Curious Christian

In view of my recent comments on “god” language I thought I’d post this somewhat extended quote from N T Wright in “The Challenge of Jesus: Rediscovering Who Jesus Was and Is”:

It is an interesting observation on today’s religious climate that many people now get every bit as steamed up about insisting that “all religions are just the same” as the older dogmaticians did about insisting on particular formulations and interpretations. The dogma that all dogmas are wrong, the monolithic insistence that all monolithic systems are to be rejected, has taken hold of the popular imagination at a level far beyond rational or logical discourse. The “remote god” view encourages it: if god is, or the gods are, far away and largely unknowable, all human religions must be at best vague approximations, different paths up the mountain (and all paths get lost in the mist quite soon anyway). Equally, the pantheism that sees “god” as the divine or sacred aspect within the present world leads ultimately in the same direction: if all religions are responding “to the sacred” in this sense, they are simply different languages expressing the same concept.

Few who embrace one or other of these beliefs (or in some cases, it seems, both) stop to consider how remarkably arrogant and imperialistic these rejections of the supposedly arrogant and imperialistic religions actually are. They are saying with all the authority of the eighteenth century Enlightenment behind them that they have discovered the hidden truth that all the great religions (especially Judaism, Christianity and Islam) have missed: all religions are “really” variations on he Enlightenment’s idea of “religion”. Well, of course, if you start out with that idea, it would look like that, would it not?

But why should we believe the Enlightenment’s arrogant claim any more than anyone else’s? Some Christians, thinking to be generous-spirited towards those who embrace other faiths, have spoken of such people as “anonymous Christians”; this is now generally rejected as hopelessly arrogant. Why should a Buddhist want to be an “anonymous Christian?” But by the same token it is just as arrogant, if not more so, to claim that the adherents of all religions are really “anonymous Enlightenment religious persons.”

We cannot, obviously, settle the debate here. I merely raise it to show the way in which different ideas of “god” give rise to or are raised by various current ideas about the meaning of the world and of the religions. And also to show that the Jewish idea of “God” was quite different both from the distant, remote being(s) of ancient Epicureanism and more recent Deism, and from the immanent god(s) of ancient and modern paganism and pantheism.

In other words, to invoke “god” generically in conversation often achieves little more than conceeding the centre ground to those who aspouse the perennial philosophy. Christians who would witness to others in the pluralistic West need to be more astute.

Matt Stone

Technorati Tags: emerging church perennial philosophy apologetics mission