Towards a Network of Theological Enquiry
A question of mission – a mission of questions
Freedom of the human spirit from captivity
Theological and ethical issues in the age of globalisation
Towards an Asian theological agenda for the 21st century
Impulses in Caribbean theology
Beyond partnership – Towards a global theological agenda
The people of God among all God's peoples
Globalisation: A myth without a vision?
Democratic impulses in Buddhism
Let me take the liberty of starting with a brief tribute! One of the greatest privileges of the years I spent teaching in the University of Otago, New Zealand, was my involvement in the 'Programme for Theology and Cultures in Asia'. This provided opportunity for extensive discussion and debate with the likes of Choan-Seng Song, Archie Lee, John England, Masao Takenaka, Kim Yong-Bock, Yeow Choo-Lak, Zenaida Lumba and a great many others. Thus began (and it is only a beginning) an immensely enriching learning process one that has left me profoundly indebted to a large number of people, many of whom were to become good friends over the years.
Predictably, this whole process led one to do a great deal of rethinking about what actually belongs to the Christian faith per se and what has been the product of the Graeco-European apperception. It also served to highlight some of the profound differences that exist between the Asian and European theological perspectives as also among the various, richly diverse Asian perspectives. Whereas some of the challenges and concerns in Asia now appear to be closer to those of European debates than they seemed at first, others are clearly quite different and distinctive.
For a European, this kind of learning process cannot be a comfortable one not least its exposé of European attitudes and their impact on Asian theological debates. Kim Yong-Bock has stressed that theology must engage with history, and so it is to some reflection on the nature and character of the European influence that I wish to devote the body of my paper. That is because there simply can be no advocacy of a global theological agenda (not least by a European) without frank engagement with these issues.
As one reads through the PTCA volumes, 'Doing Theology with Asian Resources' with its allusions to Western influences, a clear pattern begins to emerge of the 'Western' attitudes with which the Asian theologians have had to wrestle in developing authentically Asian (as also Austral-asian) approaches to theology. It is of fundamental importance that these be brought into the open if the new millennium is to usher in a remotely 'koinonial' approach (to use Feliciano Cariño's word) to the task of theological enquiry and if reference to 'global' theological agendas is to be genuinely 'inclusive'. To this end, I shall attempt a very rough typology of attitudes. Contrary to appearances, this should not be assumed to denote clear, successive stages in a transition of Western attitudes since all of these can be found alive and well, and operative today. 1) First, there is what is generally referred to as 'theological imperialism' where the West simply identifies 'theology' with 'Western theology' and tacitly assumes that its own definition of content, theological method, ethics etc. determines the shape of any 'global' agenda. Consequently, Asian theologies require to be interpreted in this light and to conform accordingly. Given the financial and educational reliance of many theological centres in Asia on the West, challenging this assumption has not always been as straightforward as one might assume.
2) It may be possible to distinguish the above from what might be termed 'theological patriarchalism' where the West sees itself as defining the boundaries of orthodoxy within which Asian theology is allowed to 'do its own thing'. Such a veiled form of imperialism has been the particular temptation of certain Roman Catholic theologies.
3) The third type of Western attitude may be termed 'liberal paternalism'. Asian theologians should be 'encouraged' to do their own thing and the West should stand back and not interfere. The subliminal paternalism here is more covert but no less damaging than the above. It is particularly apparent in the form of the involvement of Asian theologians in academia in the West as also in the Western tendency to withdraw from critical dialogue and interaction. Sadly, a generation of Western theologians has used 'Asian theology' to establish its own ideological credentials. Consequently, Asian theologians have regularly been employed to teach 'indigenous' or 'ethnic' or 'local' theologies rather than being employed simply as 'theologians'.
The ideological assumptions underlying this 'circumscribing' of Asian theologies, however, were far from neutral in that the underlying approach was either 'immanentist' or 'inclusivist', namely, that we all have direct and internal access to the divine (via the 'imago dei' in each of us) and that there remains one faith informing multiple religious forms from which the Western liberal will always be able to distil an underlying common essence. This whole mode of approach particularly influential in the 1970's and early 1980's reflected what Kierkegaard described 150 years ago as 'the Socratic' (Gnothi seauton). We shall return to this later. A distinct but related (quasi-Marxist) form of this approach speaks of Aneignung, of a necessary, immanent and all-embracing dynamic which leads from thesis to antithesis and ultimately to synthesis and thus the consequent levelling of difference in favour of the universal ideal. It is incumbent upon us to ask whether this is the rationale for a 'global theological agenda'.
