Approaches to Religions
Approaches to Religions
Addressing the theme of “Christianity and other religions” immediately raises the question of how religion is to be defined. This question is made substantially more problematical on account of the fact that no universally accepted definition has emerged. A number of significantly different understandings of the nature of religion, each claiming to be “scientific” or “objective,” emerged during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Certain of these attempts (most notably those of Karl Marx, 1818–83, Sigmund Freud, 1856–1939, and Emile Durkheim, 1858–1917) have been strongly reductionist, generally reflecting the personal or institutional agendas of those who developed them. These reductive approaches have been subjected to severe criticism by writers such as Mircea Eliade (see p. 413), on account of their obvious inadequacies.
Thomas Luckmann's (born 1927) The Invisible Religion (1967) was probably the last major contribution to the sociology of religion to use the word “religion” in a Durkheimian manner to denote “beliefs with no super-empirical or supernatural reference”; the term “religion” has now generally been accepted by many writers to refer to “beliefs and practices with a supernatural referent.” However, as the comments of Anthony Giddens make clear (see previous section), this is by no means universally accepted, especially among sociologists with a vested interest in treating religions as a social phenomenon and human construction.
It must be stressed that definitions of religion are rarely neutral but are often generated to favor beliefs and institutions with which one is in sympathy and penalize those to which one is hostile. Definitions of religions show a marked tendency to depend on the particular purposes and prejudices of individual scholars. Thus, a writer who has a particular concern to show that all religions give access to the same divine reality will develop a definition of religion which embodies this belief (e.g., the famous definition of religion by F. Max Mueller, 1823–1900, as “a disposition which enables men to apprehend the Infinite under different names and disguises”). A similar agenda underlies more recent writings which are committed to the view that all religions are simply local culturally conditioned responses to the same basic transcendent ultimate.
Such attempts often rest on what might be considered an excessive reliance upon an outdated Kantian distinction between “phenomena” and “noumena,” with the various religions corresponding to the former and “ultimate reality” to the latter. This distinction has been challenged by the rise of the type of holistic linguistic interpretive approach found in the writings of philosophers such as Donald Davidson (1917–2003), raising serious doubts concerning the coherence of the Kantian viewpoint when applied to the case of religions.
Writers specializing in fieldwork anthropology (such as E. E. Evans-Pritchard, 1902–73, and Clifford E. Geertz, 1926–2006) have offered more complex and reflective models of religion. A major debate within contemporary anthropology and sociology of religion concerns whether religion is to be defined “functionally” (religion has to do with certain social or personal functions of ideas and rituals) or “substantially” (religion has to do with certain beliefs concerning divine or spiritual beings). Despite widespread differences in terminology (many writers disagreeing over how appropriate it is to use key terms such as “supernatural,” “spiritual,” and “mystical”), there appears to be at least some measure of genuine agreement that religion, however conceived, in some way involves belief and behavior linked with a supernatural realm of divine or spiritual beings.
In what follows, we shall consider a number of major approaches to the religions of the world. Some are secular; others are explicitly Christian in their orientation. We begin by considering the views that emerged at the time of the Enlightenment.
The Enlightenment: Religions as a Corruption of the Original Religion of Nature
The Enlightenment witnessed the birth of the idea that religion was fundamentally a corruption of a primeval rational worldview, engineered by priests as a means of enhancing and preserving their positions within society. In his True Intellectual System of the Universe (1678), the Deist writer Ralph Cudworth (1617–88) argued that all religions were ultimately based upon a common ethical monotheism – a simple religion of nature, basically ethical in character and devoid of all the arbitrary doctrines and religious rites of Christianity or Judaism. The primordial rational religion of nature had become corrupted through its early interpreters. This approach is also found in Matthew Tindal's (1657–1733) highly influential work Christianity as Old as Creation, or, The Gospel a Republication of the Religion of Nature (1730). On the basis of the foundational Enlightenment assumption of the rationality of reality and the ability of human beings to uncover and apprehend this rationality, it was argued that whatever lay behind the various world religions was ultimately rational in character and thus capable of being uncovered, described, and analyzed by human reason.
