09/22/2021 – Theology Without Walls

What is theology without walls? Transreligious theology? What? I’m not quite sure what this is all about either, but we’re going to learn together. This is TenOnReligion.

Hey peeps, it’s Dr. B. with TenOnReligion. This video is closed-captioned here on YouTube and the transcript is available at TenOnReligion.com. One quick thing I need you all to do is smash that sub button because it really helps out the channel. Okay, first things first. Theology Without Walls, often abbreviated as TWW, also became known as transreligious theology, although that phrase may have been used to describe other people’s works which are not necessarily part of the TWW project. This movement goes back at least as far as the spring of 2014 at an American Academy of Religion regional meeting, though I’m guessing it started much earlier than that in personal private discussions. TWW’s main flag bearer is Jerry Martin, who has taught at many places, most recently at UC Boulder. The first national-level meeting occurred at the AAR annual meeting in San Diego in 2014 and I was at that meeting. I looked over my notes from that meeting and things were very much in the question stage at that point rather than the answer stage. What is this research project? What are its aims? Where should it fit? If the same religious authorities are not recognized, then what does this mean for the appeal to authority? Does authority then lose its power or meaning? Not easy questions to respond to, I mean, it’s not like there were any colleges or universities who were hiring people to teach transreligious theology.

Meetings and conversations continued and by 2018 it was clear that some sort of introductory book on Theology Without Walls was non-postponable. (I’m not sure if “non-postponable” is a word, but that’s what John Thatamanil said in the meeting, and he’s a pretty smart guy so it must be almost a word). Well, the book came out in 2020, titled, Theology Without Walls: The Transreligious Imperative. There’s an introduction by Jerry Martin who provides a quick overview of TWW followed by five major sections with four to five chapters each, totaling 21 fairly short chapters. Now, we’re not going to go over all 21 chapters in this video, but I’ll try to provide a broad overview along with a few specific examples from some of them. During the most recent AAR meeting (as of the publication of this video) in November and December of 2020, which was online because of the pandemic, many of the authors gathered on our little boxes on Zoom and made some interesting comments, which I will mention in a little while as well. By the way, TWW has its own website which you can check out for more info at theologywithoutwalls.com. The short little intro video there is pretty good. Definitely much better than this one you’re watching right now.

Jerry Martin’s introductory chapter to the book states that if everything that we can know about the divine or ultimate reality is not limited to a single religious tradition, then the only way to learn more about the divine or ultimate reality is to go beyond confessional restrictions, or a Theology Without Walls. The subject matter is not a particular religion nor necessarily even religion at all, but ultimate reality. Yeah, that’s a pretty big statement. The book’s five sections are “Why Theology Without Walls?” “Experience and transformation,” “Challenges and possibilities,” “Theologizing in a multireligious world,” and “Expanded confessional theologies.” Now I just have to pause a second and say at the outset, that one of the issues with this book, aside from the fact that it probably had way too many chapters and contributors, is that not all of them really address TWW or transreligious theology directly, so it was a little unclear what they were doing here in this book. But, I digress.

The first section, “Why Theology Without Walls?” explains the rationale behind this initiative. Are there any ways to show a correspondence between spiritual experiences of differing traditions? Not that they are identical, but do they have anything in common? If so, what does that say about the human being experiencing it, and what does that say about the human experiences? But, as Robert Neville says in his chapter, comparison is always hard work because one has to identify what exactly what one is comparing. The respects in which things can be compared amount to categories which are harder to develop than one thinks.

The second section of “Experience and transformation” has a few interesting chapters including one on an interspiritual approach in which all human beings have a capacity for growth that can transform them. Such growth aligns them in increasing degrees with ultimacy, although I’m not sure how ultimacy is being defined here. It’s some sort of amorphous, ambiguous meta-term used to justify an assumption that such a singular “thing” exists out there somewhere. I’m not entirely convinced that all writers in this book are using this term in the same way. Paul Tillich and Neville do a much better job describing “ultimacy,” and it’s not clear all of the authors are utilizing their understanding of “ultimacy.”

The next two sections contain some of the best chapters in the book. In “Challenges and possibilities” Peter Feldmeier questions the assumption of ultimacy by using the example of Daoism, in that it is acosmic with no sense that there exists some sort of ultimacy undergirding created reality. He wonders if maybe TWW’s scope is a little too big, which, it might a valid concern. Wesley Wildman’s two chapters were in this section of the book and both were very good. I need to read more of Wildman’s ideas but some of his books are just too expensive. Sheesh! Anyway, Wildman describes three models of ultimate reality as agential being, ground of being, and subordinate god (meaning a god existing within a more fundamental reality) and then explains how these approaches utilize different views of anthropomorphism which affect the way transreligious theology is understood. This was a good chapter. I need to read his book on which this chapter is based. If I could afford it. Wildman’s other chapter is on the human love-and-desire systems and how they create biocultural conditions which greatly influence how we theoretically could understand TWW. It’s some very dope stuff. That means uh, interesting, for all you boomers out there.

