Method & Theory in the Study of Religion 4/1-4/2 (1992) ON TOWARDS A WORLD THEOLOGY PETER SLATER For Wilfred Cantwell Smith, to understand religion is to understand— transculturally and critically self-consciously (TWT, 60)—what he considers to be constitutive of our full humanity (¢.g., 51). His data come from all of religious history, seen ‘whole’ so far as possible, but seen from the perspective of participants in one or other religious tradition, not from “outside” or somehow from “above” (44, 49). Through such understanding, Christians are expected to become more Christian, Buddhists more Buddhist, humanists more humanist, and so on. They become such by discovering the cross-cultural currents in the one river of life which moves us all along (26). The philosophical inspiration for Smith's foundational contrast between cumulative tradition and personal faith is Buber's classic conception of Ich und Du (40, 143). In Towards a World Theology, however, as I shall point out, Smith's mature position echoes themes more often associated with Hegel or Whitehead (37, 193)? It remains to be seen how successfully he holds the two strands together—the personalist/existentialist and the holistic/evolutionary—in his accounts of the humane and transcendent, i.e., the terms which, with faith, prove key ' The following is a revised version of my contribution to a symposium on subject and ‘object in W. C. Smith's pecent work, held at the 1992 Canadian Leamed Society meetings in Charlottetown, PEI. My assignment was to reflect on the theological direction being taken by Smith. In this paper 1 discuss only Smith's mature thought as exemplified in Towards a World Theology (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1981). Unless otherwise indicated, page references in this paper are to this work, alluded to hereafter as TWT. 1 Vhave discussed Smith's other work in Studies in Religion 10/1 and Journal of the ‘American Academy of Religion SO. Copyright © Peter Slater 1993.116 Method & Theory in the Study of Religion 4/1-4/2 (1992) to his conception of religion. How does his increasingly theological thrust, we may reasonably ‘ask, sit with the objectivity expected of historians of religion? Granted that his essay is only towards a theology, and not systematically theological, what kind of theology might he be moving us towards? The focus for what follows is on hermeneutical questions raised by Smith's discussion of symbols, as these bear on his call to go beyond subjectivism and objectivism in discerning religious truth. It also focuses on one version of the idealist tradition in philosophy, as modified in theology by Tillich, as indicative of the kind of background in phitosophy and theology against which Smith’s proposals may be viewed. Smith does not claim to have studied Buber or the other figures mentioned in this paper. But over the years he has engaged in vigorous dialogue with those who have; and we see the echoes of their thought in the directions his thinking takes. I begin with remarks on his position concerning the symbolic or metaphorical uses of language and the juxtaposition of history and myth in religion. Near the opening of Towards a World Theology, we find this fairly typical pronouncement: What all Christians have in common is that they have shared a common history. ... They have in common also . . . something transcendent. Yet to say in words what that transcendent really is—the Real Presence, Christ, God; or to say that the Church in whose on-going life they variously participate, is itself the body of Christ; or however one conceptualise it—is to employ formulations that in turn are themselves not transcendent, and that are historically not stable. (TWT, 5-6) Smith then goes on (o illustrate the cross-cultural nature of our common history with the story of St. Josaphat, aka the Buddha, and the example of the rosary. With the latter he stresses our “deep human capacity to symbolise” and observes, concerning use of the rosary, that its history exemplifies “a process of change of symbolisation, not merely across religious boundaries but within them” (TWT, 13). Let me immediately applaud here the focus on stories as contexts of religious symbols (cf. TWT, 36) and the emphasis on hard historical data as a way of keeping our feet on the ground when talking of essentially spiritual movements in history. Movements, rather than systems of ideas or social institutions, I would also agree, are where we should look for signs of living faith (e.g., 24, 35, 156). As Smith stresses, our concernOn Towards a World Theology M7 in the study of religion is not just with what Islam or Christianity has been, but what it is and may become (30, 155-60). Repeatedly he insists: it is faith that saves, not tradition (and certainly not traditionalism). Concern with developing faith, for Christians, means attending to the divine-human incarnating power inspiring the New Israel movement identified with Jesus by those who call him the Christ (my way of putting it, but see Smith’s phrasing, 34-6). With reference to the interpretation of history and history-like stories, ‘Smith’s avowed method is what most would consider a hermeneutics of discovery or recovery (cf. 47, 123). In practice, Smith is enough of a Protestant still to be suspicious of organised religion and its magical offshoots (13, 150). But his thrust is to approximate not less than an insider’ s or participant's sense of what religious movements are about when they are creative and transforming