How would you define a 'religion'?

There is no universally agreed upon definition of religion. The approach one assumes towards religion often dictates the subsequent definition. Religion, in the liberal sociological or phenomenological tradition, most broadly refers to the ritual actions of a community which may or may not have a supernatural referent. The stress here is on the commitment of the practitioners as expressed in their social constructs and actions. The stress is not, however, on an evaluation of the truth of the religion: whether or not the supernatural exists. The stress is on description of human practice or construct as it pertains to human reality such as culture, psychology (meaning) and society. Another perspective in this 'science of religion' approach is to adopt a general thesis that all religions are expressions of an ultimate transcendental. The stress in this approach is to catalogue the local and culturally conditioned responses to that transcendental ultimate in order to find a common expression of the ultimate. The stress here is on prescription as it pertains to ultimate reality within human constructs. This was a fairly usual approach in many inter-faith dialogues until recently and can still be found. Both assume, whether in a substantial or functional manner, that religion is an expression of belief and behavior associated with a higher reality. The difference between the two positions is on the nature of that higher reality as real or an expression of human ritual. Five approaches can be identified in trying to understand this dialectical position: Religion as a corruption of an intrinsic religion of nature; as an objectification or projection of human feeling; as a product of socio-economic alienation; as a wish fulfillment; as a ritual within society; and finally, as human invention or idolatry.

Religion as a corruption of an original religion of nature is directly traceable to the Enlightenment and its confidence in human rationality. For many Enlightenment thinkers, religion (and here they almost exclusively think in terms of Judeo-Christian religion) was the 'husk' of a more pristine and deeper religion universally accessible to right-thinking individuals. The task of each person was to see through the 'husk' via reason in order to align with the truly universal (see Lessing pp 384-387) and in the process to jettison the 'superstition' that immobilized just such a quest. Of course, doctrines such as original sin (p 94) were targeted as they taught moral laxity with a fatalistic acceptance of human moral limitation. This brings into definition the common stresses in this position. First is the stress on religion as antithetical to morality, indicating that true religion is morally or ethically based. Subsequently, ritual or practice is rejected as being secondary to the quest of moral teaching, which is found within human nature and not without in a transcendental ultimate. This position minimizes particular manifestations of religious praxis, usually charging those practices as mere 'superstition'. Religious practice must then be reinterpreted in order to be made accessible as to its true meaning, independent of its historical conditions or even internal meaning. This last point remains salient to many contemporary philosophers of religion and is the bequest of the Enlightenment thinkers.

L. Feuerbach's assertion that religion is an objectification or projection of human feeling is a natural egress (pp 195-196) from the sub-point of the Enlightenment stress that what is central in religion is the subjective human experience. Feuerbach simply thought that what was predicated of divinity needs not to be explained in terms of a divine 'other' but can equally be expressed as merely human predicates. His claim is rooted in a theory of consciousness which states that to be 'conscious' (i.e. having knowledge) is to be aware of something, and that to be aware of human feelings is to externalize (make knowable) those feelings by projecting them onto a 'greater matrix' which is named the divine or God. God is the projection of all human fears and hopes. Of course, Feuerbach's thought is heavily influenced by the 'religious feeling' theology of Schleiermacher who held that religious feeling or piety was an expression of divinity within. Feuerbach simply asks the question, 'why must it be divinity within and not merely human nature itself'?

Feuerbach heavily influenced Karl Marx. The extension by Marx on Feuerbach is Marx's placement of religion as a human impulse or projection into a material context, the result of socioeconomic realities on human psyche and culture. As in Feuerbach, God is merely the 'reflection' of alienated human beings. In short, God is what we would desire, hope and aspire to be. Marx differs in that this alienation within human life is due to material socioeconomic forces, not forces of metaphysical angst or finitude. Religious people are people who have not found themselves, more specifically found themselves to be part of a socioeconomic system in capitalism that perpetuates human alienation. Unjust capitalism produces religion, which, in turn, continues to feed that very system and its growth. The Marxist stress on the material causes, and specifically non-liberating causes such as patriarchy, for religious activity has been taken up both by many liberation theologians and philosophers of religion. An important instance of the latter is the feminist or womanist critique of religion. The important general stress in this position, against Feuerbach, is that religion is the product of an unjust human culture over the Feuerbachian 'uttered sorrow of the soul'.

Another 'spin-off' of Feuerbach, albeit reinterpreted, is Sigmund Freud's assessment of religion as wish fulfillment. As with Feuerbach, Freud is keen to emphasize the existential aspect of religion, as the expression of human fear and longing, but relocates it to human development. Religion, accordingly, is the perpetuation of 'infantile' or 'adolescent' responses and fears projected onto God as our great Father. Of course, unlike his counterpart G Jung (who presents a much more inclusive and penetrating position in his collective unconscious theory), Freud's theory is heavily preoccupied with the Judeo-Christian form of religion and tends, therefore, to be reductionist and preoccupied with themes not shared with other world religions. To be religious is to remain arrested in one's development and interaction with the world. Freud's theory, at least to my mind, is seen mainly in popular culture and in caricatures of religious people therein. Conversely, the Jungian form remains a recognizable force in philosophies of religion that attempt to prescribe the meaning of rituals in terms of a common human essence.

