Problems of Religious Diversity E-Book

Paul J. Griffiths

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: Exploring the Philosophy of Religion
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 402

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Beschreibung

Exploring Religious Diversity analyzes the philosophical questions raised by the fact that many religions in the world often appear to contradict each other in doctrine and practice.

• Analyzes the philosophical questions raised by the fact that many religions in the world often appear to contradict each other in doctrine and practice.
• Evaluates the fundamental philosophical underpinnings of the debates between religious and non-religious approaches to religious diversity.
• Contains a glossary that defines the book's key technical terms and how they are related to one another.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Series Editor’s Preface

Preface

Acknowledgments

Key Terms

CHAPTER 1: Religious Diversity

1.1 Religion: Some Historical Remarks

1.2 Religion: A Definition

1.3 Diversity in Religion

1.4 Philosophical Questions about Religious Diversity

1.5 Standpoints and Answers

NOTES

CHAPTER 2: Religious Diversity and Truth

2.1 Religious Claims: Doctrines and Teachings

2.2 Assent and Acceptance

2.3 Truth, Falsehood, Incompatibility

2.4 Parity with Respect to Truth: A Kantian View

2.5 Parity with Respect to Truth: A Wittgensteinean View

2.6 Parity with Respect to Truth: Nonreligious Views

2.7 Difference with Respect to Religious Truth: Exclusivism

2.8 Difference with Respect to Religious Truth: Inclusivism

2.9 A Catholic Christian Argument for Open Inclusivism

CHAPTER 3: Religious Diversity and Epistemic Confidence

3.1 Epistemic Confidence

3.2 Awareness of Diversity

3.3 Religious Responses to the Question of Epistemic Confidence

3.4 Privatization

3.5 The Epistemic Significance of Religious Diversity: A Christian View in Conversation with William Alston

NOTES

CHAPTER 4: The Religious Alien

4.1 Toleration: Enduring the Religious Alien

4.2 Separation: Isolating the Religious Alien

4.3 Conversion: Domesticating the Religious Alien

4.4 Christian Evangelism

NOTES

CHAPTER 5: The Question of Salvation

5.1 Pluralism

5.2 Exclusivism

5.3 Inclusivism

5.4 Restrictivism and Universalism

NOTES

A Brief Guide to Further Reading

Index

Exploring the Philosophy of Religion

Series editor. Michael L. Peterson, Chair of the Department of Philosophy, Asbury College

This is a series of individual volumes on classic and contemporary themes in the philosophy of religion. Each volume introduces, examines, and discusses the main problems and arguments related to each topic. Each book also considers some important positions of major philosophers, offers thoughtful critiques, articulates new positions, and indicates fruitful directions for further investigation.

1 Problems of Religious Diversity Paul J. Griffiths

Copyright © Paul J. Griffiths 2001

The right of Paul J. Griffiths to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published 2001

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Blackwell Publishers Inc.350 Main StreetMalden, Massachusetts 02148USA

Blackwell Publishers Ltd108 Cowley RoadOxford OX4 IJFUK

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Griffiths, Paul J.  Problems of religious diversity / Paul J. Griffiths.    p. cm. – (Exploring the philosophy of religion; 1)  Includes bibliographical references and index.  ISBN 0-631-21149-7 (hardcover) – ISBN 0-631-21150-0 (pbk.)  1. Theology of religions (Christian theology) I. Title. II. Series.  BT83.85.G75 2001  261.2 – dc21

2001000956

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

This book is for my teachers, especially Trevor Williams, Richard Gombrich, Minoru Kiyota, Keith Yandell, and Noriaki Hakamaya

Series Editor’s Preface

Philosophy of religion is experiencing a kind of renaissance. From the last quarter of the twentieth century onward, we have witnessed remarkably vigorous activity among philosophers interested in religion. We are likewise seeing college and university students seeking courses in philosophy of religion at an unprecedented rate. To reach this point, philosophy of religion had to weather the harsh and hostile intellectual climate that persisted through most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Absolute Idealism depersonalized deity, naturalism supplanted a religious worldview, and positivism deprived theological claims of cognitive status. Yet, partly because of incisive critiques of these viewpoints and partly because of new, first-rate studies of religious concepts and beliefs, this field of inquiry has once again come to the fore.