The idea of a universal rational religion was, however, at odds with the diversity of the world religions. As European knowledge of these religions deepened, through the growth of the genre of “voyager literature” and through the increasing availability of Chinese, Indian, Persian, and Vedic religious writings, it became increasingly clear that the notion of a universal religion of reason faced difficulties when confronted with the evidence of the astonishing variety of human religious beliefs and practices. Many Enlightenment writers, perhaps more concerned with championing reason than with wrestling with the empirical evidence, developed a theory of religion which accounted for this diversity, at least in part.
The theory that gained an especially wide hearing was that the various world religions were little more than the inventions of cultic leaders or priests, whose main motivation was the preservation of their own interests and status. The Roman historian Tacitus (56–c.120) had suggested that Moses invented the Jewish religious rites as a means of ensuring religious cohesion after the expulsion from Egypt; many writers of the early Enlightenment developed this notion, arguing that the variety of human religious rites and practices were simply human inventions in response to specific historical situations, now firmly in the past. The way was open to the recovery of the universal primordial religion of nature, which would put an end to the religious squabbles of humanity.
The idea of “superstition” emerged as significant at this time, often becoming pejoratively synonymous with “religion.” In his Natural History of Superstition (1709), John Trenchard (1662–1723) developed the idea of the inherent credulity of humanity, which permitted natural monotheism to degenerate into the various religious traditions of humanity. The enthusiasm with which this idea was received can be judged from the comments of the Independent Whig (December 31, 1720), to the effect that “the peculiar Foible of Mankind is Superstition, or an intrinsick and pannick Fear of invisible and unknown Beings.”
For Trenchard, the religions represented the triumph of superstition over reason. By eliminating such superstitious beliefs and rites, a return to the universal and simple religion of nature could be achieved. A similar idea was developed during the French Enlightenment by Paul Henri Thiry (1723–89), Baron d'Holbach, who argued that religion was little more than a form of pathological disorder. The French Revolution had seemed set to eliminate this disorder; its total failure to do so raised awkward questions for the general Enlightenment approach to religions. For this reason, the approach adopted by Ludwig Feuerbach seemed to offer new possibilities for those disaffected as a result of the European religious situation at the time.
Ludwig Feuerbach (1804–72): Religion as an Objectification of Human Feeling
In the foreword to the first edition of his The Essence of Christianity (1841), Ludwig Feuerbach states that the purpose of his work is “to show that the supernatural mysteries of religion are based upon quite simple natural truths.” The leading idea of the work is deceptively simple: human beings have created their own gods and religions, which embody their own idealized conception of their aspirations, needs, and fears. We have already considered some aspects of Feuerbach's approach (see pp. 133–4); it now demands to be treated in more detail.
It is not correct to suggest that Feuerbach merely reduces the divine to the natural. The permanent significance of Feuerbach's work lies in its detailed analysis of the means by which religious concepts arise within the human consciousness. The thesis that human beings create the gods in their own image is but the conclusion of a radical and penetrating critique of concept-formation in religion, based on the Hegelian concepts of “self-alienation” and “self-objectification.”
The Hegelian analysis of consciousness requires that there be a formal relationship between subject and object. The concept of “consciousness” cannot be isolated as an abstract idea, in that it is necessarily linked with an object: to be “conscious” is to be conscious of something. Human consciousness of feelings, such as fear or love, leads to their objectification and thus to externalization of these feelings. Divine predicates are thus for Feuerbach recognized to be human predicates:
Consciousness of God is human self-consciousness; knowledge of God is human self-knowledge. By the God you know the human, and conversely, by the human, you know the God. The two are one. [...] What an earlier religion took to be objective, is later recognized to be subjective; what formerly was taken to be God, and worshiped as such, is now recognized to be something human. What was earlier religion is later taken to be idolatry: humans are seen to have adored their own nature. Humans objectified themselves but failed to recognize themselves as this object. The later religion takes this step; every advance in religion is therefore a deepening in self-knowledge.
