Postscript: This article, by Charles Caputt, pretty much raises my concerns below. One concern I do not raise which is worth careful thought, what is the meaning of martyrdom, if all relgions are equally valid pathways to God?
Original Post:
Why ask, Can Pope Francis be saved (from himself)?
I noticed a series of X/Tweets a couple of days ago [below], highlighting something Francis has said in Singapore (a melting pot place of faiths) about all ways leading to God.
1. The statement as cited is pretty unnuanced around Christianity being one way rather than the way or the highway into which other faiths are feeder roads.
2. Edward Feser, a sharp (and Catholic) critic of "sloppy" Catholic thinking raises the question whether Francis has spoken correctly in accordance with doctrine.
3. A respondent cites the Catechism in defence of Francis.
However that response still places the Gospel as the pathway to salvation, other faiths potentially being preparations for the Gospel being received.
A few observations from me:
Francis has form in saying things which receive quite a lot of reaction from a doctrinal perspective (notably in relation to human sexuality). Whether we think it helpful or not, this is part of the style of his papacy.
Is it reasonable to expect Francis to stop speaking publicly in ways which prompt criticism from within his own church? Probably not!
Is it reasonable to expect a church leader to speak in ways which conform to the doctrine of that leader's church? Yes.
There is a dilemma for current Catholic adherence to the teaching (informal, formal, let alone "infallible") of Francis as present incumbent as Pope.
To be honest, I am closer to Feser than to Francis on the issue at hand. We honour Jesus Christ when we point to what is distinctive about him (his life, death, teaching) and from that point of view both find everything that is good in other faiths (and, indeed, in the approaches to life of non-religious humanism etc) and all that is fulfilled within those faiths and -isms in Jesus Christ our Lord and Saviour.
The consistent approach of the New Testament writers is to present Jesus Christ as true God among many surrounding claimants to be gods (Roman gods, Greek gods, Roman emperors) and true fulfilment of all prophecies voiced among the scriptures of Israel.
Further, the cumulative approach of the New Testament is that Jesus Christ reshapes who the God of Israel is: in Jesus we see and through Jesus (and his apostle) we hear the final, fullest revelation of God. Religions which speak of a way to God which is not through Jesus Christ speak of a "God" who is never exactly the God who reveals God's self in and through Jesus Christ.
This leads to a further note about what Francis is reported as saying: Yes, all religions (in one manner or another), are paths to God, but religions are also revelations of God reaching out to humanity: in which revelation do we find that divine reach to us drenched in love, full of mercy, expressed in sacrifice of God himself that we might live forever?
I can only think of one such revelation.
28 comments:
"You want to go to Dublin? Well, sir, if I were you, I wouldn't start from here."
Pax et bonum
William Greenhalgh
Brilliant, William!
The writers of the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament simply did not have the knowledge of world religions and cultures that we do now. We are doing theology in a vastly different context. In a holographic sense, their "all", "humanity", "world", "universe" *was* sufficient as every part contains the whole. But in a more obvious sense, despite their detailed and intimate knowledge of local semitic religion and Hellenic realities, the people who wrote the Bible simply did not know about the religion and practices of, say, indigenous peoples in Aotearoa or the Amazon forest, Buddhist meditators in India, Taoists in China etc. in the same way that we do now. Nor could they have any knowledge of major world religions that would arise after the death of Christ, principally Islam. Their "all"/"world"/"universe" was a non-global one.
Most Christians who have more than a textual, distant, or brief encounter with people of others faiths come to experience as much grace, truth, and wisdom - as well as points of didagteement - in these religious traditions as in their own.
The ocean of grace has many shores.
Sufism is drenched in love. Bhakti is throbbing with love. What is Buddhist loving-kindedness but yet another expression of love.
"... the prople who wrote the Bible did not know about the religion and practices of, say, indigenous peoples in Aotearoa". I'm sure Mark knows the only kiwis in New Zealand in AD 95 were the feathered variety, the first "indigenous" settlers arriving in the 13th century, about the same time when Thomas Aquinas completed (or rather broke off writing) his Summae Theologiae. New Zealand was of course the last place on earth to be settled. The ancestors of the Polynesian peoples appear to have left Taiwan about 3000 BC to begin their very slow spread across the Pacific. We do not know what these Proto-Malayo-Polynesians believed about "religion" because Neolithic peoples left no writings, but doubtless these beliefs evolved as they moved eastward through the Pacific and encountered new phenomena and fauna (like volcanoes, sharks and whales, and maybe Melanesians near New Guinea).
