupposes that both hold religious worldviews with a great deal in common. Had a secularist tried entering into constructive debate with Hill, there can be little doubt that the parties would simply have talked past each other – for the worldview of the secularist and that of Hill would have been far too distantly related. It is also unlikely that a Christian with liberal theological commitments would have been able to make much progress in debate with Hill. It is highly significant though that Hill actively sought approval from North. It is extremely important to Hill, Bray, and their ilk, that their actions are justified on theological grounds and this is why they are keen to enter into debate with those who at least have enough in common with them to understand their position in its theological context. This suggests that a potentially effective strategy for reducing the risk of religious beliefs issuing in violence is to encourage theological debate between members of those religious groups that, at least to some extent, speak each other’s language, and which are, therefore, less inclined to view

276  Victoria S. Harrison each other’s beliefs as self-evidently false or irrational. Such debate might also usefully be encouraged between the mainstream forms of faith and the diverse independent groups that have sprouted from them (for example, between orthodox Calvinists and those belonging to the Reconstructionist movement). Extremist groups often form when members of an established tradition, such as Calvinism, take certain ideas from within that tradition and push them to extremes. But even when a group has broken away from its parent organization, their respective worldviews will usually remain sufficiently cognate for mutual understanding to be possible. At the very least, attempting to lessen the danger posed by extremist groups by encouraging dialogue with those with whom they have some shared beliefs39 might succeed better than a strategy of overt repression – a strategy that, in any case, sits unhappily within a modern society committed to diversity. This strategy is also more likely to target those most likely to fall prey to the ideas that can lead to religiously motivated violence than are the highly intellectualized strategies discussed by Peter Jonkers in his contribution to this volume.40 The argument of this chapter suggests that by encouraging and supporting a range of religious views, a society will have all the more resources available for effective engagement with those who hold religious views that might lead them to commit acts of violence.

Conclusion Whatever else it may be, religious extremism of the sort that leads people to commit acts of violence should be regarded as a theological problem. It is often overlooked that individuals who contemplate committing religiously motivated acts of violence can be as keenly aware as anyone else of their responsibility to critically assess their beliefs, and may, in some cases, be even more aware than others of this responsibility. Their actions are not random acts of violence; but are rather perpetrated against a background of theological conviction – without which we would surely hesitate to call their acts “religiously motivated”. Those with a foot on the path that leads from religious belief, through intolerance of others, to violence are likely actively to seek out possibilities for theological discussion and debate, as we saw in the case of Paul Hill. While Hill himself was not deterred from killing others, it is likely that making public his exchange of letters with Gary North did have a deterring effect on others. Moreover, we can conjecture that many of those who read these letters were themselves wrestling with the theological questions they addressed. One response to religious extremism, then, is to encourage serious theological discussion and debate between those who hold enough in common to make constructive intellectual engagement a possibility. Such measures will facilitate a richer theological engagement with potentially dangerous beliefs, which may serve to obstruct the path from extremism to religiously motivated violence. There are various ways in which a society might,

Problem of religiously-motivated violence 277 through policy decisions at various levels of government, seek to raise public theological awareness and encourage debate about religious ideas. A society within which religious literacy was publicly supported (and properly funded) would be one where people were accustomed to handling different interpretations of religious beliefs and were thus correspondingly less inclined to regard their own interpretation of religious truth as unconditionally and exclusively correct.41 In such a society, religion, in its many forms, would be more socially visible not less. My proposal thus runs counter to what still seems to be the dominant trend in many parts of the Western world – a trend shaped by the philosophy of political liberalism – of seeking to make religious voices and religious reasons increasingly less audible in public discourse.

Notes 1 My focus is on violence against people, as it is questionable whether attacks on property should, legitimately, be conceived as instances of “violence”. 2 I do not discuss the connection between religion and violence in the Asian religions. On this see John R. Hinnells and Richard King, eds., Religion and Violence in South Asia. Theory and Practice (London and New York: Routledge, 2006). 3 “Ideological Motivations of Terrorism in the United States, 1970–2016,” National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism, accessed 7 February  2019, www.start.umd.edu/pubs/START_Ideological MotivationsOfTerrorismInUS_Nov2017.pdf. 4 See Peter Jonkers, “How to break the ill-fated bond between religious truth and violence,” in this volume. 5 Peter Jonkers, “Religion as a Source of Evil,” in International Journal of Philosophy and Theology 78 (2017): 419–31. 6 See Åke Wahlberg, “Truth, meaning and interreligious understanding,” in this volume. 7 By contrast, liberal religious thinkers are more likely to regard scripture itself as an object of study and interpretation. 8 Jonathan Sacks, The Persistence of Faith. Religion, Morality and Society in a Secular Age (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1991), 78f. 9 Hal Lindsey (with C.C. Carlson), The Late Great Planet Earth (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1970). 10 Lindsey, Planet Earth, 44. 11 Gerald A. Larue, “Surviving the Apocalypse,” in Neo-Fundamentalism. The Humanist Response, ed. The Academy of Humanism (Buffalo and New York: Prometheus Books, 1988), 136f. 12 Larue, “Surviving,” 137. 13 Cited in Lawrence Jones, “Reagan’s Religion,” Journal of American Culture 8, no. 4 (Winter 1985): 64. 14 Cited in Jones, “Reagan’s Religion,” 65. 15 See Stephen Jay Gould, Questioning the Millennium. A Rationalist’s Guide to a Precisely Arbitrary Countdown (London: Jonathan Cape, 1997), 52. 16 On the political debates that led up to these murders, and the “justification” proffered for them by anti-abortion Christians, see Sara Diamond, Not by Politics Alone. The Enduring Influence of the Christian Right (New York and London: The Guildford Press, 1998), chapter 7. Interest in these murders was revivified in

