Radical Faith - exploring faith in a changed world

Transforming Christianity
and the World
John B Cobb, Orbis Books, 1999

The editor of this book, Paul Knitter, remarks that its author holds an unusual place in literature which concerns itself with the development of new approaches by Christians to other faiths. Where others tend to elicit either approval or rejection, writes Knitter, Cobb somehow manages to achieve an ongoing openness to dialogue:

... while others have helped construct positions within the academic discussion of religious pluralism, Cobb has fostered a conversation among those position ... While others are "responded" to, Cobb is first of all "listened to".

When all is said and done, when all the rebuttals have been advanced and all the brickbats thrown, continued dialogue is all that matters. No matter how much you or I disagree, as long as we keep talking, there remains a chance that some new mutual insight will be arrived at.

Knitter has arranged these twelve essays by Cobb into two main sections. The first contains five essays headed Beyond Absolutism; the second comprises seven essays under the heading Beyond Relativism.

These two categories are key to the future of the Christian faith in a world which, all things being equal, is bound to become ever more global. For the first time in its history, the Church is encountering other faiths on their own terms. That is, they are firmly rooted in their cultures. They have God and don't need Jesus.

The Church is also having to come to terms with a large majority in its own Western culture who feel no need for traditional religion. If Christianity means anything at all to them, it is only as a personal way of understanding the ultimate in their lives. But a majority is firmly non-Christian and seemingly non-religious.

Cobb is convinced that any dialogue between Christians and non-Christians must be based upon authentic mutual listening. Any dialogue which doesn't allow change in Christianity in response to the other tradition is not authentic, he says. Absolutism is whatever prevents such listening.

That's why most, if not all, so-called ecumenical dialogue between churches is a waste of time and effort. Each church focuses intensely first on its own holy cows and then on the errors of the other party. It seeks to preserve rather than discover and in the process perpetuates division and misunderstanding.

At the same time, Cobb is concerned to emphasise that not being absolute about Christianity's truth claims does not mean throwing out the baby with the bathwater:

We live in a time when the world needs Christ as never before ...

he writes. It's important to understand that when he says this sort of thing, Cobb does not mean quite what those words usually convey - that mission and evangelism are good things. What he means is that there is a sense in which Jesus embodies something which is universally relevant.

There are those, says Cobb, who defend against absolutism by holding that Christianity is true in one sense, while other faiths are true in some other senses. In effect, this approach abandons any claims to truth at all. This is the relativist's position, in which

... reflection necessarily occurs within a given frame of reference, and there is no way to bridge the chasms that lie between alternative systems of concepts.

Claims to absolute truth result in a sort of doctrinal imperialism in which what is perceived as "common to all" is actually a clever re-write of one's own position. The relativist position, on the other hand, involves taking no position at all, since to hold a position demands that one also asserts its reasonableness. It's true that

... all apprehension of the world is perspectival, fragmentary, and in some measure distorted ... [and] the belief that there is finally no justification for one's ideas tends to weaken the hold of these ideas and to inhibit acting upon them ...

If absolutism cripples dialogue by refusing to listen authentically, and if relativism takes away the possibility of abiding truth, what is the way ahead for Christianity? Christian evangelical imperialism, in reaction to these threats and driven by absolutism, attempts to take over, absorb and snuff out the light of other faiths. Christian relativism in seeking to absorb and modify the pressures, tends to diminish or even destroy the illuminating power of Jesus of Nazareth.

How can these blind alleys be avoided?

Cobb's solutions are not easy to understand. He was an academic all his life - and clear, simple writing is not the forte of academia. So what he says has to be read carefully if it is to sink in. Even then, I found myself wondering if his conclusions are quite as potentially effective as some appear to think.

Let me try to translate Cobb's conclusions into language I can understand. I must first ask, "How is it possible to recognise in Jesus a completely satisfying approach to life, and at the same time affirm the same for another faith system such as Islam? Isn't it self-contradictory to do that?"

Cobb suggests that an essential starting point to working out an answer to that question is to recognise that each religious system is different, and that difference does not force us into any judgement of "better" and "worse". But this seems to be relativism - that truth becomes whatever a religion says it is.

This is avoided, says Cobb, if only each party to inter-religious dialogue (or, though he doesn't say as much, also between the religious and the secular) recognises that each falls short of the absolute. If that is true, then each can discover the "more" than lies out there to be discovered and appropriated by both. That is, what is essentially partial is no longer treated as the whole.

To put it another way: Christians have often killed and tormented those whose opinions differed from theirs. Cobb's claim is that we move towards an interfaith solution when we realise that

... all this is not truly faithful to Jesus Christ, and that the true meaning of faith has expressed itself, imperfectly but authentically, in other features of our [the world's] past history.

Yet again, Cobb would say that the essence of Jesus demands that we accept others as authentically themselves - even if that acceptance leads us somehow to adopt an understanding of God and the world which is not "pure" Christianity. It may be possible to be both Christian and Buddhist.

This is not, says Cobb a "universal theology of religion" which floats above or underpins each authentic instance of religious commitment. As Paul Knitter puts it,

Cobb warns that such a bird's-eye view may exist for birds but not for humans ... [it] ends up distorting other particulars in order to include them in its "universal" embrace.

A proclamation that Jesus is the "way, the truth and the life" need not be exclusive. What is at the centre of life is not the whole. If we see Jesus at the centre of history, he is nevertheless not the whole of history. When is comes to interfaith dialogue, then, the problem

... is not, as some suppose, that Jesus is at the centre, but that the circumference is far too narrow ... the broadening of our internal history to include Judaism does not - for us Christians - displace Jesus from the centre of our history.

Cobb is reaching for a "both and" rather than an "either or" position. In doing so he is forced to displace traditional Christian theology to some extent. It's to his great credit that he does so with charity and a genuine striving for authenticity combined with recognition of the uniqueness of every faith system.

Whether or not the author's approach bears fruit will be tested by time, and no doubt by any number of ventures down blind alleys. In other words, I think we have here an embryonic rather than a developed map to the land of multifaith exploration.

If there is a weakness in this book, it is that there is no sign that Cobb has fully faced up to the hugely diminishing role played by religion in the life of the average Westerner. All religion is faced by the same problems in the West and increasingly elsewhere. Bringing the faiths together in whatever form, backed by whatever philosophy, is not going change that. Multifaith or not, organised religion may be not only on the back burner but also heading for a long-drawn-out but terminal illness.

Cobb is an academic, used to thinking things through in abstract. To do him justice, however, he makes it plain that considerations for concrete issues such the destruction of the environment concern him deeply.

Nevertheless, he does not face up properly to that which drives the religious yearnings of ordinary human beings. It is not philosophy or theology, but tradition, culture and emotional need. Such drives care little for understanding or even tolerating other faiths.

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