Another variant from the Jungian form is Emil Durkheim's religion as a symbolic action of the values of a society. Durkheim marries the Feurbach-Marx split of internal-external forces by arguing that religion, particularly in rites and rituals, expresses the internal cohesion or commitments of a society in an external and positive manner. A key difference from Marx is that the external, while it may be antiquated and even organically evolving, is not negative to its practitioners but actually provides a key positive location for societal cohesiveness. Religion reflects the need to express the 'unstated' or even 'unconscious' values of the community. A strength of Durkheim's definition is that 'religion' can be described in non-traditional terms such as nationalism and non-faith based societies, clubs or affiliations. In a Durkheimian sense, 'baseball' or being 'American' can have religious tones with rites and symbols therein that express the values or aspirations of its membership. The true object of worship in a Durkheimian system is the society of membership engaged in a greater common praxis. The Durkheimian position is the one of the dominant approaches to contemporary philosophies of religion with its double stress on the internal-external axis and its affirmation of religious practice as valuable to human culture.

The final position in regard to religion is the theological critique given particular clarity by Karl Barth and Dietrich Bonhoeffer. This is treated below.

Why was Dietrich Bonhoeffer so attracted to the idea of a 'religionless Christianity'?

Barth and Bonhoeffer, following the Apostle Paul (Romans 1:18-25), stated that religion is a purely human construction understood as the attempt by humanity to find God on its terms - the making, in short, of an idol. What is important to note is that neither Barth nor Bonhoeffer reject religions per se but what they reject is the human attempt to construct a system of beliefs that restrict God's freedom to self-reveal. In particular, both were more concerned with the religion of Christianity than with other faiths and religion in general. What both rejected, and in reference to Christianity itself, was the sense that human institutions could be conflated with God in a direct manner. Barth varies from Bonhoeffer in assuming a more positive assessment of religion (but still needing critique from the gospel) as a 'necessary' limitation awaiting eschatological fulfilment. Bonhoeffer was more radical with his 'religionless Christianity', a topic of some debate and misinterpretation. For him, 'religionless Christianity' was a direct challenge to the supposition that humans had some intrinsic religious orientation as manifest in religious (Christian) culture. The experience of Nazi Germany demonstrated to Bonhoeffer, contrary to his own earlier thought, that there could be no neutral ground of human religiosity, even in religion itself. Instead, there was only grace and sin, God's self-revelation and human construction.

Bonhoeffer's 'religiousless Christianity' understood the chasm between God and human culture, even church culture, to be so extreme that no common ground between them could be found. The church as a community of grace and dependent on divine self-revelation was a categorically different place than that of any human construct. Human society was therefore hopelessly imbued with godlessness and the church should be a place of radical difference due to its origin outside of human construction. Bonhoeffer didn't advocate the dispersement of corporate Christian life or traditional Christian worship but rather reminded us that the nature of the church as elected and called by God is to mirror the Christ, who allowed himself to be 'pushed out of the world and on to the cross' in order to demonstrate God's true nature. Bonhoeffer's comment is a reflection on the willingness of the church to compromise its uniqueness in order to find itself an easier or acceptable place in human culture at the cost of its mission. Christianity, then, should be 'religionless' in that it should not heed the greater culture in order that it should be faithful to God's self-revelation in Christ.

Do all religions lead to God?

As western scholars began to dialogue and learn in earnest from non-western scholars of religion a surprising movement arose. This was the dethroning of a certain form of eurocentrism, usually well intended, that wanted to find commonality in the world's religions by finding a common theme in the quest for God. Implicit in this movement was the basic assumption that all religions lead to God, meaning 'valid expressions of God' and each particular manifestation was naught than a variation on a theme. However, further study ran counter to this pluralist assumption of a core religious reality that is expressed in terms of God or a higher being as described in either Hellenistic or Judeo-Christian terms. There are some major world religions, for example, such as Buddhism that clearly does not espouse any notion of a personal God or even a higher reality, seeking instead the nothingness of nirvana. Semantically speaking, all religions do not lead to God (especially understood in Judeo-Christian terms as a personal being (see p 549)) but the pluralist holds that all religions can point to a religious reality. The nature of this core reality, however, is disputed.

Some such as John Hick argue it to be a universal core expressing the will of the divine in drawing humans to the divine life intrinsic in all reality. Positive religions are contingent expressions of this insipid divine will or the 'Real'. Others such as Paul Knitter have recently jettisoned this view, being somehow a crypto-Christianity, in favour of a divine reality that is an expression of soteriocentrism in this world. In this case, what is the core of religious affinities is the human concern for others and the world in this life. This alone is the 'divine reality' and the only common place for inter-faith dialogue. Knitter's relocation from his early position that was similar to Hick is directly due to the awareness that there is no single essence of revelation common to all world faiths except that common goal of making human life more bearable. Ironically, the theologian has become, in form, a Durkheim adherent.

