In this powerful collection of essays, William Greenway sharpens the moral clarion call that he has been sounding for the past decade. With unflinching eye, he describes the economic and environmental crises threatening our global community, and he summons all humans to deploy faith and reason together to address these challenges. Greenway seeks to render visible a simple truth: many people across the globe agree on what is reasonable and good, and this shared understanding is grounded in common understanding of a ‘spiritual dimension of reality’ (p. 2). ‘I believe we’ (here he means not only leaders in the world's faith traditions, but also secular ‘atheist’ critics of religion) ‘actually share substantial spiritual and ethical common ground, and I am interested in finding a positive way forward’ (p. 9).
Greenway is not arguing for human effort alone as the path to repair the world. His approach is grounded in moral realism: the conviction that there is a force beyond us, not of our own making, that seizes us with agape. As a Christian theologian, Greenway is ready to call this ‘God’, but he is not invested in defending that term for all people. Rather, he is invested in the conviction that there is something Real that grounds us and binds us together, if we consent to it.
In his lucid introduction to the volume, Greenway traces the evolution of the contemporary philosophical landscape, beginning with the Enlightenment and ending with the inadequacy of modern western ‘secular’ thinking. He notes that this inadequacy is visible in thinkers like Gayatri Spivak, who is reaching for something beyond ‘secular reason’, but without recourse to religious/spiritual reality. While many in the West now recognise the problems of a simple Enlightenment appeal to natural reason, many thinkers (even, Greenway laments, the analytic philosopher Richard Rorty) remain convinced that we can distinguish between ‘religious’ and ‘secular’ reasoning, maintaining an outdated Enlightenment suspicion of ‘religion’. It is this suspicion that Greenway seeks to address.
In addition to his concern about lingering ‘secular thinking’, Greenway critiques the sectarian fragmentation that arises from postmodern relativism. Despite the extensive resources of the world's faith traditions, Greenway describes ours as an age of dangerous sectarianism that is unable to address the integrated and oppressive global systems that drive towards profit for the few. In ‘A Time for Prophets? Non-Sectarian Affirmation of Particularities and Universal Morality’, Greenway illumines the practical dangers of such sectarianism. After describing the skyrocketing cost of EpiPens because of global market forces, he laments, ‘postmodern stress on the discrete identities of diverse communities has been resulting in a sectarian fragmentation that leaves all these discrete communities enfeebled in the face of global economic forces’ (p. 198).
Greenway avers that recognition of common religious and spiritual ground could actually help us address such sectarian intolerance. In a particularly lyrical passage, he describes the agape that grounds human experience:
while our reactions vary according to context, in both horrific and joyful contexts we are seized by the same reality, by the same passionate concern for others. This is a passion, a love, a concern that is not from us, not a product of any decision on our part (though we might harden our hearts), not a product of our desires. It is most fully and accurately described as a passion not from us that seizes us for others. This is what Christians call agape… (p. 17)
There is much to celebrate in this volume. Greenway offers sophisticated engagement with complicated philosophical arguments; this is no glib claim that we are all really up to the same thing. His thesis emerges from decades of conversation with western analytic philosophy, driven by an ethical passion shaped by his own Christian evangelical roots. For instance, he argues, against Jeffrey Stout, that social justice movements ‘cannot succeed in being good and just without faith in the living God’ (p. 200). That is, remembering and having faith in ‘God’, means precisely feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, freeing the oppressed.
As a Christian theologian increasingly engaged in comparative theological work, I am interested to see Greenway engage more deeply with religious voices from non-western and non-Christian traditions to test and develop his claim that a common ‘reasonable faith’ can address the dangers of our post-secular age. Greenway clearly invites this – he does not want claim of commonality to mask real diversity (a danger that haunts projects like that of the late John Hick). I wonder: is there something to be learned from engaging in conversations with religious instances that are not grounded in agape? Or are all religions actually swept along in a universal agapic undertow?
Many of these essays have been previously published, but their revision into a single volume around a common theme makes them available to a wider audience. As noted in the book's subtitle, these essays engage philosophers with whom Greenway has long been in conversation, including Donald Davidson, Emmanuel Levinas, John Rawls, Mayra Rivera, Rorty, Spivak, Stout, Charles Taylor and Bernard Williams. Some of these essays address a more specialised academic audience (e.g. chapters 1, 2, 5, 6), while others speak more easily to non-specialists (see, for instance, the elegant chapter 7, ‘Christian Ethics in a Postmodern World?’, originally written in 1994 and now available for the first time in print, as well as the compelling final sermon, ‘A Time for Prophets?’). This volume will be most rewarding for those who are familiar with the thinkers engaged, and/or who have a penchant for analytic philosophical approaches. However, all readers who are invested in the conversation about faith and reason will benefit from this serious critique of secular so-called rationality, and for Greenway's call to join the forces of reason and faith in common cause for the common good.