forces in human lives (c.g., 111-2). Anything less he sees as reification and hence distortion of the data. On these grounds he will, for example, dismiss fundamentalist Christians as not knowing their history, not knowing or being wrong about the faith of others (171)—not “other” faith (103), since faith is one in kind (168)—or as making creedal religion a matter of belief instead of faith (97-8, 101), as subscribing to a big bang theory of revelation (155), and as embracing the theological fallacy that God does not want us to get along with our God-given neighbours (136). Evidently, Smith sees little faith in the fideism of fundamentalists. His conception of religion is of living relationships, in which he exhibits typically Protestant ambivalence towards immanence and incarnation. Whether or not this judgment is entirely fair, it is consistent with Smith’s reference to the symbolic nature of religious language. ‘The point which I want to make about symbols (using the term in a post-Tillichian sense) is that the symbolic or metaphorical sense of terms depends upon their literal significance and use to give precision to thoughts about the future. Take, for example, the Holocaust in the religious thought of Emil Fackenheim. (I am indebted to an unpublished paper by David Demson for this example.) That it becomes almost as powerful a symbol for Zionists as the Torah is precisely because of its awful, obstinate facticity. The agony for Fackenheim comes through wanting to find historic meaning after the Holocaust without, in doing so, tivialising precisely what that event meant and did to the p: We may compare here the impact of the Cross on the early Chri its subsequent domestication in later high christologies. Its literal significance is essential to its symbolic power.118 Method & Theory in the Study of Religion 4/1-4/2 (1992) The Holocaust is a very different symbol for Fackenheim than it is for ‘a Neo-Nazi who denies that it ever happened on the scale most historians acknowledge. Precisely because others for apologetic reasons want not to confront the full horror of the Holocaust, Fackenheim sets himself against any attempt to categorise it as just one more, albeit very dreadful, instance of humanity’s inhumanity to humanity or the problem of evil. The Holocaust is no “mere symbol.” Those who take seriously Jonathan Z. Smith's strictures in Drudgery Divine? against facile religious talk of uniqueness in the comparative study of religion, may have difficulty here with Fackenheim’s insistence that the Holocaust is a novum in the history of the Suffering Servant People and, as such, not to be compared with anything else. (In this connection, I would ask whether the atomic bomb, as a symbol also coming out of World War II, is another novum for Fackenheim, or is he being Eurocentric in a way that Wilfred Smith would cor unacceptable?) In any case, the cross-culturally conditioned, dialogically oriented, W. C. Smith does not seem to share J. Z. Smith's point of view. The former looks for novelty in history, not just common themes (157). The contrast between J. Z. Smith and W. C. Smith is striking. Both are acknowledged historians of religion concerned with cross-cultural truth, But J. Z. Smith's work is with historical texts and unlikely parallels, uncovered by a hermeneutics of suspicion and encyclopedic knowledge of ancient Mediterranean cultures. W. C. Smith's concern is with contemporary dialogue, in which ideally we pass from the thing as given in history to the story, the process, the relational movement of faith. And this emphasis leaves in doubt how fact and faith go together in the full moment of reality (cf. 156). My question here is whether Wilfred Smith is so concerned to emphasize the symbolising power inherent in religion that he mutes the controls on faith coming from history. He rightly stresses that history is Present processing of past events, not the past as such (155). And he rightly wants to remind us that in religious history myths are as much a fact of life as originating events (165). For example, that the Buddha story became part of Christian legend, he insists, is just as important to our understanding of Christianity, perhaps more so, as any analysis of its original basis in Indian history. But whether the Holocaust happened as Fackenheim describes it, and whether Jesus really died on a cross, are “Jonathan Z. Smith Drudgery Divine: On the Comparison of Early Christianities and Religions of Late Antiquity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990).On Towards a World Theology ng crucial questions for Jewish and Christian theologians, in a way that circumscribes for them what the symbolic import of such events can be. W. C. Smith’s account of the history and theology of religion does not help us to understand why this is so. In post-Bultmannian terms, in Towards a World Theology, Smith seems only to allow for remythologizing, never demythologising. Yet what we count as myth very much depends on what we understand as secular history. Confusing the two can be injurious to one’s health, as the followers of Louis Riel discovered against the firepower of the white settlers a century ago. (His followers held his arms up during battle in imitation of Moses, in the expectation of warding off defeat, but to no avail.) Smith uses the Buddhist jataka story and the subsequent Christian legend of Josaphat as a symbol of the cross-cultural flow in religious history to which he draws our attention. But it is such