It is obvious that Feuerbach tends to use the terms “Christianity” and “religion” interchangeably throughout The Essence of Christianity, thus glossing over the fact that his theory has some difficulty in accounting for nontheistic religions. Nevertheless, it is clear that his reduction of Christian theology to anthropology is of considerable significance.
The most important epistemological analysis in The Essence of Christianity is concerned with the role of feeling in the process of religious concept-formation, and has important consequences for the approach centered on “religious feeling” characteristic of F. D. E. Schleiermacher (1768–1834) and the later liberal tradition. For Feuerbach, Christian theology has tended to interpret the externalized image of “feeling” or self-consciousness as a wholly other, absolute essence, whereas in fact it is a “self-feeling feeling”: human religious feelings or experience cannot be interpreted as an awareness of God – only as a misunderstood self-awareness. “If feeling is the essential instrumentality or organ of religion, then God's nature is nothing other than an expression of the nature of feeling. [...] The divine essence, which is comprehended by feeling, is actually nothing other than the essence of feeling, enraptured and delighted with itself – nothing but self-intoxicated, self-contented feeling.”
Important though Feuerbach's analysis may have been, it was overshadowed by that of Karl Marx, to which we now turn.
Karl Marx: Religion as the Product of Socioeconomic Alienation
In his 1844 political and economic manuscripts, the left-wing Hegelian political thinker Karl Marx (1818–83) developed an approach to religion which rests upon ideas that clearly stem from Feuerbach. Religion has no real independent existence. It is a reflection of the material world and is derived from the social needs and hopes of human beings (see pp. 409–10). “The religious world is but the reflex of the real world.” Marx argues that “religion is just the imaginary sun which seems to humans to revolve around themselves until they realize that they themselves are the center of their own revolution.” In other words, God is simply a projection of human concerns. Human beings “look for a superhuman being in the fantasy reality of heaven, and find nothing there but their own reflection.”
Figure 17.1 Karl Marx (1818–83).
Source: The Art Archive / Karl Marx Museum, Trier / Gianni Dagli Orti.
Yet the human nature which generates religious ideas is “alienated.” The notion of alienation is of central importance to Marx's account of the origins of religious belief. “Humans make religion; religion does not make humans. Religion is the self-consciousness and self-esteem of people who either have not found themselves or who have already lost themselves again.” Religion is the product of social and economic alienation. It arises from that alienation and at the same time encourages that alienation by a form of spiritual intoxication which renders the masses incapable of recognizing their situation and doing something about it. Religion is a comfort which enables people to tolerate their economic alienation. If there were no such alienation, there would be no need for religion. The division of labor and the existence of private property introduce alienation and estrangement into the economic and social orders.
Materialism affirms that events in the material world bring about corresponding changes in the intellectual world. Religion is thus the result of a certain set of social and economic conditions. Change those conditions, so that economic alienation is eliminated, and religion will cease to exist. It will no longer serve any useful function. Unjust social conditions produce religion and are in turn supported by religion. “The struggle against religion is therefore indirectly a struggle against the world of which religion is the spiritual fragrance.”
Marx thus argues that religion will continue to exist as long as it meets a need in the lives of alienated people. “The religious reflex of the real world can [...] only then vanish when the practical relations of everyday life offer to humanity none but perfectly intelligible and reasonable relations with regard to other human beings and to nature.” Feuerbach had argued that religion was the projection of human needs, an expression of the “uttered sorrow of the soul.”
Marx agreed with this interpretation. However, his point is more radical. It is not enough to explain how religion arises on account of sorrow and injustice. By changing that world, the causes of religion can be removed. It is important to note that Marx regards Feuerbach as correct in his analysis of the origins of religion, even if having failed to discern how an understanding of those origins might lead to its eventual elimination. It is this insight which underlies his often quoted 11th thesis on Feuerbach (1845): “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.”
Sigmund Freud (1856–1939): Religion as Wish Fulfillment
Earlier we explored Ludwig Feuerbach's radical idea that the concept of God is fundamentally a human construction, based on the “projection” of fundamental human longings and desires. Feuerbach's basic ideas were taken over, and given a new sense of direction, in the writings of the Austrian psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud. “All I have done – and this is the only thing that is new in my exposition – is to add some psychological foundation to the criticisms of my great predecessors.” In fact, it is probably fair to say that Feuerbach's “projection” or “wish-fulfillment” theory is best known today in its Freudian form, rather than in Feuerbach's original version. “Religion,” Freud wrote, “is an illusion and it derives its strength from the fact that it falls in with our instinctual desires.”
