Major Trends in Religious Pluralism:

1. Secular Humanism – Founding Fathers of America and Harvey Cox

2. Global Theology – Wilfred C. Smith and John Hick

3. Syncretism – Kabir and Nanak – Ram Mohan Roy – Sri Ramakrishna – Mahatma Gandhi

4. Perennial Philosophy – Thomas Huxley – Rene Guenon – Frithjof Schuon – Seyyed Hossein Nasr

Secular Humanism – Founding Fathers of America and Harvey Cox

• Anthropocentric outlook - humanistic approach- man is the measure of everything-man as center of cosmos

• the reawakening of the humanistic approach rooted in the philosophy of Protagoras (490-460 BCE)- as alleged by F.C.Schiller (1937)

• Since man is the measure of everything no human view is certain enough, that every human view is relative and subjective in terms of its certainty

• Avocation of relativism and rejection of absolutism as the episteme of modern humanism

• The humanistic philosophy; logical positivism, pragmatism, democracy, nationalism, globalization, (human as the sacred)

• Humanism as the method not merely as theory or a system of philosophy

• Therefore humanism is;– Cultural and ideological revivalism for secularism as the

outcome of admiration for the Greco-Roman culture– Methods of thinking that advocate for human values as

the ultimate– A system of philosophy that concerns on human interest

and wellbeing

• Such is a form of desacralization, modern humanism is secular in nature leading to agnosticism and finally atheism (A.J.Ayer 1910-1989)

• Secularism become part of humanism• Therefore secular humanism is the ethical system

that advocate human values as the ultimate such as tolerance, compassionate , respectfulness, devoid of divine or religious values

• Two important pillars of secular humanism;– human centric as the principle and objective– Secularism as the foundation for peaceful co-

existence of religionsHUMAN CENTRIC AS THE PRINCIPLE AND

OBJECTIVE• August Comte (1798-1857), the founding father

of positivisme, in Religion of Humanity: humanism to fulfill human spiritual/religious needs in replacement of religion/god

• The most exploited human value therefore; tolerance; to substantiate democracy

• Thus leading to political pluralism and religious pluralism• In the context of US, John Adams (1735-1826), Benjamin

Franklin (1706-1790) and Thomas Jefferson (1753-1826) advocated “E pluribus unum (Out of many, one), addressed as The Republican Banquet, William James (1842-1910)

• Pluralism thus became one of the terms in the US constitution and its public life. (Martin Marty, 1987) –

• The American Enlightenment; in contradiction to the European Enlightenment that marginalized religion and religious tradition, the former crystalized religious claims

• Also Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790); the Public Religion (1749) – as political means to advocate loyalty and tolerance in the face of multiplicity (of religions, races, cultures, ethnicities)

• Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778), The Social Contract, The Discourses, that put forward the term Civil Religion

• The main characteristics of ‘public religion’ or ‘civil religion’ – emphasis on collective moralities in the execution of individual right and societal role and obligation

• This human religon-faith in collective human values rather than faith in religious metaphysics and transcendant

• Perfect example of deism; faith devoid of belief in revelation and metaphysics, denounce divine intervention in the natural law, rely on human reasoning, natural and empirical evidences.

• William James (1842-1910), the American prominent secular humanist; the essence of religion as human experience, The Varieties of Religious Experience: Study of Human Nature

• His pragmatic philosophy accepted religion, (as variously experienced by man)

• The Will to Believe; W.James condemned absolutism and exclusivism

• A more radical and pragmatic approach, in 1934, John Dewey introduced A Common Faith; calling for religion without god, but to ascribe to humanistic values, rationalism and democracy as the foundation and objective of the new religion.

• Even if god is to be regarded as component in the new religion, the combination of humanistic values and its practicalities is the god for the new religion.