for us, I would argue, because we know, as the legend-makers did not, both the earlier and later developments in history and mythology. Smith's objection is to reductionism. But I maintain that the emphasis ‘on symbols carried by storytelling is also reductive. Alll storytelling must be reductive in order to tidy the data into beginnings, middles, and ends in a narrative sequence. It is just as reductive to focus wholly on humanising factors as it is to juggle statistics as the sole answer to questions about personal relationships. Taken out of context, a symbol may seem ambiguous, but in fact its use in religious stories is quite precise. It is used to direct attention to religiously significant outcomes. The example of the bodhisattva/saint illustrates this point. That the story can go in either a Buddhist or a Christian direction depends on the codes carried by Buddhist and Christian traditions. In both, the symbol is used to define thought, like a metaphor used in poetry. As an expert on Islam, Smith is well aware of the political power of poetry and of the precision with which poets use metaphors, But he glosses over the fact that such precision is just as reductive in its organisation of data as is scientific literalism. The point of making a symbol more precise by setting it in one story rather than another is in the direction of the move, as in the dispute between Fackenheim and the Neo-Nazis. The Zionist’s cry “Never again!” can hardly be shared by the Neo-Nazi. ‘The use of symbols to effect the shift from potential to actual is important in religion because there the interest is in a future that will not be like the present or immediate past (TWT, 156-60). We shall return to this open feature of religious moves to transcendence, when we take up the quest for ultimate freedom, with reference to Hegel and Tillich below.120 Method & Theory in the Study of Religion 4/1-4/2 (1992) But here I want to maintain that such openness does not warrant Smith's negativity towards scientific models for the history of religions on the grounds the such science is reductive, Smith tacitly acknowledges this when he discusses subjectivity and objectivity in matters of faith. But his method of word analysis, sharply distinguishing between faith and belief, leaves us enable to guard our use of the former against the temptation to sheer subjectivism in religion. A notable feature of Smith's rhetoric is his use of adverbs and adjectives. Of our contemporary understanding of a Hindu temple Madurai, for example, he will say that it is “vastly richer, deeper, truer’ than our predecessors’ (65). Such locutions bring to mind the title of a current British romance entitled “Truly, Madly, Deeply,” in which the two. lovers pile on the adverbs to describe their feelings for each other. They are so madly in love that, after the man's sudden death, he has to return to snap the woman out of her fixation on their relationship, so that she can go on with life without him. A dose of objective realism is needed. Similarly, I believe that the time has long since arrived, in the study of religion, for us to snap out of our mistrust of the social sciences in their treatment of the external facts which serve as a foil for accounts of the internal and subjective dimensions of faith. On these topics, religious apologists do no better when caricaturing social scientists than social scientists do with respect to them. Smith has heard this point before (from Antonio R. Gualtieri and Donald Wiebe, among others). But it bears repeating. Consider for example Smith's dismissal of B. F. Skinner, when he declares: “Any objectivist, externalist, behaviourist observer who leaves ‘out human consciousness simply does not know what he or she is talking. about” (67). Skinner would agree: we do not know what we are talking about when we use ghost-in-the-machine accounts of human consciousness. That is why he talks instead about behaviour. Smith's adverbs and adjectives tell us how strongly he feels about positions which violate his existentialist sense of what counts as humane or the transcendence evocative of faith. However, they do not do much to delineate a theory about what makes humanity humane or what entitles us to assume that the transcendence invoked in every tradition is the same. To this extent, his style of argument skews discussions of religion in the direction of their dismissal as nothing but subjectivist survivals of archaic cultures in a world not yet come of age. Smith allows for objective study in its place, which is to ascertain the contours of a tradition (66). He acknowledges that “[s]ubjectivism is no royal road to truth, either” (70). But he still individualises his normativeOn Towards a World Theology 121 descriptions of faith (164) and trades on the old subjectivist charge that objective analysis only leads to fragmentation (72). Of course, objectively oriented research yields knowledge of objects. But how else do we know what a subject is, except by contrast? Are objects only things? And are we not supposed to be going beyond the subject-object dichotomy in our rejection of reification in religion? In practice, Smith can be very analytic, if he wants to be, as when he argues that variously traditioned faith differs in form, not kind, from one religion to the next (168) or declares that the locus of revelation is persons, not texts (175). Here he speaks with the authority of one who knows his traditions and will not be put off by the superficial similarities