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Honors’ Class for Comparative Religions – Spring Semester, Los Medanos College

Dr. Peter Krey

Course Introduction, January 18^th through 20^th, 2005.

The ecumenical movement brought many Christians from different traditions together. Many times the police did it, New York’s finest, by picking us clergy up in their vans to bring us to their meetings dealing with intractable city problems. When Rabbis and Imams were also present, it was an inter-faith meeting. When only Christians were gathered, then it was ecumenical.^[1]

In one meeting, a lay leader, i.e., non-clergy, compared the church to a coffee: “Chock full o‘ Nuts.” We all laughed. He later ran off with the treasury.

In that ecumenical meeting, hearing Greek Orthodox and Roman Catholic priests and Protestant clergy talk, it occurred to me that they were representatives of former Greek and Roman empires whose values their churches continued to keep alive. I later came upon this thought in Thomas Hobbes:

…if a man consider the original of this great ecclesiastical dominion, he will easily perceive that the papacy is no other than the ghost of the deceased Roman Empire, sitting crowned upon the grave thereof.^[2]

But to be associated too closely to the secular time seems to some to take away human freedom. Why not live out of previous cultures in present circumstances, if the values cherished are positive?

Reinhold Niebuhr speaks of the need for personal or individual transcendence in several of his books. Why not live in Western culture out of Eastern values? Why not be Caucasian and live out of an African-American ethos, or vice versa? Some people are even in the body of a man, but want to live out of the life of a woman, or vice versa. They sometimes even surgically and with the help of hormonal treatments change their bodies to transcend or change their gender into the opposite one.

Reinhold Niebuhr is far more conservative and does not refer to what is happening here on the gender edge of our world. But he says:

Part of the anatomy of human self-hood is to be able to stand beyond and outside himself and his communities^[3]

Niebuhr means that a human being has to be free to transcend the given community s/he is part of. Religions may provide ways to participate in such freedom. He speaks about the “transcendent dimension within the human soul“ in one of his later books.^[4]

His concept of transcendence helps me, a practicing and deeply rooted Christian of the Lutheran Denomination, as traditions are called here, to learn about and understand other religions. But the same concept also more basically explains why many people feel unfulfilled, duck-taped to and caught in, an impersonal, depersonalizing secular order.

Niebuhr also provides a criterion for determining whether religion is positive of negative in the place just cited:

It was a mistake of the religious ages to regard the religious dimension^[5] as good in itself and an equal mistake of the secular age to regard it as purely the source of evil. It can be both destructive and creative. It is creative when an ultimate norm or value is set in judgment over the historically relative and ambiguous achievements of [hu]man existence. It is destructive and a source of evil if a simple identification is made between the ultimate norm and the norms and values, which we cherish.^[6]

The longer compass and the gyroscopes of stability – (gyroscopes are used to stabilize ships) – are sometimes provided by religions to people and cultures. What about states? Question: What happens when the deep cultural strain is merged with the state? In secularism, the state can co-opt and compromise religion and in clericalism, religion can co-opt and compromise the state.

Often we fear to study other religions because we are afraid our own beliefs and convictions will become undermined. The concept of transcendence can also help us here. We are free to investigate other religions and do not have to forsake our rooted-ness in our own religion. It even becomes our experience that it takes knowing other religions to understand our own.

We can investigate different religions from many different scholarly stand-points:

***phenomenology of religions: the source of religion is an encounter with the holy, {Rudolf Otto (1869-1937)} and the holy is the numinous, while the manifestations by which religions display themselves are their phenomenology. The religious phenomena that undergo rigorous descriptive observation and analysis (via Edmund Husserl’s method) are authentic records, (sacred texts, symbols and doctrine), (piety, social structure, and their idea of the holy), historic settings, career of the founder, saint, or philosopher. Thus the phenomenology of religion is the objective analysis of religious essence (the numinous) as it displays itself on the world stage.^[7] “Religious phenomenology demonstrates the primitive, folk, and world religions live through the stress and strain of interaction with law and ethics. They are quickened through ritual, social change, and historical interpenetrations.“^[8]

***Comparative religions: religions studied side by side and compared to highlight their similarities and differences. “Only what has been understood can be compared.“^[9] Seeing the ways that various religions solve the same social and historical problems confronting human beings help bring out the particular nature or essence of each one. For such a study of religions to succeed one needs sympathy for things that are religious, personal religious experience, and impartiality.^[10] Actually to understand a religion an inner participation and commitment are also a prerequisite.^[11] For example in comparing religions, the teachings of one are often compared with the reality of another; but doctrine ought only be compared with doctrine, ideal with ideal, and reality with reality.^[12]

***the history of religions: a religion can be studied as it progresses and changes through history, from its founding to it most modern manifestations. In doing so, the historian does not need to limit his or her study to one religion, but can trace the origins and interactions of the world religions, starting with the most ancient e.g., the Hindu, to the latest, e.g., Islam, or Protestantism, if you will. (Karl Jaspers has an Axial Theory of religions, where Protestantism – with Luther and the Reformation -is considered an early modern breakthrough into the numinous after Confucius, Buddha, Moses, Socrates, and Mohammed.)

***the sociology of religions: Robert Bellah theorizes that

there are three approaches to religion:

1) the cognitive propositional

2) the expressive experiential

Using a Noam Chomsky expression, there is a deep structure to all religions and there are surface structures. (Perhaps phenomenology of religion tries to get at this distinction with the numinous and the phenomenal.)

3) the cultural linguistic

Religion is a whole way of life, according to Robert Bellah. Learning religion is like learning a language with a whole grammar into which one is inducted over a long period of time. Religion is a system of beliefs and practices relative to the sacred, creating a moral community. This moral community is critical. Private religion violates moral community. [A constant theme of Bellah.] Bellah’s definition of religion marginalizes private religion.

See a sample lecture of Robert Bellah using a cultural-linguistic approach: “Being- and Deficiency-consciousness.“

***the theology of religions: such a study views other religions from a Christian theological stand-point, pointing out that a scientific approach to religion is doomed to miss the essence of religions. Schlette argues there is special sacred history and general sacred history of the non-Christian religions and they are willed and sanctioned by God with their negative as well as positive elements. They encounter God’s divine guidance and presence and are embraced in God’s universal salvific will. The non-Christian religions are ways of salvation, while the Christians walk the extraordinary way, whose election is for the sake of other religions. Christianity is not a superior way of salvation, but an epiphany for other religions. The ways lead through the darkness into the way through clear light. (I might add to Schlette that some of Christianity still needs to muddle its way into clearer light as do other religions.) Schlette presents an interesting way of one religion affirming the participation of the other religions in salvation history.

***anthropology of religions: the many methods used by this discipline make such a study unwieldy. Interestingly enough, one study speaks of making a “hiérography” of a religion, much the way anthropologists do an ethnography of a culture.^[13]

***Philosophy of Religions: religions as grist for the mill of metaphysics, except that the truth question would be unavoidable, where other “scientific” studies might avoid evaluation by attempting neutrality.

I wonder if there is a psychology of religions and which one of you might write it from a Jungian or Freudian perspective.