278  Victoria S. Harrison 2009 when Dr George Tiller was shot dead as he assisted with Sunday worship at the Reformation Lutheran Church he attended in Wichita, Texas. Tiller was killed because he performed abortions. 17 See Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship (New York: Touchstone, 1995). This was first published in 1937 as Nachfolge (München: Kaiser Verlag). 18 See Michael Bray, A Time to Kill. A  Study Concerning the Use of Force and Abortion (Portland, OR: Advocates for Life, 1994). See, particularly, 95–99. 19 Michael Bray has himself served time in jail as a result of his involvement with explosives intended to destroy clinics where abortions were performed. He was released in 2003 and is now an active member of the Army of God, which is widely classified as a terrorist organization. 20 See Peter C. Wagner, Dominion! How Kingdom Action Can Change the World (Grand Rapids, MI: Chosen Books, 2008). 21 On the relationship between dominion theology and reconstructionism, see Anson Shupe, “Christian Reconstructionism and the Angry Rhetoric of Neopostmillennialism,” in Millennium, Messiahs, and Mayhem. Contemporary Apocalyptic Movements, eds. Thomas Robbins and Susan J. Palmer (New York and London: Routledge, 1997), 195–206. 22 See, for example, Gary North, Unconditional Surrender. God’s Program for Victory (Tyler, TX: Institute for Christian Economics, 1986) and Gary North, Is the World Running Down? Crisis in the Christian Worldview (Tyler, TX: Institute for Christian Economics, 1988). 23 “Manifesto for the Christian Church”, published in Crosswinds (a magazine promoting dominion theology). Cited in Juergensmeyer, Terror in the Mind of God, 27. 24 Rousas John Rushdoony, The Institutes of Biblical Law (Vallecito, CA: The Presbyterian Reformed Publishing Company, 1973), 14. 25 Hal Lindsey criticized reconstructionism on theological grounds, arguing that the Bible did not advocate theocracy. See Hal Lindsey, The Road to Holocaust (London: Bantam, 1989). 26 Failing a revolutionary transformation of the whole of the United States, some have proposed that one or two states might break away from the federation and become independent Christian theocracies. Richard Butler, for example, who was the founder and former leader of the Aryan Nations, which is influenced by dominion theology and embraces the ideology of the Christian Identity movement, argued that Montana and Idaho should become theocratic states occupied entirely by white Christians. See Juergensmeyer, Terror in the Mind of God, 212. It is interesting that the proponents of this vision seem unaware of the similarities between their aspirations and those that motivated the Iranian Revolution. 27 See C.L. Quarles, Christian Identity. The Aryan American Bloodline Religion (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2004). 28 For an analysis of these three ideas and their importance within Christian Identity ideology, see Michael Barkun, “Millenarians and Violence. The Case of the Christian Identity Movement,” in Millennium, Messiahs, and Mayhem: Contemporary Apocalyptic Movements, eds. Thomas Robbins and Susan J. Palmer (New York and London: Routledge, 1997), 248–60. Also see Barkun’s detailed study of the Christian Identity movement, Religion and the Racist Right. The Origins of the Christian Identity Movement (Chapel Hill and London: The University of North Carolina Press, 1997). 29 Charles H. Roberts, Race over Grace. The Racialist Religion of the Christian Identity Movement (Omaha, NE: iUniverse Publishing, 2003). 30 On McVeigh and the Christian Identity movement, see Juergensmeyer, Terror in the Mind of God, 30–36. 31 Richard King rightly warns against allowing the obvious religious dimension of such political rhetoric from obscuring our understanding of the wider political contexts in which the language is used. See Richard King, “The Association

Problem of religiously-motivated violence 279 of ‘Religion’ with Violence. Reflections on a Modern Trope,” in Religion and Violence in South Asia. Theory and Practice, eds. John R. Hinnells and Richard King (London and New York: Routledge, 2006), 226–57. 32 Juergensmeyer, Terror in the Mind of God, 223. 33 Juergensmeyer discusses the centrality of images of cosmic warfare within different forms of religious fundamentalism in Terror in the Mind of God, chapter 8. 34 Mahmud Abouhalima, cited in Juergensmeyer, Terror in the Mind of God, 69. 35 Steve Bruce, Fundamentalism (Cambridge: Polity, 2000), 116. 36 Oliver J. Wiertz “Epistemic desiderata and religious plurality,” in this volume, also argued that we should turn to individual religious traditions when seeking resources to respond to the social consequences of religious diversity. 37 Gary North, Lone Gunners for Jesus. Letters to Paul J. Hill (Tyler, TX: Institute for Christian Economics, 1994). 38 Unfortunately, Hill did not receive a response from North until after the murder of Barrett. 39 Indeed, a growing number of North American Muslims are adopting this approach as a form of response to those of their co-religionists who are disposed towards religiously motivated acts of violence. For a discussion, see Aasma Khan, “How Muslims can Combat Terror and Violence,” in Taking Back Islam. American Muslims Reclaim Their Faith, ed. Michael Wolfe (Emmaus, PA: Rodale, 2002), 49–53. 40 See Jonkers, “How to break?”. 41 On the problem of religious illiteracy, see Victoria S. Harrison, “Narrative, Postmodernity and the Problem of ‘Religious Illiteracy’,” New Blackfriars 89 (2008): 591–605.

Bibliography Barkun, Michael. “Millenarians and Violence. The Case of the Christian Identity Movement.” In Millennium, Messiahs, and Mayhem. Contemporary Apocalyptic Movements, edited by Thomas Robbins and Susan J. Palmer, 195–206. New York and London: Routledge, 1997. Barkun, Michael. Religion and the Racist Right. The Origins of the Christian Identity Movement. Chapel Hill and London: The University of North Carolina Press, 1997. Bonhoeffer, Dietrich. The Cost of Discipleship. New York: Touchstone, 1995. Bray, Michael. A Time To Kill. A Study Concerning the Use of Force and Abortion. Portland, OR: Advocates for Life, 1994. Bruce, Steve. Fundamentalism. Cambridge: Polity, 2000. Diamond, Sara. Not by Politics Alone. The Enduring Influence of the Christian Right. New York and London: The Guildford Press, 1998. Gould, Stephen Jay. Questioning the Millennium. A Rationalist’s Guide to a Precisely Arbitrary Countdown. London: Jonathan Cape, 1997. Harrison, Victoria S. “Narrative, Postmodernity and the Problem of ‘Religious Illiteracy’.” New Blackfriars 89 (2008): 591–605. Hinnells, John R., and Richard King, eds. Religion and Violence in South Asia. Theory and Practice. London and New York: Routledge, 2006. Jones, Lawrence. “Reagan’s Religion.” Journal of American Culture 8, no. 4 (Winter 1985): 59–70. Jonkers, Peter. “Religion as a Source of Evil.” International Journal of Philosophy and Theology 78 (2017): 419–31. Juergensmeyer, Mark. Terror in the Mind of God: The Global Rise of Religious Violence. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000.