The most powerful statement of Freud's approach may be found in The Future of an Illusion (1927), which develops a strongly reductionist approach to religion. For Freud, religious ideas are “illusions, fulfillments of the oldest, strongest and most urgent wishes of mankind.” The parallels with Feuerbach are evident; yet Freud went on to develop a radical and original explanation of religion, grounded in the insights of the newly emerging discipline of psychoanalysis, which took Feuerbach's critique of religion to new heights. Illusions are not deliberate deceptions; they are simply ideas that arise from within the human unconsciousness, as it seeks to fulfill its deepest yearnings and longings. For Marx, those longings are the tragic outcome of social alienation, requiring social transformation for their elimination. For Freud, their origins lie not in society but in the human unconscious.
The first major statement of Freud's views on the origin of religion – which he increasingly came to refer to as “the psychogenesis of religion” – may be found in Totem and Taboo (1913). Developing his earlier observation that religious rites are similar to the obsessive actions of his neurotic patients, Freud declared that religion is basically a distorted form of an obsessional neurosis. The key elements in all religions, he argues, are the veneration of a father figure (such as God or Jesus Christ), faith in the power of spirits, and a concern for proper rituals.
Religion, according to Freud's historical account, arises through inner psychological pressures, which reflect the complex evolutionary history of humanity. In particular, Freud located the origins of belief in God in the human need for a father figure. In The Future of an Illusion, Freud argued that religion represents the perpetuation of a piece of infantile behavior in adult life. Religion is an immature response to the awareness of helplessness, involving regression to childhood experiences of paternal care: “my father will protect me; he is in control.” Belief in a personal God is thus little more than an infantile delusion. Religion is wishful thinking, an illusion. The psychological origins of human belief in God are thus to be found in a projection of the intense, unconscious desires of humanity. God is to be seen as a wish fulfillment, arising from repressed, unconscious infantile longings for protection and security. Therefore, religious beliefs owe their origins to a childlike feeling of helplessness, which arises in response to external dangers, internal impulses, and a fear of death. Just as children look to their parents to protect them from danger, so this infantile pattern is transferred to adulthood, in that adults create gods for themselves precisely because they had similar “gods” in their homes while they were growing up.
The cultural impact of Freud's approach has been immense, especially in North America. It is fair to say that, from about 1920, Freud's account of religion gained the ascendancy within the American intelligentsia, attracting a following exceeding even that of such postmodern writers as Paul de Man (1919–83) and Michel Foucault (1926–84) in more recent times. Freud set the cultural agenda of his day and for a generation beyond in a way that admirably justifies W. H. Auden's (1907–73) famous description of Freud as “not a person, but a whole climate of opinion.” Freud was regarded as having scientifically unlocked the hidden, repressed secrets of the human mind, thus enabling humanity to face its future with confidence and hope – and without religion. Although Freud's theories of the origins of religion are now generally regarded as unscientific speculation, their influence lingers on, and they are still occasionally encountered in some discussions of the nature and origins of religion.
Emile Durkheim (1858–1917): Religion and Ritual
In his Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (1912), the French sociologist Emile Durkheim explored the relationship between religion and the institutions of society in general. The case study upon which most of his ideas are grounded is that of “totemism” in Australian aboriginal societies. For Durkheim, totemism represents the “elementary form of the religious life.” A totem was originally an animal or plant which was regarded as having especial symbolic significance for a people. It was thus treated as sacred – that is, as being set apart from the routine aspects of human life.
The reason for this, according to Durkheim, is that the totem comes to represent values which are central to society itself. As a result, it comes to be a symbol of the group. The reverence with which the totem is treated is, in reality, reverence for the group itself and its undergirding values. The true object of worship is thus not the totem but society itself. The ceremony and ritual which attend this worship are seen as reflections of the need for social cohesion. The special religious ceremonies which are associated with birth, marriage, and death are to be regarded as a reaffirmation of group solidarity at moments of cultural importance. Thus, funeral rites demonstrate that the values of a society will outlive the death of any of its individual members.
