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Acknowledging our place in
a Pluralistic World and in an ongoing and developing tradition of faith
By Hugh Reid
(This essay is
based on remarks delivered at a Symposium on the proposed Statement of Faith,
held in Toronto in October, 2005.)
I begin my remarks
with thanks to the members of the committee who prepared the Draft Statement
of Faith. They were given what, in any generation, amounts to an impossible
task and what, in the context and diversity of the contemporary United Church of
Canada, only becomes more impossible. The document before us gives ample
evidence of careful and compassionate thought and great effort, as one colleague
has described it: "it is a theological poem." Any remarks and suggestions that
I make, I give with an acknowledgement of the difficulty of their task,
respectful appreciation for their efforts, a humble awareness that I speak from
the weakness of my own faith journey, and a profound consciousness of my own
inability to express what is the breadth and length and height and depth
of the love of God for us in Jesus Christ.
The Need for Grace
Along this
biographical theme, I would also like to confess one personal element and need I
bring to this conversation -- the need for grace. I have long been
afflicted with the twin and complementary burdens of perfectionism and an
extreme self-critical consciousness with its depressive and sometimes paralyzing
effects. This has made me especially sensitive to moralizing/works
righteousness tendencies in the faith and to the common error of mistaking a
minimalist tolerance for grace.
I grew up in the
United Church, was baptised and confirmed and entered into a great friendship
and conversation with the minister who was my mentor through my adolescence and
early adulthood. It was he who asked me to consider entering the ministry. I
owe him a great deal, love him dearly, and had the privilege of giving the
eulogy at his funeral a few years ago.
He introduced me
early to the great social justice tradition of our church. Before I heard of
the doctrine of the Trinity, I was boycotting the purchase of grapes, before it
was a subject for anguished contention in our church courts, I was writing
papers on the dignity and respect owed to homosexual persons. My first
intellectual contact with academic theology in the 1970's was with Process
Theology and the output of Claremont California. I can't help but smile these
days, when I see newspapers publish stories about "new theologies" or the, I
would venture, inaccurately named, "progressive Christianity" because they were
the theologies of my youth, thirty years ago. It doesn't take much of a
philosophical and historical background to trace them through the enlightenment
of the 17th and 18th centuries, into the neo-stoicism of
the Middle Ages, and the Stoicized Platonism of the first centuries of the first
millennia. I was intellectually stimulated by the abstract God of philosophical
theism and the self-realizing responsibility incumbent of the human agent. While
my friends all left the church, I remained, seeing it as an organ for moral
good, judgmental of the society around me, and conscious of my own cooptation by
and privileged position in that world. I learned to carry a fair amount of
guilt.
When I entered
university, I found myself increasingly burdened and slowed by my own sense of
inadequacy, isolation, and the mounting burden of the god of my choosing. I
became clinically and spiritually depressed, my moral faith had little to offer
but judgement and my philosophically complex and well-constructed God was as
paralyzed as me. I took time off from school, entered into a searching
conversation with my minister and friend, and was given books, some Tillich,
some Cobb, and one by Reinhold Niebuhr, to take with me into the bush of British
Columbia.
It was in Niebuhr's
book that I encountered for the first time the doctrines of the Trinity and the
Incarnation, and the notion of radical grace – that I was personally and
infinitely loved by a God who dared to get divine hands dirty. It was a
glancing but transforming intervention of God's grace in my life. When I came
later to the works of Karl Barth, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and the story of the
German Church Struggle, it was spring water to a person dying of thirst.
I still embrace
proudly the social justice tradition of our church, I still live with the
tension of my guilt and involvement in a Western and patriarchal culture of
privilege but my existential place is not one of paralyzing depression but one
of joy. If there was an element missing from my earlier journey of faith, it
was a sense of this joy, this good news of a self-giving God. I know I am not
alone. As a teaching assistant in systematic theology, I sat with a group of
twelve intelligent adults who had been confirmed in the United Church and felt
called to full time ministry in that church. I asked them what their definition
of grace was and, to a person, they said they had never heard the word! I found
the same to be true in pastoral ministry where I discover many who have not
experienced the reality of grace. My ministry has been marked by a passion to
bring the good news of God's self-giving love to members and adherents of the
congregations I have served.
