Religion for Reluctant Believers - Leonard J. Swidler

RELIGION for Reluctant Believers

Leonard J. Swidler

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RELIGION FOR RELUCTANT BELIEVERS Copyright © 2017 Leonard J. Swidler. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401. Cascade Books An Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3 Eugene, OR 97401 www.wipfandstock.com PAPERBACK ISBN:

978-1-4982-9517-8 HARDCOVER ISBN: 978-1-4982-9519-2 EBOOK ISBN: 978-1-4982-9518-5

Cataloguing-in-Publication data: Names: Swidler, Leonard J., author. Title: Religion for reluctant believers / Leonard J. Swidler. Description: Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2017 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: ISBN 978-1-4982-9517-8 (paperback) | ISBN 978-1-4982-9519-2 (hardcover) | ISBN 978-1-4982-9518-5 (ebook). Subjects: LCSH: Dialogue—Religious aspects | Religions—Relations | Religion and culture. Classification: BL410 S 85 2017 (print) | BL410 (ebook). Manufactured in the U.S.A.

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Table of Contents Title Page Chapter 1: Invitation Chapter 2: Personal Self-Disclosure Chapter 3: The Meaning of Religion Religion and/or Spirituality Popular and Reflective Religion Mature and Immature Religion Excursus: Our Understanding of How We Understand Mature Religion’s Development Chapter 4: Modernity Modernity Is the Atmosphere in Which We Live Freedom at the Core of Being Human Critical-Thinking Reason, the Arbiter of Truth Case Study 1: A Critical-Thinking Reading of the Biblical Creation Story Case Study 2: A Rabbi Becomes the Messiah,Who Becomes the Christ, Who Becomes God The Expansion of Critical-Thinking Reason The Limits of Critical-Thinking Reason History Transforms All Human Reality Dialogue: Radicalizing All Thought A Radically New Age The “Cosmic Dance of Dialogue” Postmodernity? A Place for Religion in Modernity? Authentic Religion: Within Me and between Me and Thee The Existence of God Theology from Below More to Reality Than Meets the Eye? Chapter 5: Reflections on Problematics Miracles Reincarnation/Samsara/Moksha/Nirvana or Resurrection/Immortality of Soul/Eternal Life—Or? Chapter 6: Purposes of Religion—The Future 4

Exterior Religious Life—Ritual Interior Life Ethical Principles and Practices A Global Ethic Chapter 7: The Search for Ultimate Reality: Deep-Dialogue Polytheism: The Many Hinduism: The One and the Many Judaism/Islam: The One Zoroastrianism/Manicheism/Yin-Yang: The Two Christianity: The One and the Three Buddhism: Ultimate Nothing Confucianism/Daoism: Ultimate Harmony Summary of Insights from World Religions The Move to Deep-Dialogue Deep-Dialogue and Ultimate Reality Critical-Thinking Chapter 8: Light and Dark Sides of Major Religions Judaism Christianity Islam Hinduism Buddhism Daoism Confucianism Chapter 9: Conclusion Bibliography Suggested Reading

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Invitation I am writing for persons who either have been brought up to be religious or are now finding religion—or “spirituality,” some might say today—intriguing, meaningful, but are having increasing difficulty in squaring it, or important portions of it, with one or more of the core characteristics of Modernity. In brief, I am writing for “reluctant believers.” I am inviting all such readers to look over my shoulder as I offer these reflections—first for myself, then, if you wish, please join me in dialogue at [email protected]. These pages, then, are written for persons who, like me, live in the mental world of Modernity.1 Modernity, as I understand it, is a world that cherishes: (1) freedom as the core of being human; (2) critical-thinking reason as the arbiter of what to affirm or not; (3) history, process, dynamism seen at the heart of human life and society; and (4) the increasing need to be in dialogue with those who think differently from us—yet sense that there is somehow more to life, to reality, than meets the eye, that there is a depth or spiritual dimension that is not captured in our everyday experiences. Because I am probably older than most of you reading this book, I was brought up learning Greek and Latin and have found them immensely helpful in better understanding even everyday English (which comes mainly from Latin and Greek on the one hand and German on the other; I also went to Germany to learn German). So, now, how do I write for the nonscholar in this very complicated field of humanities without either unduly shrinking my writing tools or putting off younger readers or just leaving you in the dark? Here is the deal: I will use some English Latin-root terms when they seem to fit best, and as unobtrusively as possible include the meanings in parentheses immediately afterward. You, the reader, for your part will either see the meaning and continue, or you can also consciously enrich your vocabulary (which really means your thinking as well).

1. Some may question my use of “Modernity” rather than “postmodernity.” This is not an oversight on my part. Rather, I am deliberately choosing “Modernity” and will argue later why I find “postmodern” wanting in comparison.

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Personal Self-Disclosure The casual reader glancing at this first page or two might wonder how I can claim to write about believing, or not, concerning not just a religion but about religions in general. I rather slowly worked my way into the job. Although I was born in Sioux City, Iowa, and spent ages two to four in a tiny town, Cumberland, in far western Wisconsin, I call Green Bay, Wisconsin, where we moved when I was four, my hometown. Although since long before I was born it was the home of the doubtless (at least, I have no doubts) most famous football team in the world, the Green Bay Packers, it was a city of a population of a mere 35,000 when I lived there in the 1930s and 1940s. My wonderful mother came from a devout shanty Irish Catholic family, with fourteen siblings. When old enough, I went daily to Mass and communion. I had eight years of Catholic primary school, four years of Catholic boys’ high school, four years of Catholic men’s college at St. Norbert in De Pere, Wisconsin. (All the while, I played on their football teams, starting in sixth grade.) Then I had four years of Catholic theology in seminaries, and a further year of graduate studies at a Jesuit university (Marquette). So, you might say that I knew the Catholic tradition fairly thoroughly. At the same time, like most children, I also had a father. He came to America in 1912 from Czarist Russia by himself as a fifteen-year-old lad. I am still stunned when I think of his bravery. (He might have said hutzpah, since he was Jewish.) Yes, I grew up with an Irish Catholic mother and a Russian Jewish father—the product of a living version of the 1930s radio program, Abie’s Irish Rose. I never thought much about it when I was a child. Children almost always just take life as a given and do not think to ask questions about it. However, I do remember one Sunday morning in church when I got up with Mom to go to communion, but Dad stayed in the pew (he obviously must have at least occasionally come to church with us), and I asked Mom why he did not come up with us. I do not remember the answer, just the question. The next thing I remember in that area was when I was sixteen, and Dad decided to be baptized a Catholic; from then on he, too, went to Mass with us almost every day. I remember also that he said that by becoming a Catholic he did not become less a Jew. I, of course, had no idea then of what profound theological issues lay behind such a position. Just two short stories about my Jewishness will help provide my bona fides (Latin: literally, “good faith,” meaning you really are what you claim to be) as knowing something “practical” about more than just one religion. I still remember vividly a bedtime story Dad told me more than once. My grandfather—whom I never got to know, since all of Dad’s family were murdered by the Communists during the purge of

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the “Kulaks” of the Ukraine in the 1930s—was in charge of a Russian nobleman’s estate. One winter day when he was riding his sleigh past a Russian peasant’s house, a young boy happened to come outside in his bare feet to urinate. When he saw Grandfather riding by, he began to shout “Dirty Jew! Dirty Jew!” whereupon Grandfather pulled up his sleigh, took out some tobacco and cigarette paper and began very slowly to roll a cigarette, while the boy kept up his chanting, but he soon also began to accompany it with dancing in the snow as his bare feet got colder and colder. Finally, he burst into tears and ran into the house, upon which Grandfather lit his cigarette and shouted, “Giddyup!” The other story is more personal to me. I must have been around ten years old, judging from where I remember we were living, and it was during the summer. Mom ran a beauty shop downtown, and Dad was out looking for work (the Great Depression with breadlines and all, you know). I still have the picture in my head of how I was standing on the front lawn of our rented two-story house at 913 North Chestnut St. on the west side of Green Bay, surrounded on three sides by a group of boys calling me a dirty Jew and throwing stones at me. I still recall being scared to death but also unwilling to run into the safety of the house. I do not remember how long the standoff lasted, or, indeed, how and why it began, but the bullies must have gotten tired or bored and eventually left, leaving me slightly psychically scarred, as evidenced by this memory seared in my mind. One of the gang was Eddie Hammer, my best friend from across the street. I also remember how the next day when Eddie came over to play, I beat the living daylights out of him—definitely not in the spirit that I later came to advocate: dialogue. After being fortified with seventeen years of Catholic education, I finally decided to go to the “godless” University of Wisconsin in Madison, where rumor had it that many a good Catholic student “lost his faith.” As it turned out, my best professors were Jews, Orthodox Christians, and Protestants, all very knowledgeable about religion. I ended up choosing to write a doctoral dissertation in intellectual and cultural history on the “Una Sancta Movement” in twentieth-century Germany, a movement of dialogue between Protestants and Catholics, which later had a huge influence on the turn-toward-dialogue in the Catholic Church at the Second Vatican Council (1962–65). That dissertation topic led me to Germany for three years, where I also did a degree in Catholic theology (STL, 1959) at the Pontifical Catholic Theology Faculty of the University of Tübingen, as probably the first Catholic layperson to get a degree in Catholic theology in modern times. The brilliant and gorgeous Arlene Anderson and I met at the University of Wisconsin and married just before I went off to Germany in the fall of 1957. Arlene, or Andie, as she was known, followed a little later when we got together enough money for both of us to live on, and as a consequence our daughter Carmel was born in Tübingen, where we stayed for one year before another two years in Munich. After that we returned to the

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States to teach at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, she in English and I in history. It was Andie’s idea to start a scholarly journal devoted to ecumenical dialogue, since there were none in America at the time. Thus, the Journal of Ecumenical Studies first appeared in 1964; the first issue included articles by the two most famous theologians still alive in early 2016: Hans Küng (1928–), and Josef Ratzinger (1927–, a.k.a. Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI). The first volume was subtitled “Catholic–Protestant– Orthodox,” but, before the end of the second volume, it was dropped when we took on our first non-Christian associate editor, Rabbi Arthur Gilbert.2 We soon added Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, and other associate editors and also immersed ourselves in the Christian–Marxist dialogue. I have been to Europe many times—first in 1953, hitchhiking with my brother Jack for ten weeks; I was in the Middle East in 1972, but it was in 1983 that I took my first round-the-world trip, interviewing everybody I could line up from East to West. Suffice it to say that since then I have been an inveterate peripatetic (Greek, to “go around”), circumnavigating the globe many times over, and writing articles (200+) and books (80+) on Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Confucianism, the global ethic, and—most of all—on dialogue. I gradually figured out that all the religions and ethical systems of the world have fundamentally the same goal, namely, to provide an answer to the fundamental question, does life have meaning? The usual response is yes, and the follow-up question is, what, then, is that meaning? The answers are many, and we count them as our various religions and ideologies. These are the questions and answers that I want to examine together with you.

2. Gilbert (1913–76) was a Reform rabbi and the first dean of the Recon-structionist Rabbinical College, which was related to the Temple University Department of Religion at its founding in 1968; see Wikipedia, s.v. “Reconstructionist Rabbinical College,” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reconstructionist_ Rabbinical_ College#History:_Founding_to_1981/.

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The Meaning of Religion Religion and/or Spirituality We need first to be clear about the basic terms we are using; otherwise, we will just be confusing ourselves. First, what do we normally mean by “religion”? Here is the definition of religion with which I work: Religion is an explanation of the ultimate meaning of life, based on a notion and experience of the Transcendent, and how to live accordingly. It normally contains the four C’s: creed, code, cult, and communitystructure. A “creed” refers to the cognitive aspect of a religion; it is everything that goes into the “explanation” of the ultimate meaning of life. A “code” of behavior or ethics includes all the rules and customs of action that somehow follow from one aspect or another of the creed. A “cult” means all the ritual activities that relate the believer to one aspect or other of the Transcendent, either directly or indirectly: prayer is an example of the former (direct relation to the Transcendent); certain formal behavior toward representatives of the Transcendent, such as priests, is an example of the latter (indirect relation to the Transcendent). “Community-structure” refers to the relationships among the believers, which can vary widely—from a very egalitarian relationship as among Quakers through a “republican” structure such as Presbyterians have to a monarchical one as with some Hasidic Jews vis-à-vis their Rebbe. “Transcendent,” as the roots of the word indicate, means “that which goes beyond” the everyday, ordinary, surface experience of reality. It can mean spirits, gods, a personal God, an impersonal God, emptiness, and so forth. Especially in modern times there have developed “explanations of the ultimate meaning of life and how to live accordingly” that are not based on a notion of the Transcendent: for example, Marxism or Atheistic Humanism—“What you see is what you get.” Although in every respect these “explanations” function as religions traditionally have in human life—because the idea of the Transcendent, however it is understood, plays such a central role in religion, but not in these “explanations”—for the sake of accuracy it is best to give them a separate name; the name often used is “ideology.” Hence, much, though not all, of the following discussion will, mutatis mutandis (Latin: “adjusting what needs to be adjusted”), also apply to ideology even when the term is not used. “Spirituality” is a term with a long use, but it has become more prominent of late in distinction from “religion,” with familiar statements such as “I am not religious, but I am

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spiritual.” Whence the word “spiritual”? It comes from the Latin spiritus (“breath”). Ancient humans noticed that if there was no breath in a body, it was dead; breath was a reality that could not be seen, that was “within,” and obviously was literally vital to life. Thus, “spirituality” refers to the interior, the internal, as distinct from the exterior, the external. It is the latter that the popular phrase means when it rejects religion. It understands religion as referring to externals; spirituality, to the interior life. Seeing religion as merely dealing with externals, however, is a quite reductionist view of religion, as the above definition makes clear, and as do our experience and history. “Spirituality” stresses the interior meaning of our humanity, the vital personal side of religion, but neglects the communal aspect, which of course for us humans is a serious deficit. One way or another, we humans will seek out community (more or less successfully), those with whom we can share the “ultimate meaning of life and how to live accordingly.”

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Popular and Reflective Religion The next thing we need to do before focusing on the core meaning of Modernity in the area of religion is to recognize that, even after we have gained a reasonably clear idea of what we mean by religion in general, we have to pay attention to at least two major distinctions scholars make between what I call “popular religion” and “reflective religion.” In popular religion the degree of reflexive consciousness, of self-awareness, is quite low. It is like that of a child’s experiencing something. The child is not very aware of its experiencing something but tends to be exclusively focused on the thing experienced. We thus say that the child is naive, that is, its mentality is still close to the way it was when it was born (Latin: natus, as in “nativity”). Things tend to be understood by the child in a fashion that is rather literal, straightforward, immediate, that is, with no intermediate element, no mental distance between the thing experienced and the one experiencing. But, as a child grows through puberty into adulthood, he or she gains a certain distance on the things learned when younger—and on him- or herself. The child becomes reflexive, reflective, aware not only of the things she or he encounters and experiences but also increasingly aware of the experiencing of things. She or he often becomes critical of the things previously learned, at times rejecting them because he or she judges that they could not possibly be literally true, as had earlier been understood. If the process of maturation continues as it should, the young adult will gradually move to the stage that Paul Ricoeur (1913–2005) called a “second naïveté.” Now, the adult realizes that often those things that he or she understood as a child to be literally true and then rejected when a young adult are, in fact, true—far more true than the child thought, who took them literally, or the adolescent, who likewise rejected. Now, the adult sees them for what they truly are—metaphors, symbols, and images pointing to a much deeper reality than can be expressed in literal language. For example, the small child believes Santa Claus empirically exists; this is the stage of naiveté (to be as when one was born—natus). Then, at a certain age, the child discovers that Santa does not really exist; this is the stage of rejection. This happened to me when I was about eight—I was a slow learner! I then seditiously took my brother Jack, who was five years younger, into my new wisdom by dragging him out of his bed to see Mom and Dad putting the presents under the tree after returning from midnight Mass. As a result, poor Jack had a somewhat truncated childhood. When the child grows up and has her or his own child, she or he may decide that the real meaning of Santa Claus is the spirit of gratuitously giving gifts without looking for something in return. When Andie and I faced our decision whether to go with the Santa Claus “myth,” for our children, Carmel and Eva, we decided that the custom of giving gifts simply to make others happy was not only a good custom to pass on to the next

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generation, but, as Christians, we decided that it also fit very well with what we thought was a core value for followers of Jesus, namely, reaching out selflessly to help others, for the sake of others. Therefore, for us as new parents, Santa Claus existed again, but this time as symbol, the existence of which is much more important than the earlier presumed physical one. This is the stage of the second naiveté. This example points to a deeper lesson. Matters of deep human import are too weighty for prose to carry them adequately; poetry—metaphor, symbol, image—must be brought in to carry such a message, even partly adequately. For example, a prose description of one’s beloved (blond hair, blue eyes, so tall, and the like) is much too feeble to express the object of such an important human experience as being in love; hence, the world is full, not of love prose (literal description) but of love poetry, which bursts with metaphors, symbols, and images. All of this is true of the development not only of individuals but also of whole communities and, indeed, ultimately, of the entire human race. We see the human communal breakthrough to the level of “reflective, mature religion” in what Karl Jaspers (1883–1969) called the “Axial Period” (800–200 BCE), when the ancient major world religions were born in their several different cultures. Humankind in general moved through a kind of “communal puberty” to greater self-awareness on a civilizationwide basis (more of this below). Thus, there will be individuals, regardless of age, whose religious consciousness is on a quite naive level and those whose religious consciousness is on a very reflective level— and persons everywhere in between. There will also be whole communities of these different types; for example, certain Protestant Christian churches tend to be “fundamentalist” (naive), and others tend to be “progressive” (ranging from the critical to the “second-naiveté” level). Some communities may even be officially on the “secondnaiveté” level but with much of its leadership still largely on the “precritical” level. This is true at present, for example, of the Catholic Church—with its Vatican II official commitments to a historical, dynamic, dialogical, collegial, freedom-oriented, turnedtoward-this-world self-understanding, on the one hand, and, on the other, the static, pre– Vatican II, fortress mentality of Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI and their chief advisers, as well as most of the bishops they appointed in the past third of a century— which credibility gap accounts to a large extent for the thirty million former American Catholics out of one hundred million current and former American Catholics in 2014. Fortunately, Pope Francis is, in his deliberately casual manner, leading the Catholic Church, and even many beyond it, back to the modern spirit of Vatican II. Keep in mind that one cannot expect the level of a person’s religious consciousness to be higher than her or his general human consciousness; so, a person who in general is rather naive and unreflective would also tend to be religiously rather naive. (This will

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usually be reflected in the political sphere also.) However, perhaps because religious institutions usually are so old, and hence often very traditional and conservative, it is far too often true that many people’s level of religious consciousness is below that of their general consciousness, especially in modern society with its rapidly expanding education system, which tends to raise the general level of consciousness of whole populations. Also depressing is the fact that churches, synagogues, mosques, and temples tend to cultivate their congregants at a level significantly below their level of general consciousness, as was carefully laid out by James W. Fowler (1940–2015).3

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Mature and Immature Religion Already a century ago Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) taught us about psychological projection. In plain words, he was saying that when we were little, we looked to Daddy to have all the answers and solve all our problems. But when we grew up and Daddy was gone, we projected a “Big Daddy in the Sky,” God, who had all the answers and could solve all problems. Doubtless, Freud was onto something here. He assumed, however, that religion was only something children had use for, that adults could come up with all the answers to the meaning of life. Many, probably even by far most, persons would hesitate to claim that they know all the answers to the meaning of life. In other words, Freud assumed that a naive, immature understanding of religion was the only way religion could be understood. It is important to make a distinction, however, between an immature understanding of religion on the one hand and a mature understanding on the other, what I termed popular-level and reflective-level religion above. Unfortunately, just getting older does not necessarily mean that one becomes more mature in general. Many people grow to old age and go to their graves as psychological adolescents and probably even more so religiously. In fact, another psychologist, a younger contemporary of Freud, Harvard professor Gordon W. Allport (1897–1967) noted, “In probably no region of personality do we find so many residues of childhood as in the religious attitudes of adults.” Further, “Most of the criticism of religion is directed to its immature forms.”4 He also noted that a mature religion could be characterized by six major traits, which are simply the normal tests for general maturity of personality applied to the religious sphere. Mature religious sentiment is well-differentiated, dynamic, productive of a consistent morality, comprehensive, integral, and heuristic. 1. Differentiated: People who think their parents, spous​es, or religion are abso​lutely perfect are clearly not seeing things as they are; a “differentiation” needs to be made in view of all these, seeing their strengths, weakness​es, and so forth. Just as advancement in the physical and societal spheres is marked by an increas​ing complexifi​cation, so, too, it is in the inner psy​chic area in general and, therefore, also in the individual’s religious senti​ment. 2. Dynamic: The “genetic fallacy” is a trap that needs to be avoided in understanding religion. It is true that in the beginning (both with each indi​vidual and with the human race as a whole) the motivation for religion is external and “is largely concerned with magical thinking, self-justifica​tion, and creature comfort.”5 As it matures, however, religion ceases to be controlled by these motivations and takes on its own inner dynamism, directing the subject to the fulfillment of its life’s meaning, which is ever transcending itself. A helpful analogy would be an acorn, which is an indis​pensable starting point for an oak tree, but, as the tree matures, the acorn is broken asunder,

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and the maturing tree develops its own inner dynamism. 3. Consistent Morality: While it is true that a person can develop a consistent morality without religion, a mature religion is not possible without ​a consistent mo​rality. Recall our definition of religion: “an explanation of the ultimate meaning of life and how to live accordingly.” Accepting the explanation implies acting accordingly; hence, a consistent code of behavior is a necessary result of an authentic embrace of the expla​nation. 4. Comprehensive: Again, the basic definition of religion, an explanation of the ultimate meaning of life, makes it clear that religion is that which attempts to cover all the bases. 5. Integral: Not only must reli​gion’s coverage be comprehensive, “but its de​sign must be harmonious . . . Since we cannot and will not turn our backs on the modern world, then the religion we embrace cannot be pre-scientific; nor anti-scientific; it must be co-sci​entif​ic.”6 6. Heuristic: A “heuristic [Greek, ‘to discov​er’] belief is one that is held tentatively until it can be confirmed or until it helps us discover a more valid belief.”7 In general, mature persons do not go off half-cocked, nor on the other hand do they wait frozen until they are cocksure. They take all reasonable measures and then act in the direction that makes the best sense. They may well be persuaded of the truth of some​thing but are always open to new evidence or arguments, for after all they are interested in gaining an ever firmer grasp on reality, not just on their opinion. In a word, their understanding of truth is “deabsolutized”—more about that below. Clearly, just as it is vital for a child to grow and mature into adulthood in general, it is equally important that the child also grow into a mature understanding of religion. It should be noted that this distinction in the area of cognition/feeling between immature and mature religious sentiment is analogous to the above distinctions between (1) popular-level and reflective religion, (2) Ricoeur’s levels of first and second naiveté in responding to symbols and images, and (3) an absolutist and deabsolutized understanding of truth—to which distinction I now turn.

