The possibility of religious pluralism: a reply to Gavin D'Costa
(response to article in Religious Studies, vol. 32, 1996, p. 223)
John Hick
Religious Studies
Vol.33 No.2 (June 1997)
Pp.161-166
COPYRIGHT 1997 Cambridge University Press
In 'The Impossibility of a Pluralist View of Religions' (Religious
Studies 32, June 1996) Gavin D'Costa argues that 'pluralism must
always logically be a form of exclusivism and that nothing called
pluralism really exists' (225). He sees himself as doing a
'conceptual spring cleaning exercise' (225). However the result is
to obscure clear and useful distinctions by confused and confusing
ones. Some further spring cleaning is therefore called for.
The religious pluralism that D'Costa is referring to is the view
that the great world religions constitute conceptually and
culturally different responses to an ultimate transcendent reality,
these responses being, so far as we can tell, more or less on a par
when judged by their fruits. And the religious exclusivism to which
he refers holds that one particular religion - in his case
Christianity - is alone fully true and salvific, the others being
either wholly misleading, or inferior imitations of or inferior
approximations to the one 'true' religion(1).
To say that the former of these two views, religious pluralism, is a
version of the latter, religious exclusivism, would be so totally
implausible that this cannot be what D'Costa means. Even if we
banished the word 'pluralism' the two rival views would remain so
manifestly different that we would still need different names for
them.
D'Costa's real concern is, I think, that in distinguishing between,
on the one hand, those religious phenomena (Christianity, Judaism,
Islam, Hinduism, Sikhism, Buddhism, Taoism ...) that are held to be
different culturally conditioned responses to the Transcendent, and
on the other hand those religious, or quasi-religious, phenomena (he
cites Nazism and the Jim Jones cult) which are held not to be
responses to the Transcendent but products of individual or
collective egoism, the pluralist is obviously using a criterion; and
D'Costa's thesis is that to use a criterion is to be an exclusivist.
For in operating with a criterion one is accepting something and
rejecting something else; and this is what D'Costa choses to mean by
exclusivism. 'I want to suggest,' he says, 'that there is no such
thing as pluralism 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'
(226).
That religious pluralists do employ criteria is certainly true, even
though D'Costa at one point slips into saying that 'Hick holds that
all religions are paths to the "Real"' (227, my italics). The main
criterion is whether a movement is a context of human transformation
from natural self-centeredness to a new orientation centered in the
Transcendent, this salvific transformation being expressed in an
inner peace and joy and in compassionate love for others. (More
about where this criterion come from presently.) But to think that
using criteria, as such, constitutes exclusivism, although
intelligible in a purely notional and trivial sense, is much more
misleading than helpful. In this trivial and misleading sense one is
an exclusivist when one admires Mahatma Gandhi and the Dalai Lama
but condemns Hitler and Stalin; or when an umpire declares a foul in
football; or even when one distinguishes between left and right, or
night and day, or makes such an innocent statement as that it is
raining! For to make an assertion about anything is to deny its
contrary, and to propose a theory or view about anything is to
reject alternative views. But to label all judgments, all proposing
of theories and hypotheses, all expressions of opinion, as
exclusivist would be to empty the term of any useful meaning. For
there could then be no non-exclusivist statements, so that the term
would cease to mark any distinction. We can hardly suppose that
D'Costa means to affirm the self-destructive principle that to use
criteria is to be an exclusivist.
But in the special field of religion, when we hold that such
religious and quasi-religious movements as Nazism, which set out to
exterminate the Jewish race, or (on a much smaller scale) the
Peoples' Temple of the 1978 Jonestown mass suicide, or the Branch
Davidians of the 1993 Waco massacre, or the Order of the Solar
Temple of the 1994 Swiss mass suicide, or the Aum Shin Rikyo cult
which put sarin nerve gas in the Tokyo underground system in 1995,
are not authentic human responses to God/the Divine/the Dharma/the
Real/the Transcendent, are we perhaps being exclusivist in a more
substantial sense? It is of course possible to use the term in this
very extended way; but it would in my view be confusing and
unhelpful to do so. For it would obscure the important distinction
between, on the one hand, claiming that one's own religion is the
only 'true' religion, for which 'exclusivism' is surely the natural
descriptive term(2) and, on the other hand, the idea that there is a
plurality of 'true' religions, for which 'pluralism' is surely the
natural descriptive term. Gavin D'Costa and others will still want
to argue against this latter position, and rather than having to
invent a new name for it, would it not be more sensible to continue
to use the established name?