The Meaning of “Pluralism”
This excursus on
the discovery and centrality of grace in my faith journey is not a digression
but meant to bring us cogently to the discussion of A Statement of Faith
and its mandate to "acknowledge our place in a Pluralistic World and in an
ongoing and developing tradition of faith." From here, I would like to proceed
by first, exploring the term, "Pluralistic World," and then seeking to
constructively contribute to the way in which the Statement speaks to
that world out of our dynamic tradition.
The meaning of the
term "Pluralistic World" is not prima facie self-evident, or a simple given, as
is apparent to any who have sampled the academic literature on pluralism. There
are at least two primary "Pseudo-Pluralisms" that need to be distinguished and a
third that needs to be raised so that the ground may be cleared to speak
distinctly of and to the reality of Pluralism. All three have in common the
fact that they do not take seriously the integrity of the claims of the
ideologies, faiths, and systems, they pretend to acknowledge. They relativize
and do not respect, appropriating the truths of others for their own ends. It
is important to note at this juncture as will become clear that relativism is in
itself an absolute truth claim.
Pseudo-Pluralism #1
The first "Pseudo
or False Pluralism" might be spoken of as a transcendental relativism. Scholars
usually trace its origin to the work of Gotthold Lessing (1729-81), he of
the now proverbial though dated dictums that “contingent
facts of history cannot prove eternal truths of reason” and “the ugly great
ditch between faith and history.” Lessing is a part of the heritage but it is
always more complex than that. Lessing is a child of the enlightenment's
absolutization of reason and the religious wars and Westphalia. He breathed the
same Cartesian air as Hume and Kant and contemporary practitioners of
Philosophical theism or the so-called Theocentrism and its claims to pluralism
owe as much to Neo-Kantianism and the inaccessible, ineffable transcendent, the
Real an sich, as they do to Lessing. But then prior to Lessing there was
throughout antiquity and the Middle Ages the neo-Platonic understanding of the
transcendent Good in itself of which the observable phenomena of creation were
but imperfect renditions of the real. So it is that this ancient thought form
with its absolute claim to an absolute transcendent “Real” in which all
terrestrial forms participate re-emerges in contemporary times. According to
this view, all forms of belief and unbelief are merely contingent
cultural artefacts. All forms of cult, liturgy and religious language, and
doctrines, are only historically conditioned phenomena that must point beyond
themselves. They are simply different words in a language that says the same
thing. As one United Church ministerial colleague liked to say, "I am not a
Christian but a philosophical theist who uses Christianity as his symbol of
expression."
As this is not an
effort at criticism but only one of description, I will leave aside the glaring
logical problem in this theology that was also always a problem with Platonism:
while everyone and everything speaks, postulates, of this ultimately reality, no
one can say finally what or who it is. We are ultimately left alone. With
regard to the matter at hand – namely, the actuality of pluralism -- there is
another problem. The system of philosophical theism is not pluralistic at all
but monistic and paternalistic. It is, as it has been described, a "spiritual
colonialism" that mines other faiths and presumes to tell them what they
actually believe, and the limits to their belief. It ignores their truth claims
and violates their integrity.
The fact is that
what I have described is not really a pluralistic worldview at all but its own
faith tradition. In its contemporary form, it is a tradition descended through
Western intellectuals beginning in the eighteen and nineteenth century. It is a
sophisticated faith tradition and to be engaged not dismissed. It has many
respected practitioners: Wilfred Cantwell Smith, John Hick, Raimundo Panikkar,
to name a few. But it is not pluralism.
Pseudo-Pluralism #2
The second
predominant form of pseudo-pluralism might be called anthropological
relativism. It is to this that the preamble of the Statement may
have been referring when it declared: "Some regard all truth as relative and
consequently are complacent in the face of harm." While moral/ethical paralysis
may be a consequence of this kind of relativism it can just as likely inspire
assertion which does harm.
It pretends to be
pluralism when it says that all truths are equally valid (which is tantamount,
of course, to saying all truths are equally invalid except for the truth of
relativism which must be excluded from the statement!) This is similar to the
transcendental relativism previously discussed according to which all religions,
ideologies, beliefs, and unbeliefs, are equally historically derived and
contingent phenomena. It distinguishes itself in its assumption that there is
no transcendent, no “Real” for which these cultural phenomena serve as heuristic
devices, rather they are simply assertions of human will, human
self-realization, the effort of humanity to create meaning where there is none.
