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Keith Ward's Exceptionalist Theology of Revelations

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2024

Kenneth Rose
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Drawing extensively upon anthropological and historical studies of primal and “canonical” religions (RR, 2, 232, 278, 318, 343), the philosophical theologian Keith Ward attempts in his recent book Religion and Revelation,’ to develop a comparative doctrine of revelations in order to situate Christian revelation within the plethora of revelations that are an undeniable aspect of human religiousness in its virtually infinite forms (RR, 57, 37, 23, 215-16). Yet because Ward believes that in Jesus Christ God has disclosed the true form of human redemption (RR, 280), he evaluates other revelations in light of this belief. Consequently, his theology of religions, despite its drawing upon the data of historical and comparative study of religions, is incapable of accommodating other revelations on their own terms. For example, Ward tries to read Sankara as a theist, and, thus, as an ally. In this essay, I will argue that this appeal to Sankara is misdirected since Sankara's position involves an ontological nondualism that ultimately annuls theism. I will also argue that such a misreading is an inevitable consequence of Ward’s exceptionalist theology of revelations, but is unconvincing to philosophical theologians of religions who cannot agree with Ward that the central claims of orthodox Christianity are “simply true” (RR, 279). Ward’s fideism forecloses arbitrarily upon the limits of revelation and encourages an exceptionalist parochialism This is harmless perhaps within the walls of liberal seats of theological learning, but it can foster fundamentalisms in other settings. Finally, I will argue that Ward’s fideism belies the apparently comparative character of his undertaking.

Type
Research Article
Information
New Blackfriars , Volume 79 , Issue 926 , April 1998 , pp. 164 - 176
Copyright
Copyright © 1998 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers

References

1 Ward, Keith, Religion and Revelation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 57Google Scholar (hereafter cited as RR).

2 I prefer exceptionalisl to more polemical terms, such as hegemonic, monologic, solipsistic, imperialistic, and so forth. By exceptionalism, I have in mind its use by Americanists for the messianic idea that America as a new, democratic nation founded in a “New World” under God's special providence will prove an exception to the apparently fixed laws of history that governed the birth and death of Old World civilizations (See Jace Weaver, “Original Simplicities and Present Complexities: Reinhold Niebuhr, Ethnocentrism, and the Myth of American Exceptionalism,”Journal of the American Academy of Religion 63 [Summer 1995]: 231‐47). Adapting this idea to religious studies, I would use the term exceptionalism to stand for the belief that a particular religion is excepted in some significant way from human limitations‐Examples of exceptionalism include the belief that elements of one's religion have been instituted directly and without admixture of human error by the Divine itself. The view that the patterns that mark the birth, growth, and death of all other religions do not apply to one's own is another instance of exceptionalism. In Ward's case, exceptionalism shows itself in the belief that, unlike other religions, Christianity proleptically reveals in Christ “the true form of human redemption”(RR, 280), while other religions approximate this form to lesser degrees.

3 See Pinnock, Clark H., A Wideness in God's Mercy: The Finality of Jesus Christ in a World of Religions (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan Publishing House, 1992), 79Google Scholar; Sanders, John, No Other Name: An Investigation into the Destiny of the Unsaved (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1992), 230Google Scholar.

4 Hick is in the advance on this position, along with Paul Knitter. Besides the carefully articulated philosophy of religion that Hick has most fully developed in An Interpretation of Religion, he has continued to write as a Christian theologian about the relation of Christianity to other religions–a relationship that he believes must be reconceived in light of the rejection of the literal truth of the belief that Jesus is God incarnate. See his The Metaphor of God Incarnate: Christology in a Pluralistic Age (Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1993), 109Google Scholar. See also his latest book in this area, A Christian Theology of Religions: The Rainbow of Faiths (Louisville KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1995)Google Scholar.

5 Ward's attempt to find a way through the bewildering diversity of religions and theories of religion without surrendering what for him are the irreformable (RR, 279) claims of orthodox Christianity, but also without remaining confined within biblicism (RR, 281) marks a step forward for an orthodox Christian theology of religions. He thereby avoids the pluralistic revisionism of Hick as well as the exclusivistic biblicism of Harold Netland (Harold A. Netland, Dissonant Voices: Religious Pluralism and the Question of Truth (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1991), 34. For Hick, see works cited above and below.

6 RR, 199, 206‐8. See also Ward, Keith, Rational Theology and the Creativity of God (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1982), 233‐34Google Scholar.

7 RR, 279. Here Ward makes the decidedly confessional claim that this view of God is “simply true.”

8 This approach, genial as it appears from within the circle of moderate but orthodox Christian faith, is unlikely to be welcomed by those whose revelations are so treated. Nor is the philosophical theologian of religions whose concern is not with the truth of this or that revelation but rather with the cognitivity of religious claims in general likely to feel the force of Ward's judgments.

9 Ward notes, however, that Hindu theisms, though often fostering devotion to a supreme God, lack central aspects of Abrahamic faiths such as notions of a single, transcendent Creator, who is not essentially identical with his creation, a Judge who is “experienced as absolute moral demand,” and as a Redeemer who acts in history and makes his will known through prophets who condemn oppressive social contexts (RR, 134‐35; see also 134‐41).