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Excursus: Our Understanding of How We Understand Having brought up the notion of a “deabsolutized understanding of truth,” I need to explain that a bit before going on to mature religion’s development. Until the nineteenth century in Europe, “truth,” that is, a statement about reality, was con​ceived in an absolute, static, exclusivist, either-or manner. It was thought that a statement was true, totally true—or false. This is a classicist or absolutist view of truth. The word “absolute” is from the Latin, ab-solvere (literally, “loosened from,” hence, “unlimited”). 1. Historicism: Then, in the nineteenth century, scholars came to perceive all statements about something as being partially products of their historical circumstances; only in their historical Sitz im Leben (German, “situation in life”) could they be properly understood: A text could be correctly understood only in context. Therefore, all statements about the meaning of things were seen to be deabsolutized, that is, “limited” in terms of time. Such is a historical view of truth. 2. Intentionality: Later on it was noted that we ask questions so as to obtain knowledge, truth, according to which we want to live; this is a praxis or intentional view of truth: that is, a statement has to be understood in relationship to the action-oriented intention of the thinker who poses the question that is being answered—and is thereby further limited or specified. 3. Sociology of knowledge: Just as statements were seen by some thinkers to be historically deabsolutized in time (text can be understood only in historical context), so, too, in the twentieth century, Karl Mannheim (1893–1947) developed what he called the “sociology of knowledge,” which points out that every statement about something is perspectival, for all reality is perceived and spoken of from the perceiver’s perspective, and that perspective is shaped by one’s culture, class, gender, and the like. Such is a perspectival view of truth—thereby once more limiting a “truth,” a statement about reality. 4. Limitations of language: A number of thinkers, and especially Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951), uncovered the limitations of human language. Every description of reality is necessarily only partial, for, although reality can be seen from a limitless number of perspectives, human language can express things from only one perspective at a time. If the question is asked in legal terms, the answer is limited to a legal response; the same linguistic determination exists if, for example, a historical question or a biological question is asked. This partial, limited quality of all language is necessarily intensified when one tries to speak of the Transcendent, which by definition “goes-beyond.” Such is a language-limited view of truth. 5. Hermeneutics: Through the contemporary discipline of hermeneutics—led by such

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great thinkers as Bernard Lonergan (1904–1984), Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900– 2002), and Ricoeur, we now realize that no knowledge can ever be completely objective, for we, the knowers, are an integral part of the process of knowing. In brief, all knowledge is interpreted knowledge. Even in its simplest form, whether I claim that the Bible or the Qur’an or the Gita is God’s truth (or, indeed, the interpretation of the Bible by the pope or Martin Luther or anyone else), it is I who affirm that it is so. But, if neither I nor anyone else can know everything about anything, including, most of all, the most complicated claim to truth, religion, how do I proceed to search for an ever fuller grasp of reality, of truth? The clear answer is dialogue. Lonergan, Gadamer, and Ricoeur each stressed that all knowledge is interpreted knowledge. This means that in all knowledge I come to know something; the object comes into me in a certain way, namely, through the lens that I use to perceive it—by hearing, sight, touch, mathematical computation, mental abstraction, emotion-laden symbols, or what have you. As Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) wrote, “Things known are in the knower according to the mode of the knower.”8 Such is an interpretative view of truth. 6. Dialogue: A further development of this basic insight is that I learn not by being merely passively receptive to, but by being in dialogue with, extra​mental reality. Reality can “speak” to me only with the language that I give it; the “answers” that I receive from reality will always be in the language, the thought categories, of the questions I put to it. If the answers I receive are sometimes confused and unsatis​fying, then I probably need to learn to speak a more appropriate language when I put questions to reality. For example, if I ask, “How heavy is green?” I will receive a nonsense answer. Or, if I ask questions about living things in mechanical categories, I will receive confusing and unsatisfying answers. I will likewise receive con​fusing and unsatisfying answers to questions about human sexuality if I use categories that are solely physical-biological. (Witness the absur​dity of the answer that birth control is forbidden by natural law—the question falsely assumes that the nature of humanity is merely physical-biological.) Such an understanding of truth is both necessarily limited and a dialogic under​standing. In brief, our understanding of truth and reality has been under​going a radical shift. The new paradigm that is being born understands all statements about reality to be historical, praxial or intentional, perspectival, language-limited or partial, interpretive, and dialogic. Our understanding of truth, in short, has become “deabsolutized”—it has become “relational”: that is, all statements about reality are now seen to be related to the historical context, praxis intentionality, and perspective, of the speaker and, in that sense, are no longer “absolute.” Therefore, if my perception and description of the world are true only in a limited sense, that is, only as seen from my place in the world, then if I

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wish to expand my grasp of reality, I need to learn from others what they know of reality, what they can perceive from their place in the world that I cannot see from mine. That, however, can happen only through dialogue.

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Mature Religion’s Development I would like to reflect further on what has been learned recently about the structure and growth of the human self in developmental psychology. The two major pioneers were Jean Piaget (1896–1980) and Erik Erikson (1902–1994); the work of both was applied by Lawrence Kohlberg (1927–1987) to the development of the moral self, and by Fowler to the believing self. Kohlberg and Fowler investigated the relationship between an individual’s cognitional, moral judgment and faith develop​ment. The relationship might be summed up in the two words, “prerequisites” and “stages.” Cognitional capacities, that is, the ability to understand, and psychosocial experiences, that is, life experiences, must reach certain minimums before the person can advance to the next level of moral judgment and/or faith. The advance does not necessarily occur, but it cannot occur without the prerequisite capacities and experiences. Further, a more advanced level of moral judgment and/or faith cannot be attained without passing through the lower stages, that is, one cannot skip from Stage 2 to Stage 4. Kohlberg developed a schema of three pairs of stages of moral judgment development, which he called (1) preconventional, where the standard for moral judgment tends to be the self; (2) conventional, where the standards come from the outside society; and (3) postconventional, where the standards tend to go beyond societal patterns to general prin​ciples. Fowler, building on the work of Piaget, Erikson, and Kohlberg, built an impressive body of field research and analysis, on the basis of which he formulated his theory of six stages of faith development that are similar to Kohlberg’s six stages of moral development. Living as we do in a world that is increasingly shifting to a paradigm of a deabsolutized understanding of truth (that is, increasingly recognizing the limitations of all statements about reality) and a proportionate openness to and need for interreligious dialogue, it is helpful to note the characteristics Kohlberg found in what he called the postconventional stages, stages 5 and 6, and what Fowler found in his Stages 5 and 6 of faith development. Kohlberg argued that ​the rejection of conventional moral reasoning begins with the perception of relativism, that is, the awareness that any society’s definition of right and wrong, however legitimate, is only one among many, in both fact and theory. Thus, it would be necessary for a person to have moved to Kohlberg’s Stage 5 in moral reasoning in order to engage in authentic interreligious dialogue. In writing of Conjunctive faith, his Stage 5 in faith development, Fowler stated: Stage 5 accepts as axiomatic that truth is more multidimensional and organically interdependent than most theories or accounts of truth can grasp. Religiously, it knows that the symbols, stories, doctrines and liturgies offered by its own or

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other traditions are inevitably partial, limited to a particular people’s experience of God and incomplete. Stage 5 also sees, however, that the relativity of religious traditions that matters is not their relativity to each other, but their relativity —relateivity—to the reality to which they mediate relation. Conjunctive faith, therefore, is ready for significant encounters with other traditions than its own, expecting that truth has disclosed and will disclose itself in those traditions in ways that may complement or correct its own . . . This position implies no lack of commitment to one’s own truth tradition. Nor does it mean a wishy-washy neutrality or mere fascination with the exotic features of alien cultures. Rather, Conjunctive faith’s radical openness to the truth of the other stems precisely from its confidence in the reality mediated by its own tradition and in the awareness that that reality overspills its mediation. The person of Stage 5 makes her or his own experience of truth the principle by which other claims to truth are tested. But he or she assumes that each genuine perspective will augment and correct aspects of the other, in a mutual movement toward the real and the true.9 Again, it is clear that Stage 5 faith is a prerequisite of authentic interreligious dialogue. Before that, interreligious encounters would be a prelude ​to authentic dialogue. The age of the appearance of Stage 5 faith is also pertinent. According to Fowler, transitional Stage 4–5 does not appear until one’s twenties—and then only relatively rarely. However, of adults over thirty that his team interviewed in depth (359 persons over eight years), a third attained transitional Stage 4-5 or higher, meaning that a third of the population​ over thirty is capable of authentic dialogue. Unfortunately, institutional religion in America seems to be out of step with this development, since, as Fowler suggested, most churches, synagogues, and the like are at Stage 3, that is, “we’re right and they’re wrong.” It is obvious that humans have choices between either staying at the low end of the spectrum, which is very materialistic and selfish, or moving toward the high end, which is spiritual and altruistic—or pausing at some stage in between. Religion can be seen as a path, as Abraham Maslow (1908–1970) described the goal of human life, toward “selfactualization,” and religious experiences may be seen as “peak-experiences,” to use an expression he coined. Thus, it is clear that these humanistic psychologists have much in common with religious persons. Many of the visions of humanistic psychologists regarding human potentialities are strikingly similar to the visions of the spiritual masters in various world religions concerning human liberation or salvation. Maslow famously described the hierarchy of values in human life, starting at the foundation with physical needs, rising to the peak of the fully self-actualized person. He found this hierarchy of values in all the principal religions and ethical systems of humankind, and noted that they

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project an image of humanity as we could be if we would develop our potentialities to the highest. These are ideals, that is, statements not of what is but of what ought to be. They are projections beyond the present reality to an ideal of perfection. These humanistic psychologists noted that the notions of the development of morals and faith did not significantly differ from those among the major world religions. Individuals regarded by the various world religions as having attained the greatest spiritual achievements are invariably at the highest stage of moral and spiritual development in the search for meaning, and they see reality as infinite. These psychologists understand religion to suggest that much of conventional human conduct needs to be transcended, and that there is also a need for reconciling what most people see as opposites. As a link to the next section, recall the last half of the second greatest command of Judaism/Christianity: “Love your neighbor as yourself,” which, of course, is the quite universal Golden Rule: We cannot love our neighbor unless, and to the degree that, we love ourselves. This is the moral acme of mutuality.

3. See Fowler, Stages of Faith, 107; and Swidler, After the Absolute, 195–99. 4. See Allport, The Individual and His Religion, 52 and 54 (italics added). I am grateful to Allport for outlining the characteristics of a mature religion (57–74). 5. Ibid., 63. 6. Ibid., 70. 7. Ibid., 72. 8. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, II–II, Q. 1, a. 2: Cognita sunt in cognoscente secundum modum cognoscentis. 9. Fowler, Stages of Faith, 186–87.

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Modernity Modernity Is the Atmosphere in Which We Live Anyone reading this book is living in the mental world of Modernity with the four characteristics mentioned above: (1) a sense of radical freedom, (2) automatically asking whether something makes rational sense, (3) perceiving all human experience in its specific historical context and because of the relationality of all knowledge, and (4) the need to engage persons with different views and experiences in dialogue so as to learn more. We cannot avoid Modernity, even if we do not allude to it or are not consciously aware of it. Modernity is all around us. It is the very air that we breathe, even when we might vigorously be trying to reject some part of it. In our bones we feel free, and we feel outraged when we learn of others who are robbed of their freedom. We cannot help but involuntarily ask of every new or old idea or bit of information that comes along whether it makes sense, whether we “buy” it. So, too, we are increasingly aware that reality around us is constantly changing, that old givens do not necessarily hold; consequently, we constantly ask whether old maxims are still valid or are something from a past context. Increasingly, we do not automatically discount those who are different from us, but we are more and more inclined at first to tolerate them, then to open out to them, and then even to seek them out. Modernity makes up our mental world—just as water is where fish live or as the air is essential for us mammals. We do not even notice it, unless it is severely damaged and we start to choke and even die. We automatically resist threats to our freedom and protest when something unreasonable is being forced upon us. We would do the same if our radios, TVs, cellphones, or computers were taken from us and we were forced to go back to living in the older context and could no longer learn new things from persons elsewhere in the world. This is all true even if we do not think about it until part of it might be taken away. Consequently, if a hoary tradition is to find a helpful, creative place in our lives, we need to undertake two important steps. First of all, we need to reflect more intensely and consciously on just what our mental world of Modernity is like and to learn in greater depth what its elements are and how they intertwine to constitute the atmosphere in which we “live, move, and have our being,” as Saint Paul wrote in quoting an ancient Greek poet. The contemporary philosopher Gadamer put it that history does not belong to us, but we belong to it. When we become more self-aware of the mental context in which we live, we will then be forced to ask ourselves questions about the “explanation of the ultimate meaning

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of life and how to live accordingly, based on some notion of the Transcendent.” In my case, that religion is Christianity, but the questions and many of the answers will be very similar for the other religions of the world. The questions we will have to ask of our religion will automatically be raised by the elements of Modernity: Can Christianity promote my freedom? Can Judaism make reasonable sense? Can Islam adapt to the changing world? Can Buddhism help me expand my understanding through dialogue with the Other? If a religion cannot answer those questions adequately, it will not be able to provide us with the “explanation of the ultimate meaning of life and how to live accordingly” in today’s—and tomorrow’s—world.

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Freedom at the Core of Being Human We are increasingly learning that at the heart of the universe there is a radical freedom, an indeterminacy. Already in the early twentieth century we learned of the “Heisenberg Principle of Indeterminacy,” roughly stated: In investigating subatomic matter, we cannot accurately know both the speed of an electron and its location. This may seem quite uninteresting to the nonphysicist, but it has huge implications. It means that at the very foundation of our physical reality there is a radical freedom. Hence, when we humans experience or feel a radical freedom at the heart of our being, it is not some strange anomaly. Our human sense of radical freedom—despite all the restraining limitations we may also experience—is something that is very much in sync with the very physical foundation of our bodies and of the whole universe. Despite the arguments of such famous twentieth-century psychologists of determinism as Ivan Pavlov (1849–1936) with his famous salivating dog, and B. F. Skinner (1904– 1990); despite nineteenth-century determinist philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer (1788– 1860); and despite theologians such as Saint Augustine in the fifth century (354–430), and Martin Luther (1483–1546) and John Calvin (1509–1564) in the sixteenth—the vast majority of men and women are convinced that there is a core of freedom, of choice, at the center of our being human. Our whole civilized world of whatever culture is built on that bedrock of freedom. Let me point to one example standing in for all the other elements of civilization: All our legal systems are built on the presumption of a fundamental human freedom and responsibility. You know that this Ferrari is not yours, but you take it anyway for a joyride or to a chop shop and are caught; the law determines that you will pay a penalty, because it is presumed that you had a choice and freely decided to steal the car. On a larger scale, think about the Nuremberg War Trials and other war-crimes trials since then, such as those against the perpetrators of genocide in Rwanda, Bosnia, and Iraq. The defense of the SS guards at Auschwitz, and others—that they were “just following orders”—was not found persuasive. They were held responsible for their despicable crimes against humanity—because they were considered free in their actions. In the theological sphere almost nobody really follows those Christian theologians who teach determinism and predestination. What preacher gets up in the pulpit on a Sunday morning and tells his congregation that there is nothing they can do about whether they are going to go to heaven or not, since God decided that when he created them? (I am deliberately using the traditional sexist language here because all these things were/are normally done by males, including a “male” god.) If the congregation believed him, they would save their money by firing him and closing the church. Yet, even those theologians (such as Luther and Calvin and their intellectual descendants) who teach that we humans can do nothing whatsoever to avoid eternal damnation will nevertheless on

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Sundays enthusiastically preach that we should open ourselves to God’s gracious mercy (although they also teach in self-contradictory fashion that God determined ahead of time that he would give us the grace to accept his offered mercy—or not). No, no Christian preacher really seems to believe that we humans are not radically free and hence responsible for our “salvation,” despite his sometimes confusing and self-contradictory teaching—not if he hopes to keep his job. Is there a way for us humans to explain to ourselves how we are free, how it happens that we have the ability to make choices? There have been many such attempts, of course, but let me see if I can make it fairly clear from just your and my personal reflection—I mean, not by running neurological tests or any other experiments but by simply recalling our common human experience and analyzing it for its implications. I am not persuaded by that very august ancient Greek philosopher Plato in this matter. He argued that we humans have certain inborn ideas and that they are the “really real,” compared to the “shadowy” sense images that we experience in everyday life. Rather, I am persuaded by his equally, if not more, august student, Aristotle (384–322 BCE), who argued (and here I use the words of Aristotle’s much later but also very august student, Thomas Aquinas, in the thirteenth century): Nil in intellectu quod non prius in sensu, “Nothing is in the intellect which was not first in the senses.” Everything we humans know came to us first through the experience of our senses, which we then analyzed (took apart, Greek: ana, “up”; lysis, “break”) and then synthesized (put back together either in the same, or new, ways, Greek: syn, “together”; thesis, “put”). We humans are able, for example, to perceive through our senses a wide range of dogs, and then “abstract,” that is, literally “pull away” (Latin: ab, “from”; tractus, “pulled,” as in “tractor”) from the myriad differing sense details (for example, size, weight, and color) a common notion “dog” that fits all individual members of the species. Our abstract reasoning allows us to line up the variety of individuals, see their commonalities and their differences, compare them, and thereby choose one, several, all, or none of them. If we could not think abstractly, we would not be able to make comparisons and, from that, to choose. We would not be free but determined by our internal instincts, which operate much like computer programs—and just as irresistibly. Another way to say “choosing” is to say “loving,” in the broad sense. When our knowing faculties—for example, our five senses or our reason—present us with an aspect of reality (truth), our appetitive, our “wanting” faculties—that is, our will or appetites—move to unite us with what they perceive as the good. Here is a simple example: My sense of sight sees an ice cream cone, and from my past experience of the sense of taste I perceive it as good; my appetitive faculty then moves to unite me physically with the good, the ice cream cone. Thus, love, or choice, is a unitive force. To be a little “punny,” love is the “urge to merge.” It brings the “actor” together with what it

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perceives as the good—whether the good be an ice cream cone, a Mozart concerto, or a friend. Yet, even when we are presented with what our appetitive faculties perceive as the good, we still have the capacity not to move to unite with that good. We can refuse the ice cream, turn off the Mozart recording, not visit the friend—though we cannot thereby stop being drawn toward unity with them. That is one reason some existentialist philosophers who have stressed the centrality of human freedom have spoken of “our damnable freedom”—we just cannot shake it. We humans have always been radically free, but for much of the history of humanity most women and men were told that for the most part they were not free and were physically prevented from exercising most of their freedom. Only a very few elite humans—mostly males—were relatively fully free. Vast numbers of humans were “unfree.” For example, in the “inventor” of democracy, ancient Athens, only about 10 percent of the population could actually take part in the government, were the demos (Greek for “people”), while perhaps two-thirds of the population were either slaves or metics (those who had civic responsibilities but no rights). Slavery goes back thousands of years, to even before writing. It was only in the late eighteenth century as a result of the “abolitionist” movement, which was started in England by Christians, that it has been almost eliminated—something in which both Christianity and Modernity can take pride. Further, women have been by far the largest unfree group of humans; throughout most of human history the vast majority of women have been greatly less free than men. Here, too, Modernity can take satisfaction for working with significant success (though there is still far to go) to free women from sexist bondage. Unfortunately, all the world’s religions either have continued to be resistant to this freedom movement or have come to it late. When the inner core of human freedom finally reached the tipping point in the eighteenth-century Western Enlightenment, it became unstoppable. Everybody wanted to exercise her or his radical human freedom. I personally am honored to live and be typing these words in the city where this incredible breakthrough took place—Philadelphia (Greek: “sisterly/brotherly love”). This is where the immortal words “All men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights” and the American Constitution with its Bill of Rights of freedom were penned and made into law in 1776 and 1787 respectively. These documents came before the French Revolution and its Declaration des droits des hommes et citoyens (Declaration of the Rights of Men and Citizens—1789) existed—indeed, the earlier writings helped to bring them about. Almost all the civil and religious forces in the West—never mind elsewhere—viciously resisted the expansion of human freedom. One egregious example in the West was Pope Gregory XVI’s 1832 encyclical Mirari vos, which harshly condemned freedom of conscience and religious liberty as absolute madness. Deliramentum (“deliriousness”) was the Latin term

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he used. In this he was quoted with even greater rage by his successor Pope Pius IX in 1864, in his Syllabus of Errors. Nevertheless, even that very same Catholic Church relented and totally reversed itself (without admitting it, of course) in the 1965 Declaration of Religious Freedom (Dignitatis humanae) at Vatican II, which insists that religious liberty and freedom of conscience are at the heart of the Catholic tradition.

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Critical-Thinking Reason, the Arbiter of Truth The very fact that religion in general claims to provide an “explanation of the ultimate meaning of life” shows that it is obviously focused in a central way on the human mind. This was especially true of the great world religions that arose, or were transformed, during and after the Axial Period (800–200 BCE), when second-order thinking developed —that is, thinking about thinking, probing for the questions behind the surface questions. Hence, profound systems of thought were developed by Greek philosophy, Hinduism, Christianity, Islam, Confucianism, and the like. However, because, as Lord Acton (1834–1902) aptly put it, “power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely,” religious institutions tended to enforce belief standards that were based on something other than the believer’s reasoning—whether the Sacred Scripture, the Tradition, the Halacha, Shari’a, the Law of Manu, or what have you. The invention of printing by Johannes Gutenberg (1398–1468) in the fifteenth century, however, broke the dam of limited literacy, and reading turned into a flood by the eighteenth century, providing the broad basis for the Enlightenment. The touchstone to decide whether or not an idea was to be accepted came less from the former measures and more from reason. The question was no longer whether it was in scripture, tradition, or authority but, rather: Did it make sense? Was it reasonable? It was during the same century that serious modern scholarly analysis of the Jewish and Christian Scriptures, the Bible, were begun, and then greatly expanded in the nineteenth century when “scientific” historical writing was developed (more below). The scholarly rational analysis of the claims of religious authorities began in earnest, especially in the West, which meant largely first an analysis of Christianity’s claims. As more and more geological discoveries about the age of the earth were made, the straightforward assumption that had been held for many centuries, namely, that the earth was created between five and six thousand years ago, seemed increasingly impossible to hold. It appeared more and more that the earth was created many millions of years ago (actually, today we figure the earth is approximately 4.54 billion years old.). What to do? There seemed to be three major choices looming: (1) The Bible is the word of God and is true; hence, the counter physical evidence that the world is older than six thousand years is in one way or another mistaken. (2) The physical evidence that the world is at least many millions of years old is so clear that we simply have to understand the biblical claims to be like children’s fairytales and reject them. (3) We recognize that we had misread many of the biblical writings, assuming that they all were intended to be factual, historical accounts of events, whereas in many instances (for example, the Creation and Garden of Eden stories) they were precisely that—that is, they were really stories, not some kind of newspaper-reporter eyewitness accounts, and were intended to make certain moral points. People chose each of the options.

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Let me try to make more concrete how this might happen with one Jewish and one Christian case. Similar analyses have, of course, been done in Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, and other religions, but these two cases should be sufficient to exemplify this line of critical reasoning. (Incidentally, “critical” comes from the Greek krinein, “to make a judgment”—more about that below.)

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Case Study 1:A Critical-Thinking Reading of the Biblical Creation Story Since most English-language readers will be more or less familiar with the creation story as found in the first three chapters of Genesis, I will offer a—not complete, but only partial—contemporary critical-thinking reading of those chapters—which is the third option above. I do not assume that the Genesis account is the historical report of some precreation Paradise Times reporter describing what happened from the beginning (today one can perhaps only sigh at such an assumption). I will focus on two misreadings resulting from unwarranted assumptions. The first misreading is that the story is about the fall of humanity into the state of being a sin-sotted soul, and the second is that the man was created superior to the woman. The first question relates to the Western Christian doctrine of original sin—which, incidentally, is not present in Judaism and, hence, is the source of a potentially creative dialogue between Judaism and Christianity. The second question, about the relationship between women and men as laid out in Genesis 1–3, provides a very enlightening and creative dialogue possibility concerning that relationship for both Judaism and Christianity and, indeed, for Islam—which also recognizes the Hebrew and Christian Bible as God’s revelation, though as somewhat mucked up by the Jews and Christians—and the rest of the world.

