How to be a Responsible Religious Pluralist

Last updated on: August 4, 2015 at 10:10 am by Kyle Roberts

How to be a Responsible Religious Pluralist 2015-08-04T10:10:43-05:00 Kyle Roberts

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So many people today are struggling to figure out how to relate to one another, especially to those who are religiously, culturally, politically “other.”

Catholics and Oriental Christians debating (13th century)

Granted, many aren’t even trying or don’t care about the fractured situation in which we live. But for those who do, David Tracy’s book Plurality and Ambiguity is a great resource (and it’s a much quicker read than his more elaborate argument in The Analogical Imagination).

It’s a book about hermeneutics (in brief: the pervasive and very human acts of interpretation and understanding) and about theological method, but it’s most significant as a guide to thinking about living responsibly in a religiously pluralist context.

What Tracy offers is not a simplistic “lighten up everyone and just get along” approach, or a pluralistic “everything and anything goes” model. Rather, he shows how the human act and art of deep, empathetic, and responsible interpretation might be our best hope at finding more peace and genuine community in a fragmented, divisive, and often hostile society. Religious differences, ideological clashes, and conflicts between religious practitioners (and those of no religion at all) cut through so much of our public debates.

Regarding religious plurality, Tracy describes the situation this way:

There are family resemblances among the religions. But as far as I can see, there is no single essence, no one content of enlightenment or revelation, no one way of emancipation or liberation, to be found in all that plurality. There are different construals of the nature of Ultimate Reality itself: God, Emptiness, Suchness, the One, Nature, the Many. There are different understandings of what has been revealed by Ultimate Reality about Ultimate Reality and thereby about ourselves in our relationships of harmony and disharmony with that reality…The discourses and ways of the religions can sometimes complement or even, at the limit, complete some undeveloped aspect of one another. The religions can also interrupt and, at the other limit, obliterate one another’s claims. There is no way to tell before the conversation which is the right one. To want more is to try to be freed from the demands of interpretation (90).

In other words, if we are to be responsibly pluralist, and yet also be practitioners of any particular religion, we need to be in conversation with those from other faiths. Only in the midst of the conversation (and in the context of interpretation) might we begin to pinpoint strengths, weaknesses, coherence, incoherence, etc.–either of our own faith and theology or that of an other’s.

He goes on to say that,

Pluralism–more accurately, perhaps, a pluralistic attitude–is one possible response to the fact of religious plurality. It is an attitude I fundamentally trust. But whenever any affirmation of pluralism, including my own, past and present, becomes simply a passive response to more and more possibilities, none of which shall ever be practiced, then pluralism demands suspicion…Such a pluralism masks a genial confusion in which one tries to enjoy the pleasures of difference without ever committing oneself to any particular vision of resistance and hope. (90).

And then to put a final point on it,

The plurality of interpretations of religion is a fact, as is the resulting conflict of interpretations. The great pluralists of religion are those who so affirm plurality that they fundamentally trust it, yet do not shirk their responsibility to develop criteria of assessment for each judgment of relative adequacy (91).

Tracy also makes the very important point that is is not only the “pluralistic interpreters” of religion that can and should be trusted or “heeded.” To be truly pluralistic requires a willingness to “learn from anyone–including, and sometimes especially, the great monistic interpreters of religion.” By monistic here Tracy seems to mean those thinkers and practitioners who are decidedly non-pluralist in their outlook toward the religions and who are often rather dogmatic in their view of and practice of religion and theology.

To apply this to contemporary Christian discourse, it would mean that progressive Christians with a pluralistic attitude toward theology and an openness to learning truth from other religions and practitioners of other religions would also need to be open to learning from and listening to our more dogmatic brothers and sisters in our own Christian camp. In some ways, this can be the most challenging thing of all.

But that openness, Tracy rightly insists, is not (to repeat the point) an “anything goes” passivity. There are simply some things that the responsible pluralist believes to be true, some moral convictions that would be unwavering, some values that hold up, no matter how rigorous the evaluation or critique. Of course, when we are talking about the nature and being of God, the responsible pluralist recognizes that religions are all in various ways attempting to grasp at understanding and apprehension.

No matter how convinced we might be that God reveals God-self to us in large part through the practices and texts of religion, it seems to be a fundamental (!) truth that God always eludes our complete understanding. This is one very important reason why we need each other and why religious conversations (and humility in interpretation of religious texts) are so crucial.

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Christianity

David Tracy

Plurality and Ambiguity

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