FEBRUARY 2005 - ISSUE 4 - ISSN 1448 - 632

DOGMA AND RELIGIOUS PLURALISM

JOSEPH S. O'LEARY

ABSTRACT

The dogmatic foundations of Christian theology are relativized in a post-metaphysical world. Divine revelation is fragmentary, pluralistic and tension-ridden rather than a self-contained set of insights that can be adequately formulated in any set of dogmas. Interreligious dialogue reinforces the relativization of dogma's status. This raises issues about central Christian doctrines such as the Incarnation and the Trinity. The perspective outlined here focuses on religious experience as encounter with the ultimate saving reality which cannot be reduced to direct comparison of dogmas from competing religious traditions, such as Christian claims for the Trinity, Islamic claims for the Quran , and Buddhist claims for the Dharma . One must step back to the lived encounter that founds the dogmatic claim, relating it to analogous foundational events or disclosures in other traditions. Possibilities inherent in this approach to interreligious encounter—especially implications for Christian theology—are explored.

1. Dogma plays a less central role in contemporary theology than previously. One reason for this is the step back, initiated by Luther, and which Heidegger helps us to think afresh, from metaphysical objectifications of Christian truth to the primary situation of faith. When dogma is given unquestioned primacy in our thinking, it creates a distorting objectification of the divine, which blinds us to the mode of givenness of divine revelation. Another reason for our more discreet attitude to dogma is that historical consciousness grasps dogma in context, as an offshoot of a dynamic history of thought, within which it plays a limited role. Its scope and bearing are measured by the concerns which prompted its formation. No matter what degree of objectivity or universality the dogmatic statement achieves, it always remains bound to a certain situation within a certain religious culture. Thus to say that `Christ is true man and true God' is not to define a truth in some timeless scientific space, but is a concrete intervention in the history of the exegesis of John 1:14a: `The Word was made flesh'. In presenting Christianity to the world, the Johannine utterance offers a more eloquent account of Christ than the dogmatic formula, but that utterance in turn must be reinserted in its historical context, and retrieved from the ahistorical metaphysical interpretation it is given when it is subordinated to dogma, becoming merely a proof-text for Chalcedon. `The Word became flesh' is a statement of the same order as `God is Spirit' or `God is light'. As a resume of the entire Christian vision and experience, it conveys a contemplative insight which one can appropriate only by a continual opening of the mind.

In the past, theology took dogmas as the starting-point of a search for intellectus fidei. The intelligibility of faith meant its hidden logical and ontological rationality. A stupendous example of what this approach could achieve is Aquinas's exposition of the Trinity (Summa Theologica I qq. 27-43). But the brilliance and coherence of Aquinas's discussion is no guarantee that it corresponds to objective ontological reality; the systems of Plotinus and Hegel are brilliant and coherent too, yet we see them as maps of a vanished world. Today, after Kant and Wittgenstein, we would see Aquinas's construction as having to do more with the way we think about God or with the grammar of a certain historical language about the Trinity, than with God's actual being.

A retrieval of dogmatic tradition in the contemporary epistemological horizon whittles down the claims of dogma to a minimum. Dogma becomes the grammar or syntax of a prior language of faith. It no longer puts forward ulterior grounds that go behind the scenes of faith. It no longer projects a heavenly pre-history of the immanent Trinity or the divine decrees of predestination, which would overshadow the actual revelation of God in history. That revelation is not a rounded, self-contained sum of insights that dogma can formalise. Rather it is pluralistic, fragmentary, tension-ridden in its texture. Can dogma complete it, filling out the missing parts and tying up the loose ends? No, its role is only to clarify the story as received, in order that it can be continued in further dialogue and exploration.

If the search for intellectus fidei forgets its subordination to the pluralistic, changing, continuing story, it hardens into a metaphysical theory, insensitive to the rhythms and resonances of the prior language of faith. Then the language of Scripture is quarried for proof-texts and is forced into an alien horizon. To give free rein to the biblical word in that environment would be as disturbing as a pistol-shot in a concert hall. Within a comprehensive dogmatic system one may imagine that one is giving free rein to the Word, but in reality the constraints of the system shape the scriptural input subtly into the kind of material it is equipped to handle. This is true even of a self-consciously biblicist system like that of Karl Barth, whose theories of divine self-determination, Christocentrism, and Revelation are powerful metaphysical stylisations of the biblical events.