The Exploring the Philosophy of Religion series, then, comes into a very exciting arena. The books it contains treat some of the most important topics in the field. Since the renewal of interest in religion has occurred largely among Anglo-American philosophers committed to the best in the analytic tradition, these works will tend to reflect that approach. To be sure, some helpful general introductions and anthologies are available for those wanting a survey, and there are many good cutting-edge monographs dealing with technical issues in this burgeoning area. However, the books in this series are designed to occupy that relatively vacant middle ground in the literature between elementary texts and pioneer works. They discuss their stated topics in a way that acquaints the reader with all the relevant ideas and options while pointing out which ones seem most reasonable. Each volume, therefore, constitutes a focused, intensive introduction to the issue and serves as a model of how one might actually go about developing an informed position.

Philosophy of religion is dynamic and growing. The issues it addresses are of primary significance for understanding the divine, ourselves, and our place in the universe. With this sense of magnitude, the present series has been conceived to offer something to all who want to think deeply about the issues: serious undergraduates, graduate students, divinity and theology students, professional philosophers, and even thoughtful, educated lay persons.

Michael L. PetersonSeries Editor

Preface

Many questions of conceptual and practical interest are raised by thinking about religious diversity. This book is intended principally as a map of the territory covered by these questions. It is a guide to what the questions are, and to ways of thinking about and answering them that have proven attractive and interesting to many. It also contains suggestions, recommendations, and arguments as to how these questions are best thought about. Since each question treated is complex, controversial, and possessed of many and deep connections to other equally complex and controversial questions, I don’t expect any of the recommendations offered to find wide acceptance; they will have done their work if they provoke further thought and writing on the topic.

Three threads that run through the book deserve brief comment here.

The first thread is an attempt, not often made, to distinguish with as much clarity as possible responses to the questions posed by thinking about religious diversity likely to be congenial to the nonreligious from those likely to be congenial to those with religious commitments. This I take to be important because of the deep differences in the way these questions appear to the two groups; and because of the influential nature of the attempts by the democracies of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century to offer consistently nonreligious (or religiously neutral) answers to the questions of religious diversity.

The second thread is an attempt repeatedly to draw attention to the fact that resolutions of the questions treated in the book, whether proposed by the religious or the nonreligious, always assume and deploy convictions about matters of fundamental philosophical importance. Disagreements about particular solutions to the questions of religious diversity will not be arrived at without attention to these more fundamental disagreements. This is important because it provides a nice illustration of a general philosophical truth: argumentative attempts at resolution of a particular philosophical problem are most useful not when they produce agreement, but when they show with clarity how deep the disagreement really goes.

The third thread is the frequent recommendation of peculiarly Christian responses (responses that rely on Christian assumptions) to the questions of religious diversity. The responses of this kind that I commend and argue for will not be attractive – and perhaps not even interesting – to non-Christians; they won’t convince all Christians, either. But their presence is required by the book’s second thread, since this suggests that any attempted resolution of the questions of religious diversity cannot avoid and should not try to avoid deploying controversial assumptions of a philosophically fundamental sort. Since this book is written by a Catholic Christian, the assumptions of this kind that inform its attempted resolutions are inevitably and properly those of Catholic Christianity. Their presence and use therefore serves as an illustration of the book’s understanding of how the questions of religious diversity inevitably must be approached. Christian readers can enter more fully than non-Christian ones, perhaps, into those parts of the book in which specifically Christian positions are recommended; but non-Christian readers can profit from them as examples of how a religiously-committed person reasons about these matters.

Two practical matters, in conclusion. First, immediately following this preface is a section in which the book’s key technical terms are given brief definitions and related discursively to one another. They’re given in roughly the order in which they’re introduced in the book. You’ll find it useful to read the key terms section through once before you begin the book, and then to turn back to it at intervals as you need to remind yourself of how a particular term is being used. The key terms may seem obscure at first reading, but at that point it’s meant to serve only as a guide or template for what’s to come. Its terms will become clearer as you read through the book.

Acknowledgments

The following people have read and commented upon all or part of this book at various stages of its composition: Jeffery Long, Dan Arnold, Kristin Beise (who also helped me find the sources I needed to consult), Gus DiNoia, Thomas Forsthoefel, Mark Heim, Will Kiblinger, Derek Jeffreys, Jared Ortiz, Jerry Walls, and an anonymous reader for Blackwell Publishers. I haven’t adopted all the suggestions made (that would have been impossible), but I have learned from them all and am deeply grateful for the collegial spirit shown by those who made them. I’m grateful, too, to students at the University of Chicago (especially those in my classes on religious diversity in 1997 and 2000) who suffered with apparent good will my teaching about the matters discussed in this book. As usual, I learned more from them than they from me. Finally, this book is written for the greater glory of God and at the service of the people of God: Non solum non peccemus adorando, sed peccemus non adorando.