and differences which distracted the first missionaries. But too often he es fundamentalist positivism undue importance by attacking it for what it is not, instead of moving us on to the next stages of analysis and debate. In his attacks on the either/or and ‘nothing but’ rhetoric of positivists-turned-metaphysicians, Smith tends to reinforce such dichotomous approaches to knowledge in the study of religion. What he should be objecting to is not reductionism, since every model used to articulate knowledge is reductive, but minimalism, that is, reducing conceptions of the whole to the lowest common, cultural denominator, whether that be materialist or jist/mystical. I shall point out below that his own best insights point instead to a more dialectical approach that stresses the richness of our diversity in religion. Smith’s thesis is that humankind is saved by faith, which “cannot be theologised about by an outsider” (110). He has been around the globe enough times to know that to many this sounds like Protestant imperialism and triumphalism. He now qualifies his accounts of faith among the traditions as he does a virtuoso rendition of the reactions of other people of faith to his proposals (chapter 7). He flirts with mysticism, but he knows that there are no tradition-free terms with which to articulate the coming global theology, such as mystics tend to assume (181). Yet he mostly tells us what we are saved from, not what we may be saved for: we are “saved from nihilism, from alienation, anomie, despair; from the bleak despondency of meaninglessness. Saved from being the victim of one’s own whims within, or of pressures without; saved from being merely an organism reacting to its environment” (168). ‘What requires us to be objective at this point is that we can be saved from all of the above by devoutly believing that a space ship from Alpha Centauri will rescue us tomorrow morning. As a way of escape from current pressures, that belief provides temporary relief. But such relief122 Method & Theory in the Study of Religion 4/1-4/2 (1992) does not make our belief true in more than a purely subjective sense. Talk about space ships is meant to be objective. And we are not the sole authorities on space ships. Somehow our statements of faith must connect us with everyday conceptions of space, time and causality, including realistic projections concerning the future. Otherwise we shall be back with the confusion between myth and history which did in Riel and, some would add, Jesus. What Smith wants is a sense of reality that allows not only for space, time and causality, but also for Geschichte and transcendence. He maintains that we acquire this sense through “intersubjective dialogue. Historians of religion can give the same description of this phenomenon—what John Hick calls the shift from self-centredness to Reality-centredness—for members of every religious tradition. But they cannot jump out of there traditional skins to give religiously neutral accounts of the data, without changing topic, from transcendence to immanence, It is important to notice here that Smith's own position is not itself based on faith but on his knowledge and experience, better than most, of what other religions are about. He recognizes their family resemblances. But he says little about the criteria which might enable others to recognize these too. Perhaps he is too inhibited by the negative connotations he gives to analysis to be able to show us how his normative conception of transcendence is grounded in perceptions of what he takes to be one world. (This too is a comment he has heard before, most recently from John Hick.) Yet there must be identifiable standards at work, if his claims about “richer, deeper, truer” are to mean anything to his multicultural public. To sce how this may be so, we need to probe more fully than Smith as an historian ever does, some of the philosophical and theological concepts involved in accounts of the ultimate goal in religion. it As Smith acknowledges, some would use the term liberation rather than safvation to describe the definitive goal in religious traditions (182). However defined, all or almost all religions point to ultimate freedom asOn Towards a World Theology 123, that which sets the normative sense of value in life.‘ The point about freedom, which Gandhi for one emphasized with his concept of ahimsa, is that by definition we cannot predetermine all its forms. What we can do, however, is ensure that our means of liberation are consistent with our goals. As Kant insisted, we do not lie our way to truth, So we do not order or manipulate people, to make them free. What this means for the study of religion is that, although the goals defined may seem mythological and obscure, we may yet gain a sense of their import from studying the ways proposed for the realization of such goals. Smith proposes the praxis of critical self-consciousness as the way for us to realize the ger transcendence in matters intellectual and salvific which freedom entails. He emphasizes the need for criticism, because he is well aware that there is much inauthentic religion curtailing freedom for the so-called faithful. At this point, he leaves behind the individualistic subjectivism of existentialism in favour intersubjective, cross-cultural reflection. I maintain that he also needs to leave behind the dichotomy between I- You and I-It relationships which leaves inexplicable the fact that / may be both You and it. What is needed is a sense of the dialectical Yes-and-No interplay among contrasting ways of being human and of construing human points of view, if the truth in the traditions is to be upheld, It is from Hegel that we inherit the language of critical self-con- sciousness as the key to ultimate freedom. To be critical in western philosophy is to be post-Kantian. And to be self-conscious after Napoleon (Hegel's model of a world-historical individual) is to begin to surmount the master-slave relationship, which, according to Hegel, alienates both masters and slaves. This insight applies as much to imperialism in religion as it does to imperialism elsewhere. It points to the partnership needed among contrasting others in any dialogical approach to truth, such as Smith affirms.’ Smith offers no warrants for hubris in his appeal to faith. For Hegel, as for all idealists after Plato, there is no reality without form. Hegel seeks a dynamic account of form which makes time something more than the “moving image of eternity,” as Plato would have “ For systematic and historical analysis of the pervasive individualism marring most modern accounts of value, see Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990). I'am also indebted to Taylor's studies of Hegel for some: of what follows. * On this topic sec the discussion of ideology in David J. Krieger, The New Universalisin (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 1991).124 Method & Theory in the Study of Religion 4/\-4/2 (1992) it. For religion, Hegel's emphasis on historical process as the locus of being and becoming means that salvation may no longer to be sought in eternalising abstraction from the temporal. Salvation or liberation constitutes the telos of a temporal process in which everlasting freedom is given successively objective approximations throughout history. ‘The history in question is cultural and political history, that is, of social forms which change as we realize greater degrees of freedom in history. Forms inform our perceptions in the sense that they give our sense of reality the shapes it has to have in order for it to become self-conscious. ‘An example of form in Hegel's sense is modern science, not this or that theory from Newton or Einstein, but that pervasive orientation towards natural processes which puts germs ahead of demons, on the list of invisible things we fear the most. Other forms of consciousness are art, law, and politics. We shall come back to where Hegel put religion, in a moment. But it would be unthinkable to him that historians of religion should ignore the lessons of philosophy and the social sciences in their quest to understand religion. To identify the informing/reforming/transforming development of humanising consciousness, Hegel chose the category of the Spirit. (I am indebted here to a recent lecture at the Centre for the Study of Religion, University of Toronto, on Hegel by Graeme Nicholson.) Spirit, for Hegel, was the boundary term for that in us and in our world which holds together finite and infinite. The spirit is in me, but not only me. The spirit is in us, but not only us. It is what moves in all the movements of which we discourse so knowingly, as we cultivate true freedom through science, art, morality and politics. Science is a spiritual form which historically comes to consciousness as this or that form of science in a contemporary culture. So also in all the forms of culture mentioned. We should no more reify ‘the scientific’ than we do ‘the religious.’ In all cases, Spirit/spirit is not a ghost-in-a-machine but the growth point in all transitions, whether construed as natural or supernatural. For Hegel, as I understand him, the ultimate goal is the self-conscious identity of the divine and the human in the Kingdom of God through political history. The primary self or subject here is God. Subject in this context is used in the sense of “that which stands under.”* History is the process of objectification whereby the subject comes to self-conscious: * See James Brown, Subject and Object in Modern Philosophy. the Croall Lectures for 1955 (London: SCM, 1953), on the changing meanings of these terms from Kant to Heidegger.On Towards a World Theology 125 ness. Finite selves become free as they participate in this process, that is, as they conform to the process of coming to self-consciousness through throwing up or objectifying creative conceptions of the underlying SpirivSelf/Subject. The objects here are cultural artifacts, formed from the stuff of history, the raw materials of sensation and emotion which, uncontrolled, turn would-be free individuals into. masters and slaves. Note here that the move towards greater freedom as persons in community—the goal Smith shares with Hegel—requires objectification as part of the process. Like all philosophers who set off new movements of thought, Hegel left lots of fuzzy edges. For theologians, the interesting biographical fact is that this was often because he was rushing into print to head off what he considered the anti-intellectual thrust in the study of religion which he saw in Schleiermacher's stress on the feeling of absolute dependence. Contra Schleiermacher, Hegel insisted that religion fits into the liberating process as the symbolic step towards full consciousness which is finally achieved through the disciplined conceptualisations of philosophising. In his later Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, Hegel seems to have modified his position on philosophy and religion, a position which is