Since Origen's On First Principles, theology has taken itself for a constitutive science, with dogmas as its supreme principles. But with growing awareness of the historical situatedness of Christianity and the complex empirical sources to which theological thinking is inescapably referred, theology is changing into a reflective, hermeneutical discipline. Kant's Critique of Judgement is a more useful guide for its methodology than the more radical infrastructural plumbing of the Critique of Pure Reason. Reflection on dogma, instead of moving forward to an ever more radical grasp of the foundations of revelation and of the cosmos, now moves backward to the conditions which ground dogma and for which it exists: to Scripture and revelation, or to the entire faith-situation of encounter with the transcendent, a situation lived out in the historical thought and praxis of the believing community. It can no more attempt to convert this complex history into a systematic vision than the reflective discipline of aesthetics can hope to do the same for art, or than philosophy of science can hope to produce a final synthesis that has eluded the scientists themselves. .

2. Interreligious dialogue reinforces this relativisation of the status of dogma. If one attempted to pursue such as a quest for a vast metaphysical synthesis of the doctrinal insights of different traditions (in the manner of Hegel), such a project would soon run aground on the contradictions between the different doctrines. Even if the contradictions were resolved dialectically, in the triumph of one religion over the others or in a system embracing them all, the result would falsify the finite, historical existence of the religions.

The religions are languages and lifestyles slowly formed within particular cultures over long stretches of time. Essentially broken, incomplete, open-ended, these finite paths lose their raison d'être if they become moments within an over-arching synthesis. The enactment of the human quest for God as a pilgrimage of faith would be absorbed into a philosophical gnosis. But closer attention to the texture of religious cultures moves us in the opposite direction. A general theory of religious pluralism, which would view pluralism not as a surd or an embarrassment but as intrinsic to the nature of the religions as open-ended, incomplete, and always culture-bound paths of thought and imagination, could make sense of pluralism without suppressing it or subordinating it to an over-arching system. Variety and divergence of styles is as essential to religion as to art, and in neither case is this a mark of incoherence.

Thus the truth of the religions is secured not in a synthesis but in sustaining the tensions of their dialogal co-existence. To discover itself as one among others is a humbling experience for any religion. Thus the religions give one another lessons in modesty and simplicity, revealing to one another their finitude as faltering human constructions. The unity between them is that of the open space of questioning in which each unfolds its central conviction. Each religion wants to share the conviction which animates it, but it also hopes to see this conviction clarified in a new way, in the critical interplay with other equally powerful religious visions.

Our nearest neighbours, Judaism and Islam, provide a salutary example of abstinence from the speculative hypertrophy which has marked Christian theology. Judaism claims to know of God only what God has revealed, and that does not include any recondite intra-divine processes. Islamic theology is a defence of the Quran against objections, and does not construct a doctrinal system which might rivalise with the revelation. Christians might say that the Trinity and the Incarnation, known only from the New Testament, provide a foundation for speculative penetration of the depths of God. But the question is, whether these doctrines really add all that much to the Old Testament revelation of a covenantal God. Speculative theology has flourished in disregard of the sobriety of the Hebrew Bible, which allegorical exegesis also transformed into a speculative goldmine. To bring the New Testament into perspective, and to restore communication with Jewish and Islamic monotheism, we need to relinquish far-fetched speculations about divine kenosis, circumincession, the suffering God, the ‘divine matrix’ of process theology, or whatever the latest speculative trend may be, and return to the minimal, bedrock elements of the Trinitarian and Christological doctrines.

