11/13/2024 – What is "religion"? Comparison of Religion

Have you ever wondered what is “religion”? I’ve got your back because I’m a former community college professor of religion. We’re going to look at a number of lenses academic scholars of religion use to understand, interpret, and define religion, but… broken down into slightly easier-to-understand bits. Check this out. This is TenOnReligion.

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This is the sixth and last episode in a multi-episode series which I’m simply calling “What is Religion?” This is about understanding the academic field of religion including how it started and ways academic scholars of religion interpret, understand, and define religion. In the first five episodes we looked at some of the early stages of development, the anthropology of religion, the sociology of religion, psychology of religion, and the phenmenology, or experience, of religion. In this episode were going to get into the comparison of religion through the lenses of four important figures: W. C. Smith, John Hick, Raimon Panikkar, and Robert Neville. Let’s get into it.

W. C. Smith (1916-2000) had a long career as a religious scholar in India, the United States, and Canada. Smith stressed the idea of people over systems of religions. He preferred to talk about Jews, Christians, Muslims, Hindus, and Buddhists rather than Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism. He emphasized dialogue as a means of studying religion as a part of the larger whole of all “humane” knowledge – knowledge about humans and their societies. For Smith, religious adherents can no longer simply dismiss or ignore other religions, or say that they are all the same, or say that all religions other than one’s own are wrong. He famously said to Christians, “We explain the fact that the Milky Way is there by the doctrine of creation, but how do we explain the fact that the Bhagavad Gita is there?” Isolationist thinking is no longer adequate. We need to remove the silos and see the greater landscape. He described three basic levels in the comparative religion task: (1) information and study of traditions, (2) interpretation and understanding of faith, and (3) generalization and drawing of conclusions. This was all to be done in the context of history.

Smith wrote about faith as a quality of human living and advocated for a comparative approach to scripture. One of his more well-known characterizations is the following. Check this out and listen to this. The traditional form of Western scholarship in the study of religion was that of an impersonal presentation of an “it.” The first great innovation was the personalization of the faiths observed, so that one finds a discussion of a “they.” Then, the observer becomes personally involved, so that the situation is one of a “we” talking about a “they.” The next step is a dialogue, where “we” talk to “you.” If there is listening and mutuality, this may become that “we” talk with “you.” The culmination of this progress is when “we all” are talking with each other about “us.” Now, that is some good stuff right there which can be applied to many other situations far beyond religion as well.

Next up is John Hick (1922-2012) who is the subject of the second episode I ever did four and half years ago when TenOnReligion was very much in its infancy. The video and production quality were low, and I literally had no idea what I was doing. But the content was good. And I still have no idea what I’m doing. Hick was a philosopher of religion, a Kantian, meaning his views were rooted in the philosophy of Immanual Kant, a German philosopher from the late 1700’s. He differentiated between an object as it appears (the phenomenon) vs. an object in itself (the noumenon). Thus, the object of religion, for which Hick used the label “the Real,” can be described as the Real-in-itself independent of our experience vs. the Real as humanly thought & experienced. We can never know the Real-in-itself. We can only know the Real as humans experience it in either its personal or non-personal forms. He called for a Copernican Revolution in our understanding of religion. The Copernican Revolution was transferring from a geocentric to a heliocentric understanding of the solar system back in the 1500’s. Since many Western cultures were dominated by Christianity, Hick’s Copernican Revolution was a shift from Christocentrism to Theocentrism, or Real-centrism.

Hick also reiterated a threefold typology originally developed by another scholar named Alan Race in 1983. This was exclusivism, inclusivism, and pluralism. Exclusivism is the view that there is only one religious goal and only one way to get to that religious goal, which is through my religion. Basically, it’s my way or the highway sort of view. Inclusivism is a bit more complicated, but basically the inclusivist view is that there is still one religious goal, but more than one way to get there. For example, someone could still get to my ultimate religious goal, but do it through their religion, even if they don’t realize that is what’s happening. This view was popular in Christianity during the Roman Catholic Vatican II council meetings in the 1960’s and still has some advocates today. Hick however, does not like either of these options and prefers his option of pluralism as the best answer. Hick’s view of pluralism is that there is one ultimate reality, which again he labels with the religion-neutral term “the Real,” but, there is more than one way to approach the Real. One image to describe this is the pyramid image, or a mountain in the clouds whereby all of the major world religions are at the bottom and the Real is at the top, but about two-thirds the way up the pyramid, or mountain, there is an obstacle blocking our vision of the top, and that obstacle represents death. One cannot see the ultimate end. So, he suggests, or postulates, that in the end, all religions will ultimately arrive at the same place at the top.

One method he uses to arrive at this conclusion is the soteriological criterion of saintliness. For example, says Hick, take the best person from each religion – the best Jew, the best Hindu, the best Muslim, the best Buddhist, the best Christian, and so on. Look at their lives and what do you see? They’re all great people! How can one possibly use this as a criterion to suggest one religion is the right way? Thus, Hick terms salvation/liberation as human transformation, from a problem to a goal. He describes this in general terms as Self-centeredness to Reality-centeredness. Hick argues that if religion were to be understood in this way, in a more non-exclusive way, the tensions between religions would be greatly reduced. Hick admits that for many religious adherents such a reinterpretation would be a huge psychological obstacle to overcome. But, reinterpreting religious beliefs from more of a mythological or metaphorical perspective would have significant worldwide benefits and the starting place for that is the acceptance of their symbol of the Real as being infinite. And that’s a simplified version of John Hick.