• To him, all religions that exist are identical but they are potential threats/stumbling blocks to the realization of the democratic ideals in human affairs

• This radical development of secular humanism was embraced and manifested in the universal declaration of human rights of the united nation 1948 that advocate for human dignity and freedom

• An author, J.Paul William disqualify the traditional religion and secretarian as outdated, thus calling for the churches to adopt democracy as religious teaching and values

2. Secularism as the foundation for peaceful co-existence of religions

– Secularism as secretarial and secularization as a process– Harvey Cox in The Secular City;– Secularization as the freedom of human mind and

language from the domination of religion and metaphysics , and defatalization of history; the freedom of man from fatalistic belief that dominate the past by changing the orientation of their belief from metaphysics to the present secular world

– Pluralism and tolerance is the outcome of secularization

• He substantiated from the Bible to justify his theory of secularization

• Thus man is free to belief and to practice his belief as long as it is an individual/a personal endeavor

• On the other hand, communal and collective matters should submit to the political system; secular state

Global Theology – Wilfred C. Smith• Wilfred Cantwell Smith: Towards a World

Theology & The Meaning and End of Religion (1962) – heralding the ways for rp

• stressed the need for a more adequate understanding of religion, (of others as well as one’s own religion) for the betterment of mankind in living together

• To develop universal friendship but this is difficult if to be based on religion

• the root problem was in the definition of religion, no one valid definition , therefore to redefine the term

• religion in its contemporary Western usage as an evolving Western concept leading to an understanding of religion as an objective systematic entity; a system of ideas or beliefs and practices in which men of faith were involved, or with which men of potential faith are confronted

• Religion therefore has been interpreted as a positive organized/ systematic entity; and this definition is problematic; confront the pluralistic reality, and lost of its essence

• The problem with such an understanding, according to Smith, is that it concerns only the external observable part which constituted religion and ignored the most important inner part of religion, that is the relation with the transcendent

• the existing conception of religion has finally led to a differentiation process, religion in a variety of minor forms and identified as Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism and so on, later to be phrased as ‘religions of the world’ indicating the plural religions. Indeed, such naming and identification of one religion is the ultimate development of the evolving Western conception of religion (as an external objective systematic entity

• The questions arising on the very existence of religion and the truth claim posed by religions

• To him there is no such thing as religion as a noun and therefore there will be no need for propagating the truth

• Smith offers his ideas of faith and cumulative traditions, two elements mistakenly understood as religion.

• Cumulative tradition is the outcome of human interactions and human cultures that include;

• the entire mass of objective data that constitutes the historical deposit, for instance; temples, scriptures, theological systems, dance patterns, legal and other social institutions, conventions, moral codes, myths and so on; anything that can be and is transmitted from one person, one generation, to another and that an historian can observe

• religious tradition enters the mundane aspect of religious life as it is a historical construct and, indeed, a human construct which can take many forms and is simply the expression of man’s faith; they are inherently and inevitably contingent,

• The collection of hymns in the Rig Veda of the Hindus, the Islamic legal system - the shari‛ah, the different religious context that constituted the Christian Church of Western Europe and the Russian Church, are examples of religious traditions that are emerging, changing and developing

• cumulative traditions are all historical entities, and since they are adaptive to changes, transformation and alteration, this implies that no one tradition is fixed, certain and objective. Indeed, cumulative tradition, according to Smith, is a human construct

• Faith, more to address one personal conviction, inner religious experience or involvement of a particular person; the impingement on him of the transcendent, personal and profound matter, too divine for public exposition and not directly observable.

• Faith can be expressed and expressions of faith vary and are identifiable; faith is but an expression of religious faith; The faith of men in all communities is not the same. Even the faith of one man within one community is not the same. In fact, any one man’s faith is different on any given morning from what it was the preceding afternoon.

• Smith notion’s of faith and cumulative tradition, it is speculated that his contribution to the spirit of religious pluralism lies in three facts.

• Firstly, in disqualifying the concept of religion as imposed by modernity, secondly, in negating the exclusive spirit brought by the concept of religion and thirdly, in celebrating the multiplicity and divergences of the religious life of mankind depicted in cumulative divergent traditions

JOHN HICK: God-centeredness• John Hick; the prominent propagator• Copernican Revolution (against the Ptolemaic

theory of the earth) centrality of sun to the universe instead of the earth

• In the context of religion, transformation from religion-centeredness to God-centeredness; centrality of god instead of Christianity

• Using Smithian’s lense, Hick in Philosophy of Religion, dynamic of religious life, development is inevitable, and gradually there will be converging courses

• Hick in his first book Philosophy of Religion, in 1963 launched his discourses on religion and religions; historical constructs of religions

• There will be converging courses; religions become plural sects

• Called for a global theology; as preparation for future plural religious engagements

• Religion is a fortuity of birth, man born and affiliated to particular religion familiar to his environment

• Religion to him is a cultural factor; those who are born to Buddhist parents in Thailand are very likely to be Buddhist, while someone who is born to Muslim parents in Saudi Arabia will be a Muslim, someone born to Christian parents in Mexico is likely to be a Christian, and so on.