4) Fourth, the inconsistencies of this last approach have led to the appeal of 'pluralism'. Pluralism attempts to take the 'particularity' of Asian (as all other) theologies much more seriously implying that Asian theology has its own essence. Differences are not to be construed, therefore, as being merely differences of 'form'. Pluralists suggest that no one approach may be assumed to include truer elements than any other approach and that this applies as much to Europe as it does to Asia. A second assumption of this approach is that religious expression is as much about 'identity' and the realisation of one's identity as about the truth question.
Pluralism attempts to take seriously, therefore, individuality and the diversity of human identity. In recent years, this has been widely assumed to be the most constructive and liberated approach. Widely encouraged, not least, in theological centres during the 1980's, it came to define 'political correctness' in the debate. However appealing this might be, it turns out to be no more theologically and philosophically neutral or non-Western than the previous approaches. Its primary driving force is found in developments in modernist concepts of truth and identity, namely, that all that exists is our own projections of reality, all of which may be assumed to be equally in touch with 'reality' as it is in itself and secondly, that the fundamental task of religion as of culture is the articulation and realisation of our human 'identities' – something which every party does individually, independently and in contradistinction to other contexts of self-identification.1
The most that pluralism can offer theological dialogue is the view that partnership may be good for our own particular processes of self-understanding, self-definition and self-fulfilment. What it cannot do is to provide any reason whatsoever as to why partnership in theology is good in itself. Partnership is unlikely to have any more or less significance or bearing on individual identity in theology than in any other area of research in the humanities or social sciences. Theological discussion in one context is only interested in any other context to the extent that it serves its own distinct and individual ends.
5) Fifth, it should be unambiguously clear why this approach should have developed more recently into so-called 'post-modernist' or 'anti-realist' approaches. The weakest link in the 'pluralist' approach is its ambiguity vis-a-vis the concept of truth. On what basis is one to suppose that every approach possesses roughly equivalent 'elements of truth'? How could one possibly know that? This clearly makes a very specific truth-claim. Moreover, does this not itself denote a patronising attitude to religious claims which are, as Friedhelm Hardy argues in his book on Indian religions, invariably 'absolute claims'?
The natural development of 'pluralism' has been the side-stepping of these issues by adopting an 'anti-realist' approach. Its philosophy of truth is that truth is simply 'the state of play' (Cupitt). Accordingly, it allows the unimpeded pursuit of religious self-expression. Any importance or value attached to religious diversity or uniformity is simply the arbitrary and incidental product of our language-games and nothing more. All we can ever have is simply our various and diverse articulations of our 'religious identities'. We may choose to shape people's religious thinking in particular contexts through whatever resources, cultural or otherwise, may serve that task but we have neither justification for doing so and neither a need nor an obligation to find any such justification. Any such shaping makes, and need make, no claim on what is 'true' of 'false', 'ethical' or 'unethical' in any objective sense.
Such a position has interesting consequences which its proponents are none too eager to spell out. If a society believes that all women or all poor people are inferior and if the women or the poor have been subliminally conditioned into thinking that they are inferior, then it is 'true' that they are inferior. What Paulo Freire articulates as the very means of oppression of the two-thirds world and of women becomes, on this model, the servant of truth. What requires to be made unambiguously clear, however, is that 'anti-realism' is grounded in a 'realist' claim. When Cupitt suggests that truth is quite simply 'the state of play', he is relying on the fact that he appears to be making a 'truth-claim'. As Alvin Plantinga and others have argued, it is thus 'self-referentially incoherent'.
More seriously, however, in relativising the European claim on truth it also relativises all Asian claims to theological, religious, philosophical, ethical truth or insight into reality. It not only denies any warrant we might have for partnership or dialogue or networked enquiry it denies the very possibility that there could ever be such warrant.
The fundamental question which confronts this organisation, therefore, if it is to move beyond the confusions and manipulative philosophies which have distorted East-West mutuality in theological engagement, concerns whether we can affirm together in koinonia rather than partnership a theological warrant for genuine theological 'networking'.2 If this is to be found and if this enterprise is to have any 'integrity' (integratedness), does it not require to be seen as belonging to an impetus which stems from the heart of the Christian faith itself to the extent that it is liberated from the imposition upon it of such Western philosophical thought forms? As I shall argue, any such 'dis-covery' requires dialogue which is radically open and mutually critical.