best known from the Phenomenology of Spirit.” But in any case, for him the connection was dialectical. Philosophy cannot remain just an analytic armchair enterprise any more than religion can be just a mindless pursuit of sanctuary. The key point for our purposes is that, for Hegel, basic human relationships result from thought, not just feeling, and the form of thought is universal. (Compare Smith on the intelligibility of faith, 101.) Where philosophy and religion come together is in the realization of the concrete universal in the historical process. It is this, for Hegel, which transposes our abstract philosophical concepts into the critically self-conscious judgments of actions in the real world. The eschatological ideal is that these judgments bring into history the universal Kingdom of God, where truth, beauty, and goodness, actually are the order of the day. For Hegel the goal of history is absolute freedom for the finite-Infinite Spirit which drives us to ever more universally embracing relationships in one world. 1G. W.F. Hegel. The Phenomenology of Spirit, Trans. A. V. Miller, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977). Sec Peter C. Hodgson’s Introduction to the one-volume edition of the Lectures of 1827, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 27-30. | am indebted here to a doctoral thesis on Hegel's eschatology by Stephen Schaeffer, St. Michac!'s College 1991.126 Method & Theory in the Study of Religion 4/1-4/2 (1992) Smith half-consciously follows Hegel by directing our attention, in the history of religions, to world history and to history as the locus of self-transcendence (33, 126-7). What is evolving, for Smith as for Hegel, is a world community where everyone is increasingly an “insider” (188-90). Smith echoes Hegel’s talk of absolute relationships and adopts the ideal criterion of universality in true religion (cf. 117-9). But, unlike Hegel, Smith stresses diversity and the human and finite side of the finite-infinite continuum. He warns us against too ready a claim to universality on the part of philosophers (182). In this he points us more in the direction of Tillich, who stands firmly inside the ‘theological circle’ of those who base their talk on some form of revelation rather than on philosophical analysis of self-consciousness development. What is muted by too great a focus on a supposedly universal eschatological horizon is the present denial of the holistic vision, symbolised in recent history by the Holocaust and the Atomic Bomb. Smith acknowledges that, so far as we can tell, neither religion nor anti-religion, nor indifference to religion, is currently assisting people in becoming truly human (148). As Tillich insisted, against Hegelian progressivism, history is ambiguous. What disambiguates it in religious life is, for Smith as for Tillich, the poetry and eschatological vision of such historic figures as Jesus, the Guru Nanak (TWT, 160) and M. K. Gandhi. But the content of such visions, they insist, is not to be taken literally. What is it then about the symbolically generated move from history to eschatology which characterises true religion? In answering this question, Tillich, like Hegel, emphasizes dynamics over form and is more christological than Smith. True to the mediating tradition of German thought, Tillich tried to hold together the insights of both Schleiermacher and Hegel. How he did so has a bearing on where we place Smith's move towards “global theology.” Here the two topics of importance are the concept of the demonic and the perceived connections between philosophy and theology. As is well known, Tillich followed Schelling against Hegel in positing a surd in the heart of the Absolute. This had at least three important implications. One was Tillich’s emphasis on the demonic in the divine. Another was a less deterministic sense of dialectics than in Hegel or Marx. And the other was the already noted priority of dynamics over form. ‘There are places (e.g, 169) where Smith would be aided by employing a Tillichian concept of the demonic. It would enable him to account for those moves in religion which use the language of universality to impose on others what is in fact but a partial grasp of theOn Towards a World Theology 127 whole. Smith ruminates on dialectics as a better term than dialogue for flagging the transitions to universality in this connection (193). But he never develops the term to relate the negations and affirmations which are 0 characteristic of our global history. He says almost nothing about the nature of transcendence or the God to whom we supposedly respond in revelation, that will help us to establish criteria of authentic faith in the dialectics of every day. The problem is, as Smith well knows, that religious language is not always rightly used (e.g., 84-5). We may say that the criterion of right use is the liberating effect of ever more universal or global movements which include rather than exclude diverse creatures in one salvific relationship. But tyrants are adept at the rhetoric of supposedly salvific movements and the co-opting of religious institutions. If rel thinkers stress relationships (love, justice), it is because so often what we experience is not relationship but brokenness. Our accounts of symbols, stories, and moves of faith must help us to recognize this phenomenon. Otherwise we shall remain far short of that critical self-consciousness on which Smith rests such hope. Both Hegel and Tillich try to deal with the topics just