How helpful and persuasive do you find Karl Rahner's idea of an 'anonymous Christian'?

Karl Rahner's work is a majestic attempt to hold together two dialectical positions common in the inclusivist position. The inclusivist holds that Christianity is the absolute religion (or Christ is the means or mechanism of salvation) and thereby normative (in effect and essence) but also that salvation, due to God's universal will to save, is available to others outside Christianity due to historical placement or circumstance. Rahner's 'anonymous Christian' states that a faithful adherent to another world faith is saved by accepting what grace is manifest in that religion, transferred by the merits of Christ. In accepting the indigenous faith environment, regardless of its total relation to Christian revelation, the follower is accepting the proffered grace of God therein and thus the 'terms' of Christianity's by grace alone. Two major assumptions operate in Rahner's exposition.

First, Rahner is employing a theological understanding of God's relationship to the creation that stresses the continuity of God in creation, despite sin. Rahner's neo-Thomist 'transcendental method' (p 109) argues that within human experience there are points of contact with the transcendence of God to which Christian revelation gives additional shape and meaning but not form (the form is given in the Triune life and work of Christ even before creation). As all of human history or creation is the locus of divine play, and as Rahner's Trinitarian theology holds a correspondence of the Trinitarian inner life and economic work (p 327), it makes sense to think in terms that whatever kind of 'religious' experience one truly has, it is a manifestation of God as God really is in se. An adherent of a world faith outside Christianity in responding to their own 'religious unthematic' and whatever grace found in the actual religion therein is responding to the Triune God. To this theological proof is added a contextual proof in the history of Christianity itself. Rahner points out that his proposal is actually the manner by which the church has understood Judaism in regard to Christianity. Judaism is a religion in which Christians 'read' certain affinities and disregard other aspects while never discussing the salvific status of its practitioners, especially those in the Old Testament. Why not, Rahner concludes, extend the same courtesy (and theological foundation of limited but sufficient revelation) to other faiths?

Rahner's success in his proposal is both its honesty (especially in regard to Judaism) and its theological foundation, which is based on his understanding of the Trinity and the nature of religious experience. While some might contest the validity of his starting points on theological grounds, the sheer force of the argument in its complete scope is impressive. The usual criticism, nonetheless, against Rahner is not on his theological arguments, but on his implicit paternal attitude towards other world faiths. In essence, as John Hick argues, what Rahner does is to reduce all world faiths to various expressions of Christianity in a rather imperialistic manner. The faithful follower of Buddha or Krishna, it turns out, was really worshipping, albeit indirectly, Christ, it is argued. This is not to treat the other faiths as equals or even to grant the understanding of salvation that a follower is seeking is valid in itself, but rather to 'sneak' in Christianity with disregard for the intention of the adherent in practicing their faith. To combat this criticism Rahner did think that the practice of any faith was important in evoking the sense of transcendental love and common origin in God without the necessary need to make evaluations on the 'truth' of a non-Christian religion. Hick's criticisms that Rahner merely 'baptizes' other faiths lose some of their force in light of this movement towards acceptance of diversity in world faiths in favour of stressing the commonality of a mediation of grace common to all human expressions of the divine.

Why have ideas such as the resurrection and divinity of Christ proved to be such a hindrance to inter-faith dialogue? Is there a case for their elimination, in order to make such a dialogue more fruitful?

The issue at stake is best seen in the work of John Hick and especially his 1983 work Second Christianity. In this work Hick argues that in order to move the dialogue between world faiths forward, one must adopt a theocentric perspective over a Christocentric one. By theocentric Hick means to speak not of God in Christ but to reduce Christianity to shared commonalities of the 'Real' that are reflected in Christian themes albeit mixed or imperfectly. Christology becomes not the exclusive source of examination for revelation but another case of a mediated revelation of God, even if given a near normative status. Hick's Kantian distinction of essence and phenomenon drive his argument insisting that who God is can never be directly related to what we experience or know God as, even in the incarnation. God remains forever inaccessible to those needing to know God through mediate means. The divine essence is not open to scrutiny, even in the revelation of God in Christ as Triune. What religions are, then, are expressions of this always partial or indirect theocentric manifestation including Christianity. To begin with Christian understanding of revelation is to confuse the issue of priority and his Kantian method. The question remains, in spite of Hick, that Christian theology has always maintained the opposite point of view; namely that not only is Christ a revelation of God but that Christ is God. Hick's move to theocentrism is at the expense of Christocentrism, and finally looks nothing like Christianity with its claim that in the resurrection of Christ God has made the divine Self truly manifest.