The Meeting of Religions and the Trinity

Review of Gavin D’Costa’s The Meeting of Religions and the Trinity

One of the inevitable results of globalization and the ever-increasing interface of the world’s disparate cultures has been a culture of de facto religious pluralism in many areas in which a single religious tradition has historically dominated. As the fact of pluralism has increasingly set into the global consciousness and heterogeny replaces long-standing cultural and religious homogeny, philosophers and theologians of every major tradition have sought to wrestle with the shifting “facts on the ground.” Some thinkers, not only Buddhist, Hindu and other traditions, but Christian theologians as well, have sought to take this de facto pluralism and turn it into a de jure pluralistic theology of religions, requiring the adaptation and conformity of historical forms of the world’s religions to what they perceive to be the new paradigm of normative pluralism.

Against this culture of normative pluralism, Gavin D’Costa’s The Meeting of Religions and the Trinity seeks to name and address the tensions and internal breakdowns of different pluralisms that claim to affirm the validity of all religions. D’Costa defines a religious pluralist as one who holds that
all religions (with qualifications) lead to the same divine reality; there is no privileged self-manifestation of the divine; and finally, religious harmony will follow if tradition-specific (exclusivist) approaches which allegedly claim monopoly over the truth are abandoned in favor of pluralist approaches which recognize that all religions display the truth in differing ways. (19)[1]

This work is a stridently postmodern[2] reaction against Enlightenment-inspired pluralistic Christian theologies of religions. Grounding himself firmly in the tradition of post-Vatican II Roman Catholicism, D’Costa launches an incisive critique of several different forms of religious pluralism, ultimately concluding that each in its own way collapses into some variety of exclusivism. Along the way, he questions the adequacy of the three-fold typology of theologies of religions (exclusivism, inclusivism, and pluralism), so prevalent since Alan Race’s 1983 Christians and Religious Pluralism, suggesting that the latter two cannot but help but collapse into the first. Finally, in a rhetorical coup de grâce, D’Costa attempts to turn the perceived “openness,” “tolerance,” and “equality” of pluralism on its head by demonstrating (1.) religious pluralisms fail to deliver on these lofty liberal aims due to a number of unarticulated assumptions and internal contradictions, and (2.) that trinitarian orthodoxy can better deliver pluralism’s stated goals than can pluralism itself. In this essay, we will offer first an overview D’Costa’s nuanced argument, followed by an evaluation of its main strengths and weaknesses. In the interest of brevity, we must largely pass over his analysis of the neo-Hindu pluralism of Sir Sarvapelli Radhakrishnan and the Tibetan Buddhist “pluralist-exclusivism” of the Dalai Lama to focus more fully on D’Costa’s deconstruction of Hick and Knitter’s Christian pluralism.

Chapter One takes up the task of critically examining the Christian and Jewish pluralisms of John Hick, Paul Knitter, and Dan Cohn-Sherbok. Each of these thinkers, who themselves are located within an exclusivist tradition, attempts to articulate a genuinely pluralist theology of religions. D’Costa’s main line of criticism in this section is that while each of these theologians stresses the need for a non-tradition-specific approach to theology of religions, their own approaches are actually dominated by a single tradition-specific context: Enlightenment modernism. The metanarrative of the Enlightenment, D’Costa argues, is as inherently exclusivist as is the Christocentric metanarrative it seeks to displace, even while it stridently denies this charge. These three theologians have effectively abandoned the exclusivism of their Christian and Jewish tradition in favor of the new exclusivism narrated by the Enlightenment project.

Hick’s Enlightenment assumptions sneak through clearly at several points: First, in seeking to unseat Christ from the center of a religious worldview, Hick is forced to decenter the incarnation, reinterpreting it mythologically[3] until Christology becomes an ethical “ought” rather than a doctrinal claim of fact. D’Costa comments: “This instrumentalist view is a child of modernity, in so much as the ontological claims of religions are negated, and religion's only usefulness lies in its ethical force, which is possible to replicate without the particular trappings of religion” (25). Second, Hick applies this same demythologizing strategy in his consideration of all other religions, denying any truth to their ontological claims. This is a thoroughly Kantian move, severing any connection between human language and the divine reality it purports to describe. Third, in denying the truth of the religious language of each tradition, Hick has committed himself to an ontological agnosticism. In doing so, he “seems to ignore or deny the really difficult conflicting truth claims by, in effect, reducing them all to sameness: i.e., they are all mythological assertions” (27), thus denying their ontological validity even while claiming he affirms it! Fourth, Hick cites the Golden Rule as an example of an ethical precept that is common to all religions. As Hick narrates it, it is traditionless, contextless, and divorced from the nuances and sources which impact its interpretation and application within a given religious community. This is, in effect, doing ethics for everyone by ignoring their particular convictions and tradition-specific religious and moral formation, a thoroughly Enlightenment project.