• Hick quoted Xenophanes• Ethiopians make their gods black with turned up

noses. Thracians make them with red hair and blue eyes; mortals think that gods are born and have their own food, voice and shape….that the ancient nomadic pastoral communities tended to think of the divine in male terms, in contrast to settled agricultural peoples who tended to think of the divine in female terms

• Hick propagate the idea religion centeredness to God centeredness;

• The transformation of self-centeredness to Reality centeredness

• Faith is a cognitive freedom; therefore it can be developed and changed

• Salvation is a process of transformation

• Every religion propagate different way of salvation, when in reality they are different responses to the Reality/Transcendent/God

• Eg; he propagated Christological revolution; doctrines of Christianity as myth rather than reality -to avoid the confusion of plural truth-claim put forward by religions

• Using Kantian epistemology;’ noumenon ‘thing as it is in itself and ‘phenomenon’ thing as experienced by human being

• Therefore prefer the Real than god• Concerns over the plural truth claim made on

salvation• is dissatisfied, however, with the word ‘God, he prefers ‘the

Real’, believing that the term has the advantage of not being the exclusive property of any tradition but is familiar within all of them.

• the Real an sich or the Real in itself is distinguished from the real as manifested within the intellectual and experiential purview of any one religious tradition.

• He claimed that the doctrine of Incarnation is responsible for cultivating the idea of the uniqueness, superiority, exclusiveness, absoluteness and sole saving power of Christianity

• Incarnation should be understood as a symbolical or metaphorical or mythic rather than as a literal truth

• the traditional argument (of substance and hypostatic union of Jesus and God) was not only out of fashion, but has a tendency to mislead

• Hick chose to understand the Incarnation as the divine purpose of Agape (love), which is disclosing itself in the life of Jesus. It is indeed God’s love becoming incarnate in Jesus dealing with sinful humanity

• Using mystical approach: Hick has made a considerable recommendation for the mystical approach as propagating a means for a pluralistic account of religion.

• Cited Jalāl al-Dán al-Rumá, ‘the lamps are different, but the Light is the same; it comes from Beyond’, to propagate what he believed as a pluralistic account in religion.

• Hick acknowledged a few Muslim Sufis of the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries, for example Muäy al-Dán Ibn ‛Arabá, and al-Junayd al-Baghdādá, who taught that the divine light is refracted through many human lenses

• within the spectrum of mysticism, which according to Hick has captured the idea of the transcendent God as inwardly manifested in every religion.

• Hick was suggesting that the spiritual experience of mankind on the transcendent God, as providing a ground for a pluralistic account in religions, in the view that every spiritual endeavor would finally reach an acknowledgement of the existence of a transcendent God which has been variously interpreted by man

• Hick claimed that even such mystical experience is unable to provide a definite account of the Real an sich

• In this regard, Hick insisted that event the mystics are not free form their cultural conditioning

• indeed, it is the manifestation of the real rather than the postulated Real an sich

• Wittgenstein’s ‘family-resemblance’ concepts to religion so that different traditions, movements, and ideologies could be classified under the word ‘religion

• to employ Wittgenstein’s family-resemblance concept on the belief in a transcendent or an ultimate reality which has been affirmed in most religions

• different religions have different identification for the transcendent or the ultimate; the Yahweh for the Jews, the Brahman for the Hindus, the Holy Trinity for the Christians, the Dharmakaya/Nirvana/Sunyata for Mahayana Buddhism

• three important features which shaped Hick’s philosophical formulation on the philosophy of religious pluralism. First is the sociological approach; Hick’s adoption of the sociological theory of religion, that every religion is cultural-based. Second is the theological approach; the problem of salvation and its new interpretation as central to Hick’s pluralistic position. Finally, the mystical approaches; Hick’s ideas of religious pluralism is made possible and sanctioned under mysticism

Syncretism – Kabir and Nanak – Ram Mohan Roy – Sri Ramakrishna – Mahatma Gandhi

Perennial Philosophy – Thomas Huxley – Rene Guenon – Frithjof Schuon – Seyyed Hossein Nasr