You might recognize here the resonance with the thought of Friedrich Nietzsche
(1844-1900).
Again,. I would
argue that what we have to deal with is a false pluralism that is
actually in itself a sophisticated tradition/belief system; a part of our
pluralistic world. Anthropological relativism does not honour the integrity or
listen to the claims of others but absorbs them into a monistic vision that
reinterprets and redefines their meaning according to its own absolute
doctrines.
Pseudo-Pluralism #3
Both of these
traditions of pseudo-pluralism participate in and are absorbed by what has been
described as a third false pluralism. This is a product not so much of
intellectual endeavour as it is of the opulent culture of Western society. It
certainly grows out of the Copernican turn to the individual of the 17th
and 18th centuries, and conspires with what many would regard as the
misconstrual of human freedom and human identity (the lineaments are well
described in Charles Taylor's work, Sources of the Self), and the
exigencies of market economy, but it is a simple fact of our time and place, our
consumer society. In this society "pluralism is complicit in the
commodification of religious traditions.”
By an insidious genius this process leaves the outward
appearances the same, though now the turban, the prayer wheel, and the mantra
have been rendered "consumer preferences."[i]
Most of us are
familiar with churches and spiritual life commandeered by the consumer culture.
Religious doctrine and observance becomes merely a function of personal whim,
preference, mood, and occasional need – the smorgasbord approach to faith.
Consumer culture that relativizes everything to its own ends is an “existential”
false pluralism.
The question
remains: What is a "Pluralistic World" and how are we to speak a statement of
faith to it? Genuine plurality would suggest a multiplicity of confessions and
ideologies, beliefs and unbeliefs, liturgies and doctrines, praxis and cultis
that have their own integrity, their own internal rationality[ii],
plausibility structure, and personal commitment to universal intent (Michael
Polanyi), i.e., truth claims.[iii]
These are contingent and culturally shaped; but they are also foundational and
shaping of culture. They create and share worldviews. Some we will agree with,
some not. Some deny our truth claims implicitly or explicitly, some have truth
claims that are implicitly or explicitly denied by us (e.g. Atheism and
Theism). We will say things that are mutually exclusive and hold things, such
as hopes, goals, beliefs tasks in common. A plurality is just that, a plural:
"consisting of, containing, or pertaining to more than one."[iv]
As such it is a descriptive, not necessarily a prescriptive, term, like Jesus'
statement "For you always have the poor with
you..." (Matthew 26:11)[v]
Many of the belief systems implied by this discussion have a teleological vision
of oneness whether eschatological, political, or cataclysmal.
Dialogue as Relationship
What is our
place in this Pluralistic World, how do we acknowledge this community of voices
and stories? I think David Lochhead put it well in his little book, The
Dialogical Imperative: "The call to dialogue, to open, trusting and loving
relationships with the neighbour, is clear and unambiguous."[vi]
Lochhead makes a careful distinction between dialogue as activity and
dialogue as relationship. "If dialogue can happen only when people meet
in openness and honesty, then it would seem that it is the relationship
of honesty and openness more than the activity of conversation, that is
constitutive of dialogue.”[vii]
This has also been well described as vulnerable listening while making a witness
that risks change. Or, we might also use the Pauline term, to “speak the truth
in love.” Such an approach to dialogue calls for humility, compassion, and
precision in expression as we tell our story, the story of the Good News of
God's gracious and inclusive love in Jesus Christ speaking out of the dynamic
and wisdom of the two thousand year conversation of our tradition.
In this
regard, the Statement sets an important tone of humility and in equal
measure suggests, through its poetic style and content, the limitations of
propositional and discursive statements.
My concerns
relate mostly to its precision attending to and honouring the development our
faith through its two thousand years. Many of these concerns will be related to
my sensitivity to the need to maintain and enhance the clarion declaration of
God's inclusive grace, through bearing faithful witness to the free and
unconstrained movement of God ad extra pro nobis.
