Respondin’ to the Sanskrit Boy
Back about a month ago, Ryan over at SanskritBoy responded to my Episcopal/RC post by talking about the religious pluralism aside, and one of his interlocutors said the following:
“You can call the old-fashioned approach to religious others
‘exclusivism’–others will be excluded from salvation. Its opposite
number is ‘inclusivism’, which comes in two kinds. ‘Closed exclusivim’
holds that adherents of other religions may obtain salvation, but only
in spite of the imperfections of their religion, which offers no
improvements to our own. (For example, Karl Rahner wrote famously of
the “anonymous Christian,” a person outside the Church nonetheless
lived the life of a de facto Christian. Such a person might receive
salvation, but not because the religion she professed had much to
recommend it.) On the other hand, an ‘open inclusivism’ holds that the
other may have something to teach us.”
What I’m holding to in my previous post is probably something more like the open inclusivism mentioned.
But my religious pluralism probably regards the belief in the existence
of something larger as a requisite for discussion (though not for
existence as a fellow religionist). I realize that I am going to
have a very hard time talking with the people Ryan mentioned:
“There are some types of Buddhists whose views are so incompatible I
just couldn’t imagine them joining an interfaith discussion table where
the common underlying link is assumed to be God. God, after all, is
just another schmuck- subject to eventual fall from heaven once he’s
used up his store of good karma, destined to be reborn as a lowly king
or administrator or even a peasant or (gasp, the horror!) a woman one
day. God probably got to where he is today by doing ascetic practices
for a few aeons, and finally he attained rebirth in a really pimpin’
paradise. But God still doesn’t really get it- and as soon as he does
get it, he will have ceased to exist.”
At least in terms of “God” (expansively defined) as an underlying
concept, we’ll have a difficult time talking to one another. It’s
a prior that I can’t really get away from. And the Buddhists that
Ryan mentions probably can’t get away from their prior that
“understanding” leads to non-existence.
But here’s where we might come in together, an approach I learned when
my small faith community was trying to do some intra-faith dialogue a
few years back. We didn’t start with questions of belief, as
would be a natural approach in Western Christianity and Western
society. We started experientially, asking what religion and
faith meant in the day to day lived experience of life. “How does
living your religion help your daily life?” “How does your
religion hinder your daily life?” “What about your life compels
you to practice your religion?”
I did this with a group of Episcopalians (ranging from conservative to
liberal) who figured out that we found it easier to talk about faith
with Jews and Buddhists than with other Christians, like Mormons,
evangelicals, and some of the Orthodox. We spent more time
getting to know the non-Christians than we did the Christians, and our
own understanding of our own faith had some holes, as a result.
But it’s always hard to get to know and get along with your family,
often harder than with strangers.
And I think process-oriented conversation will likely be more fruitful
in terms of finding common ground. In talking to a Buddhist,
Muslim, or another Christian, it’s probably just a dead-end to discuss
“belief” (especially since “belief” may not be the most fundamental
requisite of the above in all cases). But what we do probably provides a lot more range to the conversation.
I’ve heard that the above approach is one that many monks have found
useful when talking to one another. According to some reports
I’ve heard from interreligious monastic conversations, the monastic
commitment to a life of prayer and contemplation, no matter what the
particular religion, provides an entree into interfaith understanding
that non-monastics have a much harder time accessing. In other
words, if you spend your days praying and contemplating, you’re already
doing such a lot that’s similar that you’ve got a good place to start
talking, and the discussion of differences leads not to belief but to
how different groups pray and contemplate differently.
And in the end, that may bring us back to the “open inclusivism”
above. When the discussion centers on action and practice and
process, the “other” may indeed have something to teach us, as the
process of another faith can find a situation in one’s own, becoming a
thing that’s really not the exclusive domain of one or the other but
something that’s a bit of both.
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