The Origin of Good and Evil All the cultures and civilizations of the ancient world had their various explanations of reality and, especially, the source of evil. Basically, their answers were that good things came from good gods or spirits and evil things from evil gods or spirits. It was not so with the ancient Hebrews. They came up with a breakthrough theory, namely, that everything was created by one God, and this one God created everything good (ṭov in Hebrew). Genesis 1 describes the creation of the various parts of the universe as taking place in six phases (“days”), and at the end of each day it states that God saw that what God had done was ṭov. At the end of the last day of creation, what God had done was ṭov me’od, very good. Now, this story raised a problem, one that my then-three-year-old daughter Carmel starkly posed as a question (her question was of the kind known in Goethe’s Faust as a Gretchen Frage, a “Gretchen question”: that is, an obvious question, such as, “Why is the emperor not wearing any clothes?”). When she asked this question, my daughter Carmel was then speaking only German, having been born and raised in Germany till then. We were out for a walk after a very warm rain, and the sidewalk was covered with earthworms, Regenwürme, which for her were definitely icky, “evil.” She very seriously,

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quietly asked, “Vati, ist Gott gut?” (Daddy, is God good?) I responded, “Ja.” Then after a little more silent walking, she asked, “Hat Gott alles gemacht?” (Did God make everything?) I, now becoming somewhat wary, answered slowly, “Ja.” Then she sprang the trap: “Wer dann hat die Regenwürme gemacht?” (Who, then, made the earthworms?); the problem of evil, at age three! From then on, I thought of this kind of querulous query as a “Carmel question.” The ancient Hebrews were also aware of that problem and had their answer: the “domino theory.” During the Cold War, in the second half of the twentieth century, the United States applied the “domino theory” about the fall of countries into the camp of communism to justify political or even military intervention. For example, if Vietnam fell to communism, then Cambodia would fall next, and Laos after that, and then Burma, and so on, like dominos stood on end next to each other, in a row, knocking each other over, one after another, once the first one was tipped over. Perhaps the first version of the “domino theory” was developed in Genesis 3. As seen in Genesis 1, everything that God made was good; hence, everything was acting according to its good nature, that is, tov, as it was created by God. However, when the acme of God’s creation, women and men, disobeyed and no longer acted according to their good nature, they stepped out of the good relationship with their Creator: The first domino fell, and consequently everything else fell out of its originally good relationship to humanity—hence, the various “curses” in Genesis 3, wherein weeds grew amid the plants, childbirth became painful, and wives became subordinate to husbands (more on this below). It might be best, however, not to pursue the Regenwürme matter in this context; the point has been made that there is this puzzle inherent in monotheism, as bothered my young daughter.

A “Modern,” “Irenaean” View of Human Life The way early Christian thinkers posed the question of moral evil to themselves was often to juxtapose the All-Powerful, Omnipotent God on the one hand and the radically free human being on the other. The Irish theologian Pelagius10 favored humanity’s free will, whereas Saint Augustine, who is credited, if “credit” is the right word, with “inventing” the doctrine of original sin, leaned toward the omnipotence of God—and the Western Christian church largely followed after him. After breaking my head over the question for many years as a young man, I decided that the problem was not primarily with the irrational answers given by Augustine, Luther, Calvin, and others, eliminating human free will and blasphemously describing God as creating the majority of humans just in order to cast them into hell for all eternity. Rather, the problem is the silly forming of the question. We are here dealing with two “unknowns” and then asking what the relationship is between the two. It reminds me of

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our boyhood smart-aleck question: What happens when an irresistible force meets an immovable object? Clever answer: an inconceivable reaction. As in mathematics, so also here one cannot rationally expect to answer the question of the relationship between two unknowns. If we humans are not able “rationally” to explain to ourselves the antinomy (Greek, anti, “opposed”; nomos, “law,” “apparent contradiction”) between an omnipotent Creator and a radically free human, if we cannot rationally explain the looming contradiction between Evil and the God of Love11 (as the famous Protestant thinker John Hick [1922–2012] titled his 1966 book), we can, nevertheless, find a less pessimistic, dark direction of a response in what was offered in earlier Christian thought, as well as in traditional Eastern Orthodox Christianity. Hick laid out that approach in great detail in the above-named book and, subsequently, again almost forty years later in The Fifth Dimension.12 Hick located a more positive interpretation of this dilemma several centuries before Saint Augustine, first of all in Saint Irenaeus of Lyon (130–202)—who, despite being named by a city of France, Lyon, where he eventually served as bishop, was originally from the East and was Greek-speaking. Rather than understanding the Genesis story of the first woman and man as a “fall” into evil from which all subsequent humans cannot escape and are consequently punished—as did Augustine and almost all later Christian thinkers—Irenaeus saw the situation much more the way a “modern” evolutionary thinker does. Hick wrote, “Irenaeus suggests that man was created as an imperfect, immature creature who was to undergo moral development and growth and finally be brought to the perfection intended for him by his Maker . . . And instead of the Augustinian view of life’s trials as a divine punishment for Adam’s sin, Irenaeus sees our world of mingled good and evil as a divinely appointed environment for man’s development towards the perfection that represents the fulfillment of God’s good purpose for him.”13 Irenaeus used an exegesis (Greek, “explanation”) of Gen 1:26 that no modern Scripture scholar would accept, but it was a way for him to find a biblical basis for his understanding of human life. He asked what the biblical author intended by saying that humanity was made in God’s “image and likeness.” Why two synonyms, imago and similitudo in the Latin Vulgate, and eikon and homoiosis in the Septuagint translation? The answer, according to Greek Orthodox scholar P. Bratsiotis, was, “The eikon is related, according to these Church Fathers [he meant first Irenaeus, then Clement of Alexandria, Origen, Methodius, and Saint Gregory of Nanzianus], to man’s spiritual nature as a rational and free being. But the homoiosis means, according to the same Church Fathers, man’s longing and positive striving toward God, and at the same time man’s destiny, which is to come into the likeness of God.”14 This is the famous Orthodox Christian doctrine of theosis. One must be careful to note that the Greek term

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does not mean “becoming God,” as in pantheism, but “becoming God-like”—hence, not “deification” but, more accurately, “divinization.” Hick referred to this Irenaean “evolutionary” understanding of human life as “soulmaking.” “This world must be a place of soul-making. And its value is to be judged, not primarily by the quantity of pleasure and pain occurring in it at any particular moment, but by its fitness for its primary purpose, the purpose of soul-making.”15

Not of the Fall of Man but of “the Rise” of Homo Sapiens In Genesis 3 the serpent tells Eve that if she eats the forbidden fruit of the “Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil,” she will not suffer some dire consequences as predicted by God but will become “like God, knowing good and evil” (Gen 3:5). According to the story, the serpent was not lying, for Eve saw that the fruit “was good for wisdom” (3:6), and that after she ate it her “eyes were opened” (3:7), and she and Adam learned to know the difference between good and evil. Further, even God says of Eve and Adam, “Look, they have become like one of us, knowing good and evil” (3:22). Since earlier the text states that humans were “made in God’s image” (1:27), it appears that “becoming like God,” as the serpent promised, meant “knowing good and evil”—hence, being able to choose the good or the evil. Here is a story that shows that the difference between humans and animals is in humans’ knowledge and free choice or love. Further, the text tells in story fashion how this came about. Our technical term for humans, homo sapiens, gives us a clue about this development. Sapiens, which in Latin means “wisdom,” comes from sapere, “to taste.” Hence, wisdom is not theoretical knowledge but the kind of knowledge that a person gains from experience, from “tasting” life. Thus, in the Genesis story, how do Eve and Adam become “wise”? How do they come to know good and evil, that is, come to be human, to be homo sapiens? By “tasting” (sapiens) the fruit of the “Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.” They are different from the animals, which operate only on instinct, whereas humans can, and should, operate by learning what is good and what is evil and then choosing, loving, the good. It is not as a result of eating the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil that we humans are now going to die. We were always going to die. However, now we humans know that we are going to die, whereas—in the story—as animals, we did not know. Thus, both my dog and I are going to die; the difference between us in this regard is that I know that I am going to die, but my dog does not know. Again, the difference between the animals and humans is knowledge, though, perhaps unfortunately, here there is no question of choosing not to die but only of choosing how to deal with that fact. Hence, the Genesis story is not the story of the “fall” of humanity but of the “rise” of

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Homo sapiens, the human knowing (sapiens) of the difference between good and evil— thus, being able freely to choose, to love.

The Man not Created Superior to the Woman It must be noted that there are two creation stories, one in Genesis 1 and a second, less detailed one in Genesis 2. The latter, written by the Yahwist writer, probably in the tenth century BCE, doubtless existed far earlier in oral form. The Genesis 1 creation story was written by the Priestly writer, probably in the fifth century BCE. In Genesis 1 it is clear that humanity was created female and male simultaneously: “And God created humanity, female and male he created them” (1:27). There is no priority of creation. What about the much older Yahwist story of the creation of humanity in Genesis 2? Is it not clear that the man is created first and then is put into a deep sleep and the woman created from the rib of the man? No, that is definitely not what the text says—the deuteroPauline’s later faulty exegesis notwithstanding (1 Tim 2:13–15). The Yahwist story of human creation is in Gen 2:6, which states that “God Yahweh took a bit of earth (Hebrew: adamah) and formed the human (ha-’adam—“the earthling”; ha is the definite article “the” in Hebrew, so that in conjunction with it, ha-’adam is not a proper name, “Adam,” but “the earthling”) and breathed the breath (ruaḥ) of life into it.” In this Yahwist story the first human being is as yet ungendered, neither female nor male. Perhaps the Yahwist wished to stress that while the human being was from the earth, it was God who was the source—God’s spirit, ruaḥ—of its life. Whatever the reason, it is clear that the Yahwist does not say that the male was created first but an initially sexually undifferentiated “earthling” (ha-’adam) taken from the earth (’adamah). How, then, do we account for the fact that there are men and women? In answering this question with an etiological story (etios, Greek for “origin”), the Yahwist took a wide detour by having God first create the Garden of Eden (including many geographical specifics, such as the names of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers of present-day Iraq). God then sent the earthling (ha-’adam) in to tend it. However, God then said, “It is not good for the earthling [ha-’adam] to be alone,” and so God created the animals and brought them one by one to the earthling to be named. Thus, in the Yahwist story God created all the flora and only one fauna, namely, the earthling; then only afterward did God create the rest of the fauna: this is an odd sequence, but is indicative that what the Yahwist writer was after was not to present a kind of primitive evolutionary picture (as the Priestly writer did in Genesis 1, five hundred years later) but rather a “story with a point,” that is, an etiological story to explain the origin of something—in this case, of gender—and the development of the relationship between the two. Next, God saw that all the various animals were good in themselves, but they were not a “like” partner (‘ezer, 2:18) for the earthling. It is important to note two things at

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this point. One is that the partner God sought for the earthling was a like one, and, hence, the other animals would not do. The second is that the Hebrew term here, ‘ezer, is most often translated as “helper” and thereby is often assumed to mean “less” than the earthling—which assumption, of course, the additional use of “like” invalidates. Moreover, ‘ezer was also used elsewhere in the Torah to describe God as humanity’s “helper”; hence, ‘ezer clearly did not denote an inferior. God then placed the earthling in a deep sleep and took out a rib and formed it into a woman and brought this “cloned” creature to the earthling, who at the sight of her described her (in the first wordplay or pun of many found in the Bible) “as woman (Hebrew: ’iššah), for she was taken from the man” (Hebrew for male, ’iš—2:23; the two words are, in fact, not at all related, but are simply homophones, that is, they sound alike—as, for example, “bear” and “bare” in English). Thus, the Yahwist storyteller stated that God first created the earthling, then in a simultaneous act formed the woman from the earthling, at whose sight the earthling was transformed into the male. The Priestly writer, on the other hand, had God creating humanity simultaneously as male and female. In neither case is any inferiority implied. This point is further reinforced by the fact that in Genesis 3, as a so-called curse, the woman is made subordinate to the man; it could not be a curse if she were already created inferior to the man.

The Image of the Woman Superior to That of the Man I hinted in the heading of this section that perhaps, contrary to the usual patriarchal traditions, at least the image of the woman in the story of the Garden of Eden (the Yahwist story) is superior to that of the man. In Genesis 3 the serpent engages the woman in a conversation—not a casual one, but rather a very heavy conversation— about good and evil, life and death, about being like God. In that conversation she holds her own with one who is said to be the “most cunning of all the animals” created by God. In the end she is persuaded—and, as we saw earlier, correctly so—that eating the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil would not cause her to die (she was going to die eventually anyway) but, in fact, would make her “as God,” which proves to be the case, as God acknowledges in Genesis 3. Moreover, five hundred years after the writing of the Yahwist story, the Priestly writer stated it straightforwardly: “God said, let us make humanity (ha-’adam) in our image and likeness” (1:26). Thus, the image of the woman in the text of Genesis 3 is of one who engaged in a profound philosophical-theological dialogue with a clever interlocutor, who thought things over, who made an executive decision, and who acted on it. What is the image of the man? The Yahwist writer simply states that the woman gave some of the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil to her man (’iš), “and

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he ate” (3:6). No heavy dialogue with a cunning partner, no reflection, no executive decision—just, “and he ate,” as if he were only appetite and stomach. The next time the man appears in the text is when God is walking in the garden in the evening and asks him whether he had eaten of the forbidden fruit: “And the man said, ‘The woman whom you gave to be with me gave me of the Tree, and I ate.’” My granddaughter Willow (“Willy”) would probably characterize his brave stand as that of a wimp and buck-passer. The starkly different images of the woman on the one hand and the man on the other stand out very clearly in the text, not in need of any profound analysis or special background knowledge to discern. Why, then, has the Christian tradition almost overwhelmingly, until most recently, not only not seen the seemingly obvious, and insisted on an inversion or distortion whereby the man is superior because he was created first? We have learned, though, according to both the Priestly and Yahwist writers that he was not. Was this distortion a product of psychological projection? Was it an internalizing of the patriarchal myth and code? Was it a sort of Nietzschean Wille zur Macht! (Will to Power)? Whatever the reasons for the distortion, today more and more Jews and Christians (and Muslims?—for the Torah, according to the Qur’an, is also Revelation for Muslims) are hearing the voice of the little child saying that “the emperor has no clothes.”

Interim Conclusion What conclusions, then, might be drawn from this brief case study of just the first three chapters of Genesis? For one thing, one might conclude along with Hick, after he explored the Jewish, Christian, and other world religious traditions: All that we know, if our big picture is basically correct, is that nothing good that has been created in human life will ever be lost . . . We do not know how the sufferings and sorrows of life, the agonies and despairs, can become steps on a long journey leading eventually to that fulfillment, as they will if the cosmic optimism of the world religions is justified. We have our theories, but they are only theories. However we do not need at this stage of our existence to know the solution to these mysteries. [He adds that we can only live in trust that in the end somehow, as Lady Julian of Norwich in the fourteenth century said,] “All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.”16 There is, of course, much more that can be drawn out of this amazing biblical text of long ago, but let this suffice to exemplify how one is not forced to choose between a naive fundamentalist acceptance of the meaning of the text, on the one hand, and a rigid total rejection of it, on the other. Rather, the scientific study of ancient texts—and not

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just biblical but also Islamic, Hindu, Buddhist, and others—opens up the way to draw from them the ancient wisdom stored therein. Such an analysis is not a desperate attempt to “save” religion, but it is the truly reasonable, rational—the “correct”—way to understand the ancient texts.

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Case Study 2: A Rabbi Becomes the Messiah,Who Becomes the Christ, Who Becomes God In the beginning of Christianity, there was no Christianity. There was Judaism, and one of its major interpreters, Jesus or, rather, Yeshua ha-Notzri (in his native Hebrew, “Jesus of Nazareth”—from here on I will use the name Yeshua so as to remind the reader that he was not a Christian but a Jew), who was a student of the two then-great rabbinic schools, if not of the Masters of the schools themselves: Rabbis Hillel and Shammai. Yeshua himself then became a great Rabbi. In the beginning, following Yeshua took place entirely within Judaism, but, after his crucifixion and resurrection, his followers included only a portion of the Jewish community and an ever-increasing number of non-Jews (Gentiles). Already during Yeshua’s lifetime there was disagreement about where truth lay—following the teaching of Rabbi Yeshua or that of some other group, for example, the Pharisees,17 Sadducees,18 Essenes,19 Zealots,20 or Hellenists.21 The Sadducees, Essenes, and Zealots were all destroyed in the unsuccessful 66–70 CE rebellion against Rome. The spiritual descendants of the Pharisees—adherents of Rabbinic Judaism—and the followers of Rabbi Yeshua—Christians—were the only survivors, for the Hellenist Jews eventually either chose one of them or assimilated into the Roman religious culture. Quite quickly what became known as Christianity spread beyond Jews, so that the majority of Christians soon came from the pagan world. This shift to increasingly non-Jewish populations meant that Christians more and more did not live in the Semitic mental world, with its “picture-language” way of thinking and speaking, and with its major emphasis not on “what should I think?” but on “what should I do?” (which of course was also precisely how Yeshua thought and taught). Christianity moved into the Greek world with its abstract, philosophical way of thinking and speaking, and with its heavy emphasis on “what should I think?” During the first century after the death of Yeshua, all of the writings that eventually were judged to make up the New Testament were written. What was and was not included was decided gradually by the Christian community at large, the Ekklesia Katholika, the universal church, and it became definitive only around 367 CE. Even during that formative first century, however, there was great diversity among the communities of Yeshua followers concerning what the truth about him was. This was reflected in the many different Christologies—that is, explanations of the meaning of Yeshua the Christ (Messiah in Hebrew: “anointed one”)—expressed in the New Testament itself. Throughout this time great debates took place about what the “Christian” truth was and how it was to be expressed. A momentous step toward clarity was taken in 325 CE when the Roman emperor, Constantine, called the first Ecumenical (Greek, oikumenos, “universal”) Council in Nicaea, a distant suburb of the new imperial city of

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Constantinople. By then the percentage of the Jewish followers of Yeshua had greatly diminished in comparison to the vast number of Gentiles. These “new” followers of Yeshua, as noted, lived not in his Semitic mental world of “picture language” and “what to do?” but in the Greek thought world of “philosophical abstractions,” with a heavy focus on “what to think.” The great debates about the meaning of the teaching and life of Yeshua thereafter continued to mine the now-canonized New Testament writings, reaching a climax in the Council of Chalcedon (another distant suburb of Constantinople) in 451 CE, although three more ecumenical councils took place thereafter, the last one being Nicaea II in 787 CE. In the Council of Chalcedon, Jesus Christ (the cosmic Greek Iesous Christos, not the concrete Jewish Yeshua ha-Notzri) was officially declared Vere Deus et Vere Homo, “Truly God and Truly Man.” From that time there reigned the so-called Vincentian Canon: Quod ubique, quod semper, quod ab omnibus creditum est, “what has been believed everywhere, always, and by all.” In summary, the path to truth was now largely through Greek philosophical thinking as expressed in the conciliar statements. Vere Deus et Vere Homo may well have been believed, but what did it mean? What was a “Finite-Infinite”? It sounded like the equivalent of “dehydrated water.” Every time a theologian proffered a seemingly understandable explanation of what it meant, it was declared wrong, heretical. Were those Church Fathers going down the dizzying intellectual path that Augustine took a few decades earlier? Were they falling into a “category mistake,” asking the equivalent of, how heavy is green? or, how far is sleeping? when green has no weight, and sleeping has no distance? Wrong question in, wrong answer out. What, then, could Christians in this and similar cases do? Actually, they have taken several different paths. One approach was that, since there was no clear specific rational content in the conciliar statement, some Christians asked what the intention of the Fathers of Chalcedon might have been when they came up with this nonsensical, that is, literally nonsensical statement. In response, a number of Catholic theologians have presented what millions of Catholic believers have found persuasive, though the Vatican has opposed them, stopping short, however, of outright condemnation.22 Another approach was to recognize that the Catholic Church clearly has changed its position on issues that were thought by high authority to be irreformable. For example, in 1414–1418, an ecumenical council (recognized by all Vatican officials as valid) of all the Catholic bishops met in Constance and issued the following decree; the decree itself noted that even the pope was to be obedient to it: This synod declares first that, being legitimately convoked in the Holy Spirit, forming a general council and representing the universal Church, it has immediate power from Christ, which every state and dignity, even if it

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be the papal dignity, must obey in what concerns faith, the eradication of the mentioned schism [there were three popes at that time, the so-called Western Schism], and the reformation of the said Church in head and members. Likewise, it declares that whoever of whatever condition, state, dignity, even the papal one, refused persistently to obey the mandate, statutes and orders of prescripts of this sacred synod and of any other general council legitimately convened, above set out, or what pertains to them as done or to be done, will be penalized and duly punished with recourse if necessary to other means of law.23 However, in 1870, at Vatican Council I, the exact opposite was stated: “all the faithful of Christ are bound to believe that the holy apostolic See and the Roman pontiff have the primacy over the whole world . . . that the judgment of the apostolic See, whose authority has no superior, can be reviewed by none; and that no one is allowed to judge its judgments. Those, therefore, stray from the straight way of truth who affirm that it is lawful to appeal from the judgments of the Roman pontiffs to an ecumenical council—as to an authority superior to the Roman pontiff.”24 Here is another example of a presumably irreformable decree being “reversed.” As I noted above, Gregory XVI stated in Mirari vos: “From this poisonous spring of indifferentism flows the false and absurd, or rather the mad principle [deliramentum] that we must secure and guarantee to each one liberty of conscience; this is one of the most contagious of errors.”25 If that were not clear enough, his successor Pius IX issued an encyclical titled Quanta cura in 1864, which repeated the prior condemnation of freedom of conscience: “From this totally false notion of social government they fear not to uphold that erroneous opinion most pernicious to the Catholic Church, and to the salvation of souls, which was called by Our Predecessor Gregory XVI (lately quoted) the insanity . . . , namely, ‘that the liberty of conscience and of worship is the . . . right of every man; which should be proclaimed by law.’”26 Just a century later, however, Vatican II issued its “Declaration on Religious Freedom,” completely reversing the seemingly irreformable decrees of the two nineteenth-century popes: “The exercise of religion, of its very nature, consists before all else in those internal, voluntary and free acts whereby man sets the course of his life directly toward God. No merely human power can either command or prohibit acts of this kind . . . Gov​ernment . . . would clearly transgress the limits set to its power, were it to presume to command or inhibit acts that are religious.”27 Subsequently, although many Catholics simply let the contradictions persist, others saw that they had to choose; they could not embrace both contradictory positions. Of those who made a choice, some chose one side and remained in the Catholic Church

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despite the contradiction because of the other greater values they found therein. Others remained because they realized that change in all religious institutions was inevitable and reckoned that the contradictions would eventually be resolved. A third group left Catholicism. It seems clear that at least these kinds of choices, and doubtless others, were present in all religions over the centuries—and would remain into the future. Hence, the reluctant believer must survey the situation and decide which choice to make, for change is inevitable—and so is choice.