3. There is one God, who created the world through his Word, and who breathes forth his Spirit. There is some distinction between God, his Word, and his Spirit, yet each is truly God. This is a fairly complete summary of the doctrine of the Trinity. Note that `word' and `spirit' are anthropomorphic, metaphorical expressions. As for the Incarnation, what does it actually mean to say: `the Word was made flesh'? Do these words refer to a miraculous conjunction of the divine and human substances in a God-man? Restoring them to the space of Johannine contemplation, may we not allow them to unfold their meaning in the following way?:

(a) For John, the meaning of Christ cannot be circumscribed by the categories of ordinary human understanding, or even by any of the titles previously conferred on Jesus and which are assigned their place in the Johannine spectrum. Only the notion of the divine Wisdom or Word, also received from a rich anterior tradition, is commensurate with the significance of Jesus' life. His presence was that of a living, penetrating word of judgement and grace, which came from God and imprinted itself in the hearts of its hearers with a pneumatic immediacy. The scope of this word is unlimitably universal, for it is spoken from the unmasterable divine dimension; it is an epiphany of the divine glory, particularly in the hour of the cross; its authority is not lessened by the limitations of its historical form, for these are overcome by the interpreting Spirit (Jn 14.26; 16.7-14).

In John's vision, the Word is at work in the world from the beginning. Its enfleshment in the life of Jesus is a novum that classical Christology has hastened to express in ontological terms; but these can be cashed phenomenologically as meaning an unprecedently concrete articulation of the divine Word. The truth of God and the truth of humanity are here brought into conjunction across the total reality of a spiritual event, a finite but open-ended and ongoing history, centred on the figure of Jesus.

(b) If no human being is an island, the Son of man less that any other can be separated from his fellows. Christ emerges from the humanity that we are, and if he is called an incarnation of the divine Logos, this means that the Logos has become incarnate in all human history. The Incarnation cannot be confined to the (non-existent) limits of a single human life. Rather than a concord of the human and divine natures at the moment of Jesus's conception, the Incarnation can be conceived as the dwelling of the Word among us across the entire historical career of Jesus, one of us. His `divinity', like his `resurrection', are better thought of as events or as emergences of meaning than as ontological attributes. Divinity does not attach itself to another thing; it is not a transferable quantity. The claim that Jesus Christ is `true God' has no clear meaning on its own. Its meaning resides in the entire history in which the figure of Jesus is set.

The `flesh' of John 1:14 is not the physical flesh of a single human being but the entire historical world in which the Logos pitches its tent. This `Logos' is at work in all history, but lodges there in a definitive way through the life, death and resurrection of Christ. The Logos is incarnate in Jesus in the totality of his relationships. Here the distinction between Jesus of Nazareth and the paschal Christ is of crucial import, for it appears that Jesus grows into his role of incarnate Logos and fully assumes it only after Easter (see Rom 1.3-4; Acts 2.36; John 7.39; Heb 5.8-9). The reality of Christ's historical humanity may oblige us to use a somewhat `adoptionist' language here, but a Nestorian disjunction of the human subject and the divine Word can be avoided by saying that the ultimate meaning and identity of Jesus is that he is God's Word spoken into history.

Even less than the pre-paschal Jesus is the paschal Christ an isolated individual. He is `a life-giving spirit' (1 Cor 15.45), the opening up of a pneumatic mode of existence, which is realised as a communal phenomenon: `and dwelt among us... from his fulness have we all received' (Jn 1.14, 16); `that which we have seen and heard we proclaim also to you, so that you may have fellowship with us' (1 Jn 1.3). The Word is incarnate in a communal movement which extends along historical paths to all humanity, and which has already engaged all humanity in principle, by reason of the interdependance of all. All aspects of human life can be ciphers of the divine; Christ emerges at the heart of this universal field of revelation and incarnation, from which he cannot be extracted. This universal revelation is cashed as a patchwork of local and particular revelations, and relate to the Christ-event not by being unilaterally subsumed into it, according to an a priori ontological necessity, but in historical negotiations which are mutually enlightening.