Does an inclusive way forward exist? Although it is still widely believed in the West that religion is a fundamental source of social values, the most cursory historical survey of our common global history raises obvious questions as to how far religion can seriously be endorsed as a source of social values at all. No account of world history can conceal the myriad testimonies to the war, victimisation, ethnic cleansings and genocide that have taken place in the name of religion. Recent and contemporary international affairs suggests that this is not changing.
The so-called Christian West offers no escape from the tragic consequences of 'civil religion' be they in South Africa or Northern Ireland or the Balkans. Add to this the various forms of social oppression promulgated in the name of Christianity, and exposed by feminist critiques, for example, and one is driven to ask whether any other single facet of human life has caused more national and international strife, social fragmentation and division, oppression, fear, loss of life and general human misery than 'religion'.
It is not surprising, therefore, that Cantwell Smith, Ninian Smart, John Hick, Keith Ward and many others have been so concerned to formulate either a unifying religion for our 'global village' a global theological agenda. It is even less surprising that Feuerbach, Marx and even John Lennon should dream of a world in which there was no religion at all. Driven by a common concern with the potential for marginalisation and alienation characteristic of exclusive religious claims, what all these people share in common is the ideal of a world characterised by liberation from the forms of alienation and closure which religious affiliation seems inevitably to engender.
All this can only lead one to ask: how, in the light of the ambiguous and often bleak, historical impact of religion on society, are we to approach the question of a global theological agenda in a context of cultural, national, historico-traditional and ethnic diversity?
The whole question concerning how we approach the diverse religious claims emerging from diverse contexts has been profoundly influenced since the mid-1980's by a three-fold typology which has gained widespread appeal in theological circles. It was first outlined by Alan Race in 1983, but substantially developed and widely popularised by Gavin D'Costa in a book published three years later (entitled Theology and Religious Pluralism: The Challenge of Other Religions). This typology distinguishes three different kinds of approach to religious claims: namely, exclusivism, inclusivism and pluralism. As D'Costa emphasises, these distinctions apply to all contexts of theological, religious and philosophical diversity. They apply to intra-religious diversity (between European and Asian approaches to Christianity) as also to inter-religious diversity (they may apply as much to Hindu views of Christianity, therefore, as to Christian views of Hinduism).
The three different kinds of approach may be summarised as follows:
a) 'Exclusivism' holds that only one single revelation or religion (or, indeed, philosophical system) is true and that all other 'revelations' and 'religions' are false. Or to use Alvin Plantinga's definition, 'the exclusivist holds that the tenets or some of the tenets of one religion Christianity, let's say are in fact true and any propositions, including other religious beliefs, that are incompatible with those tenets are false.' This approach is similar to that which Jürgen Moltmann critiques as 'absolutism' the view that one particular position has an absolute and exclusive monopoly on the truth.4
b) The second category, 'pluralism', to which we have already referred, is to be found at the opposite end of the spectrum. Pluralism suggests that all religions and philosophies contain elements of truth but that no religion can claim final and definitive truth. This has led to a widely held assumption that the main religious traditions share more or less equal degrees of validity. The appeal of this position is that it appears to render respect to diverse faith traditions an openness to recognise that other religions include amongst their adherents good, ethical, rational people of intellectual integrity.
c) The third category, 'inclusivism', seeks to embody both these positions simultaneously. Inclusivists believe that there is one revelation or religion which is true but that truth is also found in various fragmentary and incomplete forms within other religions, traditions and philosophies. For the inclusivist, religious claims are deemed true to the extent that they conform to the one normative religion or philosophy.5
In a remarkable and admirably humble paper presented in King's College London and then published in Religious Studies, D'Costa, probably the leading proponent of this threefold differentiation, renounced his own typology as logically false and demonstrably so. It collapses, he argues, because, "all pluralists are committed to holding some form of truth criteria and by virtue of this, anything that falls foul of such criteria is excluded from counting as truth."6 If this is the case with pluralism, he continues, it is a fortiori the case with 'inclusivism'.