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The Expansion of Critical-Thinking Reason After the split between Eastern (Orthodox) and Western (Catholic) Christianity, confirmed in 1054 CE, the statements of the papacy became more and more the locus of truth in Western Christianity, in Roman Catholicism. Thus, in Catholicism the papal teaching office, the magisterium, became the final source of truth, whereas in Eastern Christianity, Orthodoxy, the traditio as reflected in the ecumenical councils remained the final arbiter. With the sixteenth-century Protestant Reformation in the West, however, there came a shift away from traditio and magisterium to sola scriptura, “by Scripture alone,” for the Protestants, while the Catholics stuck with the scriptura et traditio as interpreted by the magisterium. This split led to bloody wars for a century and a half all across central and western Europe, climaxing with the close of the Thirty Years’ War in 1648. Meanwhile other huge changes took place in Europe that led it to world domination: the sixteenth-century world-exploration revolution, the seventeenth-century scientific revolution (brought on by, for example, Copernicus [1473–1543], Galileo [1564–1642], and Newton [1642–1727]), the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century philosophical revolution (brought about by, for example, René Descartes [1596–1650], John Locke [1632–1704], and Immanuel Kant [1724–1804]), the eighteenth-century industrial revolution, and the eighteenth-century economic revolution with the rise of capitalism (thanks to Adam Smith [1723–1790]). Thus, in the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, the measure of truth was no longer traditio, magisterium, or scriptura, but ratio, reason. What Christians were asked to affirm—which determined how they should act— were now the questions, does it pass the test of reason? Does it make sense? Does it square with our experience and thoughtful analysis? Now the statements of the pope and the ecumenical councils, and tradition in general, and even the source of both, the Scriptures, were subjected to the questioning of reason. The Enlightenment was a sweeping movement of intellectual reform based on the supremacy of reason on many levels, mainly in England, France, and Germany. Among other things, it contributed significantly to both the French Revolution and the American Revolution. In America Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790), Thomas Jefferson (1743– 1826), John Adams (1735–1826), James Madison (1751–1836), and Thomas Paine (1737–1836) counted themselves as men of the Enlightenment. Later critics of the Enlightenment charged it with being superficial (who would call Kant superficial?) for naively claiming a universal human rationality, for relying on an antihistorical understanding, and for mounting a thoroughgoing critique of Christianity. However, one should be careful to avoid reducing the entire Enlightenment to such superficiality, anticlericalism, and negativity toward history. This caution is especially warranted concerning the German Aufklärung, that is, “Enlightenment.”

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(“Enlightenment” is simply a direct translation of the German Aufklärung, which came from one of the most influential philosophers of Modernity, Kant, when he wrote a book in 1784 answering the question, Was ist Aufklärung? “What Is Enlightenment?”) The Aufklärung in Germany was a reform movement both in civil society and in the church, Protestant and Catholic. Its leading thinkers included such luminaries as Gottfried Leibniz (1646–1716), Friederich the Great (1712–1786), Moses Mendelssohn (1729– 1786), Gotthold Lessing (1729–1781), and Kant. For example, the Aufklärung reforms carried out in German-speaking Switzerland (present-day Baden-Württemberg, Hesse, and part of Bavaria) from 1802 to 1833 (then together making up the largest diocese in the world), under the leadership of administrator Ignaz von Wessenberg (1774–1860),28 looked amazingly like the reforms of Vatican II.29 It emphasized reform based on liturgical scholarship, the use of the vernacular in worship, promotion of popular Bible reading and biblical scholarship, ecumenical outreach to Protestants, the modernization of religious education, collegial church decision-making, the elimination of mandatory clerical celibacy, and viewing the papal office as an office to promote unity rather than as an office to further authoritarian domination. Thus, the Aufklärung in the Germanies was not antichurch (as was much of the French Enlightenment and the French Revolution) but prochurch; its leaders proudly described themselves as Aufgeklärt: enlightened.

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The Limits of Critical-Thinking Reason For all the stunning advances made in critical-thinking reason—for example, in philosophical reflection (see above concerning progress in our understanding of our understanding, epistemology), the awesome accomplishments of the physical sciences, democracy, and human rights in social affairs—we humans inevitably run into the wall of our finitude. Hence, we pose for ourselves a number of “limit” questions, questions wherein we reach our limit, questions we cannot answer with our critical-thinking reason. We know from our universal experience that all living beings have two unavoidable drives, namely, the will to survive and the will to expand (procreate). We humans want to know whether or not we simply cease to exist at death. Humans have consequently come up with a great variety of speculations, from simple cessation of existence to immortality of the soul, resurrection of the body, reincarnation, and what have you; but we cannot know whether any of these speculations is true because we would have to die to know— hence, the odd English phrase “I’m dying to know!” Further, humans unavoidably ask whether there is meaning in the cosmos—or, is everything aimless chance? As we study the physical sciences and are awed by the fantastically intricate and totally integrated sets of rules that structure everything from the subatomic microlevel to the astrophysical macrolevel, we may find it increasingly impossible that all could be just chance, that the cosmos (Greek: “order”) springs from sheer chaos (Greek: “disorder”)—but we cannot prove it. Again, we learn that the whole cosmos, which has been expanding at the rate of 186,000 miles/second for 13.8 billion years, started out less than the size of a fist and was launched on its expansion with a “Big Bang.” Why did it bang? Where was it when it banged? Where do its exquisite rules of expansion come from? Why does it exist? What was/is it? Why is there something rather than nothing? We cannot possibly ever answer these questions. They are like Catch-22 questions (we have to know the answer before we can solve the problem), and they are why we learn in first-year logic the meaning of the logical-error abbreviation Q.E.D. of the Latin phrase Quod est demonstrandum, “Which Is To Be Demonstrated [and not assumed ahead of time].” These questions are like the biology question, what is the foundation of life? In order to see the minuscule foundation of a living thing, we have to pass light through it, but then we cannot know what it was like before we passed light through it, because the light may have changed it. It is from these kinds of humanly inevitable limit questions that religion comes. (Remember the Carmel question: Wer dann hat die Regenwürme gemacht?) Our human drives for survival and expansion ooze these questions up within us, and we realize that we can neither avoid nor answer them with our critical-thinking reason. Hence, moderns more and more come up with our best “rational” explanations based on the evidence we

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have gathered and any “trajectory” patterns we see in it, and we say that this or that is our best judgment. We cannot say that we “know” the answer—as if we could see how the living thing existed before light was passed through it. But, we believe this or that to be the answer; that is, as the term “believe” indicates, we trust that the evidence we have gathered points to this or that. Here, we have moved beyond where critical-thinking reason can take us and have made a decision, an act not of the intellect but of the will, based on our most trustworthy—fides, “trust”—evidence.

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History Transforms All Human Reality Development of “Scientific” and Philosophical History Partly as a reaction to the Enlightenment’s stress on the universality of human reason there arose at the same time, especially in Germany, a balancing stress on the particularity of individual communities, customs, languages, literatures, and histories. As the Aufklärung was reaching its plateau in the late eighteenth century (German scholars also speak of the Spät-Aufklärung—Late-Enlightenment—which ran into the second quarter of the nineteenth century in Germany), the forerunners of what became known as “historicism” (Historismus in German) appeared, particularly Johann Georg Hamman (1730–1788) and Johann Gottfried von Herder (1744–1803). A key notion of historicism is that human life (as all reality) is changing, evolving. Humans have evolved out of billions of years of the universe. Though the current estimate of the age of the universe as 13.8 billion years was not arrived at until recently, there developed already in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries a keen awareness that we humans are the products of our pasts and thus have, in addition to our commonalities, significant differences. Of course, the writing of history in Western civilization goes back at least to the Greek Herodotus (484–425 BCE), the “Father of History,” and his younger compatriot Thucydides (460–400 BCE). However, it is really in the early part of the nineteenth century that there arose modern “scientific” historiography. It was Leopold von Ranke (1795–1886) who led in this new Historical School, which emphasized (1) the critical use of primary documents and original sources; the task of the historian was to ascertain the value of the sources used: Were they eyewitnesses? Were they reliable? Were they partisan? (2) Then, the “facts” were to speak for themselves. The historian was (3) to strive to describe the past as objectively as possible: Wie es eigentlich gewesen (German: “How it actually was”)—which draws on Thucydides: “What had been done” (Greek: hos epachthe). The historicists saw the past histories of each community as formative of the community and its members, so that it was not just our common humanness that shaped us. Hence, the nineteenth-century Romantic movement lifted up the past as an essential element of our humanity; for example, the Middle Ages and the Renaissance were looked at with new, positive-seeing, eyes, so that as a result we now have an immensely more accurate picture—and increasingly so—of the past, of not just Western civilization but of the entire world. At the same time, the sense of history, of dynamism, evolution, and process pervaded the philosophies springing up in Germany. One thinks of Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762– 1814), Friedrich Schelling (1775–1854), and, preeminently, Georg Wilhelm Hegel (1770–

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1831). They were seriatim professors at the new University of Berlin, Schelling and Hegel also having been students at my alma mater, the very old University of Tübingen. Of course, (in)famously there followed Karl Marx (1818–1883), who originally was part of the “Young Hegelians” but soon turned Hegel’s philosophical idealism “on its head” in his “dialectical materialism,” maintaining, nevertheless, the stress on history, on dynamism.

History Pervades Religious Thought This centrality of history appeared also in German theology. To begin with, Schelling and Hegel were philosophical theologians, and they in turn had a huge influence on the Protestant Tübingen School of Theology (the Catholic Tübingen School of Theology will be touched on below) in such theologians as Ferdinand Christian Bauer (1792–1860) and David Friedrich Strauss (1808–74), both of whom continued to delve deeply into history in order to articulate their theology, following to a large extent Hegel’s view of world history. But, the most influential Protestant theologian of this period and up to the present without doubt was Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834). Fundamentally, Schleiermacher understood dogmatic theology as the history of theology. For example, he argued that the dogma of the Trinity did not describe the way things were “out there,” in this case, in God’s Self. Rather, the doctrine of the Trinity was an expression of the fourth-century Christian community’s encounter with the divine as it came through the New Testament and the first three centuries of Hellenistic followers’ understanding of it. The focus on a critical analysis of documents and their backgrounds as promoted by scholars of historicism such as von Ranke was applied to the Bible (begun already by Hermann Samuel Reimarus [1694–1768] but published posthumously by Lessing in 1774–78) was combined with the historicizing of theology by Schelling, Hegel, Schleiermacher, et al., to create what for a century was known as Protestant “liberal theology.” It was temporarily seriously challenged after the disastrous World War I (1914–1918) by Karl Barth (1886–1968) and other Protestant theologians, but their influence largely evaporated by the last third of the twentieth century. It should be noted that these developments in German Protestantism were in many ways matched in German Catholicism. To begin with, there were the Aufklärung Catholics, exemplified by von Wessenberg and others, who were committed to the reform of Catholicism in ways that definitely embraced the Aufklärung and an appreciation of the importance of history. Besides von Wessenberg and his clerical and lay colleagues, another center of Aufklärung Katholizismus with its concurrent sensitivity to history was the Catholic Tübingen School of Theology, including preeminently Professors Johann Sebastian Drey (1777–1853), Johann Baptist Hirscher (1788–1865), Johann Adam Möhler (1796–1838), and, a little later, Möhler’s student and successor,

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the widely respected historian Karl Josef Hefele (1809–1893). Hefele was the author of a magisterial seven-volume history of the ecumenical councils, and, consequently, a dogged opponent of the 1870 Dogma of Papal Infallibility. (He and the other German bishops left Rome so as not to vote for the dogma, and he was the last German bishop finally to accept it formally.) After Hefele became the bishop of Rottenburg (in which the University of Tübingen lay) in 1869, his student Franz Xavier von Funk (1840–1907) became his successor and followed the same progressive, historical approach. The blending of the spirit of the German Aufklärung and the emphasis on history in theology could best be seen in Johann Adam Möhler’s book, Die Einheit der Kirche (The Unity of the Church), which saw the Christian church and its teaching and practices as an organism, a growing, adapting entity. At the same time, he proudly described himself as Aufgeklärt, enlightened, and was highly critical of the backward, authoritarian attitude of Rome. This understanding of a human community, including the Christian church, as an organism was very typical of the thinking of the nineteenth century, especially in Germany.

Hermeneutics of Suspicion Almost at the same time, historicism brought forth a counterview to the ideal of “objective” history, increasingly seeing underlying layer after layer of “real” driving forces in history; this view was later named “the hermeneutics of suspicion.” One of the first exponents of such a hermeneutic of suspicion was Ludwig Feuerbach (1804–1872), who—though he started out as a student of Hegel and his idealism, later turned to materialism—understood Christianity as a wish projection. Marx followed him in abandoning Hegel’s idealism for his own dialectical materialism and looked at religion as a false consciousness foisted on the oppressed to keep them from rebelling (colloquially put, religion was “pie in the sky bye and bye”); for Marx, the determining element of human life was economics. Émile Durkheim (1858–1917) saw religion as simply the necessary rules of survival of the community writ large as the decrees of God; only those societies that had rules against killing, stealing, lying, and the like could survive, and to make sure that the rules were followed, society declared them to be “from God.” Then, as was seen above, Freud viewed God as nothing other than “Big Daddy in the Sky” and religion as a psychological crutch; man was not the image of God, but God the image of man. The obvious truth in these and other “hermeneutics of suspicion” drew them many followers, but their “single-noted” quality made them in turn subjects of suspicion. They were seen by many to be simplistic and reductionist. For example, if, as Genesis states, men and women are made in God’s image, then God must also in turn be something like humans. To be sure, economics is a major force in human affairs, but so also are race,

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education, culture, weather, and sex, for instance. Because human life is extremely complicated, any “simple,” that is, “single,” explanation is bound to be one-sided, reductionist, and, hence, badly mistaken despite, or perhaps even because of, the validity of its insight. Nevertheless, it became increasingly clear that there are forces at work in human life and society about which we are only gradually learning. As we learn about each of these forces, we see human life and affairs influenced by more and more elements of which we were largely unaware before. We see our world developing as a result of whole congeries of forces operating on varying levels: psychological, social, economic, political, ecological, and technological. All is very fluid, dynamic, evolving, and historical.

History Pervades Epistemology With the rise of historicism, our understanding of truth was also pervaded by history. Truth was increasingly seen as dynamic, fluid, organic, and contextual. What happened to our understanding of truth was, in retrospect, quite commonsensical. But, first, to avoid confusion, a word about how we use the term “truth.” Normally, we use “true” to refer to our statements about some aspect of reality. We say a statement is true if it accurately describes some aspect of reality. For example, if the door to a room is closed, and I state, “The door is closed,” we then say that my statement is “true.” However, we can also make many other “true” statements about the door, such as that the door is made of wood, is blue, weighs seven pounds, is off its hinges, and so on. Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in the West, it became increasingly obvious that all statements about reality were, even if true, necessarily limited. It began slowly to dawn on us that if this were true about relatively simple physical reality such as the door, how much more must it be true of our far more complicated human reality! For example, as I noted above, we began to realize that we could properly understand statements of the past only if we read them in their historical setting. We could understand the text only in its context. Here is a case in point: For Christians—or others trying to understand something of Christianity—in order to understand how the strange doctrine of the Trinity came about at the Council of Nicaea in 325 CE, the reader needed to know a good deal about the fight between Arius and Athanasius concerning how Yeshua was to be understood: Was he God, man, both, in what way? It would not be at all helpful today simply to repeat the Nicaean formula if one did not understand its historical setting. Hence, it was slowly realized that a statement could be “true” only when seen within its limited historical circumstances. Further, we also began to realize that it was vital to notice what kind of language was being used in a statement about some important reality, for that also would “limit” its

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“truth.” To stay with our understanding of God as an example, biblical scholars increasingly realized that when the Hebrew Bible spoke about the “Spirit of God” or the “Word of God,” it was speaking in metaphorical terms, not ontological (that is, reallythere) terms. In fact, the customary language of the Jewish world was metaphorical picture language. Think for a moment about what kind of language that devout Jew Yeshua used. He nearly always used picture language. Like a good rabbi, he told stories that communicated his points. When, for example, he told his followers that if their eye scandalized them they should “pluck it out,” he clearly meant that metaphorically; otherwise, we would have precious few sighted Christians in the world. When the Hebrew Bible spoke of God’s “Spirit” (Ruaḥ) brooding over the deep in Genesis 1:1 or God’s “Wisdom” (Ḥokmah) creating the world in Proverbs 8:22–31 or God’s “Word” (Dabar) in Genesis 1 or God’s “Teaching” (Torah) or “Presence” (Shekinah—in early rabbinical writings starting around the time of Yeshua),30each of these “images” of God was just that, an image, a symbol, a “finger pointing to the moon,” not the moon itself. No Jew, including Yeshua and all his Jewish followers, would ever have misunderstood them as ontological statements, any more than they would have thought that the reign of God was ontologically a mustard seed, a net full of fish, or a precious pearl: these were all metaphors that Yeshua used to describe the reign of God. To mistake the kind of language used in a text was to misunderstand the text. Hence, we again began to realize further how all statements are limited in the “truth” they convey insofar as they are necessarily cast in a particular kind of language. Mannheim, as I noted above, developed the notion of the “sociology of knowledge,” which meant that a person’s “place in the world” affects how one perceives the world. For example, an uneducated Chinese Buddhist woman will see the world significantly differently than an educated German Jewish man does. The two are not only geographically but also culturally on opposite sides of the globe and seeing a particular aspect of it through their own “lenses.” If each is careful in describing what he or she sees, both of their statements will be true—that is, they will accurately describe what they perceive. However, they will not be the same, for one will be seeing “that” part, and the other “this” part. It is as if people around the globe all observed an object in the center and described it. If each person were careful, his or her statement describing the object would be “true,” but only limitedly so, for each could discern only his or her side, not what the person on the other side saw and carefully (and therefore “truthfully”) described, in his or her “true” but limited statement. Similarly, as was seen above, German philosopher Gadamer, French philosopher Ricoeur, and Canadian philosopher Lonergan developed the science of hermeneutics, showing that all knowledge is interpreted. When one thinks at all about the process of knowing, it is clear that it is a relational activity. There are the knower, the known, and

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the relationship between them, the knowing. It is also clear that the knower is necessarily involved in the gaining of knowledge. What, then, about the writing of history? Is that a fatally flawed enterprise that should simply be abandoned? By no means, for as Winston Churchill (1874–1965) once remarked: “The longer you look back, the farther you can look forward.” After quoting him, the well-known American historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. (1917–2007), ironically answered our question: “But all historians are prisoners of their own experience. We bring to history the preconceptions of our personalities and of our age. We cannot seize on ultimate and absolute truths. So the historian is committed to a doomed enterprise—the quest for an unattainable objectivity.” But, Schlesinger did not leave the matter there. He cited Oscar Wilde (1854–1900), who once remarked, “The one duty we owe to history is to rewrite it.” Schlesinger continued: “The great strength of history in a free society is its capacity for self-correction. This is the endless excitement of historical writing—the search to reconstruct what went before, a quest illuminated by those ever-changing prisms that continually place old questions in a new light.”31 Does all this mean that we can never know any object? No, but it does mean that all knowledge is limited knowledge. Hence, there can be no unlimited knowledge of anything. To repeat: All knowledge necessarily is limited knowledge. When this realization begins to dawn on someone or on a whole community or culture, then not only the possibility but also the necessity for dialogue arises. To summarize in a mantra: Nobody knows everything about anything—therefore, dialogue! However, before turning to dialogue, it is vital to note in the nineteenth century and onward a growing awareness of ongoing change, not only in humanity but also in all reality—evolution.

Reality Is Evolutionary—After Darwin? The understanding rapidly increased throughout the nineteenth century that all reality is constantly changing, that the present, while similar to, is also different from, the past, although it was built upon it—and the future even more so. As this perception of human reality advanced apace with the growth of the sense of history, so also did the even more challenging understanding of the physical world. Everyone in the West had simply assumed that the story of the origin of the world as described in Genesis was accurate and that consequently the world as we saw it had been created exactly that way less than six thousand years ago. However, problematic things increasingly began to turn up, such as fossilized remains of sea creatures found in the lower strata of hills in the middle of England. Our increasing knowledge of chemistry pointed to the transformation of organic matter into crystalline forms needing far more than a few paltry thousands of years. The question then became, whence these millions-of-years-old sea creatures’ remains? The

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answer burst upon the scene with the 1859 publication of Charles Darwin’s (1809–1882) Origin of Species. The world was very old, much older than six thousand years. The current estimate is that the earth flew off as a molten mass from our sun 4.6 billion years ago and that the whole cosmos started from a “Big Bang” of all matter concentrated in an unbelievably small mass, 13.8 billion years ago.32 Unbelievable! That was the response of many in 1859—and still today. However, the process of evolution and history had begun to reach what we in a postnuclear age refer to as a “critical mass” in scientific research, and the advance of our knowledge of the world exploded beyond all previous dreams. Many Christians felt, as we saw above, that they had to make a choice between accepting either the biblical description of the creation of the world as the true word of God, or the explanation of the physical sciences. Both could not be true. Those who lived in the mental world of Modernity in a nonschizoid manner either ceased being Christians or followed the line of thought that the Bible should be understood not as a scientific, empirical text but, described above, as very often metaphorical. This understanding left Christians free to pursue the physical sciences without having to reject the underlying wisdom of the Bible and to be able to fuse the two creatively. This was done particularly brilliantly by the French Jesuit Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881–1955),33 a world-class paleontologist who, among other things, was part of the expedition that discovered the Peking Man in the 1930s. More important, however, was his extraordinary work in building a vision of evolution that brought together the material and spiritual worlds in a manner that was not either-or but both-and. He wrote glowingly of the development of humanity from the Big Bang to the present and into the future. He not only saw no contradiction between an affirmation of the existence of a Creator God, of a spiritual as well as material dimension of humanity, and the scientific description of the cosmos as an ongoing evolution, but he saw them as completing each other. He spoke of how the earth, starting over four billion years ago, at first slowly cooled and formed an outer more or less solidsphere. In the cooling process, various atoms and molecules coalesced in increasingly complicated ways, forming ever more complicated forms of matter. Then, 3.8 billion years ago a major “leap” in this complexification occurred, and living matter appeared (matter that undergoes metabolism, maintains homeostasis, can grow, responds to stimuli, and reproduces), first as a single cell. Then, as greater numbers of cells coalesced, they began to form themselves together in increasingly more complex forms of life. Here one could see the beginning and development of what Darwin and others spoke of as evolution. Slowly, as living matter spread all around the outer part of the solidsphere, a biosphere (bios, Greek: “life”) formed. At a certain point of increasing complexification of living matter, of evolution, another major “leap” occurred about two

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hundred thousand years ago. (Smaller “leaps” had been constantly occurring all along, which led to the forming of the myriad of different species.) The second major “leap” occurred with the appearance of self-conscious life, homo sapiens sapiens. This leap first happened in central Africa, and from there the first humans began slowly to migrate outward, over many thousands of years, eventually beginning to cover the Earth, so that there was created what Teilhard called a noossphere (nous, Greek: “mind”). In the very year that Teilhard died, 1955, he commented on the 1946 ENIAC computer at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia and how it would accelerate both the shift from the dominance of “divergence,” after the emigration of humans from Africa to the dominance of convergence and the intensification of the noosphere. It was through these latter developments—convergence and intensification of the noosphere— rather than through physical change that evolution was continuing in humanity. From the perspective of over a half century later, in the wake of the vast development of the computer and the Internet, we see how prophetic Teilhard was and how central change or evolution has become in our human self-understanding, at the very core of Modernity.

