Truth in World Religions

TRUTH IN WORLD RELIGIONS

Lecture at the National Dialogue Australasia colloquium

Adelaide - April 2004

'He who begins by loving Christianity better than truth will proceed by loving his own

sect or Church better than Christianity and end by loving himself better than all.'

(SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 1772 1834)

'We would do well to remember the ancient analogy of the six

blind men describing an elephant; we are like blind men groping

after an elusive and many-faceted reality, and perhaps we

should be more surprised at the amount of agreement there

is in religious matters than at any disagreements we find'[i]

Let me start by saying that I am addressing this topic in terms of what happens in the curriculum in schools - nothing in this lecture is intended to relate to worship, faith formation or catechesis which I would see as a vital part of the function of a denominational school but which is a separate activity to the education that takes place in the classroom.

1) Rejection of a common opening assumption

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Discussing ‘Truth in World Religions’ in front of religious education teachers is not an easy task. It is not an easy topic for me and it is not an easy topic for teachers.

Of course, to some it will be easy. They will say:

“We know what truth is. It is what we believe and what out school stands for. We teach our children this truth and tell them about other religions and where they agree or disagree with what we know to be true. Where there is overlap we point out the similarities and where there are differences we show the children the errors of other religions.”

Many today hold precisely this view and many in this room may well hold it as well so it is as well to start with this position. I want to argue against this for four reasons:

It is not clear who the ‘we’ referred to actually is. All too often, the ‘we’ comes very close to be ‘I’ as even within a school with a single denominational background there will be differences as to how the school’s ethos will be interpreted:

In Anglican schools there will be differences between those who side with a Sydney evangelical perspective on key issues and those who instead support Archbishop Peter Carnley and Archbishop Rowan Williams in a more liberal approach to many contemporary problems. Both positions are clearly Anglican, but neither position will be particularly tolerant of the other. I wonder how many schools dominated by the influence of the Jensen brothers in Sydney will really take seriously the wider variety of different perspectives in Anglicanism including Anglo-Catholic and more liberal views?
In Catholic schools there will be a difference between those who support Archbishop George Pell and Cardinal Ratzinger and those whose position is closer to that of, say, Karl Rahner SJ or Pope John XX111. I wonder how many Opus Dei schools will take seriously the feminist perspective within Catholicism?
In Jewish schools, liberal and reformed Jews have little in common with the Orthodox - indeed they may well attend difference schools. Their shared religion masks massive disagreements. I wonder how many orthodox Jewish schools will take seriously the views of reformed Jews?
In Islam, Sunni and Shia have ancient enmities which go back to the immediate successors of the Prophet and can be as extreme as any divisions within Christianity. I wonder how many Sunni schools will really help their pupils to understand the anger of the Shias over the killing of one of the early Caliphs or the perspective of the Ismailis?

To start with, therefore, there is no clear agreement on precisely how our own religion or denomination’s position is to be defined.

Secondly, the old way of educating children has broken down in Australia and New Zealand and in the rest of the western world. A hundred years ago it was much simpler - church-supported-school-supported-family in a triangle which ensured that children were brought up in the ‘faith of their fathers’ (and mothers). The faith taught at school was confirmed by daily practice at home and, on Sundays, by attendance at Church. By and large (and this is a generalisation) this no longer applies. Many, not all, children who attend denominational schools do not go to Church other than when required to do so and observation of religious practice at home is all too often negligible. To go on educating in the old ways when the context has changed so radically is bound to fail.

The claim of truth by one group by appeal to their own authority (whether this be by way of text or religious institution) runs the risk of religion retreating into a fortress ghetto with competing claims being made from other fortresses increasingly isolated for each other. Strident insistence on ‘the truth’ of a particular teacher’s own convictions or the shared convictions of the school risks falling on the increasingly deaf ears of young people and being counter-productive as many simply ‘switch off’ religion. For evidence of this, look at many of our Churches where the age profile gives ample evidence of the alienation that many feel from traditional institutions.

To inculcate young people into our own certainties is not education - it is closer to indoctrination and it not only does not succeed but is educationally questionable as it fails to recognise the autonomy of the young people entrusted to our care. It means rejecting the truth claims of other religions because of an a priori judgement about the truth of our own and if we are going to affirm this then we must also accept the right of other religions to similarly indoctrinate their young people into the perceived truth of their own position without giving a fair hearing to the position that we may cherish.