10 Ward, following Julius Lipner, recognizes that the undue intellectualizing of Advaita Vedanta by some Western and Neo‐Vedantic interpreters is a distortion of the tradition and sees Vedanta as part of the ethnic social and ritual fabric of Hinduism (RR, 142‐43, 155‐56). This view is in line with the notion of the apophatic religious philosopher as a traditional and pious interpreter rather than a detractor of scripture, which Francis X. Clooney develops–an approach I would call the piety of reading scripture apophatically. On this view, the interpreter, is not so much a philosopher in search of universal truths as a skilled practitioner of the art of devoutly reading the scriptures that project the religious milieu within which the accomplished reader–the scriptural theologian and the scriptural philosopher–read. Skilled readers are able to sustain the priority of a simple transcendent reality to the divinities central to their scriptural traditions without rejecting their authoritative scriptures by giving priority to apophatic over cataphatic texts. They are able to “grade and qualify” the latter in light of the former without any sense of dissonance. Consequently, scriptural philosophers are able “to preserve the unity of God and the multiplicity of namings of God found in the scripture”( Theology after Vednta: An Experiment in Comparative Theology [Albany: State University Press of New York, 1993], 14‐17Google Scholar, 164, 86). Gavin D'Costa cogently discusses the differences between Clooney's contextual and textual view of Vedanta and the deracinated intellectualistic Vedanta of Paul Deussen and Eliot Deutsch in his review of Theology after Vedanta: An Experiment in Comparative Theology in Modern Theology 10 (October 94): 431‐32.

11 Bataille, Georges, Theory of Religion, trans. Hurley, Robert. (New York: Zone Books, 1992), 21Google Scholar.

12 Clooney, ibid., 17.

13 The context in which Rāmānuja deploys this phrase is his commentary on the Bhagavadgātā (G?tābhsya), where he argues against the nondualistic theism of Aankara that Ward attempts to press into service in defense of his own theism. If the sublating cognition of nondifference annuls difference (i.e., qualities), as nondualists argue, then, Ramanuja counters, to account for the persistence of the cognition of difference as the persistence of a sublated cognition is as absurd as asserting that both the guru who teaches the doctrine of nondualism and the student are illusory. This leads directly into one of the issues not answerable by Advaita Vedanta: putting to one side for a moment the question of the reality of difference, how can the illusion of difference arise within the nondual reality? Rāmānuja's argues forcefully against Aankara's nondual conception of theism and reality in his commentary on Bhagavadgāt 2:12 ( Rāmānuja on the Bhagavadgt: A Condensed Rendering of the Glt?bhāsya with Copious Notes and an Introduction, 2d ed., trans. Buitenen, J. A. B. van [Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1968], 52Google Scholar).

14 A position cogently stated by Ramanuja, even as he lampoons it (G?tābhāsya, commentary on Bhagavadglta, 2:12.).

15 Ward would have found greater support for theism in the Visaistdvaita Vednta of Rāmānuja, which mounts an effective theistic polemic against Aankara's Advaita Vednta. A more subtle inclusivist Christian reading of Sankara than Ward's is offered by Clooney in Theology after Vedanta. Without attempting to turn Sankara into a theist, Clooney draws out the similarities (and dissimilarities) between the scriptural apophaticism of both 3ankara and Thomas Aquinas. Clooney describes his inclusivism as involving the “perplexing double claim” that salvation is both universal and occurs in Christ alone. Despite being a learned and traditionalistic reader of Vedantic texts and commentaries, Clooney would not agree that Brahman is soteriologically prior to or equal to the Passion of Christ. Yet he finds himself unable, after so long and patient an engagement with Advaita Vedanta, to assert that the knowledge of Brahman does not save”(Theology after Vedanta, 192, 195).

16 Inclusivists propose soteriologies that allow of degrees of implicit or anonymous faith in Christ as saving in via. In this regard they differ from the exclusivists; they remain in agreement with exclusivists, however, in their exceptionalism. Objectively all roads ultimately merge into the Way of Christ, regardless of the subjective experience of the faithful who do not live, by the name of Jesus. In patria, every knee will bow at the name of Jesus (Phil. 2:10). To begin doubting the validity of Christian exceptionalism is to set out across the theological Rubicon toward pluralism. For a recent recanting of inclusivism and a rejection of Alan Race's triadic typology by a heretofore committed defender of inclusivism and the triadic typology, see D'Costa, “The Impossibility of a Pluralist View of Religions,” 223‐32.

17 Although I disagree with and even find objectionable the characterization of the Dalai Lama as a “false friend,” I would agree with Jane Compson that the Dalai Lama's tolerance of other religions lies not in his being a religious pluralist but in seeing other religions in light of the Buddhist notions of emptiness and skillful means (“The Dalai Lama and me World Religions: A False Friend?”Religious Studies 32 [June 1996]: 278). D'Costa makes a similar, if less pointed, criticism of the Dalai Lama (D'Costa, ibid., 232). There he also claims that underlying the pluralism of the Indian philosopher Sarvapelli Radhakrishnan is the nondual stance of Advaita Vednta. Jacob Neusner is unabashedly exceptionalistic in his representation of Judaism in A Rabbi Talks with Jesus: An Intermillennial, Interfaith Exchange New York: Doubleday, 1994), xii‐xiii, xiv, 7. Thus the Dalai Lama, as well as Ward, Neusner, and Radhakrishnan, are exceptionalists with respect to their home traditions.

18 D'Costa suggests that eventually pluralist theologians such as John Hick and Paul Knitter may no longer “properly be regarded as Christians [ibid., 226).

19 Hick, A Christian Theology of Religions, 30.

20 Hick writes respecting this choice: “we have either to seek a more comprehensive view, or else each return to the absolutism of our own tradition …” (ibid., 48).