Key Terms

A religion is a form of life that seems to those who belong to it to be comprehensive, incapable of abandonment, and of central importance. It comes in two kinds: the home religion, which is the one you belong to if you belong to one at all; and alien religions, which are any you do not belong to. It follows that there are religious aliens (those who belong to any alien religion), and religious kin (those who belong to the home religion along with you). Those who belong to no religion are nonreligious; if you are nonreligious then you have no home religion, which also means that you have no religious kin and that all religious people are, to you, religious aliens.

Religious claims are propositions about the setting of human life, the nature of humans, or the proper conduct of human life assent to or acceptance of which is required or suggested by belonging to a religion. These claims may be alien or domestic according to whether they belong to an alien religion or to the home religion. Religious claims may also be doctrines (if explicit assent to or acceptance of them is required by belonging to a religion), or teachings (if such assent or acceptance is only suggested). A religious assent is the involuntary act of taking a religious claim as true (of believing it); and a religious acceptance is the voluntary act of entertaining a religious claim, of affirming it or taking it as a guide. Religious claims typically may be true or false; it follows that they may also be incompatible one with another, in the following senses: two religious claims are contradictory if both can’t be true and one must be; contrary if both can’t be true and neither need be; noncompossible if each prescribes a course of action and it’s impossible for one person to perform both.

Exclusivism with respect to truth is the view that true religious claims are found only among the doctrines and teachings of the home religion. Inclusivism with respect to truth is the view that it is possible that both the home religion and alien religions teach truth; in its open variety it affirms the possibility that some alien religion may teach truths not already explicitly taught by the home religion, while in its closed variety it denies this possibility.

Those who recommend toleration of religious aliens seek not to interfere with them, to let them be; those who recommend separation from them want no contact with them of any kind (in which case their separatist desires are total); or only to limit such contact (in which case their separatist desires are partial). Separatist desires may also be comprehensive, in which case they’re directed toward all religious aliens; or noncomprehensive, in which case they’re directed only to some. Those who advocate conversion of religious aliens want to domesticate them, to make them into religious kin; they are evangelists, and their activity is evangelical. They may have comprehensive evangelical desires, in which case they want to evangelize everyone; or noncomprehensive ones, in which case they want to evangelize only some. Evangelical methods may favor compulsion, in which case evangelism is accompanied by threat; persuasion, in which case it is accompanied by argument; or presentation, in which case it relies simply upon being present to those whose conversion is hoped for.

Your salvation is your proper end, the fulfilment of your purpose. On the question of what belonging to a religion has to do with being saved, there are pluralists, who think that all religions are equally effective in bringing salvation about; exclusivists, who think that belonging to the home religion is necessary for salvation; and inclusivists, who think that while belonging to the home religion is advantageous for salvation, belonging to an alien religion may sometimes suffice. On the question of who gets saved, there are restrictivists, whose claim is that not all do; and universalists, whose claim is that all do.

CHAPTER 1

Religious Diversity

1.1 Religion: Some Historical Remarks

There is no general agreement about what the term religion means. It follows that there is also no general agreement about how to decide when some pattern of human activity or belief is religious, how many religions there are, or where one religion ends and another begins. Christians, Jews, Buddhists, Muslims, and Hindus (among others) sometimes call their forms of life religions and themselves religious people. When they do, they may have relatively precise ideas about what it is to be religious; but such ideas tend to be derived by generalization from what they believe and practice as Christians, Jews, Buddhists (or whatever the case may be), and not to be widely shared (or even understood) beyond those communities. People who do not think of themselves as religious are generally less likely than those who do to have given much thought to the question of what religion is; and even where they have, perhaps forced to do so by professional need (constitutional lawyers with First Amendment interests, for example, or historians concerned to understand Hindu/Muslim hatreds in post-independence India) the views they arrive at are likely to be of use only for narrowly technical purposes.

The upshot is that the term is like art or in being very difficult for native speakers of English to reach consensus about. Some of us, like terriers with rats, know religion when we see it and have deep feelings roused by it, but are quite incapable of offering a definition. Others, like people deaf from birth with music, can’t recognize it and have little interest in it. Yet others make a profession of writing about it and studying it, and yet are disinterested, like apolitical historians of politics or nonmusical musicologists.