Despite the development of a scientific worldview, Durkheim believed that religion would continue to play an important role in the future, in view of its providing social cohesion for societies (a point we noted in relation to the sacraments, pp. 390–1). The emergence of “civil religion” in the United States, centering upon the person of the president and the symbol of the Stars and Stripes, could be seen as confirmation of this approach, as could the emergence of an atheist “state religion” in the former Soviet Union under Lenin and Stalin.
Mircea Eliade (1907–86): Religion and the Sacred
The Romanian-born scholar Mircea Eliade was noted for his pioneering work in the systematic study of religions. Although his interests enfolded a wide range of areas, he concentrated on the nature of religious culture, focusing especially on the role of myths and mystical experiences. Eliade's analysis of “rites of passage” (that is, rituals marking key transitional moments in the lifecycle, including birth and death) influenced many anthropologists. His often controversial books include scholarly works such as The Myth of the Eternal Return (1949) and The Sacred and the Profane (1959).
The concept of “the sacred” plays a major role in Eliade's thought. Eliade argues that “the sacred” is to be seen as the source of significance, meaning, power, and being. There are some obvious parallels between Eliade's concept and the idea propounded by the German theologian Rudolf Otto (1869–1937) that the experience of the holy is “numinous” or “wholly other.”
While Eliade himself repeatedly identifies the sacred as something that is real, he nevertheless insists that “the sacred is a structure of human consciousness.” According to Eliade, any phenomenal entity – for example, a tree – could be apprehended by its perceiver as a “hierophany” (revelation of the sacred), given appropriate preparation. To some, a tree discloses the sacred; to others, it remains nothing more than a tree. The framework which allows the tree to become a revelation of the sacred is determined by the experience of those for whom the tree is sacred. This suggests that, at least to some extent, the “sacred” is a social construction, determined by the history of the perceiver rather than a universal, objective notion.
One point of particular interest is Eliade's emphasis on the importance of “myth.” Myths, he argues, are a particular kind of narrative, characterized by truth and reality, which exceed more scientific accounts of historical reality because of their ability to answer the deeper questions of life. “To tell how things came into existence is to explain them, and at the same time indirectly to answer another question: Why did they come into existence?” On account of its truth, a myth is able to become a hierophany – a revelation of the sacred. Myths narrate sacred history. For this reason, Eliade is skeptical of any attempt to eliminate myth from modern culture. It is a universal feature of human nature which religions continue to develop and embody. Instead of trying to rationalize or eliminate the sacred, Eliade argues, we ought to be trying to understand how it illuminates human nature, and its ultimate aspirations.
J. R. R. Tolkien (1892–1973) and C. S. Lewis (1898–1963): Religion as Myth
The Oxford lay theologians J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis developed an approach to religions as myths – that is to say, as narratives which have the power to capture the imagination and convey information. Tolkien saw the human desire to tell stories about our origins and true destiny (which lie at the heart of any religion) as resulting from the divine creation of humanity: “we make in our measure and in our derivative mode, because we are made: and not only made, but made in the image and likeness of a Maker.” Tolkien saw Christianity as a “true myth,” which brought to fulfillment whatever truths were to be found in other religions.
C. S. Lewis was initially an atheist and moved slowly toward a generic belief in a god and then to a Christian faith. Tolkien was an important dialogue partner in this final stage of his conversion. Lewis came to the conclusion that Christianity was not primarily a set of doctrines or moral principles but a controlling grand narrative – a myth, in the true sense of the term – which generated and sustained such ideas and values. God chose to self-disclose under the form of “myth”; theology is a faithful intellectual response to this revelation.