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Dialogue: Radicalizing All Thought As it became increasingly apparent to more and more thinkers in the West, and then elsewhere, that all statements about reality are necessarily limited, it also became increasingly clear that the only logical alternative to the silence of a total relativism was dialogue. If my perception of reality—including preeminently the most complex of all human reality, religion (“an explanation of the ultimate meaning of life and how to live accordingly”)—is necessarily limited, then, if I am going to continue to learn more “truth” about reality, I cannot avoid learning it from the Other, including the religiously Other. Of course, there are all of the “external” reasons why dialogue is becoming more and more important today; for example, world travel has been expanding massively in recent decades. When I was a graduate student in the 1950s, there were shipping companies that specialized in providing whole ships in the summer for students (for example, Holland America Line), which shipped a few hundred thousand students back and forth between the United States and Europe. For us students, this was “cool.” For decades now, however, hundreds of millions of all kinds of people from all over the world fly everywhere with very little fuss about it. Further, in my student days getting a longdistance telephone call from somewhere in the U.S. was a cause of great excitement. One had to book an overseas call ahead of time, and it cost the proverbial arm and leg. Today we call around the world without hesitation. We constantly send instant e-mail all over the world and think nothing of it. We now have free calling through our computers and smartphones. Cell phones, podcasts, and an endless stream of new communications technologies are everywhere. The whole world comes into our living rooms when we turn on the TV news. The items we buy—and sell—come from all over the world. All this is in stunning contrast to the way almost the whole world lived just a century ago. The vast majority of people were born, lived, and died within a day’s walk of their home village. Now, we indeed do live in a global village. Serious talk about dialogue means that I want to talk with those who think differently from me—precisely so that I can learn from them. In the past we basically talked only with ourselves, that is, we spoke only with persons who thought as we did—or should think as we did. Now that we are increasingly aware that all of our knowledge is limited, that we the knowers are necessarily involved in the process of knowing—that is, as Lonergan, Gadamer, and Ricoeur analyzed—that all knowledge is interpreted knowledge, not only are we grudgingly acknowledging that dialogue with the Other is “permitted,” but we are also being forced to recognize that it is necessary. Not only is the nineteenth century’s epistemological revolution, the “turn toward the subject,” finally beginning to catch up with the major culture-shapers of the world, but also, since the “Fall of the Wall” in 1989 and even more so since the attacks of 9/11, more and more

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people and institutions are becoming aware of the need for dialogue. The world at large is rejecting the position of absolutism in all forms, including most dramatically in religion. One might counter that extreme absolutism in religion is on the rise today, after all the predictions that religion was on the wane. However, it is precisely the religious extremists, whether bomb-throwing Catholics and Protestants of Northern Ireland, Hindutva fanatics in India, or the Islamists/Jihadists around the world, that the vast majority of Catholics, Protestants, Hindus, and Muslims are increasingly rejecting. There is validity in this saying: You can fool all of the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time. To be sure, this change from “If you differ from me, you are wrong” to “If you differ from me, I should look to learn from you” is a major paradigm shift. In fact, it is a literal “revolution,” a “turning around” from a position of absolutism, held by everyone from the beginning of humanity, to dialogue, which is increasingly espoused by the world’s shapers of culture: of business, education, the arts, communications, politics—and of religion. As with all paradigm shifts, and vastly more with the “global revolution of the dialogue shift,” resistance to the shift is intense. All the current violent absolutisms are prominent, destructive signs of that resistance, as is also (at the other end of the spectrum of resistance) the casting of “relativism” as the current bête noir (French: literally, “black beast,” meaning “bogeyman”) by, for instance, Benedict XVI. As we’ve noted, “complete relativism” is a rationally and practically impossible position. However, in tilting at that chimera, that windmill, the great danger is that charging forth under the banner of rejecting relativism will engender even more fear, thereby stoking still more the fires of violence—first psychological violence and consequently practical violence: for the way we perceive the world determines how we will act in the world. The future is already decided, as the title of Kenneth Rose’s recent book reflects: Pluralism: The Future of Religion.34 The book argues persuasively, philosophically and historically, that of the tripartite division that Alan Race devised thirty years ago (exclusivism, inclusivism, and pluralism), exclusivism is already—except for now numerically expanding but intellectually ineffectual fundamentalist groups—passe, and inclusivism is experiencing increasing intellectual abandonment. Rose has made no prediction when the inevitable embrace of pluralism will come to bodies like the Catholic Church—but come it will. Dialogue is a whole new way of thinking. Humankind is moving from the Age of Global Monologue into the dawn of the Age of Global Dialogue wherein I increasingly feel the need to talk with those who think differently from me. This includes especially religiously, precisely so that I can learn from them and they from me, because I am increasingly aware that what I know, even when it is true, is necessarily limited, and this limited characteristic of all knowing is most particularly the case with that most

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complicated, most comprehensive body of knowing (which then directs our actions), namely, religion.

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A Radically New Age Those thinkers in the first half of the twentieth century who with a great show of scholarship and historical/sociological analysis predicted the impending demise of Western civilization were clearly mistaken. After World War I, in 1922, Oswald Spengler (1880– 1936) wrote his widely acclaimed book, The Decline of the West.35 After the beginning of World War II, in 1941, Pitirim A. Sorokin (1889–1968) published his likewise popular book, The Crisis of Our Age.36 Given the massive, worldwide scale of the unprecedented destruction and horror of the world’s first global war, 1914–1918, and the even greater destruction and horror of the second global conflict, 1939–1945, the pessimistic predictions of these scholars and the great following they found are understandable. In fact, however, those vast world conflagrations were manifestations of the dark side of the unique breakthrough in the history of humankind in the modern development of Christendom-become-Western-civilization-now-becoming-global-civilization. Never before had there been world wars; likewise, never before had there been world political organizations (the League of Nations, the United Nations). Never before did humanity possess the possibility of destroying all human life—whether through nuclear or ecological catastrophe. These unique negative realities/potentialities were possible, however, only because of the correspondingly unique accomplishments of Christendom or Western/global civilization—the likes of which the world has never before seen. On the negative side, from now on, it will always be true that humankind could self-destruct. Still, there are solid empirical grounds for reasonable hope that the inherent, infinitydirected life force of humankind will nevertheless prevail over the parallel death force. The prophets of doom were correct, however, in their understanding that humanity is entering into a radically new age. Earlier in the twentieth century, the naysayers usually spoke of the doom of only Western civilization (for example, Spengler, Sorokin), but after the advent of nuclear power and the Cold War, the new generation of pessimists— not without warrant, “the corruption of the best becomes the worst” (corruptio optimae pessima)—warned of global disaster. This emerging awareness of global disaster is a clear, albeit negative, sign that something profoundly, radically new is entering onto the stage of human history. In the mid-1990s Samuel Huntington (1927–2008) of Harvard University named a contemporary reality when he argued that, with the fading of the Cold War, in its place is rising a “clash of civilizations.”37 Fundamentalisms of all sorts—Christian, Muslim, Hindu, nationalist, ethnic, tribal—are tearing at the fabric of the new world order, even as it is being woven. At least we thought we understood the other side in the Cold War, whether we admired, respected, tolerated, or despised it, but in the nineties we entered

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into a state of cacophonous confusion and consequently are floundering—for example, Rwanda, Bosnia, Ireland, Sri Lanka, the Middle East—and then the most shocking blow for Americans, the tragedy of 9/11. These outbreaks of violence are only the most visible flash points of the contemporary malaise. The problems run much deeper—culturally, ethically, religiously, spiritually. A world with clashing, or potentially clashing, cultures, religious, ethnic groups— civilizations—is the world of the beginning of the third millennium. However, that is not all it is. In the midst of our current “war on terrorism,” the very antithesis of the “clash of civilizations” is likewise a reality, increasingly so. Humanity is also in the midst of a deep evolutionary shift toward a higher, communal, and dialogical way of life. This evolution of religions and cultures points toward a process essential to healing the deep problems that inhere in all aspects of our human cultures and even threaten our very survival, namely, the awakening of human beings to the power of dialogue.38 This shift from monologue to dialogue constitutes such a radical reversal in human consciousness and is so utterly new in the history of humankind from the beginning that it must be seen as an even greater shift in human history than either a major paradigm shift or even that caesura/break of the 800–200 BCE Axial Period.39 The Axial Period ushered in a radically new consciousness. Whereas primal consciousness was tribal, axial consciousness was individual. “Know thyself” became the watchword of Greece. The Upanishads identified the atman, the transcendent center of the self. The Buddha charted the way of individual enlightenment. The prophets of Israel and Judah awakened individual moral responsibility. This sense of individual identity, distinct from the tribe and nature, is the most characteristic mark of axial consciousness. From this flow other characteristics: self-reflective, analytic consciousness that can be applied to nature as scientific theories, to society as social critique, to knowledge as philosophy, to religion as mapping an individual spiritual journey. This self-reflective, analytic, critical consciousness stood in sharp contrast to primal mythic and ritualistic consciousness. When self-reflective Logos emerged in the Axial Period, it tended to oppose the traditional Mythos. Of course, mythic and ritualistic forms of consciousness survive in the post-Axial Period even to this day, but they are often submerged, surfacing chiefly in dreams, literature, and art. Humanity is clearly entering the radically new Age of Global Dialogue.

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The “Cosmic Dance of Dialogue” I want to set this radically new way of understanding reality, dialogue, in its broadest context.

The Universe Is a “Cosmic Dance of Dialogue” Dialogue understood most broadly as the mutually beneficial interaction of differing components is the very heart of the universe, of which we humans are the highest expression: from the basic interaction on the macrolevel of matter and energy (in Einstein’s unforgettable formula, E=mc2; energy equals mass times the square of the speed of light) to the creative interaction on the microlevel of protons and electrons in every atom, to the vital symbiosis of body and spirit in every human, through the creative dialogue between woman and man, to the dynamic relationship between individual and society. Thus, the very essence of our humanity is dialogical, and a fulfilled human life is the highest expression of the “Cosmic Dance of Dialogue.” In the early millennia of the history of humanity as it spread outward from its starting point in central Africa, the forces of divergence were dominant. However, because we live on a globe, in our frenetic divergence we eventually began to encounter each other more and more frequently. Now the forces of stunning convergence are becoming increasingly dominant. During the Age of Divergence, we could live in isolation, ignoring each other. Now, in the Age of Convergence, we are forced to live in one world, which is increasingly a global village. We cannot ignore the Other, the different. Too often in the past we have tried to make over the Other into a likeness of ourselves, often by violence —but this is the very opposite of dialogue. This egocentric arrogance is in fundamental opposition to the “Cosmic Dance of Dialogue.” It is not creative but destructive. Hence, we humans today have a stark choice: dialogue, or death!

Dialogue of Head, Hands, and Heart in Holistic Harmony of the Holy Human For us humans there are four dimensions to dialogue, corresponding to the structure of our humanness: dialogue of the head, dialogue of the hands, dialogue of the heart, and dialogue of (w)holiness. a. Dialogue of the Head: The Cognitive or Intellectual—Seeking the Truth: In the “dialogue of the head,” we mentally reach out to learn from those who think differently from us. We try to understand how they see the world and why they act as they do. The world is far too complicated for any of us to understand alone; we can increasingly understand reality only with the help of the Other, in dialogue. This is very important, because how we understand the world determines how we act in the world. b. Dialogue of the Hands: The Illative or Ethical—Seeking the Good: In the “dialogue

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of the hands” we join with others to make the world a better place in which we must all live together. Since we can no longer live separately in this one world, we must work jointly to make it not just a house but a home for all to live in. That is, we join hands with the Other to heal the world. The world within us, and all around us, is always in need of healing, and our deepest wounds can be healed only together with the Other, only in dialogue. c. Dialogue of the Heart: The Affective or Aesthetic—Seeking the Beautiful, the Spiritual: In the “dialogue of the heart” we open ourselves to receive the beauty of the Other. Because we humans are body and spirit or, rather, body-spirit, we give bodilyspiritual expression in all the arts to our multifarious responses to life: joy, sorrow, gratitude, anger, and, most of all, love. We try to express our inner feelings, which grasp reality in far deeper and higher ways than we are able to put into rational concepts and words; hence, we create poetry, music, dance, painting, architecture—the expressions of the heart. The world delights in beauty, so it is here that we find the easiest encounter with the Other, the simplest door to dialogue; through the beauty of the Other we most easily enter into the Other. Here, too, is where the depth, spiritual, mystical dimension of the human spirit is given full rein. As seventeenth-century mathematician/philosopher Blaise Pascal (1623–1663) said, “Le cœur a ses raisons que la raison ne connaît point” (The heart has its reasons, which reason knows not).40 d. Dialogue of the Whole: Holiness—Seeking the One: We humans cannot live a divided life. If we are even to survive, let alone flourish, we must “get it together.” We must not only dance the dialogues of the head, hands, and heart, but we must also bring our various parts together in harmony (a fourth “h”) to live a holistic (a fifth “h”), life, which is what religions mean when they say that we should be holy (a sixth “h”—from the Greek holos, “to be whole”).41 Hence, we are authentically human (a seventh “h”) only when our manifold elements are in dialogue within ourselves and we are in dialogue with those around us. We must dance together the “Cosmic Dance of Dialogue” of the head, hands, and heart, holistically,42 in harmony, within the holy human.

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Postmodernity? Why do I find the term “postmodernity” essentially vacuous? First, any “movement” that cannot articulate what it is about, but can only say what it is not about, strikes me as intellectually adolescent, that is, immature. More important, it slowly became clear that what most “postmodern” writers seemed to be talking about when they used the term “postmodernity” appeared to be three things: (1) a hermeneutics of suspicion and the resultant sense of pluralism and consequent need for dialogue, (2) a stress on particularity, and (3) an a priori rejection of any “overall” understanding of anything.43 Concerning the hermeneutics of suspicion, pluralism, and dialogue one must ask: Have these writers been unaware of the scholarship of the past two centuries? As seen above, hermeneutics of suspicion began flooding into Western thought already before the middle of the nineteenth century. Stress on the particularity of history started even earlier, in the eighteenth century, and has continued unabated into our twenty-first century in such critical thinkers as Gadamer and Ricoeur. Yes, all knowledge is interpreted knowledge, is affected by our “place in the world,” and is accordingly limited. As a result of this growing awareness, pluralism and the consequent need for dialogue precisely with those who experience reality differently from us began to be increasingly felt, as exemplified already in the 1893 World’s Parliament of Religions in Chicago. Knowledge, we increasingly know, is far more complicated and layered than was realized before the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries, and, because of our everdeeper understanding of how we humans necessarily understand reality in a dialogical manner, we are moving ever closer to a more fully accurate picture of reality.44 For over two centuries we have become increasingly aware of the ever further dimensions of our human Ratio/Logos—which is not at all limited to abstract syllogistic reason or the like. We are constantly learning that there are depths under depths in the intelligibility of both our humanity and the entire cosmos. Cosmologists now are even speaking about all reality’s being ultimately units of “information.” (Perhaps Pythagoras [572–497 BCE] was not so crazy when he talked about the world’s being composed of numbers.) At the center of this ongoing expansion of our knowledge is our expanding awareness of the pressing need for dialogue with those who experience reality from standpoints different from ours. As far as the rejection of any and all attempts to understand an object of study in some “overall” way is concerned, the rejection also strikes me as quite naive, as being unaware of how we humans necessarily think. We always want to try to relate one thing to others. It is an unavoidable move by our Ratio/Logos, whether it is the first step of analysis or the subsequent step of synthesis. We automatically try mentally to break things down into their component parts, then try to understand how they are related. Our very language tells us that is how we think. In the initial analysis portion of our thinking,

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we say that we can or cannot “grasp” what is being explained. That is, we “grasp” the various portions of an idea by detaching them from the rest and then attempt to understand how the parts are related. For instance, the idea of “falling” is understood to contain the “parts” of above, below, and movement from the former to the latter. The same “automatic” intellectual movement is reflected in other synonyms of “to grasp,” such as to “comprehend” (Latin: com-prehendere, “to put our mental arms around” something), or “conceive” (Latin: con-cepere, “to grasp around”), or “define” (Latin: definere, “to draw a limit around”). No doubt we make many defective “syntheses.” We often will not be aware of certain dimensions of a subject; hence, we get it together in a way that is only partially accurate or perhaps even terribly mistaken. The “Wie es eigentlich gewesen” historians will strive to “tell it like it is” as best they can, and they may well stop there as historians of a specific area—like workers on an assembly line doing only their part. However, they will have to tell themselves not to follow their natural movement of the mind to relate the studied portion to contiguous portions of the story. In philosophy, phenomenologists even deliberately have to put mental “brackets” around the object they are studying, but the purpose of such an epoché (Greek: “to hold back”), as they name those mental “brackets,” is to relate it later to a larger context. Even if a completely “reductionist” socalled postmodern thinker claims that there is no connection between what she or he is studying and the rest of reality, she or he contradicts her- or himself by positing just such a connection by thinking of it—negatively. If there were no larger commonality, one would be unable to claim that there is, or is not, a lesser commonality. Far from being “postmodern,” it should be clear that all these developments of the past two hundred years were/are a continuation, a deepening, of Modernity, of the turn toward the self-aware, free, critical-thinking, ever-changing, driven-to-dialogue subject. We are, in fact, becoming not less but more modern than ever. Hence, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, we are not at all “postmodern.” We are increasingly and expandingly modern. At the same time, however, as I argued above, growing out of the beginnings of Modernity in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, developing through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and leaping forward in recent decades, there is emerging a new age of humanity that I would not name “post-”anything but, rather, the “Age of Global Dialogue.”

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A Place for Religion in Modernity? One might think that with the arrival of Modernity, with its emphasis on Ratio/Logos, there would no longer be any need for religion, for, as discussed above, although it might claim to be based on reasonable grounds, religion does attempt to reach beyond reason. The other pillar on which religion is based is belief or faith—trust in something that or someone who is thought to be trustworthy and can provide an “explanation of the ultimate meaning of life and how to live accordingly,” as I have defined religion. I am convinced that there is not only a place but also a need for religion—or its functional equivalent. As we humans resolved one puzzle after another, there were those in the nineteenth century (and, unfortunately, many educated persons still mentally live in the nineteenth century) who thought we were on the verge of solving all the mysteries of the universe. There even was a physicist who, just before the turn of the twentieth century, said that he felt sorry for young scientists, because very soon there would be nothing more to discover! Then Albert Einstein (1879–1955) dropped his bomb of relativity on the playground of Newtonian physics in 1905 and blew it to smithereens. More than a hundred years later, we not only find that we have many, many puzzles about the universe, but it seems that there are more, and deeper ones, facing us now than faced our scientist of the late nineteenth century who thought that we just about had it wrapped up. Let us say that there are one hundred basic puzzles to be solved in order to understand the universe. Then, after much hard work, we succeed in solving one of the puzzles and expect that we would then have only ninety-nine to resolve. However, in solving the one, we discovered two more puzzles of which we were previously unaware. Hence, standing on the elevation of the newly solved puzzle, we are able to see the two new puzzles that were previously out of sight. Now we have 101 puzzles instead of ninety-nine. For example, no one in 1900 would have had questions about the “Big Bang” that launched the universe (with its billions of galaxies, each with billions of stars); even Einstein could not to the end of his life wrap his prodigious mind around the mysteries of quantum mechanics, which Werner Heisenberg (1901–1976), Max Planck (1858–1947), Niels Bohr (1885–1962), and others uncovered in the 1920s and following. Clearly, our knowledge about reality and its meaning is always going to be openended. Even if, per impossibilem (Latin: “which is impossible”), we could ultimately solve all the problems about “how” the universe came to be the way it is, we can never prove why it is the way it is. But, it will not satisfy our minds to shrug our shoulders and say, “That’s just the way the universe is.” Like the little uninhibited Carmel, we want to know why. Who made those awful earthworms? Some may simply give up and say that there is no meaning, or that if there is, we cannot know it. Yet, even those mid– twentieth-century existentialist philosophers—Albert Camus (1913–1960), Jean-Paul

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Sartre (1905–1980), Martin Heidegger (1889–1976), and the like—who looked at reality with a flinty stare would not stop at the halfway houses of nihilism or agnosticism but claimed that every person must make meaning for him- or herself. What meaning they made of life was their functional equivalent of religion, whether it was called religion or not. Authentic religion (not the escapist pseudotype) clearly is not irrational. Especially for those living in the mental world of Modernity, religion cannot be accepted as contrary to reason, to Ratio/Logos, but must be built on it—and then heuristically move beyond it. We humans cannot simply stand still, facing a limitless number of puzzles. We must act, mentally, bodily, wholly. We will perhaps for a time thrash around searching, perhaps even all the time that we have on the earth, but we always yearn for the solution—which our Ratio/Logos makes ever clearer for us, but which, like the horizon, is always exceeding our grasp. Hence, most of us will honestly recognize that there is something more to life and the universe than we are able to explain rationally/logically to ourselves, something that will always be not totally explicable. Then, most of us will make the decision that “explanation x of the ultimate meaning of life and how to live accordingly” is the most persuasive explanation we have found in our lives, so far. The “so far” indicates that my religion (explanation x) is heuristic, that is, it is always open to further development as life and knowledge continue.

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Authentic Religion: Within Me and between Me and Thee Ours in the West is largely a secularized society. However, especially after 9/11, we have become much more aware of the influence of religion—mostly bad in many people’s eyes. This, I believe, is a bum rap for authentic religion, which I would describe in a phrase as “within me and between me and thee.” I use the rather archaic “thee” instead of “you” first because “thee” is necessarily a single person, not a group, as “you” might be; second, and more important in my judgment, I am always interested in using mnemonic schemes, memory devices to help people remember key insights. Here, the rhyme and link between individual persons—me and thee—stress the individual, personto-person aspect, making it easier to remember because of the rhyme. I cringe, for example, when someone says of a Jewish person that she is “religious,” meaning, of course, that she does all the externals. That is not only a wrongheaded understanding of what religion is, but it is precisely wrong. To stick with Judaism for the moment, according to the rabbis the heart of what Judaism is all about is kavanah, interior intention. The same is true, of course, of all the major religions. In Confucianism, for example, the rituals, Li, are for the sake of forming an authentic human, Ren. The externals are supposed to be helps to get our head and heart right and then to act accordingly—“within me and between me and thee.” If the externals—which include not only “doing” all the prescribed things but also “saying” the correct formularies of doctrines (which is a special problem for Christians) —distract us from the righting of our head and heart and consequent action in the world, we should reevaluate and perhaps even drop them. After all, the greatest “sin” in the Bible is idolatry. This is not because God is thereby maligned—surely God cannot be injured by humans. No, there is a constitutive reason why idolatry is the “worst” sin. Idolatry is so bad because, as long as we hold on to it, we are incapable of becoming authentic humans. Idolatry literally means “worshiping an image” (Greek: eidol, “image”; latria, “worship”). It is to focus on the finger that points to the object rather than on the object. The whole purpose, however, of the pointing finger is for us to look at the object, not the finger. In the case of religion, the finger is the externals, and the object is the interior thought and desire and consequent action: “within me and between me and thee.” The two major Semitic religions, Judaism and Islam, both tend to concentrate on what to do, on actions, whereas Christianity (“half” Semitic) stresses much more, though of course not exclusively, what to think. Hence, the greatest temptations toward idolatry for Jews and Muslims are the external actions: I must not eat certain food; I must stop what I am doing and go pray now; I may not join with you at these times. All these prescribed actions are doubtless good, as long as they are for the sake of persons (for we truly “love God with our whole heart” by “loving our neighbor as ourselves”), not for the sake of an action.

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For Christians, although they are also tempted to idolatry by way of external actions, the most beguiling temptation comes from their adherence to doctrines. For example, Protestantism classically claimed that truth is to be found solely in the Bible (sola scriptura), and yet in the U.S. alone there are hundreds of different Protestant denominations. Have they made an eidol of their doctrine of what the scriptura teaches? Catholicism, of course, is no better off, with its doctrine of papal infallibility. Has papal infallibility become an eidol that is focused on with latria? I already referred to the endemic danger of “externalism” for Confucians— overstressing the ritual Li to the subordination of its goal, becoming a Ren, an authentic human in thought and action. The converse is the greatest danger for intense Buddhism, possibly misleading the devotee to “quietism” by focusing so exclusively on interior selfimprovement—the “within me” part of authentic religion—that the consequent “between me and thee” portion is starved. Many examples of authentic religion could be lifted up. Let me pick just one here that, in different ways, reflects at least the Semitic religions. The Jew, Rabbi Jesus from Nazareth, whom both Christians and Muslims call the Messiah, said (Matt 15:11) that “it is not what goes into the mouth” (an “external”) “but what comes out” (truth or lies—an “internal” reflecting the kavanah in action) that makes a person good or not. Elsewhere he said, “What you have done to the least ones . . . enter into the reward prepared for you” (Matt 25:40, 46). To repeat: Authentic religion is “within me and between me and thee.”