D’Costa’s analysis of Paul Knitter’s proposals reveals modernistic tendencies that can be similarly enumerated. First, unlike Hick, Knitter begins his proposal with ethics, only moving on to theoretical doctrinal formulation afterwards. D’Costa notes that this approach "is wedded to the Enlightenment project begun by Kant, such that a universal ethical imperative is prioritized over metaphysics and religion” (30). Second, like Hick, Knitter seeks to establish a universal ethic by noting suffering and eco-balance as “unmediated primary universals” (31), and that therefore, everyone regardless of context or tradition is subject to the same ethical “ought.” Third, Knitter cites approvingly the 1992 interreligious earth summit’s findings that science has provided us with a universal, transcultural creation myth that should displace the creation myths of the various religions. In seeking to establish an interreligious universal creation story, Knitter has denied the validity of other tradition-specific foundational myths while promoting that of his own exclusivist tradition- liberal modernity. Fourth and finally, Knitter believes that dialogue, another of his universal imperatives, is threatened by traditional Christian claims of constitutive Christology. Thus, constitutive Christology (regardless of its ontological truth or falsity!) must be rejected for the sake of dialogue. D’Costa summarizes: “This may very likely mean that only modern liberals within the religious traditions are allowed to participate in Knitter's global dialogue table, for if they are not modern liberals, then they are a ‘threat to dialogue’” (37, emphasis original).

In Dan Cohn-Sherbok, D’Costa finds a very rare breed- a Jewish pluralist. Cohn-Sherbok rejects traditional Jewish inclusivism and exclusivism, saying that a loving God cannot have a favorite and chosen people. He also believes that pluralism is the next step in the inevitable evolution of Jewish theology, a conviction that squares firmly with the Enlightenment myth of progress. D’Costa points out that his Jewish pluralism looks just like Hick's Christian pluralism- because they both emerge from the same tradition with same assumptions and goals- modernity. In this, D’Costa sees further evidence that the project of modernist pluralism is not “Christian” in any real sense, since it is entirely transferable to any other religious tradition.

By way of summary, D’Costa notes helpfully that there is no such thing as a non-tradition-specific religious truth claim, no matter how fervently pluralists may protest:
All criteria are tradition-specific and the more general their expression (hiding their particularity), the less helpful they are to adjudicate in conflicts; and the more specific their expression, the more clearly tradition-specific they are and therefore fail in their job of ‘impartial’ adjudication. (42)

For D’Costa, the ultimate irony that belies the claims of tolerance of the pluralists is that they are rather intolerant of the various forms of orthodox belief- no matter the religious tradition.

In Part II, D’Costa begins the explication of his own constructive proposal. He seeks to demonstrate “that a trinitarian meta-narrative does a very good job at narrating an unfinished story regarding other religions, while also allowing other religions their own voice” (92), and granting greater openness, toleration, and equality (albeit in a transformed way) than does liberal modernistic pluralism. The first step in this argument is a survey of Roman Catholic Church documents from the Second Vatican Council and the years which followed in order to see whether and to what extent other religions are affirmed as “vehicles of salvation.” In consistently keeping with his case from Part I that all religious claims are tradition-specific, D’Costa is unapologetically writing from his Roman Catholic tradition, with no illusions that the documents he cites are binding on those who do not share his theological convictions or are not formed by his Catholic trinitarian tradition.