In a paper at last year’s conference in Melbourne I outlined two different approaches to truth - one was realism which sees truth being based on correspondence and the second was anti-realism which sees truth as based on coherence. Put simply, the realists maintain that statements are true or false because they correspond or fail to correspond to the state of affairs to which they refer whereas anti-realism maintains that statements are true because they are accepted as true within a particular form of life or cultural framework. If we take as an example the statement: ‘The Holy Qu’ran was dictated to the Prophet by the Archangel’, then:

The realist will maintain that this statement is either true or false depending on whether the Archangel did or did not dictate the Qu’ran. This is the theory of truth most of us work with and, of course, it sets up an ‘either/or’ situation - in other words EITHER Islam is true OR it is not. It cannot be both true and false in respect of its central claims at the same time,

The anti-realist will maintain that the statement is true if it is accepted as true within the form of life or community of Islam. If the statement coheres or fits in with other statements within the Islamic world, then it will be held to be true. Truth, then, depends on the framework within which one lives. Thus within Islam it is true that the Holy Qu’ran was dictated by Allah but within Christianity it is not. On this view, each religion can be true on its own terms and the truth claims of one religion do not conflict with those of another.

Most religious believers are realists. They wish to maintain that their religions claims are true because they correspond to the states of affairs they describe. Thus Christians will maintain that it is true that Jesus is the second person of the Holy Trinity and that he died on the cross and rose again. Those who reject this view will, therefore, be in error. The problem with this approach in the classroom is that it sets up the tension that if one religion is true then others are less true or false to the extent that they do not accord with the true religion. It was this that led the Jesuit Karl Rahner to argue that devout non-Christian could be regarded as ‘anonymous Christians’ - in other words they were effectively Christians even though they did not recognise this. Many, however, consider this to be patronising as it could be equally valid to hold that Christians are anonymous Muslims or anonymous Hindus.

2) Rejection of a common methodology

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At present almost every school - if they teach world religions at all and many do not - teach on a factual basis. They teach about what members of different world religions believe. They teach a series of factual propositions combined with, perhaps, details of festivals, dress and moral codes through which individuals in the different religions mark the passing year and demarcate themselves from other groups. They are, by doing this, setting up a series of often competing truth claims and this inevitable means that children think that either none of these claims are true or, perhaps, that one is true and all others are false. I want to suggest that this whole way of proceeding is mistaken

The challenge in the classroom is how to respond to the competing truth claims of different religions in ways which do not set the subject up in a way which will lead young people towards an unexamined relativism.

3) Alternative ways of approaching truth claims in world religions

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There are a number of alternative ways of approaching truth claims in world religions. These include (and there are a number of other positions):

EXCLUSIVISTS are realists who maintain that only one religion is true and others are false in so far as they do no agree with the one true faith.

INCLUSIVISTS are realists who maintain that all religions point to the same underlying truth and it does not matter which religion is followed provided its adherents do so fully and in the right spirit since the same underlying, transcendent reality underlies all of them.

ANTI-REALISTS maintain that truth is relative to different forms of life and there is no ultimate truth.

POSTMODERNISTS reject any single view of the truth and resist any attempt to talk of a single truth for all human beings. There is no meta-narrative - no single story which can claim to make sense of all human existence whether this is the Christian story, the Islamic story or, indeed, the Atheist’s story.

Of these four, by far the most dominant in our classrooms is the postmodern view[1] (although few of our young people will know what postmodernism[2] is). All too often our young people reject any idea of absolute truth whether in religion, ethics, aesthetics or, indeed, almost anywhere else. If we try in classrooms to push an exclusivist position we will not make much progress when most of society affirms a post-modern position.

As a society, we are in water-world where truth is regarded as being radically relative to culture. Indeed our post-modern society pays homage to a new god and the name of this God is tolerance.

4) The god of tolerance

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I certainly do not wish to argue against the value of tolerance, indeed I would praise it but I believe that when a particular interpretation of tolerance becomes a god it becomes dangerous. To an older generation tolerance meant an open minded willingness to listen to alternative views but today it has come to mean something different. Tolerance in the old sense had many positive features and its adherents have achieved much. It has:

Taught us to tolerate and listen to alternative perspectives than our own and even to learn from these alternatives perspectives.

Challenged us to be less racist; less biased against alternative sexual orientations; more committed to gender equality; more committed to equality of opportunity for those with disabilities or those who are older, a greater unwillingness to discriminate against indigenous people or those with a different skin colour and, above all in our context,

Opened us to be willing to listen to the views of other religious groupings.

These are important achievements and it is easy to forget the world of fifty years ago when tolerance was not prized and when it was not taken for granted. However the attractions of modern understandings of tolerance mask considerable dangers, as the god of tolerance has been taken over by a different and more sinister god - the god of relativism.