For Lewis, God authorizes the use of myth as a means of captivating the human imagination and engaging the human reason. In The Pilgrim's Regress (1933), Lewis imagined God speaking these words: “this is the veil under which I have chosen to appear even from the first until now.” Christianity, rather than being one myth alongside many others, represents the fulfillment of all myths. It is the “true myth” toward which all other myths merely point. Christianity thus tells a true story about humanity which makes sense of all the stories that humanity tells about itself. The great pagan myths were thus “dim dreams or premonitions” of the greater and fuller truth of the Christian gospel:
The Divine light, we are told, “lighteneth every man.” We should, therefore, expect to find in the imagination of great Pagan teachers and myth-makers some glimpse of that theme which we believe to be the very plot of the whole cosmic story – the theme of incarnation, death, and rebirth.
Lewis's understanding of Christianity as the “true myth” had three important consequences:
Karl Barth (1886–1968) and Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906–45): Religion as a Human Invention
A final approach of considerable importance has its origins within Christianity, and specifically within the dialectical theology of Karl Barth. This approach develops the idea that “religion” is a purely human construction, often an act of defiance in the face of God. Religion is here seen as an upward search for God on the part of humanity. This contrasts sharply with God's self-revelation, which exposes religion as a human fabrication.
Barth, it will be recalled (pp. 68, 72–3), received his theological education within German liberal Protestantism. The “culture Protestantism” of the period laid considerable emphasis upon the importance of human religiosity. In a lecture of 1916 entitled “The Righteousness of God,” Barth declared that human religiosity was little more than a Tower of Babel: a purely human construction, erected in defiance of God. There is a radical discontinuity between God's self-revelation to humanity, which leads to faith, and humanity's search for God, which leads to religion.
Barth is thus able to endorse criticisms of religion along the lines of Feuerbach and Marx, precisely because he believes these to be directed against the human invention of religion. Religion, for Barth, is an obstacle which must be eliminated if God is to be discerned in Christ. At its worst, it is idolatrous, in that it involves people worshiping a human construction.
Many writers have tried to summarize Barth's view on religion in the phrase “the abolition of religion.” It is certainly true that the standard English translation of section 17 of volume 1, part 2 of the Church Dogmatics is entitled “The Revelation of God as the Abolition of Religion.” This English phrase is, however, profoundly misleading and needs careful explanation. It must be remembered that Barth wrote in German, not English. The German word translated by “abolition” is Aufhebung, a term with a long and distinguished history of use within the German philosophical tradition, especially within Hegelianism. It is ambiguous and possesses two root meanings: “to remove” and “to exalt.”
It is certainly true that in his early writings Barth adopts a very negative attitude toward religion, understood as a human invention. Yet Barth is here stressing the natural human tendency to form concepts of God and to seek justification in relation to them. He is not criticizing other religions but religion in general. Barth sees the phenomenon of “religion” at work in Christianity as much as anywhere else; cultural values intrude into the gospel and become merged with it. Barth's intense anxiety about this development was particularly focused upon the German church struggle of the 1930s, in which he believed that Germanic ideals were becoming incorporated into Christian faith. However, Barth's attitude mellowed in his later period. He came increasingly to see the need for religion this side of eternity. For Barth, “religion” came more to mean “human institutions” or “modes of worship” than “a human attempt to determine what God is like.”
Barth insists that “religion” will continue until the end of time, as a necessary prop or support to faith. Barth's concern here is to emphasize that, by the grace of God, this “religion” is transcended and surpassed by God. It is something neutral, not negative. Barth's references to the Aufhebung of religion do not therefore make much sense if these are translated as referring to abolition. In fact, these comments should be interpreted in terms of the “transformation” or even “sublimation” of religion. Religion, seen as a human construction and contrasted with divine revelation, certainly needs to be critiqued – yet it serves a useful role.
This is most emphatically not what Dietrich Bonhoeffer thought. Bonhoeffer's most significant contribution to modern theology is generally regarded to be his analysis of the cultural situation within which Christ is to be proclaimed in the modern world. On April 5, 1943, Bonhoeffer was arrested by the Gestapo for his alleged involvement in a plot against Adolf Hitler. During the 18 months of his imprisonment at Berlin's Tegel prison, he wrote his celebrated Letters and Papers from Prison, in which he reflected on the question of the identity of Jesus Christ in a “world come of age,” a time of “no religion at all.” He argued passionately for a “religionless Christianity.”