280  Victoria S. Harrison Khan, Aasma. “How Muslims can Combat Terror and Violence.” In Taking Back Islam. American Muslims Reclaim Their Faith, edited by Michael Wolfe, 49–53. Emmaus, PA: Rodale, 2002. King, Richard. “The Association of ‘Religion’ with Violence. Reflections on a Modern Trope.” In Religion and Violence in South Asia. Theory and Practice, edited by John R. Hinnells and Richard King, 226–57. London and New York: Routledge, 2006. Larue, Gerald A. “Surviving the Apocalypse.” In Neo-Fundamentalism. The Humanist Response, by The Academy of Humanism, 135–52. Buffalo and New York: Prometheus Books, 1988. Lindsey, Hal (with Carlson, C.C.). The Late Great Planet Earth. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan Publishing House, 1970. Lindsey, Hal. The Road to Holocaust. London: Bantam, 1989. National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism. “Ideological Motivations of Terrorism in the United States, 1970–2016.” Accessed 7 February  2019. www.start.umd.edu/pubs/START_IdeologicalMotivationsOf TerrorismInUS_Nov2017.pdf. North, Gary. Unconditional Surrender. God’s Program for Victory. Tyler, TX: Institute for Christian Economics, 1986. North, Gary. Is the World Running Down? Crisis in the Christian Worldview. Tyler, TX: Institute for Christian Economics, 1988. North, Gary. Lone Gunners for Jesus. Letters to Paul J. Hill. Tyler, TX: Institute for Christian Economics, 1994. Quarles, C.L. Christian Identity. The Aryan American Bloodline Religion. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2004. Roberts, Charles H. Race over Grace. The Racialist Religion of the Christian Identity Movement. Omaha, NE: iUniverse Publishing, 2003. Rushdoony, Rousas John. The Institutes of Biblical Law. Vallecito, CA: The Presbyterian Reformed Publishing Company, 1973. Sacks, Jonathan. The Persistence of Faith. Religion, Morality and Society in a Secular Age. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1991. Shupe, Anson. “Christian Reconstructionism and the Angry Rhetoric of Neo-postmillennialism.” In Millennium, Messiahs, and Mayhem. Contemporary Apocalyptic Movements, edited by Thomas Robbins, and Susan J. Palmer. New York and London: Routledge, 1997, 195–206. Wagner, Peter C. Dominion! How Kingdom Action Can Change the World. Grand Rapids, MI: Chosen Books, 2008.

Contributors

John Cottingham is Professor Emeritus at Reading University, Professor of Philosophy of Religion at the University of Roehampton, London, and an Honorary Fellow of St John’s College Oxford, United Kingdom. Katherine Dormandy is a Lise-Meitner Research Fellow in philosophy at Innsbruck University, Austria. Dirk-Martin Grube is Chair of Religious Diversity and the Epistemology of Theology/Religion at Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Victoria S. Harrison is Professor of Philosophy and Religious Studies in the Faculty of Humanities, University of Macau, China. Peter Jonkers is Professor of philosophy at Tilburg University, School of Catholic Theology, the Netherlands. Elena Kalmykova is a postdoctoral guest researcher and a member of the Impact of Religion: Challenges for Society and Democracy programme in Religion and Society Research Centre (CRS) at Uppsala University, Sweden. Alexander Löffler teaches fundamental theology at the PhilosophischTheologische Hochschule Sankt-Georgen in Frankfurt, Germany. Sami Pihlström is Professor of Philosophy of Religion at the Faculty of Theology, University of Helsinki, Finland. Klaus von Stosch is Professor of Systematic Theology and Chair of the Center of Comparative Theology and Cultural Studies at the University of Paderborn, Germany.

282  Contributors Nehama Verbin is Senior Lecturer at the Philosophy Department at Tel Aviv University, Israel, and Chair of the Israel Philosophy Association. Åke Wahlberg is a PhD student at the Philosophisch-Theologische Hochschule Sankt-Georgen in Frankfurt, Germany. Oliver J. Wiertz is Professor of Epistemology and Philosophy of Religion at the Philosophisch-Theologische Hochschule Sankt-Georgen, Frankfurt, Germany.

Index of names

Aaron (bibl.) 99 – 100 Abhishiktananda, S. 223, 225 – 7 Abouhalima, M. 273, 279 Abraham (bibl.) 127, 130 Adams, N. 253, 261 – 2 Agamben, G. 59 Al-Farabi 108, 111 Allison, H. E. 57, 59 Alston, W. P. 62, 64 – 6, 72 – 4, 124 – 6, 139, 141, 143 – 4, 146, 158 – 60 Andersen, S. 24 – 5 Anderson, E. 178 – 80 Anscombe, G. E. M. 109, 111 Aquinas, Th. 91, 129, 136, 139 – 40, 159 Arts, W. 260, 262 Augustine 136, 139 – 40, 206, 247 – 8, 260, 262 Baatz, U. 223 Bailey, T. 260, 262 Baker-Hytch, M. 139 – 40 Balch, D. 92 – 3 Barkun, M. 278 – 9 Barrett, J. 76 – 7, 80, 91 – 2 Basinger, D. 125 Benor, E. Z. 109 – 10 Bergmann, M. 159 – 60 Blamires, H. 177, 180 Blée, F. 219 – 20, 224, 225 – 6 Blumenthal, D. R. 109 – 10 Boghossian, P. 71 Bonhoeffer, D. 269 Boyer, P. 77, 82 – 3, 91 – 2 Braavig, J. 23, 25 Brandom, R. B. 58 – 9 Bray, M. 269 – 71, 275, 278 – 9 Britton, J. 269 Brownsword, R. 23, 25

Bruce, S. 273, 279 Brümmer, V. 197 Buddha 89 – 91, 210, 214, 223 Bünker, A. 242, 244 Burrell, D. B. 70, 73 – 4 Bush Jr., G. 272 Butler, R. 278 Caddick Bourne, E. 94, 108, 110 Calhoun, C. 260, 262 Calvin, J. 159 Carlson, C. C. 277, 280 Carson, Th. L. 39 Cave, P. 159, 161 Cavell, S. 57, 59 – 60 Chabris, Ch. 178, 180 Changeux, J.-P. 260, 262 Conant, J. 57 – 8, 60 Conee, E. 124 – 5, 178, 180 Cooke, M. 260 Cornille, C. 17, 24 – 5, 208, 224, 227, 243, 245 Cottingham, J. 11 – 12, 20 – 1, 108, 115, 117 – 18, 120, 122, 124 – 5, 127 – 41, 158, 178, 242, 261 – 2 Craig, M. 58 – 9 Cruz, H. de 125, 177, 180 Daniel (bibl.) 267 Darwall, S. 179, 180 Davidson, D. 9, 37, 64 – 75, 197 Davies, D. 96, 110 Day, M. 85, 92 D’Costa, G. 208 – 9, 222, 226, 238, 243 – 5, 261 – 2 De Béthune, P.-F. 217, 219, 222, 224 – 7 Depoortere, F. 63, 72, 74 Descartes, R. 139 – 40 Devitt, M. 39

