Jun 3, 2022·edited Jun 3, 2022Liked by David Armstrong
Damn and blast, David, how dare you write this article before I could get around to doing it myself. You' re poaching on my reserves (ie, the files where I keep notes for future columns).
Thanks for this article. As someone somewhere between Hinduism and Christianity who finds Christ to be the meeting point between the two traditions, this is something I hope for Christian communities to engage with more deeply
I think you're overselling the religious pluralism found within empires. Mongols tolerated Jews and Muslim, true, but not their food laws, which doesn't look like any kind of meaningful tolerance at all if you're a Jew or a Muslim. To take a more recent example, the British Empire deliberately stoked religious divisions in India to ensure that Muslims and Hindus wouldn't unite against them, and the existence of Pakistan is a testament to their success. When empires are pluralist, they are tolerant mainly of syncretism, and intolerant of religious distinctives and of any religious traditions that don't have room for the empire itself in their pantheon.
As you can probably tell, my main hesitance with it comes to pluralism is political: surely the gods, whoever/whatever they are, have frequently been oppressors, and many religious systems that pay them loyalty have been openly complicit in their tyranny. Confucianism is deeply hierarchical, and has been the willing handmaid of empire for most of Chinese history. The Roman pantheon smiled on wars of conquest, death in the arena, and the patriarchal tyranny of the paterfamilias. The Shinto kami were (presumably willing) accomplices to the genocidal ideology of Japanese exceptionalism.
Surely any Christianity worth having is (among other things) a "fuck you" to the gods and the tyrants that serve them?
(Maybe I'm completely missing the point here, because pluralism can mean a lot of different things, and I think you're using it in more than three ways during the course of this article.)
Do you think the properly Christian embrace of the plurality of religious thought is a consequence of the transcendence and infinity of the divine reality? (This seems to be the point of your comments about a not-small Jesus.)
In comparison, I’m thinking of, say, Radhakrishnan’s account (in the first of his Upton Lectures) of Hindu religious thought as, on the one hand, operating at different levels of analogy, and on the other, as open to ‘non-Hindu’ religious traditions. As an example of the former, he says that those who worship the gods Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva, are ‘really’ worshipping personifications of God’s wisdom, love, and freedom, i.e. of aspects of God as perfect personality. That is, those who worship gods and God are worshipping the same divine reality at different levels of understanding. Concerning the latter, he writes: “The Hindu thinker readily admits other points of view than his own and considers them to be just as worthy of attention. If the whole race of man, in every land, of every colour, and every stage of culture, is the offspring of God, then we must admit that, in the vast compass of his providence, all are being trained by his wisdom and supported by his love to reach within the limits of their power a knowledge of the Supreme.” Hence, the Hindu looks to Buddhism, Islam, and Christianity for further inspiration.
(As an aside, I prefer your view—expressed in your video ‘On God and the gods’—that a god like Vishnu could be both a distinct personal reality and a personification or symbol of an aspect of the one God. Radhakrishnan seems to assume that the gods of Hinduism aren’t really real, and laments the fact that most of his fellow Hindus believe otherwise.)
It seems to me that Christians should say something similar of both, e.g., Zeus and the Dharmakaya of Buddha: here and elsewhere are perspectives on the divine, each offering a different limited grasp of His transcendent infinite reality. And while the Dharmakaya is a ‘higher’ analogy for the One Real, Zeus is nonetheless also an analogy for the same One Real. There is only one God and he is all gods, or something like that.
Sorry, that was a bit rambling. I hope it’s intelligible.
Thank you as always for an illuminating article and for a Christological vision that is expansive and hopeful. I do not have the familiarity with other religious traditions to comment, but I wonder here and now-even as one may again take the gods and religious pluralism seriously, if then one must then tread carefully with other spiritual powers and moral visions. Perhaps not all are as confident as Paul about the overthrow of other powers. Or how do you consider this? Is the final harmony here and we may then live without fear? Or is there a need to yet be cautious, if even damage is not final? I think here of Stephen R. L. Clark's pondering about whether some spirits are not our friends. But I am more interested in where you place the modern secular world and societies in this piece-are they irreligious, atheist or agnostic post-Christians, simply unreflective about the tenets of classical theism? Or do they serve unconsciously and consciously the material gods? How do this society fit into your vision of religious pluralism and a Christian's responsibilities towards such a 'religion' or non-religion? Apologies if I push your themes too far off the mark, but I ask sincerely and pragmatically, since I live in the culturally christian Norwegian countryside.
There's a lot here to take in, but I just wanted to express my appreciation for the depth and richness of the development of the argument. I'm going to read this again. Whether or not I end up fully agreeing almost seems irrelevant to the spirit and thrust of so much of this. Just wanted to hop on to comment that this is really on another level, whether it's right or not.
Damn and blast, David, how dare you write this article before I could get around to doing it myself. You' re poaching on my reserves (ie, the files where I keep notes for future columns).
Which is to say, this is very good.