New Zealand was not only the last place on earth to be settled but also the most isolated, as the East Polynesians who settled there (from the Cook Islands and thereabouts?) and became the hundreds of Maori iwi do not seem to have travelled north for those five hundred years of isolation. Was there any significant cultural evolution during those 500 years? I don't know. Nineteenth century ethnography suggested that Maori mythology and polytheism was pretty similar to the ideas missionaries encountered in islands to the north. It's important to remember also that in "primal" thought patterns, "religion" and ethics were two broadly disjunct things. In ancient primal thought (Indo-European and probably east Asian as well) the gods were themselves the creation of some Ur-reality (fate) and they didn't really care how humans lived provided they received their due worship and sacrifices. That way cosmic order was retained. It was only Judaic monotheism that first declared that God is the Ur-reality, that He is personally moral and seeks fellowship with His rational human creation.
Pax et bonum
William Greenhalgh
This is a beautiful story.. can't remember how I found it. Perhaps via ADU? Anyway, thought I'd share (re-share?)... "my people had already conceived that there was a Creator God before the Bible came to us"
Aunty Dr Rose Elu during her Mothering Sunday sermon, 31 March 2022 [Australia]
(Torres Strait Islander on Aboriginal land)
*
"While the Coming of The Light – the coming of the holy Bible – made this connection for us, we had already received God before the arrival of the English and Melanesian missionaries because Jesus was already with us.
"So the Coming of The Light commemorates the Gospel coming to us and giving us a name for our Creator, whose image and likeness we are made in.
*
Her response as a child in Sunday School looking at a Bible illustration of Jesus with children is sad but instructive - the girl who looked most like her was sitting at Jesus feet - it made her feel alienated and distanced rather than welcomed and included. I remember pictures like that :(
https://anglicanfocus.org.au/2022/03/31/mothering-sunday-27-march-2022-st-johns-east-malvern-melbourne/
In fairness and charity to Francis, it's important to remember that Christians are a minority everywhere in Asia except the Philippines and Timor Leste, and in that last place the people had to conduct a long and bloody struggle to secure their freedom from Indonesia. Nobody wants to see religious warfare break out, least of all in the minds (and playgrounds) of schoolchildren. I see his words not as 'theology' but as the half-lies we tell children to keep the peace. Or am I being naive? Francis doesn't really do nuance!
Pax et bonum
William Greenhalgh
That's right, Mark, it is not much understood today how far Christianity changed the religious imagination of Asia, most notably through its monotheistic offshoot, Islam, which encountered the Indic religions, leading to something of a bloody standoff on the mainland, but (notionally) supplanted Hinduism and Buddhism in Malaya and the islands later called Indonesia. Islam and Hinduism also produced the hybrid ethno-religion of Sikhism in the 15th century, while Hinduism itself was forced to undergo reform in the 19th century (e.g. the Ramakrishna movement) through the impact of British missionaries. All these nations now pay lip service to western ideas of human rights and democracy, although the traditional ethno-religious culture still prevails. Yet the Indonesian state philosophy of Pancasila is clearly shaped by Muslim ideas infused by Christianity and western liberalism.
It's an interesting question how far East Asian Buddhism was impacted by Christianity as these lands were much less subject to western colonial powers, having instead their own local imperialisms (China v. Vietnam, Vietnam over Indochina, Japan v. Korea etc). Traditionally morality in China was not religious in character but based on Confucian order. But even here in the 19th century, British and American missionaries (with their hold on education) infused Christian ideas into Confucian and Taoist thought, as French Catholics influenced Buddhism in 19th and 20th century Vietnam.
Pax et bonum
William Greenhalgh
It doesn't really matter when Maori came here. Nor that they possessed a rich web of cultural and spiritual knowledge and practices (including highly developed forms of ethics, ritual, theology, and cosmology, uniquely suited to these specific geographies). It doesn't matter which religious wisdom is "older" or first to make such-and-such a theological breakthrough (though few can compete with the ancient Vedantic refinement of sacrifice into sophisticated cosmology, psychology, and paths of liberation). We are barely beginning to really hear, let alone understand, the spiritual experience of the (non-Christian) other. Myths of Christian exceptionalism - only the Christian God is loving, only the Jewish God stands above creation, calling us into ethical life - make us look stupid, dull our hearing, harden our hearts, make God ridiculously small.
Yikes, William! Christian exceptionalism becomes Christian triumphalism: Christianity alone possessing the one true ring, humanizing all religions in its path. Thankfully, most of my generation don't believe in this racist mumbo jumbo anymore. Nor, thankfully for the sake of world peace, does Pope Francis.
A question I then have, out of this thread, is whether Christian faith is for all the world or just for those brought up, more or less, within the realm of Christian cultures/societies?