The whole typology is thus untenable and no assumed reverence for the views of others can pretend otherwise. All approaches to the truth claims and status of religious and theological claims are exclusive of contrary positions and are in essence, therefore, exclusive positions. Consequently, D'Costa argues that "pluralism must always logically be a form of exclusivism and that nothing called pluralism really exists".7 Concluding with a delightfully sardonic alusion to Rahner he pointed out that all pluralists – and thus all inclusivists – are, as a matter of fact, "anonymous exclusivists''.8
The Race/D'Costa typology is left, therefore, with only one member, namely, exclusivism. Hence D'Costa has finally accomplished what has long been argued for by a whole host of philosophers, including Alvin Plantinga, Stephen Evans and numerous others. And that is the disposal of a myth – and not an innocent or insignificant one, but a myth which has served to deceive us about the facts, and to block our understanding of them to the serious detriment of theological dialogue to the extent that it is open and honest about what it is doing.
What Dr D'Costa has shown is that all approaches to religion are couched in exclusive claims, commitments and convictions. What is more, to the extent that these exclusive claims are basic, they rest on exclusive grounds. That is, they rest on grounds that are absolute and not relative grounds that constitute our basic frame of reference undergirding all the (exclusive) affirmations which we make. There is no way out of this since to treat a religious claim as relative or even hypothetical is to assume alternative grounds.9 It is to suspend one absolute supposition in favour of another absolute presupposition, which thereby acquires 'foundational' status.
One of the problems which then comes into play is what might be called the Connemara conundrum. The somewhat hackneyed tale is told of a traveller in Ireland who asked a local inhabitant the way to Connemara. The local replied, "If I were going to Connemara, I wouldn't be going from here." The foundational presuppositions of one absolute point of reference cannot provide the means of locating another absolute point of reference.10 There is, thus, no possibility of one absolute point of reference accommodating other such points.
Nicholas Lash has sought to avoid such problems by utilising the metaphor of 'mutual space' with respect to inter-religious dialogue suggesting an appealing vision of mutuality, conversation and tolerance. What we must be unambiguously clear about here, however, is that this vision is itself grounded in a world-view one, indeed, which is inevitably exclusive of other world-views. One world-view might allow space for the expression or consideration of other views on a particular topic, indeed, it might even encourage it, but that is precisely because it is incompatible with alternative world-views which do not encourage that.
In short, the person arguing for such mutual space is doing nothing less than promoting and endorsing his or her own exclusive world-view in advocating such space. The language is 'performative' to the extent that it is seeking to mould attitudes, shift horizons, challenge affiliations and alter world-views. It is to seek to change alternative suppositions because one thinks they are confused, erroneous or inappropriate in some way. At this point one is also obliged to state the obvious, namely, that it is not possible for one party or approach to provide 'mutual space' mutual space cannot, by the very nature of the fact, be provided by any single world-view. The desire that all world-views should be such that they desire to be characterised by an openness to other world-views necessarily presupposes the non-basicality of world-views in other words, it presupposes a view on world-views which cannot be compatible with itself.
This is emphatically not the kind of arbitrary logic-chopping or game-playing for which Western philosophy is notorious. It is a statement of the simple, hard fact that people operate on the basis of basic beliefs which cannot be basic while being 'put up for grabs' let alone given away. The seductive deceit of Western pluralism and inclusivism in all its forms and as it has become widely adopted in Asian theological circles under the distortive influence of the West has invariably been that everyone else (that is, everyone who does not agree with one's own basic pluralist assumptions theological or religious) should be willing to give them away. What has run riot, in other words, in the name of pluralism and inclusivism is nothing other than a particularly seductive and insidious form of imperialism!
What, therefore, are the implications of these arguments for the pursuit of a global theological agenda in the context of religious and theological oppression?
1. The first point to make is that to utilise any norm or, indeed, to endorse any approach, is inevitably to commit oneself to an exclusive position one, that is, which presupposes absolute claims or, at the very least, beliefs which possess foundational status. It is to assume a series of basic convictions whose non-negotiable status is the presupposition of all engagement and dialogue beliefs or values, that is, which possess religious or quasi-religious status.
2. The second observation to be made is that there can be no withdrawal from this conundrum. Why? Because any withdrawal, for example, into some kind of religious agnosticism or suspension of the theological, will inevitably itself involve a commitment to reasons or arguments or assumptions which constitute exclusive truth claims claims which one holds (perhaps subliminally) to be ultimate or absolute vis-a-vis the academic task. An agnostic, for example, might be 'agnostic' because she thinks that the biblical resources do not offer sufficient justification for belief in the God of Christianity, or that the fact of suffering precludes the possibility of affirming the existence of a good and omnipotent Creator, or that the human mind is such that ultimate truths remain inaccessible to us.