Thanks for this article. As someone somewhere between Hinduism and Christianity who finds Christ to be the meeting point between the two traditions, this is something I hope for Christian communities to engage with more deeply
I think you're overselling the religious pluralism found within empires. Mongols tolerated Jews and Muslim, true, but not their food laws, which doesn't look like any kind of meaningful tolerance at all if you're a Jew or a Muslim. To take a more recent example, the British Empire deliberately stoked religious divisions in India to ensure that Muslims and Hindus wouldn't unite against them, and the existence of Pakistan is a testament to their success. When empires are pluralist, they are tolerant mainly of syncretism, and intolerant of religious distinctives and of any religious traditions that don't have room for the empire itself in their pantheon.
As you can probably tell, my main hesitance with it comes to pluralism is political: surely the gods, whoever/whatever they are, have frequently been oppressors, and many religious systems that pay them loyalty have been openly complicit in their tyranny. Confucianism is deeply hierarchical, and has been the willing handmaid of empire for most of Chinese history. The Roman pantheon smiled on wars of conquest, death in the arena, and the patriarchal tyranny of the paterfamilias. The Shinto kami were (presumably willing) accomplices to the genocidal ideology of Japanese exceptionalism.
Surely any Christianity worth having is (among other things) a "fuck you" to the gods and the tyrants that serve them?
(Maybe I'm completely missing the point here, because pluralism can mean a lot of different things, and I think you're using it in more than three ways during the course of this article.)
It's interesting that Acts 19:37 points out that the early Christians didn't blaspheme foreign gods or despoil their temples.
This also is an interesting article discussing concepts of religious freedom in early Christianity (though the main discussion is on Islam):
https://www.ias.edu/sites/default/files/hs/Crone_Articles/Crone_la_ikraha.pdf
That was excellent!
Do you think the properly Christian embrace of the plurality of religious thought is a consequence of the transcendence and infinity of the divine reality? (This seems to be the point of your comments about a not-small Jesus.)
In comparison, I’m thinking of, say, Radhakrishnan’s account (in the first of his Upton Lectures) of Hindu religious thought as, on the one hand, operating at different levels of analogy, and on the other, as open to ‘non-Hindu’ religious traditions. As an example of the former, he says that those who worship the gods Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva, are ‘really’ worshipping personifications of God’s wisdom, love, and freedom, i.e. of aspects of God as perfect personality. That is, those who worship gods and God are worshipping the same divine reality at different levels of understanding. Concerning the latter, he writes: “The Hindu thinker readily admits other points of view than his own and considers them to be just as worthy of attention. If the whole race of man, in every land, of every colour, and every stage of culture, is the offspring of God, then we must admit that, in the vast compass of his providence, all are being trained by his wisdom and supported by his love to reach within the limits of their power a knowledge of the Supreme.” Hence, the Hindu looks to Buddhism, Islam, and Christianity for further inspiration.
(As an aside, I prefer your view—expressed in your video ‘On God and the gods’—that a god like Vishnu could be both a distinct personal reality and a personification or symbol of an aspect of the one God. Radhakrishnan seems to assume that the gods of Hinduism aren’t really real, and laments the fact that most of his fellow Hindus believe otherwise.)
It seems to me that Christians should say something similar of both, e.g., Zeus and the Dharmakaya of Buddha: here and elsewhere are perspectives on the divine, each offering a different limited grasp of His transcendent infinite reality. And while the Dharmakaya is a ‘higher’ analogy for the One Real, Zeus is nonetheless also an analogy for the same One Real. There is only one God and he is all gods, or something like that.
Sorry, that was a bit rambling. I hope it’s intelligible.
Thank you as always for an illuminating article and for a Christological vision that is expansive and hopeful. I do not have the familiarity with other religious traditions to comment, but I wonder here and now-even as one may again take the gods and religious pluralism seriously, if then one must then tread carefully with other spiritual powers and moral visions. Perhaps not all are as confident as Paul about the overthrow of other powers. Or how do you consider this? Is the final harmony here and we may then live without fear? Or is there a need to yet be cautious, if even damage is not final? I think here of Stephen R. L. Clark's pondering about whether some spirits are not our friends. But I am more interested in where you place the modern secular world and societies in this piece-are they irreligious, atheist or agnostic post-Christians, simply unreflective about the tenets of classical theism? Or do they serve unconsciously and consciously the material gods? How do this society fit into your vision of religious pluralism and a Christian's responsibilities towards such a 'religion' or non-religion? Apologies if I push your themes too far off the mark, but I ask sincerely and pragmatically, since I live in the culturally christian Norwegian countryside.
Tertullian and Lactantius, among others supported religious freedom for pagans, even if they didn't approve of those practices.
There's a lot here to take in, but I just wanted to express my appreciation for the depth and richness of the development of the argument. I'm going to read this again. Whether or not I end up fully agreeing almost seems irrelevant to the spirit and thrust of so much of this. Just wanted to hop on to comment that this is really on another level, whether it's right or not.
And it's a follow from this post-Christian :)