A follow up question [on the assumption that Christians can learn from other faiths], is there anything distinctively Christian which other faiths can learn from?
It certainly does matter to historians, anthropologists, ethnographers, linguists and sundry other social scientists when and how peoples arrived in different parts of the world - and the settlement of New Zealand as the Last Place on Earth is interesting precisely for its lateness and extreme isolation because it fills out the picture of neolithic Polynesian settlements. Most of these settlements long predate the modern era and much is uncertain, but the more recent New Zealand history is easier to reconstruct. As there was literally no human settlement before the Maori in the 13th and 14th centuries, we have a unique case study of their environmental impact on land use and birdlife (including moas and Haast's eagles) and their adaptation to the much larger- and colder - islands of New Zealand, compared to their warmer tropical origins (which also hosted some land mammals, unlike New Zealand, other than bats). Because good numbers of Maori had become literate in their own language by the 1840s, it was possible to record great quantities of myths and genealogies in those years, including the great myth cycles known in the rest of Polynesia about creation, the birth of the gods, and Hawaiki, as well as local New Zealand legends (e.g. the Maui cycle, Kaitangata etc). These 19th century labours gifted New Zealand with the largest collection of Polynesian mythology of anywhere in the Pacific.
Pax et bonum
William Greenhalgh
Mark, as I understand it, Vedic Hinduism evolved out of the Indo-Aryan migrations into the Indo-Gangetic Plain after 2000 BC. The Aryans were the Iranian successors of the Proto-Indo-European communities of the Pontic steppe who migrated southwest. We can trace many of the names of the Hindu gods and concerns with purity back to these migrations or invasions (the Proto-Indo-Europeans possessed chariots and horses), as well as casteism, originally based on social stratification according to professions and class. In Indian soil these PIE myths and values took on a richer life of their own.
In time Hinduism would give birth to Buddhism c.600-500 BC but Buddhism itself was violently expelled from India centuries later. Islamic rule arose from successive invasions after the eleventh century. The whole development of Indic religion happened quite separately from Christianity until the British Raj forced radical reform upon the country. It is a long story of invasion, conquest, resistance and synthesis. (The late Church of South India bishop Lesslie Newbiggin is a good source on this history.)
Pax et bonum
William Greenhalgh
Are we talking about Christian faith as it has developed and influenced the various cultures and societies that it encountered?
Or is it about the universality of Jesus Christ, crucified and risen, and his presence through the Holy Spirit?
Thanks so much for the Postscript! Well put by Charles Caputt, bless him.
“Is Christian faith for all the world or just for those brought up, more or less, within the realm of Christian cultures/societies?”
I’m assuming that most (if not all) of us in this discussion were born into Christian households. We’ll never know what it’s like to be different. If I was born into a good Jewish or Parsi family, say, no doubt I’d be working out my relationship with God and the world within those religious traditions. Can any of us say otherwise?
Are all religions equally valid? I don’t know!
It just appears obvious to me (is it otherwise?) that Christianity (Old and New Testament, patristic, medieval and reformation periods) has mostly been experienced, written about, and codified in the absence of a genuine, deep knowledge of the major world religions. It also feels obvious to me that any claims to universality and absolute truth must be carefully, humbly reconsidered in terms of the world we live in now.
In all areas of life, my experience is God patiently invites me into a much broader, bigger, deeper view and way of being.
Chaput - not "Caputt' - or Kaputt! He did excellent work as an evangelist among Gen X university students when he was Archbishop of Denver. He wasn't afraid to speak clearly and faithfully into American politics and its cult of adulation, and in retirement he has lost none of his clarity and courage over Francis's off-script maunderings.
Pax et bonum
William Greenhalgh
Mark asks: "Are all religions equally valid? I don’t know"
Mark, it isn't that hard! Your question assumes that 'religions' are really the same fungible stuff that obtains the same 'product', just with different labels.
That's a convenient myth that's been around for a long time (think of the blind men and the elephant, and before that, Lessing's 'Nathan der Weise'), but it doesn't stand up to serious scrutiny, especially when we ask the basic questions:
- what is the fundamental reality? [the Eternal God - or nibbana?]
- why does the world exist? {Creation or - don't know]
- what is the nature of human beings? [image of God or - don't know]
- what is the basic human problem? [sin - or impermanence, dukka?]
- what happens when we die? [judgment by God - or reincarnation?]