Agnosis is in each case the consequence of a diagnosis of the situation and a diagnosis requires and presupposes some form of gnosis, an epistemic framework of affirmations. In short, each of these views involves a whole series of faith commitments, of convictions and of foundational beliefs (not least about the way God must be if God is to exist, what omnipotence and goodness must mean, the domain of scientific enquiry, the possibility and conditions of knowledge of God etc.). It involves a complex system of belief-commitments about which the agnostic could not consider herself to be agnostic.
The implication of my argument is quite simple: there is no escape from the truth question, nor is there any possibility of denying the fact that the truth is radically and irreducibly, exclusive. Questions of contextuality must not and cannot divert us from recognising this fact. As reflected in our typology of Western attitudes, loose, confused thinking here has been a substantial part of the problem, not the solution, of the theological dynamics underlying Western attitudes and approaches to Asian theology.
The saddest consequence of the Western attitudes which I have sought to portray at the start of this paper has been the extent to which they have forced much Asian theology to conceive its task in negative terms. The impact has been to oblige Asian theologies to define themselves negatively over and against Western theologies in order not to succumb to Western categories. But this poses the question whether this is any more liberated than the more explicit submission to Western theological assumptions. Both approaches allow their own agendas to be determinedwith reference to the West's agenda. This became increasingly clear ten years ago in the Programme for Theology and Cultures in Asia, the tragedy of which was the perceived need on the part of its original leadership to define Asian theology negatively over against Western thinking. This was continually manifest in conference papers, the shaping of conference agendas and the articles published in its series of volumes. The most damning criticism ever levelled against contributions by young Asians was that they were over-influenced by 'Western' categories a criticism I heard made of feminist contributions. This is not to deny that the fact that the Asian agenda should have been shaped to some degree by negative attitudes to the West was entirely understandable.
Indeed, it may, as some have argued, have been a necessary evil or 'stage on the way' in the process of liberation, given the oppressive dynamics of Western involvement in education and church politics etc that is for my Asian colleagues to judge. Whatever the case, the presence of this whole dynamic and its distortive effect on the development of theology in Asia remains the saddest single indictment on Western influence as it infiltrated the whole development of 'indigenous' theology in Asia or, rather, Christian theology's attempt to define its task with respect to its cultural, historical and semantic contexts. To witness the utilisation of Greek philosophical impositions on Christian thought in the West (viz. the confused identification of the inclusive with the immanent) in the characterisation and 'liberation' of 'authentic' Asian theology was deeply frustrating, to witness the impact of Western anti-realism on the contemporary Asian debate is even more so.
If Western thought has been driven by a distortive interest in questions of 'identity', self-realisation and self-fulfilment, and if this over-influenced the 'Asian theologies' of twenty years ago, the most exciting developments I have witnessed have been signs of a new mood and approach amongst younger theologians which promises to elevate the debate to a new level and open the door to 'contextual theologies' worthy of the name and not self-consciously defined with reference to other global trends and issues.
This is best illustrated by reference to the indigenous theology debates in Aotearoa-New Zealand. During the 1970's and the early 1980's, the whole thrust of Australasian theology was characterised by the world-wide concern to produce authentic, identity-affirming theologies. A generation of theologians devoted books and articles to the subject. It was a generation driven by an understandable desire to establish an authentic, post-colonial, theological identity. What emerged in fact, however, were simply a series of replications of 'Culture Protestantism'. (This strongly European brand of theology has been argued by many to have proved the most dangerous and divisive element in the recent history of Christianity in Europe from the Germany of the 1930's, to 'civil religion' found in the Balkans and Northern Ireland.)
The literature produced in New Zealand during this time, and which was trend-driven (too often failing to address issues of substance), now looks weary and dated.11 In the late eighties and early nineties, however, a new generation of young theologians began to emerge in New Zealand as also in Asia. This was a generation free of residual insecurities vis-a-vis their national 'identity'. Feeling no need either to discover or to justify their theological identity, they categorically rejected such self-labelling approaches to theology out of a determination to engage as radically and as seriously as possible with the fundamental theological challenges which emerged from the Christian faith and which confronted them with no concern to ensure that these were unique to their own context and not common to the context of our shared world.