The results of this survey are three-fold: in Church documents, D’Costa notes (1.) a positive affirmation of the Holy Spirit’s presence and transforming action within other religions, (2.) “This affirmation leads neither to pluralism which grants equal status to the religions, nor to inclusivism, in affirming structures per se, even if in a provisional sense” (116), and (3.) this affirmation is specifically nuanced by a trinitarian ecclesiology that does not divorce Spirit from Christ, for example (as the heavily pneumatological pluralisms of Hick and Knitter often do), and that the trinitarian symbols of Father, Son, and Spirit are always “ecclesiastical grammar” (i.e. directly tied to Christian theology and church), even when used of revelation outside the church.
Expanding on this third point, D’Costa exegetes the “Paraclete” passages of John’s gospel, finding in them further affirmation that Christian ethics, and consequently Christian theologies of religions, cannot be divorced from the narrative-specific context which gives them their distinctive form. He notes one such place where Christian praxis is rooted directly in the praxis of the incarnate Lord himself: the new commandment to love one another as Jesus has loved his disciples (John 13:34, although the examples could be multiplied). Grounded specifically in the narrative context of what Jesus has done, with specific reference to what he is about to do in the cross,
this love is no abstract idea or general theory of theism, but a specific set of practices found in the person of Jesus. The commandment to love is therefore not an ideological egalitarian principle which can be translated without this particular narrative, in the way that nineteenth-century liberal Christianity exegeted its moral gospel, and continues to do so as we have seen in chapter one. Rather, this love has both its source and shape in the "person" of Jesus, God's gift to the world- apart from whom God's love is not known. Such are the implications of a constitutive Christology. (119)

Likewise, this narrative context also bears fruit in our conception of who God is. D’Costa notes, summarizing the Johannine tradition “God who is love, cannot be other than personal” (122). An impersonal god cannot be love, for love is a relational, personal action. One cannot have a "relationship" with the cosmos, but one can have a relationship with the Creator of the cosmos.

From here, D’Costa builds off his Johannine exegesis to articulate the truly remarkable portion of his theology. (1.) Since talk of Spirit is only properly related to ecclesial reality in the church, “we must be extremely reticent about any abstract talk of the ‘Spirit in other religions,’” (128) for this would be almost nonsensical in Johannine terms. The Holy Spirit's presence is an intra-Christian claim, not a universalizable, contextless meta-theological claim. (2.) The question of "revelation" in other religions is therefore a “bogus question,” because the resurrection, for John, means that all such questions are misleading due to “a false understanding of time and history” (129). All creation, time and history are taken up and transformed in the reality of the “new creation” inaugurated by Jesus. Jesus is the metahistorical agent who “makes all things new” in the new creation. Thus, there can be no “new revelation” apart from Jesus within this new reality, for Jesus is the new reality itself. (3.) When we “observe” the likeness of Jesus in other religions, this is part of what it means to say that the Holy Spirit is present in the world and in the “other.” This “facilitates an open and generous enjoyment of the ‘good lives’ found within other religions; indeed to such an extent that Christians might even colloquially us the word "saint" of a non-Christian”(130). (4.) “So much as the Spirit is present in the world, then the world can be challenged on account of the elements of truth it might already hold, and these elements, when incorporated into Christian articulations and practice, serve to once more give praise to the triune God,” although this must be done with careful discernment (130). (5.) Saying that the Spirit is present in the lives of non-Christians “is both a judgment upon the church and a sign of promise to the church” (130.) As a judgment, it challenges us to live up to the reality of what we've been called to do and be in a way that we as the church have not. We may see, through the virtuous lives of non-Christians, how we have been ensnared by darkness. It's a promise because in being open and attentive to the Holy Spirit, we grow in our own relationships with God and with those of other religions. (6.) Despite the above, we must not uncritically baptize all Christ-like things we see in others. But we must remain radically open to the implications of it- implications which remain both ecclesiological and trinitarian. (7.) “John's theology of the spirit drives us even further to explore any such affirmations of the Spirit's presence in other religions” (131).

From this suggestive train of thought, D’Costa goes on in Chapter 5 to address a pastoral concern that has come to the forefront of the minds of many Christians in recent years thanks to the increasing plurality of religions we noted earlier: interreligious prayer. D’Costa asks whether interreligious prayer is like “marital infidelity”; that is to say, by praying with (say) Muslims or Hindus, are we betraying our first love, Jesus Christ? The discussion in this chapter is variously boldly experimental, cautiously optimistic, riskingly loving, and attentively faithful. The nuances and intricacies of his argument are too much to explicate in depth here, but D’Costa’s summary is well worth reading and considering:
I have been suggesting that plunging into the love of the triune God may well cause us to risk finding an even greater love of God through interreligious prayer, and into discovering the darkness and mystery of God afresh. Our marriage to our Lord, may itself suffer infidelity in an absolute resistance to the promptings of suffering love which might entail interreligious prayer. But equally, interreligious prayer may also be an act of irreverent infidelity. The church is called to pray fervently for those who engage in interreligious prayer for the sake of Christ. All I have sought to suggest is that under certain conditions such a risk in some circumstances is more than worthwhile; indeed it is a risk that Jesus' reckless love calls us to take. (166)

Whether or not one agrees with D’Costa’s conclusions on interreligious prayer, his approach is extraordinarily careful and nuanced, balancing fidelity to the Lord on one hand and the radical gospel impulse of personal identification with the religious “other” on the other hand. It is at once somewhat unsettling, yet extremely refreshing.

