A
Taxonomies of Religion Post
1.
Robert Hunt blogs about interfaith conversations at his Patheos blog Interfaith Encounters (catchphrase/subtitle: A Christian at the Crossroads of Religions). Hunt is himself Christian, which might well colour his own assumptions about these conversations; the assumptions, or investments, a person brings to their understanding of others’ religions is going to be a recurring theme from here on out. In fact, that’s why I’m bringing Hunt up in the first place: his work often addresses the assumptions people bring to interfaith conversations. Two of his more recent posts helped me think about how other people think about their own religion.
Robert Hunt blogs about interfaith conversations at his Patheos blog Interfaith Encounters (catchphrase/subtitle: A Christian at the Crossroads of Religions). Hunt is himself Christian, which might well colour his own assumptions about these conversations; the assumptions, or investments, a person brings to their understanding of others’ religions is going to be a recurring theme from here on out. In fact, that’s why I’m bringing Hunt up in the first place: his work often addresses the assumptions people bring to interfaith conversations. Two of his more recent posts helped me think about how other people think about their own religion.
The obvious must sometimes be said: for inter-religious dialogue to be of any value those involved must know what they are talking about. And not just expertise. They must know what they have in common, what this “religion” thing is that they supposedly share.He gives the example of a participant who claims that all religious people believe that gay marriage is forbidden by God. This participant’s claim, and the way he makes it, reveals that he understands religion as conformity to God’s commands; religion “is to listen and obey.” Later in the post he describes this position at greater length:
[religion is] faithful obedience to a complex network of divine mandates ranging across the realms of ritual worship, ethics, law, family life, and politics.Hunt goes on to note that other religious people would disagree with that participant because they have a different idea of what religion is. These religions people—often progressives—understand religion as “the human application of certain universal ethical principles to ever changing situations.” In this latter view, humans must turn to religion again and again looking for these principles, and order and re-order society, continually, according to the principles they find in revelation. Tradition is a lesson which we can use to guide us, since it shows how our predecessors applied these principles, but it cannot be a command.
Hunt argues that this difference can
make dialogue difficult—and while he’s talking about interfaith dialogue, I
think we can note that it makes intrafaith dialogue
difficult as well. However, he notes a third possibility, one which seems
increasingly prominent:
religion is a form of faithful listening attuned less to God’s command and more to God’s voice as a source of healing, life, comfort, emotional support, expanded consciousness of reality, inspiration, or direction.
This third possibility does not strike
me to be of a piece with the other two types. Those first two types were
fundamentally moral; this last is relational. One might argue that it is,
in a sense, moral, because healing, life, comfort, emotional support, expanded
consciousness of reality, inspiration, and direction are the things which equip
as to make moral decisions. Still, I wonder if it fits better in his other taxonomy for religions.
2.
2.
In “The Human Role
of Religion,”
Robert Hunt sets out another two ways of looking at religion. The first way
“examines the human person as one who asks questions, and then examines
religions as providers of answers to those questions.” The second way insists
that “the proper relationship of humans to God, to the Transcendent, is to
answer the question posed to us by
God, not vice versa.” The first view is an Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment
view, with the autonomous subject examining an external world; as the world is
an object of study, so God, Hunt observes, becomes “the object of worship.” The
second view insists that God is not the object of our religions, but rather the
subject; Hunt bases this view in the Book of Job.
That last move is actually Hunt’s first
move: he thoroughly disapproves of the provider-of-answers model of religion,
so much so that he suggests it will destroy religion and, likely, humanity.
It’s not my purpose here to discuss the merits of Hunt’s analysis, though I may
do so at some later point. But I’m reminded of Judith Butler’s Giving an Account of Oneself; there’s a
certain pop-cultural image of humans having to account for their lives at the
Pearly Gates, which is a genre of account-giving I hadn’t considered when discussing
Butler.
(Of course, Butler’s whole point is that one cannot really give an account for
oneself, since one doesn’t know one’s origins and so on; if one’s life must be
defended at the Pearly Gates, let’s hope we have an advocate who knows us
better than we do.) I want to say it’s telling that Hunt locates the second
view of religion in the Book of Job, but I’m not sure what it tells. Presumably
a Confucian scholar would not locate such a view of religion in a book from the
Bible.
At any rate, if “Inter-religious
Dialogue” is about the moral dimension
of faith, “Human Role” seems to be about the relational dimension of faith. Because of this, I wonder if
religion as hearing-God’s-voice-of-comfort might not be better grouped with
these two views…but since these two views are opposite and complementary, it
stands out here, as well.
3.
I made a possible chart, derived from
these posts:
The final column is intended to work out
which framing is most important for a person; I tacked the God’s voice as
comfort bit here as a way of including it.
I hope you noticed that I have
“Religious Person” rather than “Religion” in this chart. I’ve done this because
it seemed like nonsense to ask these questions of a whole tradition. For
instance, neither Christianity nor Islam as a whole is inclined to either the
view of religion as obedience to a command or the view of religion as application of universal principles; there
are Christians and Muslims in the first group and in the second, and it seems
easy enough to defend either position with those religions’ own resources. It
seems more accurate to ask these questions on the level of individual
communities and believers, though I suppose a religion might well include an
explicit exhortation to one or the other; however, even if it did, that
wouldn’t mean its adherents wouldn’t ignore that exhortation.
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