The result has been the emergence of a new and remarkably impressive generation of theologians determined not to dwell on contextual difference but to take on and engage with the most vital, intellectually serious and significant theological insight that the various and diverse global contexts have to offer. From this generation there is now emerging a series of books and articles (not to mention its initiation of a particularly impressive international theological dialogue group on the Internet), the quality of whose contribution to the global theological agenda is now beyond question.12
The irony of all this is that the quality, character and commitment of the debate means that the phrase 'New Zealand theology' now looks as if it might acquire some meaning and where what is being referred to are not introspective and self-labelling attempts at indigenous theology driven by insecurity the 'New Zealand theologies' of the previous generation but a school of thinking differentiated precisely by virtue of its honest, concerted, rigorously objective and unselfconscious engagement with the fundamental theological issues facing them.
Precisely the same dynamic could be witnessed beginning to emerge amongst some of the younger generation of those involved in the PTCA. One finds oneself inclined, indeed, to draw parallels here with the redeemed of Matthew 25. The defining characteristic of the righteous was the radically unselfconscious manner in which they were being driven by the perception of genuine need: And the righteous will say, "Lord when did we see you hungry, or thirsty or a stranger or needing clothes?" One might add, "And those Asians driven by the pursuit of theological truth for truth's sake will ask, 'And when, Lord, were we doing Asian theology?''' The irony of the matter is that in my own homeland, Scotland, they are now beginning to speak of 'indigenous, Scottish theologies' and to try to redeem authentic Celtic Christianity what the best of the new generation of New Zealanders would now dismiss as the apotheosis of the European concern with self-identity reflecting introspective insecurity sustained by a loss of authentic direction and focus.
Liberation ultimately means being able to look one's oppressor in the face, to see him as a fellow traveller and to seek to speak the truth in love and forgiveness. Liberation means the ability to hear, to understand and to interpret one's oppressors to themselves. That is why the liberation of the oppressed is invariably the first step in the liberation of the oppressor South Africa provides an outstanding example of this. The liberation of Australasian, Asian and Scottish forms of theology are not to be found in isolationist or self-labelling forms of approach but in the determination to engage critically and openly with theological friend and foe whatever and wherever their home town or village.
In short, the most liberated, liberating and context-affirming theological agenda will invariably be 'global' to the extent that it interprets humanity as co-humanity. Thus Feliciano Cariño asks, "what does it mean for us to say that our way of being Christian is our way of being human, and therefore our way of seeking a common human community in which the creative edges of our religious traditions are allowed to interplay with each other for the common good of all?"13 As one theologian has argued, the eye, the ear and the mouth are the symbols of our humanity as symbols of our co-humanity. Humanity is served when one can look the other in the eye, hear the other, and speak to the other and above all, and most importantly, do all this gladly.
It is surely the pursuit of truth in the context of co-humanity conceived in these terms that can begin to make sense of the language of a global agenda language that transcends that of 'partnership' and even of 'networking' in pursuit of koinonia or 'a new koinonia of theological endeavour', to use the phrase Cariño employed in the paper he gave to the CARTS/CWM meeting in Cambridge, in 1997. Koinonia affirms particularity in that it affirms persons, it sees communication as an event of communion rather than the egalitarian distribution of religious concepts. Most importantly, its goal is the winning of friends and not of arguments.
It is precisely to this end that the West requires to be liberated from the primary enemy of koinonia as the grounds of theological interaction, namely, the 'Socratic'. It is no coincidence, moreover, that the best exposé of this has just been published last year by Oxford University's Clarendon Press by a young New Zealand theologian, Murray Rae. What becomes supremely clear in Rae's discussion is that behind the confusions which I sought to articulate in the typology of Western attitudes lies not the Christian Gospel but 'the Socratic', as that defines the (distortive) Greek philosophical influence on European Christianity.
So what characterises the 'Socratic'? Three central features and implications are of particular relevance to our discussion here. a) For Socratic idealism, ultimate truth is identified exclusively with that which is immanent within the self. b) The fundamental means of access to the divine, therefore, is self-knowledge. c) The importance and value of the 'other' is reducible ultimately, therefore, to the contribution she stands to make to one's own task of self-knowledge, self-discovery and thus 'remembering' of eternal truths and values.
