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globaltheology
Strategies for all-inclusivity
a) Case study: Wilfred Cantwell Smith (Canadian, historian
of religion)
In his ground-breaking book, The Meaning and End of Religion (1963), Smith proposed that we replace the idea of ‘religion’ with the two notions of ‘faith’ and 'cumulative traditions’. Spiritual understanding is not a ‘thing’ or objective set of fixed beliefs, he said, but a human movement which nurtures a sense of the transcendent, shaped by an historic tradition. ‘Faith’ is a natural function of being human. His famous definition of faith was:
Faith is an orientation of the personality, to oneself, to one’s neighbour, to the universe; a total response; a way of seeing the world and of handling it; a capacity to live at more than a mundane level; to see, to feel, to act in terms of a transcendent dimension.
This faith then developed, was nurtured and evolved within history. ‘God’ or ‘the Transcendent’ was known in cultural forms but the human aspiration of spiritual vision united people everywhere. You could say that for Smith religions ‘become’ true in human beings as they strive to live according to the best lights before them.
For Smith, what we have been taught to call ‘the religions’ are not opposed systems of divine understanding but human awarenesses of a global ‘divine’ presence.
b) Case-study: a Buddhist parable
There is a well-known parable in Buddhist literature which tells of an elephant being approached from different standpoints according to the different touches of a group of blind men.
When the blind men had felt the elephant, the raja went to each of them and said,. ‘Tell me, what sort of thing is an elephant?’ Thereupon, the man who had been presented with the head answered, ‘Sire, it is like a pot.’ The man who had observed the ear replied, ‘An elephant is like a winnowing basket.’ The one who had hold of the tusk said it was a ploughshare. Another said the trunk was a plough; the foot, a pillar; the tail, a brush, and so on.’
(World Scriptures: a Comparative Anthology of Sacred Texts, 1995)
In its Buddhist context the moral of the parable was that the different perspectives lead to quarrelling if each person thinks that what they ‘touch’ is the whole truth. The real religious truth, however, is many-sided and no one person can ‘feel’ the whole of it. Each of us has our own journey to make.
The difficulty, it is often claimed, with both case studies here is that they assume that there is someone who takes a standpoint outside of the differences between traditions/worldviews/religions and who is able to spot that the differences are differences belonging to the same object.
In the first instance: if we are all situated within cultures and histories how can we know that ‘faith’ is shared in the manner that Cantwell Smith imagines?
In the second instance: if we are all partial in our grasp of anything who is able to tell us that we all grasp parts of the same whole?
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Is there any way we can recognise one another in our different
traditions as being in a relationship of ‘family resemblance’?
Can we describe this as a ‘global theology’?
Contents / Introduction / Global superiority / All-Inclusive / Momentum / Pressure / Inductive approaches / Initiatives / Summary / Inspiration / Resources
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interfaith organisations network 2003 |