The central
doctrine of the proclamation of that grace, the doctrine that defines Christian
ontology as it seeks to retell and bear witness to the root narrative of the
Gospel is the doctrine of Trinity in its inseparable and complementary
relationship with Christology. It is important to note at this point that this
is not a Greek or Eurocentric doctrine. The Trinity was in fact the undoing of
Greek ontology (foolishness to the Greeks). The Trinity is a new way of speaking
about God that is grounded, not in philosophical speculation, but in the
event of God's speaking the Word become flesh in a Palestinian story. It is
an effort to articulate that the subject of the life, death and resurrection of
Jesus Christ is God; and because of this, we can proclaim this particular event
as universal and inclusive Good News for the whole world.
The
precision of language developed through intense dialogue in the church's first
four hundred and fifty years and maintained and dynamically reaffirmed by the
church in the centuries following bears faithful witness to this event as
unconditional and redeeming grace, the free movement of the One Holy and Triune
God to all and for all creation. Two sections of the Statement, dealing
with Trinity and the relation between Christ and the Spirit, raise concerns in
this regard.
Trinitarian Language
The
Statement begins: "God is Holy Mystery." I'm disconcerted that a statement
of Christian faith would begin with what amounts to a postulate, especially one
that seems more fitted to the tradition of Hinduism or the Mystery-Centred
Theism of Stanley Samartha. Beginning in this way is not in keeping with a
Christian grammar of speaking of faith, for faith is always a response to what
is received from our Gracious God. It is God who takes the initiative and that
is grace. Whether it be God's Word spoken "in the beginning", God's call to
Abram at Haran, God's address to Moses at Horeb, God's address to Elijah at
Horeb; or Jesus' call to his disciples, "Follow me", the description of God as
mystery is not an opening postulate but a response to God's gracious activity,
in creation and in redemption. The Deus revelatus (God revealed) is the
Deus absconditis (God hideen.) That which is revealed is mystery; yet by
virtue of its being given, it becomes a mystery of which we can speak.
The mystery of God has its content and definition in God's self-giving, most
profoundly so at the cross. There, in the shadow of the cross, we stand in awe
of the Holy One who is Holy mystery and who is wholly love.
The
Statement would be strengthened if it were to begin in this way:
The Living God speaks and
In God's speaking creation encounters Holy Mystery
beyond complete knowledge, above perfect description.
The opening
section the Statement deals with traditional and catholic affirmations of
doctrine of the Trinity, setting us in the midst of our ongoing tradition of
faith. This is laudable, but requires a careful precision of language as
developed in the dynamic Christian conversation of the first five centuries. It
is a conversation that is always responding to challenges from pre-Christian
ontologies. One can observe throughout the two thousand years that the Greeks
(meaning Plato) as well as the poor are always with us and this too is not meant
to be prescriptive.
I would
draw the committee's attention to:
Yet in love, the one eternal God creates and seeks
relationship:
within the Divine being
It is axiomatic of
Trinitarian grammar that the immanent Trinity is not created. The usual
distinctions are unoriginate, begotten, and proceeding. The notion that God
creates relationship within God's self is not in keeping with our dynamic
tradition. Better to say:
Yet in love,
the one eternal God, who is relationship in God's own self creates and seeks
relationship:
with creation
with us.
With respect to the
article on the three persons, again one has to be careful of language and
recognize what is at stake. This section is careful to avoid male language in
describing the Trinity:
known in creation, in history, and as the one whom Jesus
Called Father;
known in the life, death, and resurrection of the child of
Wisdom, Jesus the Christ…
This is an attempt
to balance male and female images but it is not in keeping with either the
Biblical witness or theological tradition which declares that Jesus is our
wisdom, our sophia (John 1; 1 Cor 1:26-29; Matt 23:37 ; Luke 13:34). This has
been articulated beautifully by Elizabeth Johnson in her article "Jesus, the
Wisdom of God: A Biblical Basis for Non-Androcentric Christology” (in
Ephemerides Theologiae Lovanienses 61 (1985) pp 261-294). By moving away
from this part of our story, the committee may end up undermining exactly what
it is trying to support, namely, a non-androcentric trinity. To pay
insufficient attention to Christology is to take us out of the historicity of
our story, which is always the referent of the doctrine, and the catholic
expression of that story. I might suggest:
Known in creation, in history, and as the one whom Jesus
called Father;
known in the life, death, and resurrection of the one who
knew himself and was named by his followers as the Son;
known in the vitalizing, transforming, and gathering power as
the Holy Spirit
Note too, I add
"gathering" to the work appropriate to the Holy Spirit and take out the "re"
from “vitalizing” because the Holy Spirit, being One with the Triune God, is
also creator and vitalizer as well as “revitalizer.” As it now stands the
statement is too focused on the individual. I would go on from there to unpack
the statement "while necessary":
We use this
language necessarily because it is the language of a particular history. We
understand and confess that this language has been read literalistically in
limited and limiting ways. It has been used to make idolatrous assertions about
the gender of the Holy One that has been harmful and abusive to women. We
therefore make clear that this language does not identify the living God by
gender but by event. It is in the contingent events of this particular history
that the universal God, God for all and in all, is revealed as God for us, the
God who gives God's own self into our situation, even into our sin and our
suffering, even into our death, so that we are not alone, in life, in death, in
life beyond death. This language rather than limiting God, declares the God who
is without limits, the God who broke out of the box of ineffable transcendence
and out of the confusion of ambiguous immanence, to be the God who in
self-giving grace is the Holy Mystery who is Wholly Love.
