Robert Carter and Sheldon
Isenberg editors, The Ideal in the World's Religions: Essays on
the Person, Family, Society and Environment.
Reviewed by Robert M.
Price.
These
essays allow the reader to participate at arm's length in an
Inter-Religious Federation for World Peace conference (August 20-27,
1995) on the theme "Realizing the Ideal." The essays, despite their
common denominator, fall into five rather different categories. The
result is almost five different mini-books, entailing a major or minor
shifting of gears as one moves from one to the other.
The
first section deals with broad and basic issues in ecumenical dialogue:
how dare a member of one religion make criticisms about another without
reverting to the imperialist condescension of the past? Should we assume
that all religions have the most important things in common? If they
don't, can they still mutually affirm one another? Can we take each
other's religions seriously without sloughing off loyalty to our own?
The questions are important and unavoidable, and several answers offered
here strike me as truly ingenious, penetrating, and promising. Francis
X. D'Sa sketches the basic problem of religious chauvinism as being a
religion's inability to heed it's own innate drive toward universalizing
its truth by token of clinging to its own "scandal of particularity,"
the historical conditions in which its revelation was received. A
religion understandably fears dissolving, losing its distinctive
identity, if its message becomes so universal as to merge with the
general ideals of humanity. But if it seeks universalization by means of
universal conversion, we have a dangerous situation such as historically
has begotten both imperialism and religious war. D'Sa makes a brilliant
suggestion when he invokes the analogy (or is it a mere analogy?) of the
hermeneutical task within each religion as it extrapolates from an
ancient text, anchored in the original historical context, seeking to
find guidance for new situations, for new generations, in a new age. The
gap between the writer's and original readers' Sitz-im-Leben and
that of modern interpreters and their communities of faith poses a
challenge to all religions which they all accept already. They know, in
the one case, they must make a great leap into an unanticipated future
in which the applicability of the original revelation has become
problematical. They have no choice. What D'Sa suggests is that the
religions might as well recognize as an identical challenge the present
situation where several equally sophisticated and devout religions face
each other. While the proper response to superstition or moral
degeneracy on the mission field might once have been evangelism, it must
today seem absurd for, e.g., Christians to demand that Buddhists,
adherents of an equally venerable and noble religion, convert. Of course
the religions have hitherto felt justified in seeking conversions
because they were ill-informed about the other faiths, accepting
caricatures and disparagements: if a Hindu were really no more than a
demon-cultist (see popular screeds like Bob Larson's Hippies, Hindus
and Rock and Roll), then he could only benefit by changing over to
Christianity. The tactic is essentially the same as that whereby a
nation's wartime enemies are caricatured to the point of dehumanization:
if Japanese troops are sub-human monkey-men, then an American need not
scruple to shoot them. Interfaith dialogues such as the one that gave
birth to the present collection of essays may be seen as peace
conferences seeking to establish, first, a state of detente, then of
lasting peaceful co-existence, and finally--who knows?
It is
always a treat to read Ninian Smart's latest thoughts on the world's
religions, and his essay here, "Measuring the Ideal: Christian Faith and
the World's Worldviews," is no exception. Much more can and must be made
of Smith's suggestion that future religionists will regard all the
faiths not as competitors but as a smorgasbord of resources to be drawn
upon to season and spice one's own faith.
The
second section, dealing with the Ideal as it applies to the individual,
is both informative and truly edifying. Several insights will challenge
any reader's spirituality as well as providing hope that interreligious
unity is far more than a pipe-dream. How wonderful that there are
already holy tales upholding interfaith solidarity as a virtue. The
famous Buddhist-Jainist-Sufi parable of the Blind Six and the Elephant
is one. The martyrdom of Sikh Guru Teg Bahadur who gave his life to
defend the religious freedom of Hindus, with whose practices he
certainly disagreed, from the persecution of the Mughal Emperor
Aurangzeb is another. Both are worthy of ceaseless commemoration in all
faith communities. It is a new thing to build up an ecumenical sacred
lore praising the virtues of ecumenicity!