We turn now to an evaluation of D’Costa’s entire project. Overall, D’Costa’s rhetorical argument shows remarkable cohesiveness and clarity. The premises of the various chapters flow smoothly from one to another into the practical application chapter on interreligious prayer (which is admittedly somewhat unresolved and messy, for it touches on a topic in which no clarity can ultimately be defined between the various theological antinomies). D’Costa’s main argument, that there is ultimately no such thing as genuine pluralism (or inclusivism, for that matter), is clear, logical, and convincing. In perhaps the strongest part of the book, he shows that all religious thought is tradition-specific and exclusivist, including the liberal Enlightenment tradition which claims to be independent of culture and tradition, but which in the final analysis is every bit as exclusivist in its own way as traditional Christian claims about Jesus Christ. The rhetorical turn promoting the openness, toleration, and equality of trinitarian ontological theology stands these classic pluralist values on their head, effectively showing that where Christian pluralism fails to deliver on these promised virtues, trinitarian theology succeeds- but it transforms them: "Openness" becomes "taking history seriously," "tolerance" becomes "qualified establishment of civil religious freedom for all on the basis of revelation and natural law," "Equality" becomes the "equal and inviolable dignity of all persons," with no a priorism on questions of truth per se within the religions when renarrating these three terms (101).

D’Costa’s background makes him well-qualified to making this critique of pluralism. An ethnic Indian Roman Catholic, D’Costa was born in Kenya, but studied in Great Britain and now teaches at Bristol University. This diverse background makes him well-suited to understanding and appropriating the Enlightenment project because he has lived in both Western and non-Western cultures, and the sophistication of his analysis is evidently enhanced by the eclectic worldview influences to which he has been exposed. Hence, his critique of pluralism is more effective than would be one written by a theologian without significant experience living in an alien culture and immersed in a foreign worldview.
Finally, two of D’Costa’s more creative observations are important enough to warrant further highlighting: his discussion of constitutive Christology versus representational Christology on page 36, and his point that an assumption central to the Enlightenment project, the idea that God cannot (or does not) reveal Godself in the particular and concrete, is at the heart of “Christian” pluralism. Responding to Paul Knitter’s complaint about the Catholic Church clinging tenaciously to a constitutive Christology, D’Costa writes
Perhaps one reason why mainstream Roman Catholic theology has not opened itself to adopting a representative Christology is because it recognizes that this would be a departure from the fact that the Christian tradition takes its orientation from the trinitarian God disclosed in the narratives of the early church regarding the person of Jesus Christ and the community that he formed and that helped form him.... Jesus does not “represent” God, bit “is” God's very self-revelation as triune… (The) signifier in this unique case, is the signified.

A constitutive Christology, grounded in the tradition-specific narratives of the Christian church, is the essential difference between historic orthodox Christianity, and the exclusivist-pluralisms that claim the Christian tradition as their own. These pluralisms, D’Costa notes elsewhere, assume that God’s revelation is never specific, or in the historical particular. These two observations are interconnected- a denial of revelation in the particular ultimately leads to a denial of a constitutive Christology that holds up Jesus as the Word made flesh, the fullest revelation of God this side of the eschaton- and together form another vitally important part of D’Costa’s case for trinitarian theology.

The book is not without its flaws, however. First, while the depth of D’Costa’s treatment of Christian, Jewish, Hindu, and Buddhist pluralisms is rich and incisive, the breadth of this coverage is lacking. D’Costa himself notes early in the Introduction that his lacking an examination of other types of pluralisms, such as those from the Muslim or New Age traditions for example, weakens the force of his argument. Though exploring the thought of the Dalai Lama and Sir Sarvapelli Radhakrishnan certainly makes this book far stronger than it would have been had he only dialogued with Hick, the full force of D’Costa’s case is compromised somewhat by the existence of other very different pluralisms that have gone unexamined. Even readings of other Christian pluralists, such as Jacques Dupuis and Mark. S. Heim would have been helpful in order to solidify D’Costa’s case more than he already has.