The section that
follows this on "other ways" of speaking of God might be better placed in
another section of the document because, of course, the examples given might be
mistaken as an expansion of the Trinity section or to be taken as Trinitarian
language. They are not, as has long been observed. Creator, Redeemer,
Sustainer, is language that could be applied to each person in the Trinity,
applied as a Trinitarian formula it is modalistic. Equally Mother, Friend and
Comforter is language that could be used of each person of the Trinity, (see
Julian of Norwich, Jesus our Mother).
Christology and
Pneumatology
In closing, I
would like to comment on the relation of Christology to Pneumatology (the
doctrine of the Holy Spirit. St. Augustine reminds us that "opera Dei triune
non divisa sunt" (“the operations of the Trinity are not to be divided.”)
From the Eastern Fathers we get the notion of perichoresis, or “mutual
indwelling” of the persons of the Trinity. (I’m not sure why the Statement
does not make use of this wonderful term, rooted in the word for “dance” and
employed by some feminist theologians to great effect.) With these thoughts in
mind, the document articulates a strong Pneumatological Christology but a very
weak Christological Pneumatology. The Triune God exercises one agency and one
economy of salvation. Wherever the Spirit fills Christ, that same Spirit also
bears witness to Christ. Where the Spirit sends Christ, Christ also sends the
Spirit. What is perhaps behind this is the mistaken notion if we deemphasise
Christology we will somehow be more neighbourly towards other faiths. The
Spirit is more palatable than the offence of the cross. But this is unfortunate
because it is Jesus who binds us to our neighbour. It is in the event of the
incarnation that God enters into our condition, into our alienation from God and
from our neighour, and even entering our death so that even in death we are not
alone. It is to this that the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of Truth, bears witness
as out teacher and comforter for it is in the Word made flesh that God's grace
becomes a Word that creation can speak, serve, and share with joy.
There is much more
that can be said and I am sure it will be said this afternoon, this evening, and
tomorrow. For now, let me again pay tribute to the effort and compassion that
has gone into this document. It reaches out to our neighbours with an air of
humble service and quiet joy.
[i]
George Sumner, The First and the Last: The Claim of Jesus Christ and
the Claims of Other Relgious Traditions, (Eerdmans: Grand Rapids,
2004) p. 3. Cf. Kenneth Surin's "A 'Politics of Speech," in Gavin
D'Costa, Christian Uniqueness Reconsidered: The Myth of a
Pluralistic Theology of Religions, Faith Meets Faith Series, ed.
Paul F. Knitter (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 1990), pp. 192ff.
[ii]
Note here I am following A. MacIntyre et al. that all reasoning operates
within a specific tradition of rationality which is carried by a
specific human community, sometimes referred to as the sociology of
knowledge.
[iii]
For an excellent discussion of Personal/subjective investment in
'objective knowledge' from a Philosophy of Science Point of view see,
Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical
Philosophy, (University of Chicago Press: Chicago, 1958), especially
chapter 10, "Commitment"
[iv]
The Random House College Dictionary
[v]The
New Revised Standard Version, (Nashville, TN:
Thomas Nelson Publishers) 1989.
[vi]
The Dialogical Imperative: A Christian Reflection on Interfaith
Encounter, Faith Meets Faith Series, (Orbis Books: Maryknoll, New
York, 1988), p.81.
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