284  Index of names Dewey, J. 42 Diamond, S. 277, 279 Dormandy, K. 12, 21, 23, 73, 115 – 26, 160 – 1, 162 – 81, 196 Drew, R. 71, 73 – 4, 208 – 9, 222, 227 Dummett, M. 25 Dupuis, J. 223, 227 Dürckheim, K. 218 Durkheim, E. 81, 91 – 2 Düwell, M. 23, 25 Eklund, M. 94, 108, 110 Elgin, C. Z. 159 – 61 Enomiya-Lassalle, H. M. 205, 211 – 13, 215, 218, 223, 227 Ezekiel (bibl.) 267 Feldman, R. 124 – 5, 142, 157, 161, 178 – 80 Fine, A. 39 Finney, H. C. 208 – 9 Foley, R. 159, 161 Foot, Ph. 139 – 40 Ford, D. 261 – 2 Frankish, K. 160 – 1 Garrett, D. 158, 161 Gellman, J. 124 – 5 Gentile, V. 260, 262 Giorgi, M. de 213 – 14, 223, 228 Gmainer-Pranzl, F. 233, 242, 245 Gould, S. J. 277, 279 Greenerg, J. 179, 181 Griffin, M. 269, 275 Griffiths, B. 219 Griffiths, P. J. 39 – 40 Grube, D.-M. 13, 16, 20, 24 – 5, 42, 56, 59, 72 – 3, 120, 123, 158, 177 – 9, 182 – 99, 263 Gunn, D. 269, 275 Gutting, G. 124, 125 Habermas, J. 4, 24 – 5, 206, 249 – 51, 253 – 4, 258, 260 – 3 Habito, R. L. F. 222, 226 – 7 Halman, L. 260, 262 Harding, S. 179 – 80 Harrison, V. S. 16, 21, 23, 57, 108, 110, 160, 203 – 9, 247 – 9, 260, 264 – 80 Heber, R. 139 Heim, S. M. 208 – 9 Herrmann, E. 42 – 3, 56, 59

Heshel, A. J. 130, 138, 140 Hick, J. 61 – 2, 70, 72 – 4, 124 – 6, 182, 192 – 3, 196, 203, 208 – 9, 224, 227 Hill, P. J. 269 – 71, 275 – 6, 279 – 80 Hitler, A. 269 – 70 Höcht-Stöhr, J. 222, 235 Höhn, H.-J. 215, 224, 227 Honneth, A. 46, 57, 59 Hopkins, G. M. 130, 138, 140 Horwich, P. 158, 161 Hume, D. 104 – 5, 110 – 11, 142, 146, 158, 161 Ibn Bajja 108, 111 Izutsu, T. 222, 227 James, W. 41 – 2, 44, 47 – 51, 53 – 60, 191 Janis, I. 178, 180 Jesus Christ 15, 90, 103, 105 – 6, 116, 127, 131, 144, 155 – 6, 176, 194, 210, 213 – 15, 221, 224, 226, 229 – 41, 243 – 5, 279 – 80 Job (bibl.) 109, 111 John Paul II 217, 220, 223, 225 – 7 John the Baptist (bibl.) 215 Jones, L. 277, 279 Jonkers, P. 1 – 26, 38 – 40, 57 – 9, 72 – 3, 108, 140, 159 – 60, 177, 179 – 80, 197, 206 – 8, 226, 242, 246 – 63, 265, 276 – 7, 279 Juergensmeyer, M. 207 – 9, 272, 278 – 9 Kahneman, D. 178, 180 Kalmykova, E. 10, 20, 37 – 9, 73, 75 – 93, 260 Kant, I. 32, 37, 43, 45, 56 – 9, 129, 138, 140, 170, 182 – 3, 250 Kaufman, G. D. 62, 64, 68, 72, 74 Kauppinen, A. 24, 26 Kearney, R. 261 – 3 Keating, Th. 219, 225, 227 Kermani, N. 160 – 1 Khan, A. 279 – 80 Khorchide, M. 244 – 5 Kierkegaard, S. 5, 11, 38 – 9, 94 – 111, 158, 261 King, N. 124 – 5 King, R. 277 – 80 Kipling, R. 138 – 40 Kitcher, P. 127 – 31, 133, 138, 140 Kivistö, S. 56, 58 – 9 Kleutgen, J. 158, 161

Index of names  285 Klostermaier, K. 138, 140 – 1 Koskinen, H. J. 58 – 60 Krueger, J. 92 Kvanvig, J. 198 Lafont, C. 260 Lambkin, M. 63, 72, 74 Larue, G. A. 267 – 8, 277, 280 Latour, B. 92 Leeuwen, N. van 79, 82 – 4, 92 – 3 Leibniz, G. W. 50 Le Saux, H. 205, 211, 219, 223, 225, 227 Lessing, G. E. 198 Levi, P. 59 Levinas, E. 54, 58 – 60 Lewis, T. A. 25 – 6 Lincoln, B. 207 – 9 Lindsey, H. 267, 277 – 8, 280 Löffler, A. 14, 22, 204 – 5, 207, 210 – 228, 262 Longino, H. 125, 177, 180 Lopes, A. C. O. 208 – 9 Mack, A. 178, 180 Mackie, J. L. 40 Mahdavi Mehr, V. 244 – 5 Maimonides, M. 10 – 11, 38 – 9, 94 – 111, 139, 158, 261 Main, J. 218, 225, 227 March, A. 260 Margalit, A. 59 – 60 Margolis, J. 188, 190, 197 – 9 Mary (bibl.) 86, 92 McGinn, C. 159, 161 McGuire, M. 91, 93 McKim, R. 124 – 5, 196 McPherson, D. 158, 161 McVeigh, T. 271, 278 Medina, J. 48 – 9, 57 – 8, 60, 177, 180 Merrigan, T. 24, 26 Merton, Th. 220, 225, 227 Mill, J. S. 131, 139 Miriam (bibl.) 99 – 100 Moran, R. 110 – 11 Moses (bibl.) 99 – 100, 109 – 10, 130 Mother Teresa 176, 179, 181 Moyaert, M. 261, 263 Newby, G. 92 – 3 Newen, A. 178, 181 Nietzsche, F. 61, 134, 139 – 40 Niiniluoto, I. 38, 40

