Postcolonial Theology of Religions

Particularity and Pluralism in World Christianity

Jenny Daggers

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135038984
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Teologia e religione
• Subtopic: Religione

This original and ambitious book considers the terms of engagement between Christian theology and other religious traditions, beginning with criticism of Christian theology of religions as entangled with European colonial modernity. Jenny Daggers covers recent efforts to disentangle Eurocentrism from the meeting of the religions, and investigates new constructive possibilities arising in the postcolonial context. In dialogue with Asian and feminist theologies, she reflects on ways forward for relations between the religions and offers a particularist model for theology of religions, standing within a classical Trinitarian framework.

PART I

Colonial entanglement

1

THINKING ‘RELIGION’ AND ‘THE RELIGIONS’ IN EUROPEAN MODERNITY

In response to European Enlightenment challenge and aware of a growing colonial project, sceptical philosophers and Christian theologians alike shaped a generic notion of religion, which was capable of accommodating the diversity of religious traditions. Religious plurality so conceived had more in common with the Roman origins of the term ‘religion’, than with its Christian appropriation as Augustine’s de vera religione and the medieval liturgical and monastic practice of Christianity alone. The aim of this chapter is to make theological assessment of this generic concept, which was to usher in the associated notion of discrete ‘world religions’, capable of interrogation by new forms of academic enquiry. The broad lines in development of thinking about ‘religion’ are traced here, whereas specifically Christian discourse about ‘the religions’ is analysed in more detail in Chapter 2.

In my article, ‘Thinking “Religion”’, I argue that the category ‘religion’ is a tripartite, emergent from Christianity during modernity as Christianity increased, Christianity transcended and Christianity diminished, whereas the conditions of postcolonial postmodernity invite a different response of Christianity re-centred.¹ The tripartite encapsulates the complexity of debate about Christianity, religion and the religions within European modernity, and the reciprocal imprint of this debate on its colonial project and of colonial project on the debate.

While I will not repeat here in full the argument made in ‘Thinking “Religion”’, the tripartite will be deployed in this chapter and the next to analyse the emergence of ‘religion’ and ‘the religions’ from a Christian theological perspective. It is important to state at the outset that this move is not hostile to the discipline of religious studies: rather, my constructive aim in Part II is to argue the possibility of a theologically conceived Christianity re-centred that is appreciative of the academic knowledge produced through methodologies employed by religious studies, and of the religious traditions explored by this scholarly discipline. It was the contention of ‘Thinking “Religion”’ that the alternative ways of knowing pursued by Christian theology and religious studies are compatible modes of enquiry when the particularity of discrete traditions is prioritized.² While this book offers a theology, rather than a contribution to religious studies, theological perspectives on religious studies are significant in the analysis of this chapter, and in engagement with pluralist and postcolonial approaches in Part II. It is beyond the scope of this enquiry to engage more fully with its likely reception within religious studies.

The chapter begins with a review of evident concepts of religion and religious diversity within Christian theology at the dawn of modernity. The aim here is twofold: to recapture pertinent ways of thinking within Christian theology in the fifteenth century, so avoiding anachronistic assumptions that are shaped by modern concepts of religion and the religions; and to ground the case made later in this book that contemporary theological thinking about religious diversity has its own integrity. Subsequent developments in modern understandings of religion are then investigated through the lens of the tripartite: Christianity increased, Christianity transcended and Christianity diminished.

The category ‘Christianity increased’ draws attention to the entanglement of European Christianity with the expansionary colonial project: at a time when Europeans were expanding their global horizons, a growing number of European Christians conceived the destiny of Christianity in terms of global ‘increase’. The second section of the chapter scrutinizes European cosmopolitanism to identify this broader European impulse towards global ‘increase’; its Christian missionary expression will be investigated in Chapter 3.

Thinking religion as ‘Christianity transcended’ allows the emergence of the generic category ‘religion’ within Christianity to be identified, together with its potential to transcend the limits of Christianity, so placing Christianity as one manifestation of ‘religion’ alongside others – and eventually as one religion alongside other ‘religions’. This second category emphasizes the Christian origin of the generic term – and the modernist tendency towards universalizing patterns of thought, which are fully congruent with the colonial logic examined in Part II.

The third category of ‘Christianity diminished’ highlights the impact of the secularizing acids of modernity on European thought: while Christians might think in terms of Christianity increased, its cultured despisers could look instead towards a future where Christianity would wither away, and so ‘diminish’; and what was true for Christianity would be true for both ‘religion’ and ‘the religions’ more broadly.