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The Existence of God What I have been saying about religion in general is also how I believe persons living in the mental world of Modernity can deal with the fundamental question about Ultimate Reality and, more specifically, how believers, actual or potential, can relate to the question of the existence of our understanding of Ultimate Reality, which most often, at least in the West, is named “God.” In the thirteenth century Aquinas articulated his famous five ways to “prove” the existence of God. The simplest to understand is his argument from causality: The second way is by efficient cause. We find in things of the senses that there is an order of efficient causes [for example, my hand is the efficient cause of the bat swinging, and the swinging bat is the efficient cause of making the ball fly]. However, it is never found, nor is it even possible, that something can be the efficient cause of itself [for example, the bat cannot swing itself], for it thus would be prior to itself, which is impossible. Nor is it possible that efficient causes would recede infinitely because in all cases of an order of efficient causes the first is the cause of the middle one and the middle one is the cause of the last one, whether the middle cause was many or only one. If the cause is removed, the effect is removed. Therefore, if there were not a number one of the efficient causes, there would be neither the last one nor the middle ones. But if one recedes backward infinitely in efficient causes, there would not be a first efficient cause, and thus there would be neither a last effect nor the middle effects which is obviously false. Therefore, it is necessary to posit a first efficient cause: Which is what everyone calls God.45 Let me try to translate that into a contemporary example. My existence had an adequate cause: my parents. If they had not existed, I would not exist. But, I do exist; therefore, even if I had been given up for adoption at birth and did not know them, I would know that they existed, because I could not exist without their causing my existence. The same is true of the cause of my parents, namely, my grandparents. I may never have met them either, but I know that they existed, because I exist, and I could not exist if my parents and grandparents had not existed. This progress of causes will go on back for generation after generation regardless of my personally knowing any of them. I know, for example, that my great-grandparents to the tenth generation back—indeed, to the hundredth, to the thousandth generation back—must have existed; otherwise, I would not exist. We may not know exactly how many generations of humans there have been up to the present, but let us choose a symbolic number, say one billion (it could be a million or a trillion—it does not matter). Now, human parents number one billion must

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have existed, otherwise number 999,999,999 would not have existed, nor would have 999,999,998 or 999,999, 997 nor one million, one thousand, one hundred, ten, nor my parents, nor me. But, I do exist, and so everyone must have existed in the chain all the way back, that is, the first set of parents and all the prior causes that brought them into existence. At the beginning of that long prior chain of causes must, therefore, have been the First Cause in order for me to exist. That First Cause is what Christians (and others) call God. Having now thought my way back to the First Cause, I notice that there is something unique about that First Cause. Every other cause was caused by some other prior cause, but the First Cause was not, which means that it must be the source of all that was directly and indirectly caused by it, or it would not truly have been the First Cause. If something caused it, then we only mistakenly thought it was the First Cause, and we have simply moved the problem of causes back one step farther. But, we cannot endlessly keep going backward in causes, for if there were no First (uncaused) Cause, there would be no second cause, or third or thousandth or millionth or billionth—namely, me. But, I do exist, so there must be a First (Uncaused) Cause: God. For many, this line of argument was/is persuasive. For many modern thinkers, however, the leap from limited reality (causes) to Unlimited Reality (Uncaused Cause) cannot be proved, for the makeup of our limited human mind is such that it cannot grasp (the very term “grasp,” of course, implies limiting, grasping) the Unlimited. In that case, such modern thinkers46 argue that because we cannot know, that is, grasp that God exists, we end up having to decide that the evidence pointing to the existence of the Uncaused Cause, God, is either so overwhelming that it makes much more sense to affirm that God does exist than to affirm that God does not exist—or the opposite. However, because we are dealing with that which exceeds our grasp, the Infinite, we cannot prove its existence or nonexistence. We can only decide, or not decide (the agnostic position). However, agnosticism is an inherently unstable position, to borrow an image from the physical sciences. We humans with our intellects always want to know. So, we tend to decide toward one or the other. One great advantage of deciding in favor of the existence of God is that this position makes all subsequent reality eminently intelligible, while the decision in favor of the nonexistence of God leaves all the rest of reality without any ultimate intelligibility. For me, and presumably most of those reading this book, the evidence in favor of the existence greatly outweighs the opposite evidence, even though I am not convinced that we can prove God’s existence in such a way that leaves no intelligible room for its rejection, which, of course, cannot be proved either. Given that decision on my part, then what I referred to above as explanation x concerning the ultimate meaning of life is what is customarily called Christianity.

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Theology from Below A summary way of naming the reflection on the spiritual or depth dimension of human experience within the context of Modernity is “theology from below.” This means that the questions posed will be those perennially asked about the meaning of life, but the mental context determining the thought categories in which those questions will be raised will be that of the four characteristics of Modernity: freedom, critical thinking, a historical sensibility, and a dialogical attitude. The term “from below” obviously is the opposite of “from above.” In Modernity we do not think of the world as populated by gods, spirits, or demons, all operating outside our world. We no longer envision a three-tiered universe: Earth, Heaven-above, Underworld-below; we live on one sphere out of billions of billions. We do not think the world began six thousand years ago, but heuristically the scientific evidence points to the cosmos having begun with the Big Bang and homo sapiens sapiens having evolved about two hundred thousand years ago in central Africa. We are unwilling to assume that the natural laws are customarily suspended by supernatural forces; rather, the “spiritual” world exists within us and among us. We no longer think that there is only one correct way to describe reality—our way. Instead, we start with our individual experiences and the questions that arise out of them, and we learn that others share many of these experiences and questions; we then look for answers that “make sense,” within our knowledge of the natural, social, and human sciences. We thus can value, for example, the Genesis story of creation as articulating a version of perennial wisdom about matter and spirit that come from one good source. Both matter and spirit are good (moral). Evil flows from our not following our nature, that is, the good way we were created, our rising to the level of homo sapiens sapiens in our “knowing good and evil” (Gen 3:22). We sense our radical freedom but also constantly learn of the forces that limit that freedom; we then do what we can to counteract those forces, including in the spiritual, religious area. We are increasingly aware that things never were “always this way,” as authorities of all sorts, including preeminently religious, have so often claimed; we find that history is an acid that destroys almost all such claims of permanence. We learn that a “truth” articulated in a past context must be rearticulated in the present context and again in a future one, that a parroted past is a perverted past. Today, we consciously live in a global village and are keenly aware of what the seventeenth-century poet John Donne (1572– 1631) said, “No man is an island.”47 No one person or group of persons can express all the truth of reality or any part of reality. Dialogue with those who see reality from a stance different from ours is a necessity if we wish to know ever more—not just quantitatively but also qualitatively. In brief, we need to pursue the questions about the spiritual, depth dimension of our human experience with a “theology from below.”

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More to Reality Than Meets the Eye? To sum up where we have come at this point: If this is the mental world in which you live, that is, Modernity, and yet one way or another you are not satisfied that your sense and rational thought experience of reality completely plumbs its depth, that there is something more than “meets the eye,” then you are among the vast majority of humans who have ever lived, including now. You are looking at what we humans, at least in the West, have referred to as religion—“an explanation of the ultimate meaning of life and how to live accordingly, based on some notion and experience of the Transcendent.” Here, of course, you are entering the realm not of knowing but of believing. That does not mean that you leave your rational intellect at the door. That is impossible after you have crossed the Rubicon of Modernity. You cannot go back, nor would you wish to. (The Rubicon is a river in northern Italy marking a boundary that, when Julius Caesar crossed it in 49 BCE with his legion of soldiers, meant he became an “outlaw”; hence, today the word means a “point of no return.”) Religion for the modern person means using your senses and intellects—both discursive and intuitive—that will carry you with proof to the ever-moving edge of reality where you cannot penetrate with “knowing,” with proof. Many will stand there with the feeling (not something that you can “prove,” of course) that there is much more to reality than you are able to discern with proof. Then, you must utilize all of your faculties to look coolly at the evidence for and against the notion that there is more to reality than “meets the eye,” or not. Then you ultimately decide (for, ultimately, not to decide in this case is to decide negatively): Yes, it makes more sense to affirm that there is a greater depth to reality than you can “prove” (for example, “God” or Brahman or Sunyata exists); or No, it makes more sense to reject that idea (for example, “God” or Brahman or Sunyata does not exist). However, the yea-sayers cannot “prove” that they are right and that the naysayers are wrong—nor can the naysayers “prove” that they are right and the yea-sayers are wrong. Rather, all must remain constantly in dialogue with both ourselves and one another.

10. Pelagius, Latin name for his Celtic name, “Morgan,” both meaning “sea”; Irish monk (360–435). 11. Hick, Evil and the God of Love. 12. Hick, The Fifth Dimension. 13. Hick, Evil and the God of Love, 220–21. 14. Bratsiotis, “Das Menschenverständnis in der griechisch-orthodoxen Kirche,” 378; quoted in ibid., 217n3. 15. Hick, Evil and the God of Love, 295, in n. 1, he noted that “soul-making” comes from an April 1819 John Keats letter to his brother and sister: “Call the world if you Please ‘The vale of Soul-making’ . . . Do you not see how necessary a World of Pains and troubles is to school an Intelligence and make it a Soul?” (Forman, Letters

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of John Keats, 334–35). 16. Hick, The Fifth Dimension, 230. 17. The Pharisees appeared in history around 160 BCE, as middle-class men who claimed that there was not only the Written Torah (Hebrew: “Teaching”) but also the Oral Torah; they proclaimed the then-new doctrine of the resurrection of the body at the End of Days—both of which teachings Yeshua also espoused. 18. The Sadducees were from the landed gentry, believed there was only the Written Torah, and did not accept the Oral Torah or the resurrection of the body; it was from them that the Chief Priests were drawn, who, because they were appointed by the Romans to keep the peace, asked the Roman Pilate to execute the troublemaker Yeshua. 19. The Essenes are thought by most scholars to have been the denizens of Qumran along the Dead Sea, from which the Dead Sea Scrolls stem. Strongly ascetic, their inner circle rejected sex and were hyperconcerned about ritual purity. 20. The Zealots were Jews who so hated the occupying Romans that they wanted to throw them out by violence; they looked for the Messiah to lead them to reestablish the kingdom of Israel. At least two of them were members of Yeshua’s inner circle of Twelve: Simon the Zealot, and Judas Iscariot, who was a member of the sicarii, meaning “dagger carriers.” Today he might have been nicknamed “Switchblade Jude.” 21. The Hellenists were the six-and-a-half million Jews living in the Roman Empire outside of Israel (where there were a million and a half Jews). 22. E.g., see Küng, On Being a Christian; Schillebeeckx, Jesus; and Haight, Jesus, Symbol of God. 23. Swidler, Freedom in the Church, 93; italics added. 24. Ibid., 92–93. 25. Mirari vos, no. 14; my translation from the Latin.

26. Quanta cura, no. 3; available at https://archive.org/stream/QuantaCuraTheSyllabusOfErrors_247/pius_ix_pope_quanta_cura_and_the_syllabus_of_errors_djvu.txt italics added. 27. Dignitatis humanae, no. 3; available http://www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_council/documents/vat-ii_decl_19651207_dignitatishumanae_en.html; italics added.

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28. See a tendentious negative view: Wikipedia, s.v. “Ignaz Heinrich von Wessenberg” en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignaz_Heinrich_von_Wessenberg; for a more positive view, see Swidler, Making the Church Our Own. 29. See Swidler, Aufklärung Catholicism; and Swidler, Making the Church Our Own. 30. For details on all this material, see Swidler, Biblical Affirmations of Woman. It is interesting to note that all of these Hebrew terms—Ruaḥ, Ḥokmah, Torah, Shekinah, except Dabar—are linguistically feminine. 31. Schlesinger, “Folly’s Antidote.” 32. See Brown, Big History, 1–38. 33. See especially his books The Phenomenon of Man and The Future of Man. 34. Rose, Pluralism. 35. Spengler, Der Untergang des Abendlandes. 36. Sorokin, The Crisis of Our Age. 37. Huntington, “Clash of Civilizations”; see also Huntington, The Clash of Civili-zations. 38. Huntington pointed to this move toward global dialogue, even if only in the form of a need: We “need to develop a more profound understanding of the basic religious and philosophical assumptions underlying other civilizations . . . It will require an effort to identify elements of commonality between Western and other

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civilizations . . . to learn to coexist with the others” (Huntington, “Clash,” 49). 39. Jaspers coined this term and pointed out its significance in The Origin and Goal of History. He called the period from 800 to 200 BCE the “Axial Period,” for it gave birth to all subsequent history. “It is here in this period that we meet with the most deepcut dividing line in history. Man, as we know him today, came into being. For short, we may style this the Axial Period” (Jaspers, Origin and Goal, 1). 40. Pascal, Pensees, 358. 41. The term “holy” is related to “salvation”; its Latin form, salvatio, comes from the root salus (the Greek form is soterion/soteria from saos), meaning “wholeness,” “health,” or “well-being”—hence, such English terms as “salutary,” “salubrious,” and “salute.” The same is true of the Germanic root of Heil, “salvation,” which as an adjective is heilig, “holy”—whence the English cognates “health,” “hale,” “heal,” “whole,” “holy.” To be “holy” means to be “whole,” to lead a whole life, a full life. When we lead a whole, full life, we are holy; we attain salvation, wholeness, (w)holiness. 42. Those who know Western Medieval Philosophy will recognize that these are the “Metaphysicals,” the four aspects of Being Itself perceived from different perspectives: the one, the true, the good, the beautiful. 43. See Lakeland, Postmodernity, 16–18, where he lays out a variety of postmodernities; and Haight, Jesus, Symbol of God, 331–34, where he lists four characteristics of postmodernity: “radical historical consciousness,” “critical social consciousness,” “pluralist consciousness,” and “cosmic consciousness.” 44. For a more detailed analysis of the increasing awareness of the limitations of our knowledge and the consequent need for dialogue, see Swidler, After the Absolute. 45. Thomas Aquinas, in Summa Theologiae, I, q. II, a. 2, posed the question: Can the existence of God be proven? He wrote, “I respond that it must be said that there are five ways by which the existence of God can be proven. The first way, however, is the more obvious way, which can be summed up by the concept of motion.” For Aquinas this argument was the most obvious because it was based on the quite abstract Aristotelian metaphysical idea that a being can move from potentially being something to actually being it only if moved by another being that already actually has that perfection. This Aristotelean metaphysics was familiar to his contemporary readers but is not so today; thus, I will move on to his second argument, from causality, which is more readily understood today. 46. See, e.g., Küng, Does God Exist? 47. From Donne’s Meditation 17 in Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, 1624.

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Reflections on Problematics Having described, however inadequately, how I understand Modernity and the meaning of authentic religion, I think it important for my fellow “reluctant believers” that I give some attention to at least the more contemporary common problem areas of religions. Of course, in the past they were not problematic but supportive. However, in the mental world of Modernity they often have become blocks rather than bridges. I will deal here, however briefly and perhaps inadequately, with miracles, resurrection, and immortality of the soul.

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Miracles What exactly is understood by the term “miracle”? The word from its Latin root, miraculum, literally means “something to wonder at” (whence our English word “admire”). It normally refers to some happening that cannot be explained by customary natural causes. Until the age of Modernity, almost everyone was convinced that such miracles happened with some regularity. Of course, today many millions are still so convinced. However, for most persons living thoroughly in the mental world of Modernity such happenings contrary to the known laws of nature do not take place. To be sure, a theist can “logically” argue that if God is in fact the source of all reality, if God is the creator of the “laws” of nature, then it follows that God can also suspend the laws God made. However, if one were going to go down that thought path, one would have to ask why such an incredible amount of obviously unnecessary, wasteful suffering is allowed by this all-powerful God (starting just with sentient creatures who experience pain, all the way from hypertrillions of microscopic beings up to billions of humans), who just “cherry-picks” a few problems to solve by suspending God’s own natural laws. It makes God into the worst image of a stereotypical Oriental potentate who occasionally arbitrarily frees a miserably wracked creature—hardly an admirable image of a “loving” God. No, physical scientists surely can “wonder” at the marvels of nature; social scientists, at the even more intricate “miracles” of the human psyche. However, they/we are extremely reluctant to look for occasional reversals of the laws of nature, whether physical or psychical, because over the past two thousand years a pious Christian (or some other God-fearing person before then) has sent a prayer—or even a lot of them— to the organizer of the cosmos. This would be to assume that God is an Omnipotent who can be persuaded to alleviate pain in only a tiny part of the numbing amount of suffering that has coursed throughout the nearly fourteen billion years of the universe’s existence and into the future. I as a less than perfectly kind human would be profoundly insulted were such said of me; a fortiori (Latin: “all the more so”), a perfect God would hardly thereby be lauded. So, what does one do—to look at just one set of possible examples from preModernity—with what surely look like miracles in the New Testament, especially those said to have been performed by Yeshua? The contemporary Catholic theologian Roger Haight, SJ (1936–), summed up the relationship between the preaching of Saint Paul and that of the Gospels thus: “A sense of historicity is leading theologians and Christians generally to put more stock in the saving power of Jesus’ public career and ministry, in contrast to the almost exclusively dogmatic Pauline concentration on the dynamics and power of salvation in Jesus’ death.”48 To begin with—although, as Walter Grundmann (1906–1976) wrote in the prestigious

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Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, “The Hellenistic Jewish world is full of miraculous happenings and gods and miracle-workers”49—most of the “miracles” recorded in the New Testament are healings by Yeshua. Moderns are familiar with socalled faith healings, that is, those unexpected healings of the human body that occur because the person involved had an intense faith or trust that it would occur—and it did. If a person has an unusually strong will to live, she or he can at times overcome an injury or disease to which an ordinary person would succumb. We are slowly learning (through neuralpsychology) about how such “mind over matter” events operate—how, for example, optimistic persons tend to live longer and have fewer maladies that do pessimistic persons: through a measurable release of endorphins in the brain, for example, which has a healing effect on affected parts of the body. It is important to note the specific reports of this faith healing in the healing “miracles” of Yeshua. Many times he said to the afflicted person, “Your faith has made you whole” (Mark 5:34, 10:52; Matt 9:22; Luke 8:48, 17:19). Another time when two blind men asked to be healed, he asked them whether they believed he could do so, and they said, yes: “According to your faith let it be so” (Matt 9:28; cf. 15:28).When this faith was lacking, Yeshua was unable to effect a “miracle” of healing: “He did not work many miracles there because of their lack of faith” (Matt 13:58). Clearly, these healing “miracles” depended on the trust or faith of the afflicted person, which presumably then released the healing bodily action. The Greek word used in the Gospels that refers to what we usually translate in English as “miracle” is dynamis, “powerful action” (whence our English words, “dynamic,” “dynamite”). A major function of these dynameis was to provide a sign that the teachings from Yeshua were truly “from God.” (This is why the ancient prophets would “foretell” the future, so that the Israelites would be moved to believe that the prophet was indeed God’s “spokesperson,” as the Greek prophetis literally means. Consequently, we have gotten things exactly backward by reducing “prophet” to mean someone who foretells the future.) Apparently at the time of Yeshua, he also ran into a similar problem, for his opponents kept asking him for “signs,” for which he reprimanded them severely, calling them an “evil and adulterous generation” (Matt 16:4). In brief, a Christian living in the mental world of Modernity does not need such an external “sign” or miracle of the dynamis, the power, of Yeshua. It is Yeshua’s spellbinding teaching and consequent living of it that draw the modern person.50 Therein lies Yeshua’s dynamis, his miracle; if reflected on seriously and substantively put into one’s life, it is dynamite! At the same time, one should not discount prayer but, rather, redirect it. Think of Yeshua’s prayer in Gethsemane: He sought a deeper inner union with God, wrestling with his deep fear of what faced him. He must have told at least one of his followers of the

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inner struggle he had when he “sweat blood”—the details of what he said in his prayer, of his coming back to talk with his friends not once but three times, all these exclude the likelihood that his prayer “That this cup may pass” could have just been made up later. Yeshua’s prayer was to put himself “in sync” with what was going to unfold, as best he could, and he thereby found an inner calm: “Not as I will, but as you will” (Mark 14:36).

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Reincarnation/Samsara/Moksha/Nirvana or Resurrection/Immortality of Soul/Eternal Life—Or? Related to the issue of the resurrection of Yeshua is the pervasive question that underlies all religious and ethical questions: What happens to us after the grave? All comprehensive philosophical and religious systems address this fundamental question, because in the very structure of all living beings there is an always-present drive for self-preservation. The second most powerful constitutive drive is self-preservation by way of offspring. Obviously, the second is a variation of the first and comes into existence partly for a negative reason, namely, because living bodies are subject to destruction, and partly for a positive reason, namely, as a Latin phrase has it: Bonum sui diffusivum est, “goodness diffuses itself.” I will look ever so briefly at two of the major religious groupings’ responses to this fundamental question, the Indian and Abrahamic religions. We cannot know whether there is some kind of existence after the grave. Those who hold the “naturalist” position, that is, that only matter exists, can only stamp their feet and declaim that nothing exists outside of matter and that what some (actually, overwhelmingly most) claim is not matter—for example, consciousness, ideas—are just some sort of “thin” matter (a strange “matter” that does not occupy space?). It appears that we once again meet a “limit” situation where we humans with our knowing apparatus cannot “know” the answers to the questions we pose for ourselves or that are posed to us by our experience. So, again, we have three possibilities: (1) yes, there is nonmaterial reality; (2) no, there is no nonmaterial reality; (3) I have not yet made a decision. Notice that the third position, “decision,” is not an act of the intellect, of “knowing,” but of the will, of “deciding.” Because of our common human experience of consciousness and ideas that are perceived as nonmaterial, the vast majority have opted for number 1, that there is nonmaterial reality. Further, because the drive for survival is so primordial in living beings, humans over the millennia have also opted for claiming that there is some kind of continued existence beyond the grave. The Indian religions came up with the cyclical description of gradual improvement, moving toward the goal through a series of reenfleshments, reincarnations. When one has reached full development as a conscious being, one is released (moksha—this and the next two key terms are in Sanskrit, the “mother” language of all Indo-European languages such as Greek, Latin, French, German, and English) from samsara, the cycle of birth-life-death-rebirth, and one attains nirvana, bliss or happiness (which is described differently in the various forms of Hinduism, Jainism, and Buddhism). One should read John Hick’s chapter on reincarnation in his 2009 book, Who or What Is God?51 for the clearest, most plausible explanation of reincarnation I have come across—though I confess, perhaps because of my cultural background and education, I still do not find it persuasive.

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The three Semitic religions have a rather linear sense of time: Something happens in the course of history that changes everything from that point forward, for example, the exodus from Egypt, the birth of Yeshua, or the Revelations to Mohammad (570–632). The Indians have a more circular sense of time; one simply has to break out of the circle of constant repetition to attain bliss. The Israelites and early Jews did not have a doctrine of either the resurrection of the body or the immortality of the soul (a Greek teaching). There was a rather vague notion of the spirit of the person that continued to have some sort of shadowy existence, but even that notion was fairly vague. Mostly, it was thought that one lived on in one’s offspring. The teaching of the resurrection of the body is a specifically pharisaical one, and Pharisees appear in history, as noted earlier, only 160 years before the Common Era (according to the younger contemporary of Yeshua, the Jewish historian Josephus). Around the same time, the Greek notion of the immortality of the soul also began to appear in Judaism, for example, in the deuterocanonical (Greek: deutero, “second”; canon, “rule”) book of Wisdom, written around 100 BCE, that was accepted as validly biblical by Orthodox and Catholic Christians but not by Jews or Protestants. In addition, sometimes the language Jews used was about “eternal life.” What is one to make of these different but related ideas? Clearly, in general, they reflect the drive for survival, for existence, found in all living beings—in this case, found in conscious beings, humans. It is the same drive toward being that we saw in the Indian religious doctrines of reincarnation and nirvana. The idea of the “resurrection of the body” at the “End of Days” (Hebrew: aharit hayamim) perhaps has this kind of thinking behind it: The human being clearly is a very intimate combination of a physical body and a nonphysical, life-giving spirit. Remember that the English term comes from the Latin spiritus, meaning “wind” or “breath”—if no breath in a human body, no life. As noted earlier, at the very beginning of the Bible, the story of the creation of humanity makes this clear: God took some earth (Hebrew: adamah), breathed into it God’s breath or spirit (Hebrew: ruach), and created ha-’adam —literally, “the earthling.” Since the human, then, was created by God as a body/spirit, God would not continue to be frustrated by having the two intimate parts of creation’s very acme, humanity, remain forever rent asunder. Hence, at the End of Days, body and spirit would be joined together again, once and for all. The second concept, according to Socrates and the Greeks, was that the soul (psychē) is essentially a separate reality from the body. It is like an immaterial prisoner trapped within a prison-like material body. The soul, because it is immaterial and thus the truly real, is itself everlasting or immortal. It is immortal because it has no parts, as physical beings have, which can fall apart, disintegrate, and die. The third concept comes from biblical language that speaks of eternal life, zoēn aiōnion (for example, Matt 19:16).