North, G. 270 – 71, 275 – 76, 278 – 80 Oldmeadow, H. 223, 227 Orman, B. van 91 – 2 Orwell, G. 52, 55, 58, 60 Osiek, C. 92 – 3 Pagis, M. 86, 92 – 3 Panikkar, R. 224, 227 Pattison, G. 110 – 11 Paul (bibl.) 136, 214, 221, 236, 243, 247 – 8 Pawelski, J. 58, 60 Peels, R. 161 Peirce, Ch. S. 40, 42 Pignedoli, S. 224 Pihlström, S. 8, 20, 22, 24, 29 – 40, 41 – 60, 72 – 3, 75, 196 – 7, 261 Pines, S. 108, 111 Plantinga, A. 119, 124, 126, 139, 141, 147 – 9, 159, 161, 175, 179 – 80, 187, 197, 199, 241 Plato 262 Polke, Chr. 58, 60 Potter, D. R. 124, 126 Pröpper, Th. 230, 242, 245 Putnam, H. 42 – 3, 45, 56 – 7, 60 Pyszczynski, T. 179, 181 Quarles, C. L. 278, 280 Quinn, Ph. 17, 124, 126 Rabin, Y. 269 Raftopoulos, A. 178, 181 Ratzinger, J./Benedict XVI. 243, 245, 260 Rawls, J. 4, 24, 26, 206, 249 – 50, 253 – 4, 260, 262 – 3 Reagan, R. 268 – 9, 272, 277, 279 Regnerus, M. 91, 93 Reines A. J. 109, 111 Renz, A. 223, 227 Ricoeur, P. 207, 254 – 5, 260 – 3 Roberts, Ch. H. 278, 280 Rock, I. 178, 180 Rorty, R. 32, 39 – 40, 42, 52, 56, 58 – 60, 184, 190 – 1, 198 – 9 Rose, K. 24, 26 Roser, D. 198 – 9 Rushdoony, R. J. 270 – 1, 278, 280 Saarinen, R. 39 – 40, 57, 59 – 60, 196, 199 Sacks, J. 266, 277, 280

286  Index of names Saul, J. 160 – 1 Sauvayre, R. 79, 91, 93 Schalück, H. 242, 245 Schellenberg, J. 124, 126, 136, 139, 141 Schilbrack, K. 25 – 6, 92 – 3 Schmidt-Leukel, P. 24, 26 Schwöbel, Chr. 24, 26 Searle, J. 80, 91, 93 Seidel, Chr. 198 – 9 Sharpe, E. J. 224, 227 Shupe, A. 278, 280 Siebenrock, R. 215, 224, 228 Simons, D. 178, 180 Smedt, J. de 125, 177, 180 Smietana, B. 91, 93 Solomon, M. 178, 181 Solomon, Sh. 179, 181 Sottocornola, F. 213 – 4, 223, 228 Sperber, D. 83, 93 Stosch, K. von 14 – 5, 21 – 2, 24, 26, 205 – 6, 229 – 45, 262 Stout, J. 190 – 1, 198 – 9 Stump, E. 25 – 6 Swinburne, R. 18 – 9, 25 – 6 Szabo Gendler, T. 110 – 11 Tarski, A. 65 – 7, 72, 74 Taylor, Ch. 2 – 3, 23, 26, 46 Tietz, Chr. 243, 245 Til, C. van 177, 181 Tiller, G. 278 Tillich, P. 85, 92 – 3, 243, 245

Trigg, R. 16, 24, 26, 187, 197, 199 Trump, D. 38, 197 Uecker, J. 91, 93 Vaaler, M. 91, 93 Verbin, N. 20, 22, 29, 38, 39, 94 – 111, 139, 158, 261, 282 Vetter, P. 178, 181 Wagner, P. C. 278, 280 Wahlberg, Å. 9, 21, 37, 28, 59, 61 – 75, 91, 158, 160, 178, 197, 266, 277 Waldenfels, H. 221, 223, 226, 228, 243, 245 Walton, K. L. 103 – 4, 110 – 11 Ward, K. 124, 126, 140 Watt, J. 268 – 9 Weithman, P. 260 Westphal, M. 18 – 19, 25 – 6, 38, 40 Wiertz, O. J. 1 – 26, 115 – 26, 142 – 61, 178 – 80, 183 – 4, 188 – 90, 194, 196 – 9, 279 Williams, B. 48, 57 – 8, 60, 134, 139, 141 Williamson, T. 158, 161 Wittgenstein, L. 109, 111 Wolterstorff, N. 179, 181, 260 Woudenberg, R. van 197 Wrogemann, H. 242, 245 Zagzebski, L. 159, 161 Zeimbekis, J. 178, 181

Index of subjects

abortion 163, 174, 174 – 5, 269 – 70, 273 absoluteness 21, 71, 229; absolute 4, 14, 34, 42, 49 – 50, 61 – 3, 71, 96, 103, 210 – 11, 216, 221 – 2, 234, 248 – 9 accuracy 165 – 6, 171, 173 acknowledgment 47 – 9, 51 – 6, 194, 257 Ad gentes (AG) 213 agnosticism 10, 94, 153, 191 alterity 20, 216, 219 – 20 anthropomorphic 77 antirealism 31 – 3, 35, 41, 43, 54 apocalypse 266 – 7 apophatic 212 appropriation 84, 256 argument: from contingency 130; from inconsistency 128; from religious and philosophical diversity 115, 117 – 21; from symmetry 127 – 8, 130 Armageddon 267 – 8 artefact 10, 75 – 91 Aryan 271 atheism 33, 118, 191, 247 authority 10, 82, 147, 233, 250, 252 – 3; authoritarian 4, 62, 249, 253 Babel 251, 255 – 6, 258 belief 4, 6 – 14, 16, 20 – 1, 30, 33 – 8, 42, 44, 48 – 9, 63, 67 – 71, 75 – 91, 100, 105, 107, 115 – 23, 127 – 34, 136, 142 – 56, 162 – 77, 185 – 7, 190 – 6, 206 – 8, 210 – 11, 216, 219, 231, 249, 264 – 5, 267 – 9, 271 – 7; religious 4, 6, 8, 11, 20 – 1, 33 – 8, 44, 69, 75 – 83, 85 – 6, 89 – 90, 115 – 24, 127, 129 – 30, 134, 142 – 8, 150, 152, 154 – 6, 164 – 5, 172, 175, 177, 186 – 7, 190 – 2, 207 – 8, 211, 264 – 5, 268, 274 – 7