- what solution does this 'religion' offer? [eternal life - or ultimate no-thingness]
- how do I know if it's true? [revelation - or thinking your way to enlightenment]
I once taught a course on Buddhism in a school and I got the students to draw up a chart with these questions comparing the answers of (atheistic) Buddhism with (monotheistic) Christianity. At every point they could see there was a stark difference between the two systems of thought (as well as a profound problem at the heart of Buddhism: how can you reconcile the doctrine of anatta with reincarnation and karma? Are these hangovers from Hinduism in Buddhism?)
(This is why I go into all that boring stuff about the historical origins of Indo-Aryan religion as the background to the Vedas. I suppose an atheist would offer the same about the background to Judaism. In the end, everything hinges on the Resurrection as validating the divinity and truthfulness of Christ. If Christianity isn't based on history, it isn't true. By contrast, Buddhism is really nothing to do with history, it claims instead to be a timeless philosophy of existence that anyone can discover for themselves, and would be true even if Siddhartha had never existed.)
Pax et bonum
William Greenhalgh
-
No, William, I don't think you can solve this problem/mystery with a whiteboard and a spreadsheet.
It's not a matter of comparing doctrines and getting a philosopher of religion (from a Catholic university) to declare the winner (and loser).
John Hick, who went on to develop a classic recent philosophy of religious pluralism, began with a life changing experience. Taking up a chair of theology in multicultural Birmingham required him to directly engage with different religious groups. He encountered a diversity of specific beliefs of course - Sikh, Jewish, Islamic, various Hindu, various Christian - but a similar pattern of a commitment to an ultimate concern or reality, strongly ethical behaviour, and very similar compassionate outreach and social care in the city.
I remember quite clearly as a university student that the most grace-filled lecturer I met - and she really taught me what grace really could be like - was the new lecturer in Islam. It was such a weird, wonderful experience - a Muslim, just in her way of being, finally educating me on this central Christian idea.
Mark, I'm not trying to "solve problems or mysteries", I'm trying to clarify thought and decide if I am being fair to a system of belief in its own terms. John Hick's abandonment of Christianity for Positivism-informed 'pluralism' went back a long way, years before his Birmingham days. The story is told in ch. 5 of 'Encountering Religious Pluralism' by his doctoral student at Claremont, Harold Netland. Hick began as an evangelical, then became a neo-orthodox Presbyterian pastor. As a scholar in the 1940s and 50s he encountered the challenge of Logical Positivism which claimed to repudiate metaphysics and ethics as literally meaningless. Hick argued then (in 1957) for a modest space for Christian theism on the grounds that all experience is ambiguous and interpretation-laden, so one could equally opt for a religious or a naturalistic non-religious view of the world. (I do not know how much Hick knew about physics and cosmology then. Later in the 1970s, William Lane Craig was his doctoral student in Birmingham. Hick was astonished when Craig in his thesis re-discovered and re-pristinated the kalam argument in the light of Big Bang cosmology and he asked Craig if the philosophers knew these things. Evidently Bertrand Russell didn't in his famous 1948 debate with Frederick Copleston - which was before the discovery of CMBR, and it was still possible to argue for an eternal universe as a 'brute fact'.) Meanwhile, Hick continued to move away from Christian orthodoxy, rejecting Chalcedon and Incarnation (a viewpoint that culminated in 'The Myth of God Incarnate' in 1977). This was really the pathway trod by Schleiermacher. Hick came to see that if he affirmed (ambiguous) religious experience as a ground for being a Christian (as he did in 'Faith and Knowledge' in 1957), the same applied for other religions as well. And so Hick went on to affirm first a general theism, before replacing that with 'the Real' - which looks to some rather like the 'sunyatta' or 'emptiness' of Zen Buddhism.
In my view, Hick made three wrong turnings;
1. He conceded too much to Logical Positivism, a philosophy largely dismantled by Alvin Plantinga (who was already anticipated by C. S. Lewis in 'Miracles; in 1948).
2. He needed to revisit natural theology and metaphysics, not to dismiss them. Again, Hick conceded too much to Kantian epistemology, instead of refuting him.
3. He was excessively sceptical about what can be known about Jesus, leading him to a wholly wrong view of how incarnational theology developed. If Jesus is God Incarnate, that really does change everything. So it was essential for Hick to deny this claim.
Pax et bonum
William Greenhalgh
William,
This sounds a little like John Hick as told by his detractors. For what it's worth, Hick's encounter with Kant was very formative. Many have talked of his supposed skeptical view of Christian sources, but as Hick himself said many times, he was merely following what most mainstream NT scholars have claimed and discovered.