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According to the Gospels, Yeshua used the language of all three. He rejected the position of the Sadducees and affirmed that of the Pharisees on the resurrection of the body (Matt 22:23–32); indeed, he is reported to have said, “I am the resurrection and the life” (Egō eimi hē anastasis kai hē zoē, John 11:25)—which clearly can be understood only metaphorically. Yeshua also spoke of losing one’s soul (psychē, Matt 16:26) and gaining eternal life (zoēn aiōnion, John 5:24): “Everyone who lives and believes in me will never die in the future” (Pas ho zōn kai pisteuōn eis eme, ou mē apothanē eis ton aiōna, John 11:26). Beyond that, the Nicene Creed of 325 CE followed up with the statement: “I expect . . . the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come” (Et expecto resurrectionem mortuorum, et vitam venturi saeculi). How does a person living in the mental world of Modernity accept the notion that the soul is essentially separate from the body? I watched for seventeen years how the gradual deterioration of my wife Arlene’s brain led inexorably to the deterioration of her mind, her soul, her whole person; how can her soul be immortal? What evidence is there that our bodies will be reunited with our souls at the “End of Days,” whatever that might mean? For a modern, what in the world might “eternal life” mean? Clearly, for someone living in the mental world of Modernity, the resurrection of the body, immortality of the soul, and eternal life cannot be understood in some sort of naive materialistic sense—if they ever were meant in that crass manner. Thinking of Yeshua and how he would have understood and taught these terms, we must bear in mind that he thought and taught in the customary Semitic manner of “picture language,” of metaphor and symbol, not in the customary Hellenistic manner of abstract philosophical or concrete, naïve, polytheistic language. These images were/are to be understood by Yeshua and by his modern followers more like the obviously metaphorical language of the Negro spiritual: “He’s got the whole world in his hands!” It is the language of trust, hope, love—the three theological virtues of 1 Cor 13:13: Pistis, Elpis, kai Agape—faith, hope, and love. So, for us moderns, what lies beyond the grave? To be honest—and if anything, a modern wants to be radically honest—we do not know. I do not find the movies and TV shows that focus on the supernatural at all entertaining, let alone persuasive. For me, science fiction, even though “far out,” is at least thinkable, whereas the supernatural is not. We do not know what lies beyond “that dark night.” We wonder, speculate, like Hamlet, “perchance to dream . . . Aye, there’s the rub.” As modern scientific-thinking persons, we might think like Teilhard de Chardin and others as follows: The trajectory of the cosmos (Greek for “order,” the opposite of Greek chaos) in the billions of years since the Big Bang that we can increasingly trace makes it more than likely that the emergence of self-consciousness (humanity) cannot suddenly and erratically fizz into nothingness. Once independent self-awareness (personhood) has

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been attained, with its inner thrust toward ever more knowing, awareness, and consciousness, it cannot suddenly reverse itself. Everything traced to this moment points in the direction of the continued advance of ever more consciousness into the future, of the person not simply dissolving but continuing to expand. In an analogous question, Küng expressed it this way: “I have argued for a Yes to an Alpha as a ‘ground’ of all things, and I will also plead for an ‘Omega’ as a ‘goal.’ But it must remain clear that here we are dealing with a ‘Yes’ beyond science, a Yes of rational trust.”52 Such thinking based on long study of physical scientific evidence is certainly hopegiving. This thinking is along the lines of what later has been referred to as the “anthropic principle” (the universe appears to have been “aiming” at the shaping of conditions that would exude self-consciousness, humanity, anthrōpos): The “hard” version of the anthropic principle argues that from the scientific evidence of the development of the cosmos, the built-in laws are such that the evolution of the cosmos necessarily led to the emergence of reflective conscious life, humans. The “soft” version argues from scientific evidence that the built-in laws of the cosmos allowed for the emergence of humans.53 Such reflection continues into most recent times: If we want to interpret the origin of the cosmos, of space and time, as the creative act of a divine being, the results of the natural sciences do not prevent us. On the contrary, research in physics would probably describe this as the standard cosmological model of the Big Bang. I do not believe that the grandiose cosmic development takes its course simply as a meaningless play before empty seats. Like the American physicist Freeman Dyson (1923–2005), I think that there is a purpose behind it—perhaps the plan to produce an ever more complex universe of diverse forms and filled with a spiritual principle. But that brings us into the realm of values and faith, in which we must modestly concede our ignorance.54 So, the scientific evidence does not prove that the thrust of human consciousness protrudes beyond the grave. However, not only does science not deny it, it even points in that direction. I personally take that to mean that it provides me with some reasonable hope (shades of Pascal’s Wager55) of something benign beyond the grave. My experience in life, especially all the love that I have had heaped on me, leads me to a fundamental trust in life and its Source, which Christians, and others, call God. Again, “She’s got the whole world in her hands!” As I quoted Hick earlier, “All that we know, if our big picture is basically correct, is that nothing good that has been created in human life will ever be lost.”56

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48. Haight, Jesus, Symbol of God, 58. Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza has also indicated that Paul’s conception of God must be subordinated to that of Yeshua’s. See Schüssler Fiorenza, In Memory of Her, 101. 49. Walter Grundmann, “Dynamis,” in Kittel, Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, 2:302. The long article is very defensively uncritical of the divine power of Yeshua as distinct from other Jews, probably in large measure due to Grundmann’s outspoken antisemitism (he was a prominent member of the Nazi Party). See the article on him in the German version of Wikipedia. Wikipedia, s.v. “Walter Grundmann,” http://www.de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Grundmann/. 50. See Swidler, Club Modernity. 51. Hick, Who or What Is God? 52. Küng, Der Anfang aller Dinge, 174 (The Beginning of All Things, 154). 53. See Barrow and Tipler, The Anthropic Cosmological Principle. 54. Börner, “Blick ins Unendliche—Vom Urknall zum Weltall,” 115; my translation. 55. Blaise Pascal argued in Pensées that, given the potential infinite value to be gained, it was wiser to bet for God’s existence than against; see Wikipedia, s.v. “Pascal’s Wager,” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal%27s_Wager/. 56. Hick, The Fifth Dimension, 230.

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Purposes of Religion—The Future Exterior Religious Life—Ritual Along with my earlier definition of religion, I also mentioned the four “Cs” that each religion has: creed, code, cult, and community structure. The creed is the “explanation of the ultimate meaning of life”; the code is the code of ethics of “how to live accordingly”; the community structure is the organizational arrangement of the community of believers; and the cult is the relationship of the adherent to whatever she or he understands to be “the Transcendent.” Cult includes such things as prayers, signs, symbols, actions, and clothing. It embraces both interior and exterior matters. Clearly, the most apparent are the exterior ways an adherent of a religion expresses his or her relationship to the Transcendent, to Ultimate Reality, to—for Christians and other theists—God. Some devout Christians will on occasion make the sign of the cross on themselves, use holy water, accept ashes on their forehead, set up crèches, recite prayers aloud, sing hymns, compose and play sacred music, create religious visual art, or the like—all mainly exterior things. I would like first to reflect on this exterior dimension of cult. Doubtless from the beginning of human existence two hundred thousand years ago, humans were aware that we were not in charge of the world. We obviously did not create ourselves or the world around us. Moreover, from the start of our individual lives we were totally dependent on others for our continued existence. The primary one we were dependent on was our mother; without her we would not even have been born, and without her we could not live more than three days, if that. It was also apparent to primitive humans that everything around us was a given, that we did not create it. Whence did it come? The first answer to that Ur-question—that even today every child poses to sometimes embarrassed parents (Carmel question: Hat Gott alles gemacht?)— was that it came from some force(s) greater than us, and that this “divine” force was female. The divine was obviously female (in the earliest levels of archeological digs the divine is always in the form of a pregnant female), because it was obvious all around that new life came from the female (it was millennia before men discovered that they also were involved in creating new life). This sense of dependence continues today for an obvious reason: We humans are dependent beings, as are all beings. We humans, however, are aware that we are dependent, that we are ultimately dependent. We depend not only initially on our mothers, and then on many other humans, for the means of life but also on our earthly environment (soil, water, air) and ultimately on our place in the whole cosmos, and, beyond that, the creator, sustainer of the cosmos—whether we understand that Source as

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singular or multiple, personal or impersonal. As the Jew Spinoza (1632–1677) put it, “deus sive natura” (God or Nature). It was this awareness of our ultimate dependence that led humans to be “religious,” to attempt to relate to the Source(s) on which we are dependent. From very early human times, humans felt the need to offer gifts to the Transcendent, most often in the form of “sacrifices” (Latin: sacra, “sacred,” literally “set aside”; facere, “to make”). Israelite religion, and then Judaism, like all other ancient religions, had sacrifice as its central exterior way to relate to the Transcendent. However, this had already been profoundly changing even before the time of Yeshua. By his lifetime as many as six and a half million—out of the perhaps eight million Jews living among the one hundred million of the Roman Empire—lived outside of Israel. Already the institution of the synagogue as a Jewish community center, a place for the study of Torah, had been growing inside and outside the Roman Empire wherever Jews lived. That meant that the great majority of Jews of Yeshua’s time lived outside of Israel; therefore, sacrifice at the Jerusalem temple was no longer the center of the exterior cult. Rather, study and reflection on God’s teaching, Torah, on how to live a godly life—ethics—was the cultic center. It should be noted that the only Gospel references to Yeshua and the temple where sacrifices were offered were to his teaching and healing there or to his throwing out the money changers (and the curtain of the temple supposedly being torn in two at his death —a symbolic event pointing to a caesura/break, between the before and after of the coming of the Messiah). Perhaps in earliest times the exterior actions relating the believer to the Transcendent, to God(s), was thought simply to act on its own power, but with the passage of time and the deepening of human consciousness it was thought increasingly that the external action necessarily had to be connected to the inner intention if it was to be effective in relating the believer with God. The rabbis, of which Yeshua was an early exemplar, sometimes even being referred to as a “Proto-Rabbi,”57 spoke of kavanah, intention, as what made an action godly or not. The rabbinic view is that physical actions have no inherent meaning and that an action’s significance . . . can be determined only in light of the actor’s intention ... . . . [A]nyone engaged in a ritual . . . must intend to perform that act properly. If one intends to do the wrong thing, the act is invalid, even if it conforms to the rules. Human intention and purpose establish the significance and effect of actions and impart meaning to a world that has no inherent order. . . . [I]t is not enough to say the required words or to perform a set of compulsory actions. Rather, people fulfill their religious obligations only . . . with

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appropriate cognizance of the sacred nature of their activity.58 Early in Christianity the intimate connection between the external act and the internal intention was also forged in what became known as “sacrament.” In the penny catechism of my youth (1930s), we were taught that a sacrament was “an outward sign instituted by Christ to give inward grace.” Except possibly for the Eucharist, none of the seven customary Catholic sacraments was “instituted” by Yeshua. However, this “sacramental” system did insist on an intimate relationship between the exterior and interior. The outward sensible sign was supposed to engender an interior reality. Hence, in all the socalled high churches of Christianity—in their religious services, their liturgies (Greek: leitourgia, “public work”), the use of things sensible—the use of matter is widely employed as a highway to the interior, to the spiritual. If one reflects at all, it makes good sense because of the psychosomatic nature of humans. As noted previously, I am convinced of the wisdom of Aristotle’s epistemology over against that of his teacher Plato. Plato taught a doctrine of innate ideas, whereas Aristotle—as stated above—insisted that Nil in intellectu quod non prius in sensu, “Nothing is in the intellect which was not first in the senses”—to use again the language of his disciple Aquinas. Exterior actions tend both to influence our interior thoughts and sentiments and to reflect them. If used sensitively, outward things, “sacramentals,” powerfully shape the way we inwardly perceive and feel about outward reality and thence act. Such a mutual relationship between the exterior and the interior is widespread far beyond Christianity and Judaism, for it must be recognized that external practices are vital in both expressing and inducing internal attitudes. Our psychosomatic human nature demands such an inner/outer relationship. One sees this manifested in all human societies. For example, at the very heart of Confucianism is the interrelated pair: Ren-Li. The meaning of Ren is “human,” “kindness,” and Li is “custom.” Clearly, the whole point of Li is to induce Ren, to lead the person to be authentically, deeply human, Ren. Although Li exists for the sake of Ren, Ren cannot come into existence without Li, and, once in existence, Ren will necessarily also express itself outwardly in Li. What is key is to strike the correct balance and to remember that Li exists for Ren, not the other way around. Those Christian denominations that eschew the things of the senses in their worship services (liturgies) and depend solely on the cerebral, the “spiritual”—reading scripture, sermons, hymns, that is, words, words, words—make a serious mistake. They are acting as if we humans were disembodied spirits. It is understandable historically how such practices arose in protest to the sixteenth–century Catholic Church with its plethora of “chantry priests,” scandalous indulgences, and the like, but it leaves “low-church” Protestant communities relatively religiously anemic. Too many Christians and other

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religious believers merely go through the rituals in ways that seem to have little impact on their interior lives—and consequently also little impact on their subsequent actions. A healthy human approach is to link the exterior and interior in a conscious manner.

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Interior Life As noted, besides “liturgy,” the exterior dimension of the relation to the Transcendent, there is the even more important dimension, the interior one. In a very central way, the essence of religion, as I spelled out above, is “within me and between me and thee.” The “between me and thee” part is the ethical. Here, however, I would like to focus on the “within me.” The heart of being human is our consciousness, our awareness, and, even more precisely, our self-consciousness, our self-awareness. Other animals obviously also have consciousness (Latin: con, “with”; scientia, “knowledge”), that is, they know objects, things. However, we have no evidence that they have any self-consciousness. We humans, on the other hand, can be aware, conscious, that we are knowing things; we know ourselves knowing. As I sit here and write this paragraph—and as you sit there reading it—I can at the same time as I write be aware that I am writing this, just as you can notice as you read this that you are reading. Normally, as we engage in this act of self-awareness we refer to ourselves not as being an object (Latin: ob, “in front of”; jectum, “thrown), that is, that which is known, but as being a subject, that is, as being the knower. The Latin root of “subject” (sub, “below” or “within”; jectum, “thrown”), that is, the knower, focuses within, on the knower. A subject is not only a being who perceives or knows an object, a thing, but a subject is also a being who knows that it knows; it is a being that makes its own being an object of its knowing. When we look within ourselves, several kinds of things can be taking place. Usually, all kinds of thoughts pointed “outward” are going on: We notice what our senses of sight, hearing, touching, and so forth, are taking in, or we are trying to solve a problem; or we recall certain memories—or we can focus on our consciousness itself. I can sit here, reflect inwardly, and focus on being aware of me. I exist. I am thinking. Simply, I. In certain kinds of Eastern meditation we can try to eliminate all “outward” thoughts and even try to eliminate self-awareness. Sometimes that is called “Empty Mind,” and it would seem to mime sleep or unconsciousness, unawareness. If we attempt this kind of meditation, trying to “empty our minds,” the result might be to relax the body (remember, we humans are very much psychosomatic beings), producing certain health benefits. We might be able to come into close contact with our psychosomatic source of energy—Qi in Chinese, Ki in Japanese—thereby enabling an amazing psychic-bodily integration and perhaps even some astounding physical feats, as in Kung fu. I wish that I had such accomplishments. Although Eastern meditation doubtless is beneficial in its own several ways, that is not what Christian, and other theist, meditation is aiming at, for the most part. At the first level, Christian meditation aims at God-oriented behavior modification, primarily more

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along ethical than psychic-physical lines—most Eastern meditation, not being theist, seems to aim more at the latter. A Christian in meditation might engage in an examination of conscience: What did I do today? Did I succeed or fail in my efforts to be more compassionate, humble, honest? Or, a la Ignatius of Loyola (1491–1556), the founder of the Jesuits, one might try to imagine oneself in a conversation with Yeshua or to observe his suffering or to compare Yeshua’s treatment of bothersome people with one’s own treatment of such persons, drawing some moral lesson and conviction therefrom. Such meditation doubtless will have beneficial behavior-modification effects and can be easily understood and affirmed by every human being, whether Christian, Muslim, theist, or not. Only the content of such ethically oriented meditation would need to be changed for the nontheist to engage in it beneficially. On a more advanced level, Christians, and other theists, might attempt to hold an interior conversation with God or, still further on in the spiritual life, simply interiorly place themselves in the presence of God. This might be done with the sensibility of overwhelming awe, penitence, gratitude, laud, love, being with a friend, or just being in the Presence. One might deep inside be convinced that God really exists, and so this inner awareness of one’s self is also felt as a self “in his hands,” to go back to the words of the Negro spiritual. One might also say to oneself: Let’s be totally honest. Nothing is gained by trying to trick myself. I do not really know that God exists and that God is therefore present to me; I might be just in my presence, and not God’s. For a third option, one might say interiorly: Of course, I cannot know God, dummy! If I, and others, could know, then there would not be all this disagreement and confusion in the world since humanity’s beginning. If I, and you, could know that God exists and is even more “Person” than I am and you are, then most of the tough human problems of “meaning” in life would not even be problems. We would know the answers. So, perhaps, as a person living in the mental world of Modernity, after all my thoughtful reflection and experience, I am inclined toward the position that God does exist and is Person, that is, God knows and God knows me—but I cannot be certain because I cannot know. Rather, I can only choose that this seems very likely, likely, slightly likely, or not at all likely. There are no certain answers, only answers that seem more persuasive one way or another. Ultimately, I must ask myself if I am reasonably, warrantedly, inclined toward hope and trust that God exists and makes sense of everything, or not. Choose. If I am in a quandary, or inclined to choose no, perhaps I am simply being nakedly honest—or perhaps I am going through the Dark Night of the Soul, trusting, spes contra spem (hoping against hope), that I will come through ultimately.

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Ethical Principles and Practices First, let me settle a few fundamental terminological issues. There is no real difference between “ethics” and “morality,” though some try to make a distinction—but it is really a distinction without a difference. The term “ethics” comes to us from the Greek (ethos, “custom”); “morals,” from the Latin (mos, moris, “custom”). For some indiscernible reason, “moral” is more often, but not always, used in connection with sexual matters, whereas in other matters concerning right behavior “ethical” is used more often. A more important consideration is to think carefully about what we mean when we use such basic terms as “good” and “bad.” This usage can be understood fundamentally in this way, I believe: We say that something is good if it moves toward what we conceive to be the goal of the thing in question. Let me use the proverbial ice cream cone that I spoke of earlier. If I conceive of the goal of an ice cream cone to be cooling, sweet, smooth, having pleasing taste, then I say of a particular cone that it is proportionately good, or bad as it moves toward my conception of the “goal” of ice cream. Hence, when we are dealing with human actions, we need to have in mind what the goal of such an action ought, in our judgment to be. For example, if we judge that the “goal” of speech is to express outwardly what we inwardly think, we would say that truth telling is good. To do the opposite is called a lie, and it is usually said to be bad because it does not move the action of speaking in the direction of its supposed goal. However, as should immediately be clear, deciding that something is good and therefore ought to be done means that very much rides on how we conceive the goal of a particular action. We might argue that, in general, truth telling is good. However, what if during the 1940s the Gestapo came to your door in Europe and asked you whether there were any Jews in your house? Knowing that a “truthful” answer would result in sending the Jewish mother, father, and child hiding in your home to torture and death, no “ethically” concerned person would say that truth telling was good in that case. The householder might think that the “goal” of the answer to the Gestapo officer was not the customary “goal” of speaking, namely, expressing out loud what you know in your mind to be the case. Rather, here the goal of speaking was the protection of innocent life. A half century ago when I studied Catholic moral theology (it’s interesting that Protestant theologians customarily spoke of the same topic as “Christian ethics”), we learned a number of “tricks,” such as “mental reservation”—so-called white lies. (Mental reservation meant that you said out loud, “No, there are no Jews here,” and in your mind you would silently add, “that you need to know about.”) In the seventeenth century the Jesuit moral theologians were very creative at devising such “tricks,” and, hence, the term “casuistry,” (meaning that the general ethical rules had to be applied with appropriate modifications from case to case) got a bad name, sometimes being termed “Jesuitical.” In fact, “‘The End Justifies the Means’ is a maxim which originated in an

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accusation made by Protestants against the Jesuits.”59 However, if one thinks about such dilemmas, the basis for ethical decision is clear. In the example just given, there clearly are two “evils,” telling a lie, and handing human beings over to torture and death. Here, we do not have a choice between good and bad. There are only two possible choices (clearly in this case “not to choose” would be choosing to send the innocent to their death), both of them bad: Tell a lie, or send innocent humans to their deaths. One must simply choose the lesser of evils, and in this case which one is the lesser is screamingly obvious. There are several conceptualizations of what the proper basis ought to be for deciding on ethical action. One need only put the term “ethics” into Wikipedia, Google, or Yahoo! to see the almost bewildering wealth of bases for ethics in the world.

Deontological Ethics/Natural Law “Deontological ethics” is a traditional one, which argues that some things are intrinsically good or bad, and therefore a person must learn, and always follow, the principles and rules of ethics. Before that term was invented in 1930 by C. D. Broad,60 the related, though not exactly the same, notion of “natural law”was articulated by Greek philosophers, preeminently Aristotle and the Stoics.61 In the West, Gratian62 in the twelfth century, and then most of all Aquinas in the thirteenth, promoted the idea that there is a certain structure or nature (Latin: natus, “born”) with which every human is born, and therefore every human ought to follow this “natural law” built into us. This thinking has had an immense influence on all Western legal systems and, indeed, on the global level as well. It is the basis for the now almost universally accepted (but often honored in the breach) notion of “human rights.”63

Situation Ethics “Situation ethics,” advocated vigorously by the American Episcopal priest Joseph Fletcher,64 emphasized that judging something good or bad depended significantly on the concrete situation. For Fletcher and other situation ethicists the ultimate touchstone is to act lovingly. This puts one in mind of Saint Augustine’s famous saying: “Ama, et fac quod vis!” (“Love, and do what you will!”). Confucius (551–479 BCE) preceded Augustine by a thousand years when he wrote: “At fifteen my heart was set on learning; at thirty I stood firm; at forty I had no more doubts; at fifty I knew the mandate of heaven; at sixty my ear was obedient; at seventy I could follow my heart’s desire without transgressing the norm” (Analects, 2:4). However, such a “love” ethic would be appropriate only with maturation and the instilling of virtue, which normally demanded time and effort (more about “virtue ethics” below).

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Consequentialist Ethics/Utilitarianism Another somewhat similar ethical approach is “consequentialist ethics,” which argues that one decides some action is good or bad depending on its consequences. A variation of the latter is “utilitarianism,” which judges that that which is to be done is what leads to the greatest amount of good for the greatest number of persons.