The aim of the third section of the chapter is to examine the emergence of the generic modern category ‘religion’ through a theological lens, being alert to two contrasting lines of development. First, enthusiasts for Christianity transcended looked for means of escaping the constraints of denominationally ordered Christianity, while holding to ideal notions of religion that were frequently deeply indebted to Christian beliefs and practices. In contrast, proponents of Christianity diminished made devastating critique of religion. Critique of Christianity arising in these two opposing camps often overlapped and, as we will see in Chapter 2, this critique was frequently extended from Christianity to other religions. Second, the concept ‘religion’ and the notion of discrete ‘religions’ gave rise to new academic methods of enquiry that were eventually to take the form of religious studies. The fourth section, again from a theological perspective, clarifies ways of mapping the religions that emerged in the incipient discipline of religious studies.

The final section takes the World Parliament of Religions, held in Chicago in 1893, as a case study demonstrating understandings of religion and the religions in this late nineteenth-century moment. To enable analysis of developments in notions of religion and the religions in modernity that led to this point, the chapter begins at the dawn of modernity, by clarifying significant fifteenth-century perspectives on religion and religious diversity.

Religious diversity in the perspective of the ‘one true faith’³

Fifteenth-century notions need to be placed in their longer medieval context to ensure they are interpreted in their own terms, rather than through anachronistic application of modern concepts. Jaroslav Pelikan places twelfth-century Christian theological encounter with other faiths firmly in the context of contested readings of patristic sources, and the resurgence of ‘schism, sect and heresy’.⁴ Theologians’ dominant concern was to correct divergence from the doctrinal truth of the one true faith’; doctrines of the enemies of Christendom were to be vigorously contested. Truth was to be upheld in the face of error. What is important for the enquiry of this book is that there was as yet no concept of religion or the religions; rather no distinction was made between heresy or sect that looked to Bible and patristic tradition and those that repudiated these sources in favour of other authorities.

Given the significance to the Catholic tradition of what Victoria Burrus has called ‘the heresiological habit’,⁵ a simple dichotomy between orthodoxy and heresy long served to distinguish true Christianity from all rival positions. Thus Peter of Poitiers could name ‘the Jews, the heretics and the Saracens [Muslims]’ as enemies necessitating the defence of the faith, and Alan of Lille’s On the Catholic Faith against the Heretics targeted in turn Christian heretics, Jews and Muslims.

Peter the Venerable recognized ‘four varieties of sects in the world of our days, namely, the Christians, the Jews, the Saracens and the pagans’.⁶ But this did not imply any equivalence of status between these four. Rather, against the background of military confrontation with Islam, Peter aimed to combat what he named as ‘the heresy of Mohammed’ through informed scholarship on Islam, including translation of the Qu’ran into Latin.⁷ From the perspective of Christian doctrine, Islam was seen to have ‘mixed the true with the false’ and was thus understood as heresy.⁸ As established in my Introduction, no reference was made to Islam as a ‘religion’ by either Muslims themselves or Christians. This is noted by Henrici following an extensive review of the literature, where he finds Islam referred to as ‘secta, lex [law], or fides mahometana’.⁹

Making no reference to ‘religion’, (written) encounters between Christian theologians and ‘heretics’, sectarians, Jews or Muslims thus focused on issues of doctrine. For Pelikan, this rational defence of the one true faith encouraged examination of the move from faith to understanding,¹⁰ which was to lead to rational defence of trinitarian doctrine through a restatement of Augustinian theology; the emphasis here was on the relation between believing and knowing, that is between proof from tradition and proof from reason, in terms of the perfection of nature through grace.¹¹

Muslim deployment of Aristotelian philosophy shows that proof from reason could as effectively be employed in heresy, sect or other faiths. Aquinas’s Christian commentaries on Aristotle, and his subsequent use of Aristotelian philosophy in his theology, were a Christian counter-move.¹² Henrici’s estimate of the importance of this strategy – with his knowingly anachronistic use of the term ‘interreligious’ – is worth citing in full:

This absorption of Aristotelian thought in medieval theology under Islamic influence can fairly be said to be one of the key ‘interreligious’ events in intellectual history. It paved the way for the conclusion that any dialogue between religions must be based on naturalis ratio [natural reason], that is, philosophy, at a more fundamental level than was the case among the early Christian apologists.¹³

By the fifteenth century, Christian theologians had become aware of the extent of sects, laws and faiths beyond the one true faith. The potential of natural philosophical reasoning for unifying these elements, as well as for clarifying distinctions, was already evident in the thirteenth-century writings of Roger Bacon, who identified Christianity as one of six sects. While all humans can recognize God through reason, different sects believe in their own form of confirmation of faith via divine revelation.¹⁴ In a move that we will find repeated in the modern writings reviewed in Chapter 2, Bacon then asserts the superiority of Christian revelation as the single true revelation of the single true God.¹⁵

However, the fifteenth-century writings of the humanist cardinal Nicolas of Cusa provide a yet stronger point of continuity between medieval and modern ideas...