The Incarnation means the conjunction of the human, historical struggle for liberation with God's saving will. All the other doctrinal claims about Christ's birth, sinlessness, resurrection, saving role, Messiahhood, eschatological status, are subordinate to this conjunction, spelling out the concrete modalities whereby the life, death and ongoing life of this man constitute the historical enfleshment of God's Word. Some of these claims made for Christ are mythological concretizations of his status as faith apprehends it, and they tend to undermine the reality of his humanity in its contingency and its relatedness with others. Conversely, as Bultmann says, all the claims made for Christ are true insofar as he is the Eschatological Event (which is equivalent to saying he is the historical expression of God's Word). Ontological conjunctions of divine and human substances in a God-man are also a misleading concretization. Rather we may think of the Incarnation as a dynamic interplay between two processes: on the one hand, a human history, beginning with Israel, opening up to a universal covenant with Jesus, and continuing in the ongoing pneumatic life of Jesus as it unfolds as the Gospel comes into dialogue with different cultures, religions and historical struggles; on the other hand the process of divine self-revelation and grace, a process which is sheerly universal, but which attains a particular concrete breakthrough in the history centered on Christ.

4. Divine grace attains particular concrete breakthroughs in other religions as well. There is even a vague historical contemporaneity between the Christian inflection of monotheistic tradition and the interiorization and radicalization of Buddhism and Hinduism respectively in Mahâyâna and Vedânta. What distinguishes Christianity is that the breakthrough is indissolubly linked with a single chosen individual, who becomes the `second Adam', the vehicle of saving grace for all humanity.

Though I have tried to reduce Christology to its minimal essentials, the claim that God's Word is enfleshed in a unique way in a particular history centered on a particular individual, so that this human individual can be seen as the vehicle of universal salvation, and can even be adored as the bearer of the full saving presence of God, is a claim that it is by no means easy to believe. Some theologians propose that it be jettisoned. But perhaps its credibility would be greater if we understood it better, and perhaps the interreligious horizon can bring it into more luminous perspective, opening a new basis for assessing its credibility.

Christians who wish to be faithful to the essentials of the Johannine vision and the Chalcedonian dogma cannot suspend their belief in this claim. But if we differentiate between two levels of faith – the level of encounter and the level of dogma – we may choose to place the primary emphasis on the first level, especially in interreligious encounter, while keeping the second level in the background, and acknowledging that it has become to some degree obscure. The distinction is between the lived certitude of having encountered an ultimate saving reality in Christ and the dogmatic certitude immediately based on it, the claim that Christ is objectively the one Saviour of all humankind. Ernst Troeltsch saw this claim as the product of the restricted historical horizon of the early Christians, and as part of the historical trappings of the Gospel, not of its essential core. It may be that the formulation of the claim is historically naive, and that its sense needs to be rethought, beginning form the prior experiential conviction of the ultimacy of the encounter with God in Christ.

The illuminating perspective we seek from interreligious dialogue will not be attained by direct comparison of the Christian dogmatic claim with potential rival certitudes about the supreme vehicle of salvation, e.g. Islamic claims for the Quran, Buddhist claims for the Dharma. Rather, one must step back to the lived encounter that founds the dogmatic claim, relating it to analogous foundational events or disclosures in other traditions.

In Buddhism, the experience of emptiness belongs to this level of lived encounter. It is an encounter with ultimate saving reality analogous to the Christian encounter with the risen Christ. The encounter between these encounters can happen at the level of contemplation, but it should also happen at the everyday level of faith, through a sharing of languages, which for the Christian means an attempt to speak of Christ in Buddhist terms. Of course there is no point in doing this unless the Christian accepts that the Buddhist experience is an encounter with the absolutely real, just as a Buddhist could not draw on Christian language unless he believed it to speak from the realm of ultimacy.

The normative dogmatic claim is not put entirely out of play in this encounter of encounters. Nor is it just a source of headaches and scruples, making us feel we cannot `let ourselves go' in the embrace of Buddhist insights, because we have this claim to defend. Rather the dogmatic conviction the Christ is Saviour points us to the encounter with the risen one as the place where further light is to be sought, while the very opacity of the claim points us to the interreligious encounter as a context where the desired perspicuity may emerge. Mere assertion will never convince anyone that Christ is `the Saviour of the world' (John 4.42), but a renewed clarification of the salvific impact of Jesus, in terms of the conversion of vision and of life that he effects, may allow that claim to re-emerge on more convincing grounds. Buddhist thought allows the impact of Jesus to be registered in a more precise and penetrating way than the over-used Christian categories (love, faith, grace, etc.) seem currently able to do.

