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The Slippery Slope of Religious Relativism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2008

J. Kellenberger
J. Kellenberger
Affiliation:
California State University, Northridge
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Extract

Among the questions facing the religious there is one that is becoming particularly pressing in our contemporary world of mingled cultures. Expressed as religious people sometimes put it to themselves, it is: How does my religion relate to other religions? There are two very different answers abroad. One is: mine is true and all others, to the extent that they depart from mine, are false and are to be rejected. The other is: mine is valid-for-me, and those of others are valid-for-them. The first answer has the virtue of being utterly straightforward and not mealy-mouthed, but it seems parochial and myopic, for, as John Hick points out:

In the great majority of cases, the tradition within which a religious person finds his relationship to the Real depends to a very great extent upon where and when he or she is born…In view of this situation, can one be unquestionably confident that the religion which one happens to have inherited by birth is indeed normative and that all others are properly to be graded by their likeness or unlikeness to it?

Type
Articles
Information
Religious Studies , Volume 21 , Issue 1 , March 1985 , pp. 39 - 52
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1985

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References

page 39 note 1 Hick, John, ‘On Grading Religions’, Religious Studies, XVII (1981), 456.Google Scholar Quoted by Trigg, Roger, ‘Religion and the Threat of Relativism’, Religious Studies, XIX (1983), 298.Google Scholar

page 39 note 2 In ‘Religion and the Threat of Relativism’, pp. 301–5.

page 40 note 1 See chapter I of The Divine Names: Dionysies The Areopagite, trans. Rolt, C. E. (London: S.P.C.K. 1940), pp. 51–64.Google Scholar

page 40 note 2 Meister Eckhart, trans. Blakney, R. B. (New York: Harper & Row, 1941), pp. 243–4.Google Scholar

page 40 note 3 Summa Theologica, I, q. 13, a. 5.

page 41 note 1 Trigg, , ‘Religion and the Threat of Relativism’, p. 303 (his emphasis).Google Scholar

page 43 note 1 See Kierkegaard's parable of the idol-worshipper, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, trans. Swenson, David F. and Lowrie, Walter (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1941), pp. 179–80.Google Scholar I have briefly discussed Kierkegaard's parable in ‘Wittgenstein and Truth in Incompatible Religious Traditions’, Studies in Religion/Sciences Religieuses, XII (1983), 174–5.Google Scholar

page 44 note 1 Kripke, Saul A., ‘Naming and Necessity’, in Semantics of Natural Language, ed. Davidson, D. and Harmon, G. (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1972), pp. 301–3 and 309.Google Scholar See Immerman's, Leon ‘Must We Know What We Say?’, Religious Studies XV (1979)Google Scholar, for an application of Kripke's ideas about naming and reference to religious language about God.

page 45 note 1 Trigg, , ‘Religion and the Threat of Relativism’, p. 305.Google Scholar

page 46 note 1 Trigg, , ‘Religion and the Threat of Relativism’, p. 303.Google Scholar

page 48 note 1 Hick, John, ‘Religion as fact-asserting’, in God and the Universe of Faiths (London: Macmillan, 1973), pp. 22–6.Google Scholar

page 48 note 2 It is recognized ‘in all the main religious traditions’, Hick says, ‘that the ultimate divine reality is infinite and as such transcends the grasp of the human mind’. ‘The New Map of the Universe of Faith’, in God and the Universe of Faith. p. 139. And elsewhere he suggests that the ‘same transcendent reality’, the Eternal One, is experienced nontheistically or theistically in different religions. ‘Sketch for a Global Theory of Religious Knowledge’, in God Has Many Names (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1980), pp. 83–4.

page 48 note 3 Hick, John, ‘Incarnation and Mythology’, God and the Universe of Faiths, p. 175.Google Scholar

page 49 note 1 Hick, , ‘On Grading Religions’, p. 462.Google Scholar Given the first alternative it appears that, on Hick's view, the basic beliefs of one religion could turn out to be literally true after all, while the of other religions would be true only as myths.

page 49 note 2 Trigg, , ‘Religion and the Threat of Relativism’, p. 305.Google Scholar

page 49 note 3 Phillips, D. Z., Death and Immortality (London: Macmillan, 1970), p. 55.CrossRefGoogle Scholar For a development of his views on religion see his collection of essays, Faith and Philosophical Enquiry (New York: Schocken Books, 1971).

page 49 note 4 Trigg, Roger, Reason and Commitment (London: Cambridge University Press, 1973), pp. 91–2.Google Scholar

page 49 note 5 Otto, Rudolf, The Idea of the Holy, trans. Harvey, John W., 2nd edn. (London: Oxford University Press, 1950).Google Scholar

page 50 note 1 Otto stressed both the importance of the non-rational numinous sense and the importance of a clear conception of God, which he saw as necessary for religious knowledge. Otto, by the way, was acutely aware of the tension or ambivalence I discussed in section I, which for him is between the rational and the non-rational. See The Idea of the Holy, appendix V, pp. 198–9.

page 50 note 2 This is Kierkegaard's Postscript definition of faith. Concluding Unscientific Postscript, p. 182.

page 51 note 1 Hick, John, Faith and Knowledge, 2nd edn. (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1966), pp. 113–19Google Scholar and 141–7. Hick returns to this theme in ‘Religious Faith as Experiencing-as’ in God and the Universe of Faiths.

page 51 note 2 Hick, , Faith and Knowledge, p. 144.Google Scholar

page 51 note 3 Hick, John, ‘Eschatalogical Verification Revisited’, Religious Studies XIII (1977).Google Scholar

page 52 note 1 Phillips, , ‘Religion and Epistemology: Some Contemporary Confusions’, Faith and Philosophical Enquiry, p. 132.Google Scholar

page 52 note 2 See the last sentence of ‘On Grading Religions’; ‘Sketch for a Global Theory of Religious Knowledge’, God Has Many Names, p. 83; ‘The New Map of the Universe of Faiths’, God and the Universe of Faiths, p. 146. In the last two essays he advances this view as a ‘hypothesis’, but in ‘On Grading Religions’ he suggests that we can ‘only acknowledge, and indeed rejoice in the fact, that the Real… is known and responded to within each of these vast historical complexes’, that is, Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam and Christianity.