raised by identifying the so-called concrete universal in actual history with the pattern of life, death, and resurrection in the Gospel stories of Jesus. Concrete here is the word used to avoid subjectivist, Kierkegaardian conundrums about the individual and the particular in accounts of actual history. According to Tillich, “Only that which has the power of representing everything particular is absolutely concrete. And only that which has the power of representing everything abstract is absolutely universal." The historical pattern discerned is of affirmation, negation, and new affirmation. The reference to representation is to the inherently symbolic nature of religious language, which we touched on above. By using such language, both Hegel and Tillich were trying to acknowledge Jesus’ significance for world history, without excessive recourse to insider rhetoric. * Paul Tilich, Systematic Theology Volume 1 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press: Chicago, 1951), 16. 1 have to admit, when I first heard Tillich using the word concrete in this context, | automatically thought of cement. It took some time for this Anglo-Saxon philosophy student to realize that German ldealists were trying to talk about specific cultural objecis such as works of art, scientific hypotheses, codes of law, ethics, and liturgies, when they combined the terms concrete and universal in their philosophical theologies or theological philosophies128 Method & Theory in the Study of Religion 4/1-4/2 (1992) For Tillich the Lutheran, the symbol of symbols was the Crucified Christ.? The event called “Jesus the Christ,” understood in terms of a high Logos christology, is the instance of the concrete universal in history." Here it is worth noting that, from a Tillichian point of view, insofar as Hick and Smith want to move away from christocentrism to theocentrism (TWT, 177), they are moving in a more abstract, philoso- phical, and less religiously powerful direction. ‘They are failing to take adequate account of the nature of central symbols in religion, which is precisely to focus through the particular on the universal. Thus those who make the Christ figure central in their theology focus on one who is himself portrayed as never being self-centred. Smith and Hick abstract from the full texture of religious praxis in their accounts of the move to transcendence and thereby expose themselves to the criticism that they fail to portray accurately their own tradition. To say “Christ,” as Smith knows, is to talk of a community, ideally global community. This is speaking as an insider. To an outsider, however, such talk can be a code word for exploitation, Aware of this, ‘Smith proposes that “critical self-consciousness can move towards truth by, and only by, moving towards becoming corporate” (94), that is, by incorporating insider and outsider strands in the one world comunity. By this process he hopes that we shall be drawn out of the “misplaced concreteness” of singular religions, identified with the different traditions, in the direction of a global realization of faith (93-4), albeit still expressed Christianly, Buddhistically, and so on. A Tillichian way of making Smith's point might be to say that we need to differentiate between Christianity, Islam, or Buddhism etc., as religion in the generic sense and as culture. In a notoriously obscure pronouncement, Tillich declared that “culture is the form of religion, religion is the substance of culture” (Systematic Theology Il, 158 etc.). The origin of this remark was his early attempt to articulate the idea of a “theonomous” culture. What attracts my attention now is that, for Tillich, culture supplies the form. But the form is not the substance. The substance for Tillich is the dynamic Spirit-spirit interaction prompting “the courage to be” in the context of what concerns us unconditionedly. In Tillich, all uses of absolute, ultimate and unconditioned presuppose the context of Spirit-spirit awareness in philosophy and theology.) "This point was made recently by Robert Scharlemann in a paper delivered at the AAR. '" Uhave discussed Tillich's christology in cross-cultural perspective in Jean Richard (ed.), Religion et Culture, Laval, 1987.On Towards a World Theology 129 The hallmark of the Spirit’s presence for Tillich is the Protestant or Prophetic principle. About this he commented: “it transcends every articular church . . . it has been betrayed by every church . . . it needs the ‘Catholic substance,’ the concrete embodiment of the Spiritual Presence; but it is the criterion of the demonization (and profanization) of such embodiment. It is the expression of the victory of the Spirit over religion.”" In this plethora of ambiguous terms and mixed metaphors, what emerges is that, for Tillich unlike Hegel, religion qua concrete and dynamic, puts one more in touch with “the Ground of Being” than does philosophy, even in its original sense. But in doing so, it exposes one to the demonic in the depths of being. Philosophy is attuned to forms and universals. Religious life is attuned to transformation and concrete embodiment/incorporation/incarnation, in such away as to increase the likelihood of idolatry and hypocrisy. Smith's reluctance to elaborate on the nature of “the transcendent” reflects this same Protestant principle. Tillich’s idealist ambivalence at this point shows in that the only flesh allowed in the Kingdom under the conditions of humanity’s estranged existence seems to be crucified flesh. Hegel's