5. If we interpret the meaning of Christ in terms of Buddhist emptiness, seeing him as `empty of any essence and engaged in the dependently co-arisen world in all its radical contingency' (John P. Keenan, The Meaning of Christ: A Mahâyâna Theology, Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Press, 1989, p. 225), we find a new language for speaking of the impact of the risen Christ. Then when we return from this language to the dogmatic claim that Christ is the universal Saviour, we may find that this claim is not heard in a new key. The Buddhist interpretation of Christ is part of a general process whereby a new face of Christ is emerging, as reflected in the mirror of the other religions. Or to vary the image, the voice of Christ is being heard in new tones as it resonates in interreligious space. This space accords the figure of Christ all the freedom required so that it can unfold its phenomenological essence, revealing itself as intrinsically dialogical, pluralistic, relational, kenotic, eschatological. All of these traits are aspects of the emptiness of Christ, his lack of a self-contained identity. In the Buddhist ontology of the emergence of phenomena in radical interdependence, there can be no fixed substance of the humanity, divinity, person, or nature of Jesus Christ. He is incarnate in history, in a world of which the texture implies a universal co-referentiality. To say `he is God' or `he is the unique saviour' makes sense in this context only as a twitch in this universal web, a pointer to the place where divinity or salvation emerge. This place is not a fixed point: it is the network of relations in which Christ unfolds his being.

Rewriting the classical accounts of Christ's ontological constitution and the logic of redemption in this key of emptiness, we may find that they are brought into accord not only with Buddhist sensibility, but with our own contemporary sense of reality. A liberating readjustment may occur, as when Newtonian physics is translated into relativistic and quantum terms. If the image of Christ has been fading, it is not because of any lack of power in the Gospel but because of the archaic ontological categories in which we have allowed Christ to become imprisoned, and because instead of rethinking Christ we have been content with a surface facelift, using existential, liberationist or eschatological rhetoric without undertaking the necessary fundamental reorientation at the level of the underlying ontological presuppositions. The interreligious context is what at present most forcefully points the way to such a reorientation.

This wider context frees us to see that Christ himself is intrinsically dialogical. The aspects of his identity that emerge in dialogue were unnaturally occluded in a culture that took the Gospel as a complete self-sufficient Summa. Rather, the sayings and deeds of Christ which the Church remembers are cryptic fragments in search of interpretation. Christ himself is not an answer only but also a question; he addresses anew to each generation the query: `Who do you say that I am?’ (Mark 8:29), and any answer that emerges is provisional, sufficient only for a certain situation.

The first answer to this question, in the context of Jewish and Hellenistic culture, was ridden with problematic and aporetic aspects, which were never completely resolved. The same is true of the successive engagements of the Gospel with later cultural contexts. Today we can only let the Gospel unfold anew in dialogue, freely exposing it to the new problems and contradictions which will arise. We do not expect the Gospel to impose itself as a total clarification, but simply to come alive in the new context, to speak afresh in response to new voices.

The interreligious context also frees us to meet a kenotic Christ: what distinguishes Jesus is the renunciation of all insistence on his own identity, and his total openness to the human condition in its dependently arisen contingency and correlatively to God, `Abba!'. We recall Christ `according to the flesh' (2 Cor. 5.16) only in function of this double opening, repeated in each historical encounter of the Gospel with a new human situation. In each such encounter the previous forms of our understanding of Christ are seen as limited, `carnal', and to be left behind. Christ is Christ, God's Word in history, only through this constant dying to limited apprehensions of his identity.

We are freed to meet an eschatological Christ. As Christ's kenosis inserts itself into the web of history, it becomes a prophetic ferment, iconoclastic toward past forms, welcoming of new contexts, opening history to the hope of the Kingdom. At each new encounter an eschatological call is addressed to the other, a call which takes different tones according to the language of the epoch and culture in which it is formulated. The pluralism of the Gospel's cultural forms is at the service of a common theme in every case, to open the culture to the future promised by God.