bias 7, 12, 21 – 2, 156 – 7, 166 – 70, 173, 177, 195, 217 Bible 16, 86, 132, 237 – 8, 248, 252, 267 – 8, 271 bivalence 13, 123, 186, 188 – 9 Bodhisattva 210 Buddhism 14, 78, 83, 86, 203, 205, 210 – 14, 218, 221 – 2 Calvinism 270, 276 Catholic 78, 137, 143 – 5, 204 – 5, 211 – 16, 231 – 2, 236 – 8, 241 certainty 62, 121, 148 – 9, 195 Christian Identity movement 271 Christianity 5, 10, 14 – 5, 22, 75, 83, 106 – 7, 136, 155, 204 – 5, 213 – 15, 221, 229 – 32, 235, 237 – 40, 265, 271 – 2 Church 8, 14 – 15, 81, 83 – 4, 87, 136 – 7, 204 – 5, 210 – 16, 229 – 41, 246, 248 – 50, 265, 270, 272 circularity 45, 167 – 9, 171, 173 – 4 cognitive 7, 10 – 11, 20, 23, 31, 75 – 7, 79, 81 – 2, 85 – 6, 89 – 90, 118 – 19, 122, 132, 142 – 4, 146 – 7, 149 – 52, 163, 166, 175, 177, 182 – 3, 186 – 7, 190 – 2, 195 – 6, 234 coherence 7, 53, 147, 155 – 6 commitment: religious 35, 94, 122, 137, 143, 208 communion 78, 220 – 1 concept 5, 8 – 9, 12 – 13, 15 – 16, 19, 22, 29 – 33, 35 – 38, 41 – 44, 46 – 50, 52 – 3, 55, 61 – 71, 77, 97, 103, 123, 143 – 4, 164 – 9, 171 – 3, 175, 182 – 5, 187 – 194, 196, 205, 210, 212, 215, 218, 220, 222, 229 – 36, 249, 256 conflict 3, 16, 21, 36, 45 – 6, 69, 79, 116, 152, 155, 170, 240, 246, 255 – 6, 266 – 7, 272, 274

288  Index of subjects Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) 211 consensus 4, 134, 249 – 51, 253 constructivism 32, 42 contemplation 77, 86, 213, 217 – 8, 221 conversion 151, 153, 216, 241, 248 creation 16, 102, 270 criticism: external 13, 168 – 9, 171 death 9, 44, 99 – 100, 185, 213, 220, 231 – 2, 235, 237, 264, 274 democracy 162 dialogue: interreligious 7 – 10, 13, 17, 20 – 1, 38, 61, 64, 69, 75 – 6, 87 – 90, 94, 99, 108, 123, 151, 156, 182 – 3, 185 – 9, 194, 196, 216 – 18, 220 – 1, 229, 234, 252, 254; intrareligious 217 – 20 dignity: human 3, 46 disagreement 6 – 8, 11 – 13, 19, 71, 75, 120 – 1, 123, 142, 147, 150, 152 – 4, 162 – 77, 183, 188 – 9, 194, 196, 253, 268, 275; peer 6, 8, 11, 13, 152 – 4; religious 71, 154, 160, 196 discrimination 36, 143, 150 divine: hiddenness 94, 101; ineffability 20; inspiration 175 doctrine 6, 10 – 11, 15, 23, 34 – 7, 70, 75 – 90, 101, 121 – 2, 127 – 31, 136 – 38, 147, 149, 154 – 5, 157, 186, 188 – 9, 211 – 12, 222, 249 – 51; religious 6, 10, 23, 35, 70, 75 – 6, 79 – 84, 88, 89 – 90, 101, 122, 127 – 8, 154, 157, 250 – 1, 260 doxastic 23, 79, 83 – 4, 117, 142 – 3, 145, 152 – 3, 155 embodied 10, 38, 70, 75, 80, 82, 85 – 6, 90, 236 empiricism 32, 48 enactive 75, 82, 85 enlightenment 6, 15, 118, 189, 210, 250, 254 epistemic: evaluation 13, 165; humility 11, 14, 19, 150, 234 – 5, 249, 258 – 9; improvement 165; justification 143; luck 131 – 2; parity 116, 119, 121; peer 6, 116, 152, 154; standard 164; superiority 129, 131; value 122, 143, 156, 167 epistemology 6, 17, 37, 64, 120 – 1, 143 – 4, 188, 191 eschatological 18, 236, 241, 252 ethics 2 – 3, 30, 44 – 5, 49, 51, 54, 94, 135, 190, 193 – 4

evangelical 240, 272 evidence 3, 7, 12 – 3, 30, 35, 68, 79, 86, 116 – 21, 123, 142, 144 – 6, 148, 150 – 1, 154, 166 – 9, 173, 177, 194 – 5, 247, 267 evidentialism 35, 41, 44 evil 9, 18, 35, 44, 47, 50 – 3, 56, 248, 269, 272 – 3 evolutionism 270 exclusivism 1 – 2, 4 – 6, 8 – 10, 12 – 13, 15, 19, 29, 36 – 7, 41 – 2, 45, 53, 115 – 20, 133, 135, 155, 179, 182, 186 – 8, 192 – 3, 206, 246 – 9, 251 – 5, 257 – 59, 266 experience 4, 8 – 9, 22, 30 – 1, 34, 45 – 6, 48 – 51, 54 – 5, 58, 62 – 3, 83, 85 – 7, 90, 98, 104 – 5, 116 – 121, 130, 144 – 5, 166, 168 – 9, 175, 204 – 5, 212, 216 – 7, 219 – 22, 229, 233, 235, 239, 256, 258, 264, 271 expropriation 256 extremism 8, 264 – 6, 269, 272, 274, 276 faith 8, 10 – 11, 13 – 16, 20 – 1, 78 – 9, 95, 98, 101 – 4, 106, 122, 128 – 30, 134, 137, 145 – 8, 151 – 2, 191, 204 – 7, 211 – 12, 216 – 19, 221, 229 – 30, 234, 236 – 7, 239, 241, 247 – 8, 250, 254, 258, 265 – 6, 272, 276 – 7 fictionalism 94 – 5, 108 foundationalist 4, 9, 47 fundamentalist 16, 133, 247, 265 – 8, 272 – 4 Gaudium et spes (GS) 214 globalization 246 Global Terrorism Database 265 God 4, 10 – 11, 14, 16, 18 – 21, 32 – 35, 42 – 3, 45, 63, 75 – 8, 80 – 2, 85 – 6, 95 – 102, 106, 118 – 20, 122, 124 – 5, 130, 136, 144 – 5, 147 – 8, 150, 175 – 6, 194, 204 – 7, 212 – 16, 219 – 21, 230 – 7, 239 – 41, 248, 252, 265, 268, 270 – 1, 274 – 5 Gospel 11, 104 – 8, 176, 213, 217, 232, 248 grace 14, 18, 214, 240 Hatha-Yoga 218 heresy 247 hermeneutics 7 – 8, 10 – 11, 17, 20 – 1, 64, 94, 271 heterogeneity 15, 254 – 7 Hindu 76; Hinduism 211 – 12, 218