Another weakness lies in the existence of a possible genetic fallacy inherent in D’Costa’s exposé of Christian pluralism as deriving from Enlightenment principles. He seems content with his unmasking of Hick’s and Knitter’s underlying modernist assumptions and arguments, yet does not take the next logical step of demonstrating why this invalidates their proposals. As it stands without this connection, D’Costa risks committing the genetic fallacy of assuming that an idea’s genesis in the Enlightenment automatically implies its invalidity, which simply is not the case. The book would be strengthened tremendously by a clear discussion of why the Enlightenment assumptions are untenable, instead of simply identifying Enlightenment tendencies in Hick and Knitter’s theologies.

One final unresolved question within D’Costa’s work begs to be answered: once one has successfully demonstrated that all religious traditions, including the Enlightenment tradition, are exclusivist (as indeed D’Costa has), what are the requisite criteria for determining whose exclusivist claims (if any) are true? If all religious positions are exclusivistic, it remains only to adjudicate truth claims- but from what neutral ground? The postmodern critique is such that there is no "bird's eye view" from which to judge truth or falsity. This question was clearly beyond the scope of D’Costa’s project in this brief volume, yet some resources, ideas, or at least signposts to point toward a resolution of this tension would have been of great profit to D’Costa’s reader.

[1] All page numbers, unless noted otherwise, are from the Orbis Books edition of The Meeting of Religions and the Trinity, published in 2000.
[2] Not “postmodern” in the deconstructionist sense of Derrida and Foucault, but in the sense of consciously doing theology after and in reaction to modernism and the Enlightenment metanarrative(s).
[3] “Myth” here means the classical Enlightenment sense of a story which, though not literally true, nonetheless has a profound impact on its hearers.

Why Diabetic Pacifist?

I am a diabetic pacifist. I bet you probably don't hear those words together a lot, but it's true. I was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes two years ago and now must maintain a scrupulous control over my blood glucose to obviate complications down the road. Acquiring the self-discipline required for success in this endeavor was a gargantuan stretch for me, but it has helped me maintain a disciplined existence in other facets of my life as well.

The pacifist part of me comes from my Christian convictions. As a dedicated follower of Jesus Christ, I have committed myself to following his example of self-sacrificial love of neighbor and humble service to my God. Several years ago, the incompatibility between on one hand loving one’s enemy, as Jesus taught and exemplified, and on the other hand killing him or her, as the world teaches us to do, was made manifest in my theological reflections. Following Jesus, I discovered, entails “following in his steps” (1 Peter 2:21) of suffering love for the sake of others, and this has fostered in me a deep love of the holistic peace of the reign of God.

In the service of this reign therefore, I have been called to a teaching vocation. I am a first year Ph.D. student studying Christian ethics, and am seeking to transform my passion for God’s peace into an educational ministry, teaching Christian disciples what it means to take up our cross and follow the Prince of Peace. My master’s thesis, Proclaiming the Gospel of Peace: Living Faithfully According to the Original Vision, is under consideration for publication by Cascadia Publishing House, and (God-willing) this will be the start of my writing career as an extension of my passion for teaching in the service of the church.

The two self-descriptors with which I opened this essay, diabetes and pacifism, while seemingly unrelated, are actually different extensions of one overarching theme in my life- radical dependence on God’s gracious provision. At the time of my diagnosis, I demonstrated the typical adolescent bravado regarding my health- I carried myself as if I were invincible. But when the doctor broke the news to me that my pancreas had ceased producing insulin on its own, the extreme fragility of human life, including my own, was painfully driven home and I was reminded that every breath I draw is the gift of God. Likewise, in embracing Christ’s call to willing humility and weakness for the sake of others and to renounce power and security of my own strength, I have learned to step out in faith and to trust in God for all good things. I need not fight nor kill, and I am set free from fear, for the Lord is my strength. With faith in the power of God for my well-being, I am freed to love dangerously, living faithfully to his call to empty myself as Christ himself did on my behalf.

Thus, I call myself a “diabetic pacifist.” It is an unusual self-description to be sure, but the term is an apt description of who I am, for it encapsulates two superficially unrelated, yet deeply intertwined facets of my identity that point to the transcendent Source of my health, my security, and my very life itself. It’s just who I am.