However D'Costa believes that he is making a logical point:
'pluralism', he says, 'operates within the same logical structure as
exclusivism' (226). But in fact religious exclusivism and religious
pluralism are of different logical kinds, the one being a
self-committing affirmation of faith and the other a philosophical
hypothesis.(3) The hypothesis is offered as the best available
explanation, from a religious as distinguished from a naturalistic
point of view, of the data of the history of religions. Pluralism is
thus not another historical religion making an exclusive religious
claim, but a meta-theory about the relation between the historical
religions. Its logical status as a second-order philosophical theory
or hypothesis is different in kind from that of a first-order
religious creed or gospel. And so the religious pluralist does not,
like the traditional religious exclusivist, consign non-believers to
perdition, but invites them to try to produce a better explanation
of the data.
D'Costa has not taken note of this basic point. He asks, 'how does
John Hick know that the Real is beyond all language, incapable of
any description' (229). The answer of course is that he does not
know this. He is offering an hypothesis to explain how it is that
the great world religions, with their different concepts of the
Ultimate, nevertheless seem to be equally effective (and of course
also equally ineffective) contexts of the salvific human
transformation.
With this clarification we can now take up the legitimate question
that D'Costa raises. When we judge that Nazism, the Peoples' Temple,
the Branch Davidians, the Order of the Solar Temple, and the Aum
Shin Rikyo cult, are not authentic responses to the
Divine/Ultimate/Real, where did we get the criterion which entitles
us to say this?
The answer is very simple; but before coming to it I must point to a
regrettable misrepresentation which has crept into D'Costa's
article. D'Costa professes to see 'an ambiguity as to how Hick would
answer this question' (228), an ambiguity between thinking of the
Ultimate as a personal deity and thinking of it as an ineffable
transcendent reality ('the Real') to which, because it is ineffable,
the personal/impersonal distinction does not apply.(4) The two
different ideas of the Ultimate as a divine Person, and as an
ineffable Reality that cannot be described as either personal or
impersonal, both occur in my writings, the theistic view in writings
in the 1970s and those embodying the concept of the Real in the
1980s and 90s, the latter being presented as an explicit departure
from the former position. However D'Costa suggests that 'in parts of
An Interpretation of Religion (1989)' (228) 'Hick's incipient theism
leaks out' (229), so that the two incompatible positions are held
simultaneously and there is thus ambiguity as to which is intended.
He does not say which parts of An Interpretation he thinks embody a
theistic view, and in fact there are none. There is no 'incipient
theism' in the book; and to treat an earlier position, and a later
one which replaces it, as jointly constituting an ambiguity is as
inappropriate as it would be to say that D'Costa's position is
ambiguous because in his present article he renounces an earlier
view for which he had previously argued!
Returning from this corrective we come to the question of the source
of the criterion by which we judge Nazism, the Order of the Solar
Temple, etc. not to be authentic responses to the
Divine/Ultimate/Real. The answer is that this criterion is a basic
moral insight which Christians have received from Christian
teachings, Jews from Jewish teachings, Muslims from Islamic
teachings, Hindus from Hindu teachings, Buddhists from Buddhist
teachings, and so on. And within the terms of the pluralistic
hypothesis this criterion represents the basic moral consensus of
all the great world faiths. The Golden Rule, in which this basic
consensus is encapsulated, is common to (in historical order)
Hinduism, Judaism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Taoism, Zoroastrianism,
Christianity and Islam.(5)
But why select these particular traditions in the first place,
rather than Satanism, Nazism, the Order of the Solar Temple, etc.,
as providing the right criterion? The answer arises out of the route
by which the pluralistic hypothesis is arrived at. It starts from
the basic faith that religious experience is not purely imaginative
projection but is also (whilst including such projection) a
cognitive response to a transcendent reality. The hypothesis is thus
explicitly a religious interpretation of religion, and as such it
originates within a particular religious tradition - in my own case
Christianity. As a Christian, then, one accepts that the sense of
the presence of God within the Christian community is indeed an
awareness of a divine presence; and one sees as confirmation of this
the self-evidently valuable and desirable 'fruit of the Spirit'
which St Paul listed as 'love, joy, peace, patience, kindness,
goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control' (Galatians 5: 22).
It is important to recognize that religious experience and its
fruits in life cohere together; for if the fruits in this case were
hatred, misery, aggression, unkindness, impatience, violence and
lack of self-control this would lead us to deny the authenticity of
the experience.