Relativism denies any single truth and when this god takes over, any view and any opinion is regarded as being as valuable as any other. Every opinion is to be valued, every alternative perspective is to be listened to and learnt from.

There is a major difference - about which our young people are often unaware - between:

RELATIVISM - which holds that every truth is deserving of equal respect and can be held to be equally valid, and
TOLERANCE - which accepts that there may be a single truth but encourages tolerance for alternative perspectives which may partially share this truth or even acceptance of those, in sincerity, who march to a different drummer and operate within a different framework. Tolerance encourages us to listen to others without compromising our own claims to truth.

You may wonder why I refer to the ‘god of tolerance’ and the ‘god of relativism’ - it is because ‘the gods’ cannot normally be questioned and, today, any who would challenge these gods are held up to ridicule or regarded as completely unacceptable. This may be my fate today.

Because tolerance has been taken over by relativism, young people feel that every view that they put forward is worthy of attention and respect and that all that matters is that they hold and express their own opinion. Indeed the right to express their own opinion and to have this validated and affirmed is a central part of the creed of the new god. We ask our young people “What do you think?’, “What is your opinion?’ about a whole range of issues but we often do not give them the tools to differentiate between thinking well and thinking badly. This is a major failure on our part.

Heraclitus was one of the great, pre-Socratic philosophers and he argued that the opinion of one good man is to be preferred to that of a thousand poor opinions. Heraclitus had no time for democracy and Plato may well have been influenced by him when he said that the best government would be that carried out by philosophers who were not self-interested and had been trained in the search for wisdom. We tend to assume today that majority opinion is necessarily right - after all everyone agrees that democracy is the best form of government. However when it comes to the search for wisdom and truth, then the opinion of the greatest number may well be a poor guide.

Increasingly some of our pupils refuse to think deeply or, indeed, fail to see the need to think at all - they have their opinions and their opinions are as good as anyone else’s so what need is there to think deeply? This is a pernicious and dangerous position and it indicates the rule of relativism disguised as tolerance. This represents an educational failure which we as teachers must address and which vitally affects the way world religions are taught.

This new god of relativism needs to be resisted and we need to stand up against it. It is one thing to listen respectfully to the views of others it is another thing to be willing to accept these views without examination of the arguments underlying them and without challenging their presuppositions and assumptions. We see this constantly in classrooms in attitudes to, for instance, sexual relationships, abortion, religious belief or, indeed, the point of human life. Each young person may express their own view and support it by whatever they can think of off the top of their head which would endorse the opinion they put forward. If the teacher says:

“Hold on a minute, lets evaluate this argument carefully and examine the presuppositions underneath it”

some pupils may feel threatened and, indeed, resent what they take to be criticism - yet it is precisely the ability to evaluate one’s own and other people’s arguments and to spot the difference between a good and a bad argument that philosophy - and, I would argue, good education - is concerned with.

This is one of the key principles that the ‘Five Strands’ approach to religious and values education has tried to enshrine - that young people need to think deeply and well and to do this they need to be educated. It is not something that comes naturally.

I work at an extraordinary institution in London called Heythrop College[3] - it is the specialist theology and philosophy college of the University of London and was founded by the Society of Jesus, the Jesuits, in 1614. The Jesuits are a Roman Catholic religious order and are often regarded as the most academic of all the Catholic religious orders. They had a rather poor reputation in previous generations amongst non Catholics and were sometimes regarded as the Pope’s shock troops. It takes at least ten years to train a Jesuit and involves at least two degrees, often in different languages. In 1969, the Jesuits decided that Heythrop should join the University of London - this was a surprising and brave decision - here is an institution which is the major apostolic work of the Society of Jesus in Britain and which receives A$3 million in funding each year from the Society as well as the major proportion of the Society’s best British manpower, yet it joined a secular university with all this means in terms of a total commitment to academic freedom. The Jesuits basically argued that Christianity is not afraid of a far reaching and tough-minded search for truth. They saw no reason to restrict Heythrop’s staff to Catholics or to require any undertaking at all from staff that they would teach in a certain way - all that they required was a commitment to the highest standards of philosophy and theology as would be expected from a full College of one of the world’s major universities. I suggest that this was bold and far-sighted as it indicated to the wider world that Christianity has nothing to fear from tough thinking and rigorous questioning. Tolerance rules in its best and old form in that there is a willingness to listen to alternative perspectives - but this is a long way from the relativism that has hijacked tolerance in many of our classrooms. It means that any or all ideas must be subject to rigorous scrutiny and examination and that students and staff must be willing to subject their own cherished assumptions to the toughest of challenges and questioning. This, I want to argue, is part of good education.