Index of subjects  289 Holocaust 54 – 5, 61, 267 Holy Spirit 34, 78, 148, 175, 210, 214, 217, 220, 230, 232, 268 homogeneity 256, 258 – 9 homosexuality 270 hope 15, 122, 151, 188, 206, 232 – 3, 235 – 7, 239 – 41, 257, 259, 271 hospitality: linguistic 254 – 5, 257, 259; religious 8, 15, 207, 249, 254, 257 – 9 humanism 235 icon 10, 75, 81 – 6, 88 – 90 idealism 32, 43, 45 identity: religious 2, 5 – 6, 8, 10, 15, 83, 87, 90, 140, 204 – 5, 242, 246, 257 – 8, 262; socio-cultural 1 – 4, 246, 255, 258 – 60 ideology 138, 189 idolatry 20, 136 incarnation 155, 232 – 3, 236 inclusivism 5 – 6, 8, 12 – 13, 29, 36 – 7, 41, 45, 48, 50, 53, 56, 186, 196 incommensurability 6, 11, 20, 135, 256 incompatibility 79 individualism 2 – 3, 49, 58 individualization 246 interpretation 10 – 11, 30, 34 – 5, 38, 48, 69 – 72, 77, 80, 130, 145, 170 – 1, 212, 237 – 8, 248, 252, 254, 265 – 6, 268, 277 Islam 14 – 15, 33, 75, 78, 81, 87, 91, 100, 131, 135 – 6, 205 – 6, 218, 232, 237 – 42, 265, 267, 272 Judaism 14 – 5, 75, 83, 86, 130, 136, 204 – 5, 232, 235, 237 – 8, 241, 265 justice 2, 49, 135, 149, 157, 177, 182, 187, 204, 232, 236, 240 – 1 karma 90 kenotic 213 – 4 kingdom of God 14, 230, 232 – 5, 239 – 40 knowledge 11, 30, 62 – 3, 69, 77 – 9, 90, 96, 98 – 9, 105, 119, 122, 129, 132 – 7, 145, 147 – 8, 150 – 1, 157, 184, 188 – 9, 191, 194, 212, 220 koan 210 language 2, 4, 9, 15 – 16, 20, 31 – 5, 37, 43, 45, 52, 65 – 8, 70 – 1, 81, 91, 95 – 8, 144, 151, 183 – 4, 190 – 1, 207, 236, 246 – 7, 249 – 51, 253 – 7, 259, 266, 268 – 9, 272, 275 liberalism 246, 249, 277

liturgy 81 – 2, 252 Logos 233 love 14, 18, 82, 98 – 100, 156, 166, 205, 213, 215, 230 – 5, 238 – 42, 248 lumen gentium (LG) 212, 215 Lutheran 269, 275 magisterium 216, 238 Mahayana Buddhism 216, 222 Mahdi 241 martyrdom 54 – 5 meaning: linguistic 9, 20 – 1, 64 meditation 82, 85 – 6, 203 – 4, 211 – 13, 216 – 19 Megiddo 267 mercy 174, 232, 236, 240 Messiah 214, 243 mission 8, 14 – 15, 205, 213 – 14, 229 – 42, 250 modernization 2, 3 Monastic Interreligious Dialogue (MID) 217 monologue 182, 185, 253, 255 monotheism 78, 127, 128 multiple religious belonging 8, 13 Muslim 15, 78, 85, 101, 116, 127, 131, 135, 155, 205 – 6, 232, 237 – 42, 251 – 2, 269, 273 mystery 14, 81, 137, 214, 216, 221 – 2, 253, 258 – 9 narrative 11, 76, 77, 89, 95, 104 – 8, 129, 254, 256 – 7 Nostra Aetate 137, 204, 211 – 12, 215 objectivity 18, 45, 48, 53, 61, 95, 104, 108, 134 ontology 37, 188 orthodoxy 133, 252 other: religious 6 – 7, 13 – 16, 20, 38, 56, 72, 108, 119, 143, 151, 154, 182 – 3, 185 – 7, 193, 196, 219 – 20, 255, 257 – 60 paganism 102, 107, 247 particularism 5, 7 – 10 paternalism 173, 174 peer: religious 13, 154, 183 Pentecostal Assembly of God 268 philanthropy 235, 236 philosophy of religion 1, 4 – 5, 7 – 8, 12, 18 – 19, 21 – 3, 29, 32 – 3, 35 – 7, 42, 44, 75, 119, 127, 137 pluralism 5 – 6, 8, 12 – 13, 16, 29, 36, 38, 44, 49, 56, 61, 115 – 16, 118 – 19,

290  Index of subjects 182, 186, 188, 192 – 3, 196, 203, 249, 251, 257 – 9, 261; religious 16, 24, 29, 36, 38, 56, 61, 182, 186, 188, 192, 196, 203, 251 plurality: religious 1, 4 – 5, 12, 14, 21, 22, 23, 123, 142 – 57, 159, 259 politics 44, 49, 153, 162, 266, 269, 271 populism 29 postmillennialism 270 pragmatism 8 – 9, 41 – 8, 50 – 1, 53, 55 – 6; neopragmatism 42 – 3, 53 prayer 43, 76 – 7, 82, 85 – 6, 138, 144, 211 – 13, 217 – 20, 225, 252 prophet 18, 100 – 1, 105, 132, 237, 268 protestant 16, 77, 222, 247, 266, 272 public debate 1, 250; domain 206, 251, 266; policy 123, 162 – 77; reason 15, 249 – 50, 253 Qur’an 15, 81, 135, 237 – 9, 252 racism 105, 271 rationality 6, 15, 44, 86, 142 – 7, 152, 154, 190, 254, 273 – 4 Real an sich 182, 192 realism 8 – 9, 13, 22, 29 – 38, 41 – 6, 54 – 5, 64, 71 – 2; internal 43 – 4; metaphysical 8, 22, 42 – 5, 55, 64 reason 2, 6, 15, 19, 44, 100, 102, 249 – 51, 253 – 4 recognition 3, 14, 23, 36, 41, 46 – 8, 50 – 6, 137, 150, 207 reconstructionism 270 – 1 refugee 205, 232, 239 – 40 relationalism 49 relativism 7, 32, 42, 44 – 5, 49, 55, 134, 258 – 9 religious studies 1, 10, 17, 22, 23, 33, 34 – 6, 204 representationalism 32 repression 276 respect 10 – 15, 22, 61, 76, 89, 91, 117, 119, 121 – 4, 127, 137, 151, 170, 173, 176, 177, 182 – 3, 186, 193 – 4, 213, 215 – 16, 221 – 2, 236 – 7, 239 – 40, 251 – 2, 259, 260 resurrection 128, 131, 214, 231 – 2 revelation 82, 87 – 8, 102, 127, 129 – 30, 135, 145, 213, 247, 250, 252 rhetoric 269, 272 Rinzai 210 salvation 4 – 5, 34, 105, 133, 155 – 6, 206, 229, 231, 233, 236 – 7, 247 – 9, 251