6. It becomes apparent that Christian faith does not embark on interreligious dialogue merely as a missionary outreach. Rather it is intrinsically interreligious. The Gospel is Gospel only as it goes to meet the other. Barth insisted against Troeltsch that a secular science of the history of religions cannot dictate the status of revelation. Revelation, sealed by the biblical names of God and of Jesus Christ, is an irreducible reality which cannot be explained from some higher perspective. But we may correct Barth's viewpoint by enlarging it. It is of the essence of revelation to engage the other and to come into new perspective in successive cultural and interreligious horizons, as even the development of the religion of Israel as recorded in Scripture shows.

Barth saw religions as constructions of human unbelief, excluding obedience to the Word: `religion is never and nowhere as such and in itself true' (Kirchliche Dogmatik I/2, p. 356). We may agree that all religions, including Christianity, are judged to fall short of the truth of which they attempt to speak. In each of them there is a happening of truth, mixed up with the doubtful chiaroscuro of mere religion. A pure revelational core can never be sifted out of any religion, and so the critical purification of a religious tradition is an endless task.

But Barth maintains that only one religion is the true one. A religion, like the justified sinner, can be sanctified by the grace of revelation: `Revelation can accept religion and distinguish it as true religion' (I/2, p. 357). This act of grace applies only to Christianity. But it can be argued that this grace can befall any religion, so that there are not one but many true religions, all true by grace, and not in reason of the cleverness of their founders. The Bible, like all `religious' texts, falls short of the event of revelation which is at its heart, its letter betraying its spirit. But conversely, these other texts, despite their human fragility, can also be vehicles of transcendent revelation.

Does this universalisation of Barth's insights do away with the salvific primacy of Christ? No, rather it sees the Incarnation as giving a specific twist to the universal process of salvation afoot in all religions. That specificity may be located in the place of history, of the flesh, of the eschatological message of the Kingdom, in the Christian dispensation. These are what identify Christ as the enfleshment of the divine Word. But the Word is at work savingly in many other ways as well. John 1:14 does not abolish this wider presence of the Word, evoked in John 1:1-4. Barthian Christocentrism cannot do justice to the autonomy of the other religions as sources of truth, but must see all such truth as deriving, inclusivistically, from the prophetic mission of Jesus Christ (IV/3, pp. 122-53). To ascribe such truth more vaguely to God's Logos and Spirit allows more space in which those religions can speak for themselves.

Barth applied his dialectical finesse only to the relation between the Word of God and human misunderstandings of it, but we can import such critical dialectic into the unfolding of the Christ-event itself, which constantly sheds old and creates new historical forms, and does so in the wider context of the universal Logos which is expressed in all forms whatever. Here, of course, we flounder among metaphors. In any case, it is possible to maintain that the dogmatic claims for Christ, far from blocking dialogue or prescribing a Christocentric synthesis of all religions, point us toward a mutually challenging exchange between the Gospel of Jesus, as a uniquely rich enfleshment of the eternal Word, and the other great breakthroughs of revelation and grace in which we obscurely anticipate that God's Word and Spirit are also at work.

[This essay appeared in Polish translation as ‘Dogmat a spotkanu religii’ in Miesiecznik Znak 495 (1996). See also Religious Pluralism and Christian Truth, Edinburgh University Press, 1996; . ‘Demystifying the Incarnation’, Archivio di Filosofia 67 (1999), pp. 417-31; 10. ‘Emptiness and Dogma’. Buddhist-Christian Studies 22 (2002), pp. 163-79.]

Joseph S. O'Leary is currently professor in English Literature at Sophia University, Tokyo, and works in association with the Nanzan Institute for Religion and Culture . Born in Cork , Ireland , he studied literature, theology and philosophy in Maynooth, Rome and Paris . He is the author of Questioning Back: The Overcoming of Metaphysics in Christian Tradition (Minneapolis: Winston/Seabury, 1985) and the award-winning Religious Pluralism and Christian Truth (Edinburgh University Press, 1996).

Email: "Joseph O'Leary" < josephsoleary@hotmail.com >

 

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