This powerful phrase has often been misunderstood, particularly by writers such as John A. T. Robinson (1919–83) in his influential popular work Honest to God (1963). Bonhoeffer directed his criticisms against forms of Christianity which were grounded on the assumption that human beings were naturally religious – an assumption that Bonhoeffer regarded as untenable, given the new godless situation. A “religionless Christianity” is a faith which is based not upon the untenable and discredited notion of “natural human religiosity” but upon God's self-revelation in Christ. An appeal to culture, to metaphysics, or to religion was thus to be avoided, since these were inherently implausible in the new secular world and inevitably led to distorted understandings of God (there are strong affinities between Barth and Bonhoeffer here).
For Bonhoeffer, the crucified Christ provided us with a model of God appropriate for the modern world – a God who “allows himself to be pushed out of the world and on to the cross.” These ideas, especially as they related to the new secularism and the need to ground theology elsewhere than in religion or metaphysics, were to prove seminal to postwar German Christology, and had a deep impact upon many writers in the United States during the 1960s.
There were, however, obvious confusions here. Bonhoeffer's phrase “a religionless Christianity” and Barth's phrase “the abolition of religion” were taken by many more radical writers of the period to mean the end of any corporate Christian life, or an abandoning of traditional Christian ideas. These misunderstandings can be seen in influential popular works of the 1960s, such as John Robinson's Honest to God and the “death of God” movement.
Trinitarian Theologies of Religion
As noted earlier (pp. 323–6), the revival in trinitarianism has led to its explanatory and regulative fruitfulness being extended to include areas of Christian theology once regarded as lying beyond its reach, including the theology of other religions. The pioneering work in this field is often identified as Raimon Panikkar's (1918–2010) Trinity and the Religious Experience of Man (1973). Panikkar argued that a trinitarian framework offered a means of making sense of the complex nature of human spirituality, including religious experience and expression. These ideas were developed further in 1991 by Ninian Smart (1927–2001) and Stephen Konstantine. In their Christian Systematic Theology in World Context, Smart – a veteran commentator on world religions – and Konstantine argued that the concept of the “social Trinity” is the ultimate divine reality which constitutes the ground of all human religious experience. Differing forms of human spirituality are to be understood as arising from an experience of one of these three “aspects of the divine life” of the triune God.
In 1996, Jacques Dupuis (1923–2004) set out a different approach in his Toward a Christian Theology of Religious Pluralism. Dupuis, a Jesuit theologian with significant experience of the Indian context, argued that the doctrine of the Trinity “serves as the hermeneutical key for an interpretation of the experience of the Absolute Reality to which other religious traditions testify.” For Dupuis, this reflection opened up further the lines of thought already developed by his fellow Jesuit Karl Rahner (1904–84). “It may be said that the divine Trinity is experienced, though hiddenly and ‘anonymously', wherever human beings allow the Divine Reality that impinges upon them to enter into their life. In every authentic religious experience the Triune God of Christian revelation is present and operative.” We shall explore Rahner's notion of an “anonymous Christian” later in this chapter (pp. 419–20).
Gavin D'Costa's (born 1958) The Meeting of Religions and the Trinity (2000) further confirmed the fruitfulness of a trinitarian approach to other religions. Though careful to emphasize that Christianity was the unique vehicle of divine salvation, D'Costa argued that the universal presence of the Holy Spirit had implications for other religions. For example, he suggested that the Christian church might be led more deeply into the life of God through an engagement with adherents of other religions, and that Christians may observe “Christ-likeness” in these adherents on account of the universal presence and work of the Spirit. A similar approach is found in the Pentecostal theologian Amos Yong (born 1965), especially in his Discerning the Spirit(s): A Pentecostal–Charismatic Contribution to Christian Theology of Religions (2000).
What is particularly significant about these trinitarian approaches to other religions is that they do not adopt a Barthian critique of “religion” but rather seek to understand both religions and their ideas within a trinitarian framework.
Having dealt with some approaches to the question of religion in general (including Christian approaches), we may now move on to examine some Christian approaches to other religions.