Let me
confess, though it cannot count as much of a criticism, since no
symposium can cover every single base, that I missed the discussion of a
few issues relating the religious ideal to the individual person of
faith. For instance, it would have been interesting to read something on
the Sufi ideal of the Perfect Heavenly Man (such as we find in Sayyed
Hossein Nasr's essay "Who Is Man?" in Jacob Needleman (ed.), The
Sword of Gnosis, Penguin 1974). Likewise, Bultmann's denial that
Paul's dialectic of the indicative ("If we live by the Spirit...") and
the imperative ("... let us walk by the spirit") constitutes an appeal
to an ethical ideal but is instead a piece of apocalyptic existentialism
(e.g., Bultmann, The Old Man and the New). And Eli Chesen
(Religion May Be Hazardous to Your Health) raises a caveat not
considered here: how does one avoid suppressing personal emotional
growth while consciously attempting to shape oneself into conformity
with a heteronomous religious character ideal? Erich Neumann (Depth
Psychology and a New Ethic) raises a very significant question from
a Jungian perspective: does the old ethic of perfection actually
inculcate the very evil it seeks to suppress? Should we not rather seek
to balance the Shadow and the Persona? It is a fruitful topic.
The
third section, that on the Ideal Family, strikes me as diffuse and weak
in its impact. Anthony J. Guerra's "The Puritans and the Family" is
informative, clearing the reputation of the Puritans from charges that
they constituted a kind of Orwellian Anti-Sex League. An essay on the
history of Roman Catholic teaching on the family is moderately
interesting, though not too surprising. (One wonders for whom Joseph
Martos thought he was writing: "The doctrinal letters of the New
Testament, sometimes referred to as epistles..." "Great Christian
leaders and thinkers of the second through the fifth centuries are
sometimes referred to as the Fathers of the Church..." Has Martos
adapted his essay from old Pre-Cana class notes?)
Jean
Higgins's "The Healing Role of Religion in T.S. Eliot's The Cocktail
Party" strikes me as a refugee from the days before Northrop Frye's
Anatomy of Criticism, when literary studies were simply fodder for
moralizing, or for author biography. One can overhear the editors
choosing the contents for this book: "Well, it sort of fits the theme."
Sections
four and five, on the social and environmental ideals, largely smack of
a kind of apologetics, as various writers delve deep into Christian and
Buddhist traditions to demonstrate, against popular opinion, that these
religions do too have something good to say about social and ecological
ethics. One often gets the feeling in such essays that their authors are
trying to resolve their own crises of faith. They are committed to a
particular religious identity as well as to a particular socio-political
agenda. They first fear that the two may be incompatible (as Mary Daly,
once a Roman Catholic, finally decided, when she gave up working for
equality for women in the Church as being as pointless as seeking
equality for blacks in the Ku Klux Klan!). But a search of the
traditions and documents, usually neglected corners of these, furnishes
sufficient proof-texts to ease the conscience. It is clear that these
Christians and Buddhists are committed to social and ecological
activism. That's what they think is right. Presumably that's what they
are going to do. So what is the urgency of digging up a religious
license to engage in these things? Do they really need to wait for
permission? Are they trying to cover themselves? Are bishops looking
askance at them for their social involvements? (As to this last
possibility, it has been suggested that John Dominic Crossan's sudden
shift from postmodern literary criticism to historical Jesus studies was
an apologetical attempt to provide a Jesus-prooftext for social
radicalism once the Vatican had distanced itself from Liberation
Theology.) Or would they really be prepared to drop their social
activism if they could not find scriptural citations? What sort of game
is being played here? Nonetheless, it is interesting to see what such
investigations turn up, especially the Buddhist creation narrative and
theory of government which Francisca Cho dredges up from the Agganna
Sutta.
Michael
L. Mickler's "The Ideal Society and Its Realization in the Unification
Tradition" is another of Mickler's unflinchingly honest reports to
outsiders on the Unification Church and its bumpy evolutionary path.
Many religious scholars who have trouble sporting the hats of both
historian and believer (see Van Harvey's great 1969 book of that title)
could learn a valuable lesson from Mickler, who knows that the best
apologetics for one's religious movement is complete and total openness,
warts and all.
Victor
Ehly's "From Cane Ridge to Human Community" might fit better in the
book's first section, the one about the presuppositions of interfaith
dialogue, since his intriguing autobiographical reflections suggest what
many of us have come to suspect: a la Joseph Campbell, one is perhaps
best able to approach and appreciate the riches of the world religions
after the disappointment of personal faith. Renan once observed that, in
order to write the history of a religion, one must have formerly
belonged to the religion and equally one must belong to it no more.
Lacking the former, one can never know what makes the religion tick.
Without the latter, one has no hope of objectivity. Ehly's
disillusionment with Evangelical Revivalism and with Southern
Episcopalianism pushed him from any internalized religious identity to
an omnivorous interest in all religions--as an outsider. Such is the
experience of many of us. But then it is all the more remarkable that
most of the contributors to this volume are walking that tightrope
between academic agnosticism on one side and faith partisanship on the
other. That is a difficult path, and probably the only path forward in
interreligious evolution.