On the Socratic model, therefore, the other can never contribute anything new to our understanding of the divine any more than history or any figure in history. At the very most, these serve as the fleeting and incidental means of the facilitation of my self-discovery. The teacher, the communicator of the divine was for Socrates nothing more than a midwife and the process of communication the facilitation (maieuesthai) of self-discovery. The highest relation is not my relation with the Other but with the Truth conceived as eternal transcendent Ideas and Ideals immanent within the self. Consequently and interestingly, given the extent of its influence on the contextual agenda context is entirely and absolutely irrelevant. Philosophy and theology neither do nor can possess a 'geography'. The 'ideal' transcends the physical, the historical and the spatial.
To the extent that Christianity has been wedded to Athens and, in particular, to Platonic idealism, it has been blinded to Christianity's insistence that a) koinonia is essential and not incidental to our relation to the truth; b) that the historical and the spatio-temporal existence of humanity is no less intrinsic to it than God's identification with the historical and the spatio-temporal in Christ; and c) that that which is immanent within our understandings, our values, our attitudes to others may not per se be identified with the divine to the extent that they may require to be reconciled to the purposes of the God who values humanity unconditionally and therefore stands to transform (metamorphousthe) and reschematise (suschematisesthe) our prior, unenlightened agendas and immanent inclinations and perceptions (echthrai dianoiai).14
It is precisely the distortion of European culture by the Socratic that has led it to devalue the kind of open dialogue that values the other and thus the transcendence of God's purposes over our own immanent inclinations and propensities. This is because it is only a small step, therefore, from the 'Socratic' to the imperialism, patriarchalism and paternalist liberalism which, I suggested, has characterised European attitudes to Asian theology. When Karl Popper offered his damming critique of the Platonic 'philosopher king' in The Open Society and its Enemies, it was against precisely this same closure vis-a-vis the 'open society' that he was arguing.
It is equally incumbent upon us to consider the dangers which the Platonic 'theologian king' (in both his European and Asian forms) poses to an open, koinonial and dialogical 'global theological agenda'. For all these reasons, it is far from clear that the theological appeal to the immanent in any form, whether it has been one of the legacies of European thought to Asian theology or has confirmed parallel suppositions within Asian religious traditions, does not threaten to undermine the whole theology of koinonia, of the model of truth that underlies it and the character of God's commitment to humanity in Christ and the Spirit which grounds it.
One courageous voice has sought to oppose the influence of the Socratic within Europe more than any other, namely that of Søren Kierkegaard, and it is for this reason that he might be one Western resource with something to offer the debate. Kierkegaard's opposition to what he termed 'the Socratic' led him to distinguish between two types of religion or religiousness: Religiousness A and Religiousness B.
Religiousness A identifies the eternal with the immanent – identifying the divine with our own immanent world-views, paradigms and affiliations. Religiousness A, he adds, characterises not only Christianity but other forms of religious faith which operate in the same way.15 It characterises, in other words, all those forms of civil religion, cultural religion (Kulturprotestantismus) and religious fundamentalism which make easy identification between the Truth and their our own immanent religious, cultural, ideological and ethnic assumptions. Tellingly, Kierkegaard observes that on this view offence is not possible – since the interpretation of the divine is subsumed within and conditioned in its entirety by the prior categories immanent within our self-understandings.16
In radical contrast to this, authentic Christianity characterises a profoundly different form of religion – what he terms Religiousness B. This model, he writes, 'breaks with immanence'. It is no longer based on the creaturely identification of the divine with our own internal and immanent categories. In Religiousness B, there is no longer any immanent fundamental kinship between the temporal and the eternal, because the eternal itself has entered time and would constitute the kinship there.17 On this model, the Truth refuses to allow us to collapse religious truth into our own subjectivistically conceived categories and normative systems.
By contrast, that ultimate Truth (which is God) calls us beyond such subjectivism to an objectivity (and hence, Kierkegaard argues, to a true subjectivity) wherein our prior affiliations and systems of thought stand to be revised and transformed. The fundamental question to be addressed in contemplating a global theological agenda is whether such an agenda could or should be determined by a culture-levelling or culture-forgetting religious or quasi-Christian immanence. Alternatively, we must ask whether the fundamental Reality which would inspire a global theological agenda is that specific and 'unanticipatable' identification of the Eternal with time which uniquely challenges the potential for human division, polarisation, hostility and suffering that religion as 'immanence' so often serves to engender.