The fourth section on “Theologizing in a multireligious world” starts off with a chapter on hermeneutics by my former Claremont classmate, J. R. Hustwit. Our linguistic-cultural background limits the possibilities of what we can understand, but this can be enlarged through dialogue. However, we rarely can enter into a productive dialogue with a stranger. Dialogues are relationship-based and Hustwit cites Heidegger in this regard in that care precedes knowledge. Care shows and creates trust and only then can knowledge be shared. There are also good chapters by Paul Hedges citing the three traditions of China as an example and Linda Mercadante who is an expert on SBNRs (Spiritual But Not Religious, for those of you who haven’t heard that acronym before). But I really liked Jeanine Diller’s chapter about thinking globally but affiliating locally. The thousand-page models of God book she edited is like an encyclopedia so this woman must know what she’s talking about. Anyway, the visuals of her included charts and diagrams in this chapter really help out a reader trying to understand her writing. [Can you help out a brotha? C’mon sucka…] (I’m pretty sure that was probably inappropriate.) She lays down three challenges and then answers them. One, why seek truth outside one’s affiliation? Two, does this not risk denial of home beliefs which wears away affiliation? And three, if new beliefs were to be consistent with home beliefs, this still shifts the focus away from the home tradition and thus weakens one’s affiliation. The answer to challenge one is that to generalize our own personal experience is a mistake because it doesn’t tell us about the experiences of others, much less about the referent of our experience (such as God, etc.). The answer to the second challenge is what she calls partialism – we are limited creatures and at best we can only partly access any such referents. The answer to the third challenge is double-belonging to religion, which, these days, is becoming more common than one thinks.

The last section on “Expanding confessional theologies” starts out with a chapter by Mark Heim, whose work I wrote about in my master’s thesis at Wheaton College in the late 90’s and suffice it to say they weren’t too interested in me writing about such things back then. They probably still aren’t today. Heim makes an argument against TWW saying things like Robert Neville, Keith Ward, and Raimon Panikkar have already done similar things but it’s unclear where and who their “followers” really are, even though I’m pretty much one of them. So, Heim suggests that we basically should keep our buildings (i.e., religions) but just make more windows in them so we can see each other better. Or, something like that. Then, Frank Clooney contrasts his comparative theology project against TWW. Jeffrey Long uses the avatar concept of Vedanta as an example of TWW, but I think that only works if you’re Hindu, and Hyo-Dong Lee ends the book with a very interesting chapter on Neo-Confucianism and Daoism. I really liked Lee’s chapter because it made me think how much we genuinely need more East Asian input into this whole conversation. It seems way too Abrahamic and South Asian-heavy to me.

Now on to the AAR meeting last fall about the book. This took place in December of 2020 and some interesting questions and concerns were brought up about the whole TWW project. For example, is TWW different from interreligious theology in that interreligious theology assumes a home tradition and TWW does not? We obviously all stand somewhere, be it religiously affiliated or not, but TWW asserts that the goal is not limited to wherever we currently stand. But if the sources are different from our own identities – other religions, spiritualities, or even non-religious sources like science or philosophy, those sources are other people’s affiliations. So, what exactly is being advocated here? Essentially that any such individual affiliations are not exhaustive of understanding reality. There is always more to the picture. And then in this same meeting, Wesley Wildman brought up a critical concern of a practical nature in how to sustain a movement such as TWW. People need to catch the vision and demonstrate why and how it is needed as either a competitor or complement to other existing ways of thinking. This would require support of academic departments at several large or important institutions along with argumentation and defense in publications and conferences to try to change the way people think about religion and its future role in human society. Wow, that’s a big ask.

So, how do I sum all of this up? At the end of an earlier pre-pandemic TWW meeting back in November 2019 in San Diego I asked John Thatamanil this question: About what should we be descriptive, and about what should we be prescriptive? Or, maybe we should be asking, when should we be descriptive, and when should we be prescriptive? I’m not sure if that is the same question or not though. He said he’d think about it and get back to me and I’m still waiting. Well, I never got a response because I’m not sure what TWW’s response could be. I mean, aren’t we already doing this in just about every other area of life? We seamlessly incorporate so many worlds together like our jobs, medical care, sports, shopping, entertainment, and artistic expression without even realizing that we do so. Why should religion be different than any of those other areas of life? Other than the fact that it’s all just in reference to our own mortality. Maybe I’m too much of a Heideggerian. I’m sure it’s a flaw. Okay we need to, we need to end this.

So, what do you think about the Theology Without Walls project? Leave a comment on what you found the most interesting. Until next time, stay curious. If you enjoyed this, please like and share this video and subscribe to this channel. This is TenOnReligion.