One then becomes aware that there are other great religious
traditions within which people conceive and experience the
Divine/Ultimate/Real differently, but the moral and spiritual fruits
of which nevertheless seem to be essentially similar to those of
Christian faith and experience. And so one extends to them the basic
faith that their religious experience also is a cognitive response
to a transcendent reality.
At this point, it would be possible to see the theistic traditions
as responses to different deities, Christians responding to the Holy
Trinity, Jews to Adonai, Muslims to Allah, theistic Hindus to Vishnu
or to Shiva, and so on. But on reflection such a polytheism,
although theoretically possible, creates more problems than it
solves. Does the Holy Trinity preside over Christian countries,
Allah over Islamic countries, Vishnu and Shiva over different parts
of India? And what about the increasing number of places in which
more than one religion is practised? In the city of Birmingham,
England, for example, does the Holy Trinity answer prayers in
Edgbaston, but Allah in Small Heath, the war guru of the Sikh faith
in parts of Handsworth and Vishnu in other parts of Handsworth? And
when we enlarge our vision to take account of the non-theistic
faiths, particularly Buddhism, the problem is multiplied.
And so if we are looking for the most reasonable, the least
problem-prone, explanation of the data, the pluralistic hypothesis
offers itself as an obvious solution. The process of reasoning which
I have described from a Christian point of view is also of course
appropriate for adherents of any other of the world religions who
are also philosophers seeking to understand our global human
situation in relation to the Transcendent.
One further point. Possibly the real heart of D'Costa's concern is
that according to the pluralistic hypothesis the claim made in
varying degrees by each of the great religions to embody the full
and final truth, and to be in that respect uniquely superior to all
other religions, has to be modified. Thus the pluralist theory
denies an aspect of the self-understanding of each faith in so far
as each sees itself as having the only fully authentic revelation or
enlightenment. D'Costa is very critical of this. But people who live
in glass houses shouldn't throw stones! Has it escaped D'Costa's
notice that he also contradicts the self-understanding of every
religion except his own? If Muslims or Hindus or Buddhists etc.
think that their tradition has the final truth, D'Costa confidently
holds that they are mistaken. His difference from a religious
pluralist is that he regards his own tradition as the sole exception
to the general principle that claims to be the one and only 'true'
religion are mistaken! But whilst the difference between religious
pluralism and religious exclusivism is, in their logical structure,
as narrow as this, there is still an important difference in their
religious outlooks and practical outworkings.
I have been replying here to D'Costa's attack upon what he calls
'philosophical pluralism'. But this is not really distinct from what
he calls' practical or pragmatic pluralism', as is clear from the
discussion above about the moral criterion. Paul Knitter's
distinctive contribution (with which I am fully in agreement) is to
stress the liberative social and political aspects of this. There
are good answers to the questions that D'Costa raises about this
also, but the present response is already long enough.
Institute for Advanced Research in the Humanities, University of
Birmingham, Edgbaston, Birmingham, B15 2TT
1 D'Costa presents himself in this article as an exclusivist when he
says that inclusivism (which he has previously advocated) and
pluralism are both 'sub-types of exclusivism' (225).
2 There is however now a difference within the camp of those who
hold that Christianity is the only true religion. Some (such as
Alvin Plantinga, 'Pluralism: A Defense of Religious Exclusivism' in
Thomas D. Senor, ed., The Rationality of Belief and the Plurality of
Faith, Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1995) continue
to speak of themselves as Exclusivists, whilst others (such as
Alister McGrath in Dennis Ockholm and Timothy Phillips, eds., More
Than One Way? Four Views on Salvation in a Pluralistic World, Grand
Rapids, Michigan: Zondervan, 1995), perhaps feeling that
'exclusivist' sounds unattractive to many people today, now call
themselves Particularists.
3 The relevant chapter in my An Interpretation of Religion (London:
Macmillan, and New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989) is called
'The Pluralistic Hypothesis'.
4 D'Costa describes my position as 'transcendental agnosticism'
(228). But it is a mistake to equate the concept of ineffability
with agnosticism. Agnosticism in this context is the view that the
Ultimate is either personal or non-personal but we don't know which.
That the Ultimate is ineffable means that it is beyond the scope of
our human conceptual systems, including the personal/impersonal
dichotomy.
5 For supporting details see An Interpretation of Religion, chap.
17, section 5.