Now it is imperative, of course, that one does not simply critique the kind of religion one finds to be dangerous as an excuse to return to one's prior theological affiliations or preferences that would be 'immanence' of the most deceitful kind. The title of this paper asks after the possibility of a global theological agenda. Clearly, it would be entirely self-refuting if I were to attempt to predetermine or define such an agenda, or even its boundaries. Any such agenda will invariably be the product, and not the condition, of the koinonia of which we have spoken.
The question I wish to pose, however, concerns whether the very grounds of the koinonia of which Christians speak do not suggest that, far from such an agenda being distilled from our collective immanent religious affiliations or concepts of the divine, it emerges from a particular history not 'my history' or 'your history' per se but, rather, the shared history of God's concrete engagement with humanity without which Christianity has no other course to follow than to collapse into an immanence which neither affirms nor desires let alone inspires koinonia but, rather, demonstrably threatens it. This is because the koinonia of which Christianity speaks is first and foremost that koinonia which God establishes by grace with a confused and alienated humanity in the historical Christ, the Jesus of faith.18
The question is whether, outside this divine 'embrace',19 any such similarly unambiguous warrant is to be found for speaking of God's affirmation of the unconditional value of human persons in all their particularity. The global theological agenda which this shared history would inspire is one that would refuse to level cultural differences or collapse particularity into uniformity. On the other hand, it would also be one which repudiated the cultural and ethnic exclusionism, isolationism and fragmentation which derive from the identification of the divine with one's own immanent cultural, ethnic and 'religious' affiliations.
1 The underlying philosophy of this can easily be shown to be a development of Neo-Kantian idealism its concept of the limits of epistemology, the denial of accessibility of the thing-in-itself (ding-an-sich) and its focus on the sphere of the individuum as the sphere of religion.
2 Although, I should also add that the 'networking' analogy, once popular in feminist thinking but less so now, remains a hangover from the language of individualism. It suggests individual points of reference in extrinsic ways.
3 I am following here D'Costa's summary of the three positions cited in the paper. 4 I might note here that my colleague, Professor Friedhelm Hardy (professor of Indian Religions at King's) argues that all religious claims are, in fact, 'absolute' claims otherwise they would not be religious claims.
5 One might cite Friedrich Schleiermacher's description of the essence of Christian piety or, more recently, Wolfhart Pannenberg's nature-supernature model, or, as I shall argue, Platonist interpretations of Christian thought as constituting different examples of this kind of approach.
6 'The Impossibility of a Pluralist View of Religion', p 5.
7 Ibid, p 3.
8 Ibid, p 15.
9 To say a position is 'less relative' assumes an absolute claim.
10 I owe the use of this story to Murray Rae, Kierkegaard's Vision of the Incarnation: By Faith Transformed, OUP, 1997, p ix.
11 A lengthy book and other publications by Maurice Andrew on New Zealand theology; Gerald Fitzgerald's Christ in the Culture of Aotearoa-New Zealand; the major collection edited by Peter Malone, Discovering an Australian Theology; the series of books on New Zealand theology edited by Alan Ker constitute a small handful of plethora of such publications.
12 Indeed, three of these (Dr Susan Patterson, Dr Douglas Campbell and Dr Murray Rae) have just been appointed to positions in the UK because they were, quite simply, the best candidates for the relevant academic positions.
13 'The Asian Theological Scene: Concerns and Coalitions', paper presented to the CARTS/CWM meeting in Cambridge, March 1997. But why 'edges', one wonders? Surely, our humanity includes our basic beliefs and believings and to recognise the humanity of the other is to recognise and address precisely these.
14 My references are to Paul. For the sake of discernment, we require to be metamorphosed, transformed by the renewal of our minds and not schematised by the secular world (Rom 12:2).
15 Concluding Unscientific Postscript, p 495
16 Ibid, p518
17 Ibid, p507-508
18 I am alluding here to C Stephen Evans' recent and extremely important study, The Historical Christ and the Jesus of Faith, Clarendon, Oxford, 1996.
19 Cf Miroslav Volf's recent, powerful theological discussion of social fragmentation in the name of 'religion' in the light of the Serb-Croat confrontation in the Balkans, Exclusion and Embrace, Abingdon, Nashville, 1996.