Satan 271 – 2, 274 scepticism 10, 94, 121, 154, 188, 229 science 18, 23, 30 – 2, 34 – 5, 42 – 3, 47, 56, 75, 121, 131, 133 – 5 scriptural reasoning 15, 21, 159, 206 – 8, 249, 251 – 4, 259 scripture 100, 136, 138, 171, 251 – 4, 260, 265, 267, 270, 277 Second Vatican Council 140, 141, 211 – 14, 231 Second World War 269 secular 1, 4, 5, 12, 47, 51, 83, 118, 123, 162 – 5, 169, 173 – 4, 176, 196, 206, 247, 249 – 51, 253 – 5, 259, 270 – 1, 273 – 5 secularism 123, 127 secularization 271 sense perception 175 sensus divinitatis 147 – 9, 175 – 6 Shoah 237 – 8 Sikhism 83 sin 119, 147, 148 – 9, 175 social science 34, 47 society 2, 16, 34, 46, 69, 90, 123, 131, 163, 165 – 6, 169, 171, 203, 232, 250, 265, 270 – 1, 274, 276, 277 solidarity 2, 49, 233, 239 solipsism 255 soteriology 34, 37, 56, 155 – 6 spirituality 14, 18 – 19, 130, 133, 137, 149 – 50, 154, 157, 203, 205, 210, 213 – 14, 216 – 20, 225, 262, 266, 272 state 172, 266, 269 – 71 stranger 220, 240, 273 subjectivity 11, 38, 95, 99, 101, 103 – 4, 106 – 8 subversion 104 – 6 suffering 8, 9, 41, 44, 46 – 56, 105,  232 supersessionism 15, 238 syncretism 210 – 11 terrorism 265, 269, 278 testimony 54 – 5, 142, 166, 217, 232, 234 – 7, 240 theism 1, 4 – 6, 9, 11 – 12, 18, 22, 33, 75, 78 – 9, 135 – 6, 145, 147 – 8, 155, 212 theocratic 271, 278 theodicy 41, 47, 50 – 1; antitheodicism 42, 51 theology 1, 4 – 6, 16 – 17, 19 – 20, 32 – 3, 35, 41 – 3, 45, 72, 151, 203, 205, 241, 252, 270, 271; comparative 6, 17, 203, 205, 208, 229, 244 – 5, 261; dominion 16, 270 – 1; negative 20, 98

Index of subjects  291 tolerance 2 – 4, 7, 36, 56, 61, 89, 186 – 8; intolerance 2, 4, 8, 206 – 8, 229, 265 – 6, 274, 276 tradition 2 – 3, 6 – 9, 11 – 12, 14, 17 – 21, 31, 42, 44, 46, 61, 63, 70, 76, 78, 82 – 3, 85, 89, 90, 100 – 1, 118 – 20, 122, 127 – 9, 133, 136, 138, 143, 146 – 50, 154 – 7, 171, 173, 204 – 7, 210 – 22, 234 – 5, 237, 241, 246, 250, 252 – 4, 259, 264 – 5, 270, 272 – 3,  276 transcendence 10, 38, 45, 69, 95 – 6, 99 – 101, 108 – 9 transformation 14, 214, 216, 220 translation 15, 20, 66 – 7, 81, 207, 211, 221, 250, 254 – 7 Trinity 78, 84, 88, 231 trust 78, 147, 149, 151 – 2, 210, 232, 235, 240 truth 1 – 2, 4 – 5, 8 – 16, 19 – 20, 22, 29 – 39, 41 – 2, 44 – 56, 61 – 72, 77, 86, 94 – 5, 99, 101 – 4, 107 – 8, 115 – 18, 122 – 3, 128 – 9, 131 – 7, 142 – 6, 148 – 53, 155, 157, 162, 166, 182 – 94, 203, 205 – 6, 208, 211, 213 – 14, 216, 220 – 2, 230, 234 – 5, 247 – 51, 254 – 5, 257 – 60, 266, 268, 277; existential 42; propositional 30, 48, 50, 53 – 6, 65; religious 1 – 2, 4 – 5, 8 – 16, 19, 20, 22, 30, 37, 42, 61 – 3, 69, 71, 72, 87, 90 – 1, 116, 123, 133, 142, 144, 205 – 6, 211, 221, 247, 249 – 51, 253, 257 – 60, 266, 277 truth-aptness 33, 36, 39, 41, 72, 190 truth-claim 4 – 6, 8 – 12, 15 – 16, 18, 22, 30, 36, 45, 55, 69 – 71, 87, 90 – 1, 119, 144, 151, 155, 157, 196, 206, 230, 242, 249 – 55, 257, 259 truth-condition 65 – 6, 68, 72, 137

truthfulness 9, 37, 42, 45, 48 – 9, 51, 53 – 6 truth-value 30 – 1, 64, 68 – 9, 71, 188 – 90 understanding 7 – 12, 15 – 16, 20 – 1, 23, 37, 51, 53, 62 – 72, 78, 90 – 1, 96, 105, 121 – 2, 124, 144, 151, 155, 157, 194, 203, 206, 214, 233 – 7, 241, 244, 252, 255, 257 – 8, 261, 264, 276 United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth 266 universalism 8 – 9, 10 untimeliness 18 – 19 value 2, 5 – 7, 11 – 12, 20, 30, 42, 46, 48, 70, 79 – 81, 122, 130, 137, 143 – 4, 154, 156, 162, 164 – 8, 170 – 6, 187, 196, 216, 235, 237 – 8, 246, 249 – 51, 254, 271 Vatican 211 victim 46 – 7, 55, 127, 157, 172, 269, 273 violence 8, 15 – 16, 21, 36, 206 – 8, 226, 246 – 60, 264 – 77 virtue 54, 101, 116, 142, 149 – 50, 207, 249, 259 war 127, 266 – 7, 269, 271 – 3 wisdom 124, 133, 142, 254 world-religion 5, 116, 182, 218, 222 World Trade Center 272 – 3 worldview 1 – 2, 5, 12 – 13, 16, 71, 144, 157, 162 – 77, 234, 247, 249 – 51, 255, 264, 266, 268, 272 – 7 worship 87 – 8, 127, 252 Zazen 203, 210, 212 – 13, 218, 222 Zen 14, 203 – 4, 207, 210 – 22