incorporation of the universal Spirit in the modern state was, for Tillich (after Hitler), a drive towards totalitarianism which must be restrained by the Protestant principle. It is not clear to me how Smith, in Towards a World Theology, Protects himself against the totalitarian possibility. On the one hand, he seems to be more with Hegel than with Tillich in his insistence on a non-christocentric globalization. But on the other hand, his idiom is through and through Protestant. Thus the question arises: if Smith intends to be moving “towards a world theology” which takes its cues from faith-talk in the study of religion, does he mean us to adopt a position such as we find in Tillich? One suspects that the historian of religion in him beats a hasty retreat from Tillich’s theological locutions and some of their implications. But can these be avoided, once the move to transcendence is tied to authentic talk of faith? ‘The question before us is how to construe Smith's emphasis on saving faith. The context is the theme of subject, object, and beyond in the study of religious traditions. The direction seems to be towards the neo-Hegelian Frankfurt school’s emphasis on critically self-conscious discourse. And the goal seems to be full freedom as the ideal, if not the actual abject of world history. The problem, briefly stated, is that the old ideal of rationality coming out of the Romantic Enlightenment and " Systematic Theology Volume Il, 248.130 Method & Theory in the Study of Religion 4/1-4/2 (1992) articulated by Hegel takes a form of universality which drives us towards totalitarianism. A Christian theological resolution of this problem looks to a rendering of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus which takes due notice of the demonic in history. But this seems to entail a loss of that universality without which the truth of any tradition is at best only partial. For Smith, as a Christian, any final resolution of our problems and questions must also acknowledge the diversity of religious traditions and be both ‘not less than Christian,’ but also ‘not only Christian’ (112). The heart and mind of “saving faith” is then that of the new life in the new community, which in principle is inclusive of everybody. By new is meant self-transcendent, where the original self is alienated or enslaved and the new self is in community and yet free. What Hegel adds to such a conversation is a conception of spiritual formation which is fluid, as in the development of science in the history of culture. What Tillich adds is a heightened sense of the demonic and insistence on the priority of dynamics over form in talk of the Spirit. What neither offers, and Smith needs, is a sense of harmony in freedom which allows for genuine diversity without destroying vital relationships. It is here that the ‘emphasis on concrete embodiment in history points us to another criterion of authentic development, besides that of ever more inclusive universality. The other criterion of authentic faith, which Smith impli adopts. but fails to exploit, is that of mutual enrichment. This, in theological language, is due to incarnation and the sacramental principle. According to the textual tradition in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, we are not just . As H, Wheeler Robinson used to emphasize, we are embodied spirits or animated bodies. The vision of free spirits is not of anarchy or the minimalist law and order of a mega-state magically supposed to be better for having God’s name on the masthead. It is the maximising harmony of the liberation of all in the interests of each, which some would identify with the message of Jesus’ parables."= Demonic faith, by contrast, is exclusive, not inclusive, partial while pretending to be universal, and destructive of others, not mutually empowering and life-enhancing. What feminist liberation theologians add to the discussion of incarnation is that embodiment can be construed as a basis for connection, On the Augustinian tradition on freedom as harmony and order, see my essay in JoAnne McWilliam (ed.), Augustine: Fram Rhetor to Theologian (Waterloo: Wilfred Laurier University Press, 1992). See there also the excellent analysis by James Wechsel.‘On Towards a World Theology 131 not distancing.” Resurrection then means, among other things, a reconnecting of those otherwise separated by death and destruction. It is not resuscitation or a return to the status quo ante. Whether resurrection is supposed to occur within history or beyond is a matter of definition and debate among theologians. What history shows in any case, according to all such liberation theologians, is that historical processes are dialectical, both affirming and negating what went before, whether or not we count the outcome as progress. The partial knowers of religion, whom Smith so often engages in debate, are typically undialectical. They want straight Yes or No answers to questions which, by their very nature, elicit both a Yes and a No in the changing context of the whole. What takes us beyond subject and object in the study of religion, I submit, is this dialectical nature of both praxis and discourse, Here, what kills the subject of religion in the course of analysis is failure to be sufficiently dialectical, not the supposedly reductive nature of some forms of inquiry. Peter Slater Trinity College University of Toronto " See Beverly Wildung Harrison et al., in Carol S. Robb (¢d.), Making the Conmections (Boston: Beacon Press, 1985).