If you listen to Hick, and it is in his philosophy of religion too, he keeps coming back to religious experience as decisive. He had a religious experience as a young man that led him to evangelical Christianity. He had several others that then led his away into more liberal Christian forms. In terms of world religions, he had a decisive experience at Birmingham and then subsequently - a direct experience of being alongside people of other faiths, and allowing this to impact his thinking about a loving God.
He acknowledges that a large part of all of our experience and interpretation of reality, as religious beings, is strongly conditioned by the simple fact of where we are born.
I think the world is very tired of Christianity claiming it has the truth, is the one true way, is more loving, more higher than ....well, anything else - secularism, other religions....and then seeing every day how violent it is, e.g. sexual abuse of minors, psychological and physical abuse of minorities such as women, numerous etc. The conservative apologist wants to admit these as "falling short', then return to double down on "the truth". Many of us see this as a return to a philosophical violence in which the other - far from being welcomed, listened to, even met as the stranger Christ - is once again been made invisible, backgrounded, and worse.
Thank you everyone for your comments here - the thread is one of the "richer" (or "thicker") ones i have ever seen on ADU. Vital issues are at stake as we reckon with matters of truth (or, ultimate truth), goodness and grace.
My own read of the thread is that there is a tension [upon whose ultimate reconciliation I make no pronouncement at this point in time] between what the best of each religion claims, with particular reference to the telos of everything (unity with God? unity with ?non-God?, the mystery of divine love (as expressed in some upfront or more hidden manner in most faiths, the role (distinctive? unique? manifestation in different individuals?) of each faith's "chief guide" (Moses, Christ, Mohammed, Buddha, etc), that is, the possibility of (ultimate) common ground a la Hicks and others compared with the distinctive claims of each faith: Islam denies Christian claims about Christ as the Son of God [and denies the claims of Buddhism, Hinduism etc]; Christianity's claim that there is no other name by which people can be saved; the way of Buddhism which, in my understanding, leads to a union of all things, but not a union with God as the Being responsible for everything; etc ... and, noting that in our NZ context, Maori welcome for the Gospel, according to Archbishop Don, in a sermon earlier this year, was a welcome for a way out of utu which was leading to death and mutual destruction between tribes.
"Mark, I'm not trying to "solve problems or mysteries", I'm trying to clarify thought and decide if I am being fair to a system of belief in its own terms."
1. Religions are more than systems of belief.
2. The belief component of world religions - including Christianity - cannot be reduced to single concept statements like "sin" versus "dukka".
3. But when explore those concepts with more space and focus, and in genuine open dialigue, we often discover much more commonality than we had hitherto thought. In such dialogue we learn as much about our own tradition as we do about the other. See, for example, Abhishiktananda (Henri Le Saux) on Om and the Word, Thomas Merton on contemplation and zazen, Bede Griffiths on satchitananda and the being of God, Laurence Freeman (all orthodox Catholic men by the way) on the beautitides and Buddhist loving-kindness...
One further comment from me: another point of comparison between faiths is on their inherent ability to self-reform: Christianity has demonstrated that through two millenia; Judaism through a longer period (if we allow that the religion of ancient Israel is the earliest form of Judaism); Hinduism and Buddhism also ... Islam not so much (cf. current difficulties in the world for Afghani women, Iranian citizens etc).
This is a very; interesting point, Peter. I admire much about Eastern Christianity, but, from my cursory knowledge, it has lacked a capacity and willingness to self-reform in the same way that particularly Protestant and but also Roman Catholic Christianity has been able to. Is that one reason why orthodox Christianity is often found in more authoritarian societies (e.g. current Russian crisis)?
In terms of Islam, the grace-filled lecturer I referred to earlier was one of a new sort of Muslim scholars. She was engaged in what we might fall historical-textual criticism of the Quran. Very much at its beginning stage, and VERY tentative, potentially controversial/explosive. Islam has a long way to go before this is readily accepted, one feels; not just historical-textual criticism of sacred scripture, but also a sort of vibrant symbolic approach to orthodoxy that allows many of us in the Church to keep reading and following scripture and tradition despite it's ambiguous 'strict historicity' at times.
Anglican Christianity has much to commend it in this area - as catholic and reformed, as preserving both symbolic and realist approaches to truth - and the reason I continue to find a home here.
William you ask, “What happens when we die”?
Well bodily functions stop and claims that some form of consciousness persists after our bodies die and decay into their constituent atoms face one huge, insuperable obstacle. The laws of physics that underly everyday life, which are completely understood, says that there's no way within those laws to allow for the information stored in our brains to persist after we die.
Regards Thomas
"The laws of physics that underly everyday life, which are completely understood ..."
You clearly haven't read your Richard Feynman, Thomas.
Pax et bonum
William Greenhalgh
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