Next up, Raimon Panikkar (1918-2010). Now I did my doctoral dissertation on Panikkar, and I don’t necessarily hold all of his views, but I do find him to be a fascinating figure. His ideas are hard to encapsulate in a couple of minutes because he published around 50 books and hundreds of articles in seven languages, so I’m only going to focus on one aspect of his thought, that of dialogue. A lot of this comes easier for Panikkar because his mother was a Spanish Catholic and his father an Indian Hindu, so combining ideas from West and East are common in his writings. Panikkar starts out by stating that since no one myth is shared by all, suggesting an absolute universal essence of religion is not a really viable option. Nobody is outside the rainbow. Every party sees the rainbow from within their own color, or myth, so to speak. The connection, what scholars call interreligious hermeneutics, must take place at the mythic level and the form of that connection is dialogue. Hermeneutics is simply interpretation and understanding across a gap. If the gap is time, it’s called diachronical hermeneutics. If the gap is place, or topai, it’s called diatopical hermeneutics, because the places or patterns of thinking are different. The articulation of diatopical hermeneutics is what’s called dialogical dialogue. Both parties must connect and commune within the same shared myth. How we get there requires risk and letting go of our fears. This is hard for many people to do and most respond with defense mechanisms rather than allowing themselves to be open to the other party. Instead, we like to devalue the other and treat them as a “thing” rather than as a “self.” Dialogical dialogue is a relationship of reciprocity in which both parties are opening up themselves in a dialogue of trust by revealing each other’s religious myth which otherwise would remain hidden. It challenges us on a much deeper level. The goal is to convert tensions into creativity.

Now a little about Panikkar’s view of religion and language. Religious symbols arise out of religious experience and tend to resist translation because they represent myth, and its underlying view of reality. However, religious symbols and accompanying terms can be polysemic, meaning they can have more than one meaning because they are religious expressions of human religious experiences. The word “God,” for example, is a relational concept. It can mean many different things in many different contexts. The polysemic nature of religious texts can also be seen in the fact that no interpretation is completely objective outside of their own contextual world. An interpretation of a religious text means it has been introduced into a new context. The new context retains old elements and adds new elements. Religious language is dynamically alive but can only be understood as interwoven into the world within which we live. This means that in an interreligious encounter, the interpretation is not found by one side or the other, but by the language which each speaks together to bridge the gap and create a new understanding. It is a relational event best described as a dialogical dialogue, mentioned above. And that’s a few pearls of wisdom from Raimon Panikkar.

Robert Neville (1939-present), is a retired Boston University professor and another fairly prolific writer. His three-volume philosophical theology book series is fantastic, but it’s also too deep and complicated for the average reader, probably taking an entire semester to fully cover, so we’re not going there today. Instead, we’re going to take a look at the three-year study he led called the Comparative Religious Ideas Project. This resulted in three books and we’re going to look at the second book titled, Ultimate Realities. Neville led a group of scholars to reflect on various topics in specific traditions, and this one was about comparing how adherents of various traditions identify, construct, and interpret ultimate realities. From this project the scholars learned that comparative categories cannot be imposed at the beginning, but rather need to be formulated in terms of what is discovered in each of the traditions’ own voices. Religious traditions tend to suppose that human life is contingent and dependent on ultimate causes other than itself, often in a mixture of finite/infinite ideas or entities.

But what exactly is, comparison? It’s more than just putting accurate representations side by side. It does more than that because comparison is about explaining how things relate to one another. Are they similar or different? For example, what do the New Testament gospel narratives say about Mary the mother of Jesus versus what the Qur’an says about Mary the mother of Jesus. We, as humans, learn by starting with the familiar to understand the strange. Comparison, in this respect, is helpful since one can start with their own tradition to learn about another. There will then be a subsequent process of slowly correcting wrong ideas and interpretations over time. The whole point of comparison is to iterate, and amend one’s views based on discerning the proper questions to ask. The response, “The barn is red,” answers the question, “What color is the barn?” but says nothing about whether the barn is full or empty. One needs to keep pressing, to find the right questions so that helpful categories can emerge to connect religious traditions. Categories for comparison are always vulnerable to correction and enhancement. Finally, one of the key features of any religion and inquiry into comparison, is that of change and transformation, however that is appropriated in either the individual or the community.

Today we were answering the question “What is religion?” through the lens of comparison using W. C. Smith, John Hick, Raimon Panikkar, and Robert Neville. So, what do you think about the comparison of religion? Which figure did you find the most interesting and why? Leave a comment below and let me know what you think. I hope you’ve enjoyed this six-part series and found it helpful. If you haven’t had a chance to watch them, check out the other episodes on early stages of development, the anthropology of religion, the sociology of religion, the psychology of religion, and the phenmenology, or experience, of religion. I loved making this series and am now off to the American Academy of Religion Annual Meeting in San Diego. So, stay tuned for more info about my experience there. Until next time, stay curious. If you enjoyed this, support the channel in the link below. Give me a Super Thanks. Also, please like and share this video and subscribe to this channel. This is TenOnReligion.