Virtue Ethics A completely different approach to understanding ethics has been put forth in the past half century, “virtue ethics.” Here, the argument is that persons should be helped to develop a positively virtuous character—courageous, honest, compassionate. Such a virtuous person will then know how to act ethically in all different situations. One is again reminded of Augustine and Confucius. Viewed in a long-term pedagogical perspective, this approach has much to recommend it. If in growing into maturity a person develops the virtues of prudence and courage, for example, then one will not hesitate to send the Gestapo away without betraying the hidden Jews. Prioritizing life over lie will be immediately perceived as the ethical move to make.

Analysis/Synthesis Each, of course, has its attractive and unattractive aspects. For example, always to follow the rules eliminates ambiguity and keeps society from sliding down the proverbial “slippery moral slope.” However, I do not think that the Jews in the above case would be enthusiastic about such “ethical” truth-telling action—nor would even the non-Jew “truth teller” if he or she had even the slightest twinge of conscience because of the “consequence” of his or her truth-telling to the Gestapo (even Mary, Joseph, and the child Jesus would all have been sent off to the gas chambers!). It certainly appears reasonable to choose an action that will bring more happiness to more people rather than to fewer people. However, following some version of utilitarianism might, for example, lead some to decide that we have to leave the poor people in a nation to go without health insurance because financially that will ensure the highest quality of health care for the largest number in the country (which America claims it has). A growing number of American politicians, however, are beginning to act as if this were a moral blemish on America. Credit for this must be given to Hillary Rodham Clinton (1947–), as long ago as 1993. There is something fundamentally attractive about the idea of a natural law—despite the valid point of so-called postmoderns who stress the uniqueness of each of the world’s cultures or, indeed, of each individual. Having attained the concept of human rights in the eighteenth century, and still fighting for its universal implementation as an American and

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a Catholic Christian, I am not willing to abandon it for some kind of hyperbolic notion of postmodern particularity. What the nineteenth century’s sense of history added to the earlier eighteenth–century understanding of natural law is that the human being has a historical, evolving nature. Once the idea of human rights was conceived and articulated, it began to change all human beings around the world. Since 1953, I have traveled to every continent (except Antarctica), and I have never found a human being who did not claim that she or he had certain rights (the list is not always identical) simply because she or he was human— though not always able to exercise them. This was not true, as seen above, until in 1776 in my hometown of Philadelphia it was declared that “All men are created equal, endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.” This idea did, in fact, arise in one culture, but it has increasingly been recognized by all humans to be universally true. Hence, the organically developing nature of humanity is here once again manifested. Being human is a “work in progress.” In the end, I am persuaded that some combination of a historically understood version of natural law and situation and consequentialist ethics, set in the long-term pedagogical context of fostering virtue ethics, is the most human. Of course, ethical principles are important. They point us in certain directions that our centuries-long communal experience tells us is vital. For example, if a society did not develop ethical principles ensuring that the next generation would be adequately cared for, educated, and so forth, then that society would quickly disappear. Further, it is true that a person cannot become a full person except within a community, including giving back to the community in mutuality. However, in the end, the purpose of the community is for persons, not the other way around. Similarly, in ethics, principles are for persons, not persons for principles. Yeshua seemed to say the same when he stated: “The Sabbath is for Man, not Man for the Sabbath” (Mark 2:27). It is interesting to note that a very close paraphrase is also found in an early rabbinic writing: “The Sabbath is committed to you; you are not committed to the Sabbath” (Mekilta 31:13). In fact, Rabbi Phillip Sigal argued: “During his brief ministry Jesus was a proto-rabbi [his term for the pre-70-CE predecessors of the rabbis of Rabbinic Judaism] whose views influenced his contemporaries and possibly entered tannaitic literature as the views of others . . . A classic example of a view enunciated by Jesus that is attributed to a later tanna, R. Simon B. Menasia” is the Mekilta statement about the Sabbath.65 Either way, Yeshua in this regard was in the center of the rabbinic tradition—as being either paralleled or plagiarized. As noted, at the same time, one cannot become a human person alone. One becomes a person in community, so that individual persons ought not engage in destructive communal actions, because they then are ultimately also destroying themselves. The

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Golden Rule applies here fully: You love you neighbor exactly as you love yourself, and vice versa. Recently, Monsignor Gianfranco Girotti, regent of the Vatican Penitentiary, publicly argued that the Catholic Church (doubtless he would include other Christian bodies as well) needs to come up with a more contemporary “list of sins.” In the Middle Ages “Penitentials” were developed, that is, lists of sins to be avoided that one should check in an examination of conscience. Girotti argued that contemporary humans are now living in the world of globalization, so our consciences need to be “informed” about the “global” sins that we may so easily commit—polluting the air and water, unnecessarily buying “gas-guzzling” vehicles, and so forth—if we are not attentive. Norms encoded hundreds of years ago to guide human behavior in a small-scale agrarian society could not account for a globalized post-industrial information economy. Polluting the environment, drug trafficking, performing genetic manipulations or causing social inequities, new sinful behaviors mentioned by Msgr. Gianfranco Girotti, regent of the Vatican Penitentiary, are arguably more relevant to many contemporary Catholics than contraception. “If yesterday’s sin had a rather individualistic dimension, today it has a value and resonance that is above all social, because of the great phenomenon of globalization,” Monsignor Girotti told the newspaper L’Osservatore Romano.66 I think Girotti is exactly right, and that leads me to the next concern in the area of ethics: a global ethic.

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A Global Ethic The Need for a Global Ethic When the fact of the epistemological revolution’s leading to the growing necessity of interreligious, interideological, intercultural dialogue is coupled with the fact of all humankind’s rapidly increasing interdependency—such that any significant part of humanity could precipitate the whole of the globe into a social, economic, nuclear, environmental or other catastrophe—there arises the pressing need to focus the energy of these dialogues on not only how humans perceive and understand the world and its meaning but also on how they should act in relationship to themselves, to other persons, and to nature, within the context of reality’s undergirding, pervasive, overarching source, energy, and goal, however understood. In brief, humankind desperately needs to engage in a dialogue on the development not of a Buddhist ethic, a Christian ethic, a Marxist ethic, or what have you, but of a global ethic—and I believe a key instrument in that direction will be the shaping and broad adoption of a “Universal Declaration of a Global Ethic.” I say “ethic” in the singular rather than ethics in the plural, because what is needed is not a full-blown global ethics in great detail—indeed, such would not even be possible— but a global consensus on the fundamental attitude toward good and evil and the basic and middle principles to put it into action. Clearly, also, this ethic must be global. It will not be sufficient to have a common ethic for Westerners or Africans or Asians, for example. The destruction of the ozone layer or the loosing of a destructive gene mutation by any one group will be disastrous for all. I am also convinced that this “Universal Declaration of a Global Ethic” must be arrived at by consensus through dialogue. Attempts at the imposition of one ethics by force have been had aplenty, and they have inevitably fallen miserably short of globality. The more recent failures can be seen in the widespread collapse of Communism and, in an inverse way, in the resounding rejection of secularism by resurgent Islamism. That the need for a global ethic is most urgent is becoming increasingly apparent to all; humankind no longer has the luxury of letting such an ethic slowly and haphazardly grow by itself, as doubtless will gradually happen. It is vital that there be a conscious focusing of energy on such a development. Immediate action is necessary. The basis for a “Universal Declaration of a Global Ethic” is to be found not in a philosophical starting point but in a survey of the world’s religions and ethical systems, which results in the finding of a de facto common foundation, which can then be analyzed and articulated in philosophical, that is, rational, concepts and statements that can be understood and accepted by all, although the reasons for affirming the various parts might well be different at times among the “signers.”

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The Golden Rule A fundamental principle in this declaration almost automatically suggests itself because of its ubiquity; it is found almost everywhere. A glimpse of just how pervasive the Golden Rule is, albeit in various forms and expressions, in the world’s religions and ideologies, great and small, can be garnered from this partial listing: a. Zoroasterism: Perhaps the oldest recorded version, which is cast in a positive form, stems from Zoroaster (628–551 BCE): “That which is good for all and any one, for whomsoever—that is good for me . . . what I hold good for self, I should for all. Only Law Universal is true Law” (Gathas, 43.1). b. Greece: The Greek Thales of Milet, around 600 BCE, asked: “How can we conduct the best and most righteous life? By refraining from doing what we blame in others.”67 c. Greece: Pittakos, a contemporary of Thales, advised: “Do not do yourself that others make you angry at!”68 d. Confucianism: Confucius, when asked, “Is there one word which may serve as a rule of practice for all one’s life?” said, “Do not do to others what you do not want done to yourself” (Analects 12.2 and 15.23). Confucius also stated in a variant version: “What I do not wish others to do to me, that also I wish not to do to them” (Analects 5.11). e. Daoism: A contemporary of Confucius was Laozi, the founder of Daoism, which taught, “Consider your neighbor’s happiness and suffering as your own happiness and suffering and strive to increase his well-being as your own.”69 f. Jainism: The founder of Jainism was Vardhamana, known as Mahavira (“Great Hero,” 540–468 BCE); the various scriptures of Jainism, however, derived from a later period: “A man should wander about treating all creatures as he himself would be treated” (Sutrakritanga 1.11.33). “One who you think should be hit is none else but you . . . Therefore, neither does he cause violence to others nor does he make others do so” (Acarangasutra 5.101–102). g. Buddhism: The founder of Buddhism was Siddhartha Gautama (563–483 BCE), known as the Buddha (“Enlightened One”); the various scriptures of Buddhism also derived from a later period: “Comparing oneself to others in such terms as ‘Just as I am, so are they, just as they are so am I,’ he should neither kill nor cause others to kill” (Sutta Nipata 705). “Here am I fond of my life, not wanting to die, fond of pleasure and averse from pain. Suppose someone should rob me of my life . . . If I in turn should rob of his life one fond of his life . . . How could I inflict that upon another?” (Samyutta Nikaya 353). h. Greece: Herodotus (484–425 BCE), the father of history in Greece, wrote, “For

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what I reproach the neighbor, I would not do to the best of my ability.”70 i. Hinduism: The Hindu epic poem, the third–century-BCE Mahabharata, states that its Golden Rule, which is expressed in both positive and negative form, is the summary of all Hindu teaching, “the whole Dharma”: “Vyasa says: Do not to others what you do not wish done to yourself; and wish for others too what you desire and long for yourself—this is the whole of Dharma; heed it well” (Mahabharata, Anusasana Parva 113.8). j. Israelitism: In the biblical book of Leviticus (composed in the fifth century BCE, though some of its material may be more ancient) the Hebrew version of the Golden Rule is stated positively: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself” (Lev 19:18). k. Judaism I: The deuterocanonical biblical Tobit was written around the year 200 BCE and contains a negative version—as many are—of the Golden Rule: “Never do to anyone else anything that you would not want someone to do to you” (Tob 4:15). l. Judaism II: The major founder of Rabbinic Judaism, Hillel, who lived about a generation before Yeshua, though he may also have been his teacher, taught that the Golden Rule was the heart of the Torah; “all the rest was commentary”: “Do not do to others what you would not have done to yourself” (Btalmud, Shabbath 31a). m. Christianity: Following in this Jewish tradition, Yeshua stated the Golden Rule in a positive form, saying that it summed up the whole Torah and prophets: “Do for others just what you want them to do for you” (Luke 6:31); “Do for others what you want them to do for you: this is the meaning of the Law of Moses [Torah] and of the teachings of the prophets” (Matt 7:12). n. Islam: In the seventh century CE, Mohammed is said to have claimed that the Golden Rule is the “noblest Religion”: “Noblest Religion is this—that you should like for others what you like for yourself; and what you feel painful for yourself, hold that as painful for all others too.” Again: “No man is a true believer unless he desires for his brother that which he desires for himself.”71 o. Sikhism: Guru Angad (1504–1552) recommended to the Sikhs, “Treat others as you would like to be treated yourself.”72 p. Yorubism: The Golden Rule is likewise found in some nonliterate religions: “One going to take a pointed stick to pinch a baby bird should first try it on himself to feel how it hurts.”73 q. Aufklärung: The eighteenth–century Western philosopher Kant provided a “rational” version of the Golden Rule in his famous “Categorical Imperative” or “Law of Universal Fairness”: “Act on maxims which can at the same time have for their object themselves as universal laws of nature . . . Treat humanity in every case as an end, never as a means only.”74

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r. Baha’ism: The late-nineteenth–century founder of Baha’ism, Baha’ul-lah, wrote: “He should not wish for others that which he doth not wish for himself, nor promise that which he doth not fulfill.”75 s. Won Buddhism: In 1915 Won Buddhism was founded in Korea by the Great Master Sotaesan. In his teachings are found variants of the Golden Rule: “Be right yourself before you correct others. Instruct yourself first before you teach others. Do favors for others before you seek favors from them.” “Ordinary people may appear smart in doing things only for themselves, but they are really suffering a loss. Buddhas and Bodhisattvas may appear to be stupid in doing things only for others, but eventually they benefit themselves.”76 It is clear that the Golden Rule, the core of the world’s major religions, “does not attempt the futile and impossible task of abolishing and annihilating the authentic ego. On the contrary, it tends to make concern for the authentic ego the measure of altruism. ‘Do not foster the ego more than the alter; care for the alter as much as for the ego.’ To abolish egoism is to abolish altruism also; and vice versa.”77 Authentic egoism and altruism are not in conflict; the former necessarily moves to the latter, even possibly “giving one’s life for one’s friend” (John 15:13). This, however, is the last and highest stage of human development. It is the stage of the (w)holy person, the saint, the arahat, the bodhisattva, the sage. Such a stage cannot be the foundation of human society but must be its goal. The foundation of human society must first be authentic self-love, which includes moving outward to loving others. Not recognizing this foundation of authentic self-love is the fundamental flaw of those idealistic systems, such as communism, that try to build a society on the foundation of altruism. A human and humanizing society should lead toward (w)holiness, toward altruism, but it cannot be built on the assumption that its citizens start out (w)holy and altruistic. Such altruism must grow out of an ever-developing, authentic self-love; it cannot be assumed, and surely it cannot be forced, as has been tried for decades—with disastrous, dehumanizing results.

Principles Underlying a Global Ethic A vital step toward developing a global ethic is the spelling out of a “Universal Declaration of a Global Ethic,” analogous to the 1948 United Nations’ “Universal Declaration of Human Rights.” Producing and eventually adopting such a declaration will clarify what basic ethical principles are held worldwide; it will also work progressively to shape the world conscience in an ever-deepening world ethic. Such an effort was started in 1991 by Küng and me, but that was only the beginning. Both of us were asked by interreligious-dialogue organizations to consult widely and come up with an initial version

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of a “Universal Declaration of a Global Ethic,” which we both did. Those and another version can be found at www.dialogueinstitute.org/globalethic, as well as on more than a dozen websites now devoted to a global ethic. Let me offer what I believe are basic principles that need to be employed in the drafting of such a declaration that would truly reflect the basic ethical principles of all the world’s religious and ethical systems. a. The declaration should use language and images that are acceptable to all major religions and ethical groups; hence, its language ought to be “humanity-based,” rather than from authoritative religious books. It should be from “below,” not from “above.” b. Therefore, it should be anthropocentric; indeed, it must be anthropocosmocentric, for we cannot be fully human except within the context of the whole of reality. c. The affirmations should be dynamic in form in the sense that they will be susceptible to being sublated; that is, they might properly be reinterpreted by being taken up into a larger framework. d. The declaration needs to set both inviolable minimums and open-ended maximums to be striven for, though maximums may not be required, for that might violate the freedom minimums of some persons. e. It could well start with—though not limit itself to—elements of the Golden Rule: Treat others as we would be treated. f. As humans ineluctably seek ever more knowledge/truth, so they also seek to draw what they perceive as the good to themselves (that is, they love). Usually, this self is expanded to include the family and then friends. It needs to continue its natural expansion to the community, nation, world, and cosmos—and the source and goal of all reality. g. But, this human love necessarily must start with self-love, for one can love one’s “neighbor” only as one loves oneself; since one becomes human only by interhuman mutuality, loving others fulfills one’s own humanity and, hence, is also the greatest act of authentic self-love. h. Another aspect of the Golden Rule is that humans are always to be treated as ends, never as mere means—that is, as subjects, never as mere objects. i. Yet another implication of the Golden Rule is that those who cannot protect themselves ought to be protected by those who can protect them. j. A further ring of the expanding circles of the Golden Rule is that nonhuman beings are also to be reverenced and treated with respect because of their being. k. It is important that not only basic but also middle ethical principles be spelled out in this declaration. Although most of the middle ethical principles that need to be articulated are already embedded in juridical form in the “Universal Declaration of

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Human Rights,” it is vital that the religions and ethical traditions expressly state and approve them so that the world, including both adherents and outsiders of the various religions and ethical traditions, will know to what ethical standards all are committing themselves. l. If a “Universal Declaration of a Global Ethic” is to be meaningful and effective, its framers must resist the temptation to pack too many details and special interests into it. It can function best as a kind of “constitutional” set of basic and middle ethical principles from which more detailed applications can constantly be drawn. There are at present at least three drafts of a “Universal Declaration of a Global Ethic” available as models. Briefly, the history of their genesis is as follows: In 1990, Hans Küng, who has been a friend since my graduate-student days at the University of Tübingen in 1959, sent to me in Tokyo, where my wife, Arlene, and I were teaching at Temple University Japan, a copy of his new book, Projekt Weltethos.78 I was very enthusiastic when I read it between semesters in 1990–1991. Let Küng tell the next steps: A pragmatic American, Professor Swidler of the Religion Department of Temple University, Philadelphia, and editor of the Journal of Ecumenical Studies [of which Küng became an Associate Editor at its inception in 1964], then composed an appeal in which among other things he called for the prompt composition of a declaration on a global ethic. Having become somewhat sceptical after my experiences with numerous actions and appeals of this kind, I personally responded at first in a somewhat restrained way, but in the end decided to become the first signatory to Swidler’s appeal, after making some corrections. I also sought out some signatories in Europe. The key sentences from this declaration run: ‘Such efforts should concentrate on drawing together the research and reflection on Global Ethic and related matters into a “Universal Declaration on a Global Ethos” which would then be circulated to the various forums of all the religions and ethical groups for appropriate revisions—with a view to eventual adoption by all the religions and ethical groups of the world. Such a “Universal Declaration of a World Ethic” could then serve a function similar to the 1948 “Universal Declaration of Human Rights” of the United Nations—a kind of standard that all will be expected to live up to . . . The “Universal Declaration of Global Ethos” would in a major way bring to bear the moral and spiritual resources of all the religions and ethical groups on the basic ethical problems of the world, which are not easily susceptible to political force.’79 So, this appeal was finally published and was signed by important theologians and

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scholars in religious studies.80 Hans Küng then described further how he was invited to draft a document for the upcoming Parliament of the World’s Religions in September 1993 in Chicago. He launched a series of efforts, including devoting an entire summer semester seminar of 1992 to the task, bringing in many religious and other experts. He sent me piecemeal through late 1992 and early 1993 his draft of a “Universal Declaration of a Global Ethic” for translation into English, which I then forwarded to the Chicago center. The delays and frustrations mounted; finally, he wrote: “Supported as always by my colleague Dr. Karl-Josef Kuschel . . . I . . . on 17 July 1993—after further translation by Professor Swidler—was thus able to send the definitive English text to Chicago.”81 The text was finally approved, signed by many representatives of the world’s religions, and publicly proclaimed by the Parliament on September 4, 1993. Because 1993 was the centennial of the 1893 World’s Parliament of Religions, which marked the beginning of what became worldwide interreligious dialogue, a number of international conferences took place, including centrally the launching and developing of a “Universal Declaration of a Global Ethic.” The first was held in New Delhi, India, in February 1993; the second, that August in Bangalore, India; the third, as noted, that September in Chicago. Beyond that, the declaration text that I developed, after having been commissioned by the January 1992 meeting in Atlanta, Georgia, of the International Scholars Annual Trialogue—ISAT (a group of Jewish, Christian, and Muslim scholars I helped organize to meet more or less annually beginning in 1978), was submitted to and analyzed at the January 1993 meeting of ISAT in Graz, Austria; it was also focused on during the spring 1993 semester graduate seminar I held at Temple University on “Global Ethics—Human Rights—World Religions.” It was a major focus of the “First International Conference on Universalism” in August 1993 in Warsaw, Poland, while a consultation of the American Academy of Religion in November 1993 in Washington, DC, was devoted to the topic. The sixth ISAT in January 1994 concentrated for a second year on the declaration. In May 1994 it was the subject of a conference sponsored by the International Association of Asian Philosophy and Religion (IAAPR) in Seoul, Korea. The World Conference on Religion and Peace (WCRP) in part focused on it at its fall 1994 World Assembly in Rome/Riva del Garda, Italy. It was the subject of a conference held June 20–21, 1995, in San Francisco in honor of the “Fiftieth Anniversary of the Founding of the United Nations,” titled “Celebrating the Spirit: Towards a Global Ethic.” In March 1997 in Paris the Philosophy and Ethics Division of UNESCO held the first meeting of its newly established committee to work toward a “universal ethic”; its second meeting was held in December 1997 in Naples, Italy, in conjunction with the Instituto Italiano degli Studii Filosofici. Both of the above two drafts (as well as the one described next) were

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submitted to this UNESCO committee and are available in a book I edited: For All Life,82 as well as in a special issue of the Journal of Ecumenical Studies.83 Subsequently, Hans Küng drafted a third text, this time within the context of the InterAction Council, titled “A Universal Declaration of Human Responsibilities.” The InterAction Council is a committee made up of former heads of state, chaired by retired Chancellor Helmut Schmidt (1918–2015) of Germany. Thus, all three of these texts have been subjected to numerous consultations and comments by scholars and thinkers from multiple philosophical, religious and other backgrounds. In the meantime, I presented the draft of the declaration to ISAT in 1993, thinking of the declaration as a public commitment by the signatories (individuals and organizations, such as religious and ethical bodies) to live by the principles enunciated with the expectation of being held publicly accountable. After a great deal of consultation with and gaining the approval of many religious, ethical, and scholarly groups, including ISAT, I made my “Universal Declaration of a Global Ethic” available in various places, especially in For All Life, with a series of commentaries by religious and ethical scholars, that includes Küng’s draft as well as mine. The version that I drafted after wide consultation and revision, and the one drawn up by Küng, also with wide consultation, are at www.dialogue institute.org/globalethic.org/, as is the version from my 2008 graduate interreligious dialogue seminar at Temple University. Such general suggestions need to be discussed, confirmed, rejected, modified, and supplemented. Beyond this, it is vital that all the disciplines contribute what from their perspectives ought to be included in the declaration, how that should be formulated, and what is to be avoided. It can be argued that the “Toward a Universal Declaration” text issued at the end of the 1993 Parliament in Chicago with the general approval of nearly two hundred religious leaders and presented before the six thousand participants is the definitive text to be accepted and followed. There is much merit in such a position—despite the fact that the religious leaders and Parliament attendees were not able to participate in the formulation of the text due to administrative confusion. As noted, that text was carefully articulated by Hans Küng with wide study and consultation, and it is widely applauded. A somewhat different, complementary approach is that it is thought imperative for various religious and ethical communi​ties, ethnic groups, and geographical regions to work on discussing and drafting their own versions of a “Universal Declaration of a Global Ethic,” that is, what they consider to be their own basic ethical principles, which they believe at the same time that people of all other religious and ethi​cal traditions could also affirm. The three already existing drafts should certainly be employed in this process. But, in this approach it is felt that all communi​ties and regions need to make

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their own contribu​tions to the final declaration. Then, in the process of wrestling with the issue and forging the wording of such a declaration, they will make the concern for a global ethic their own and will be better able to mediate it to their “constitu​ents” and enhance the likelihood of its being adhered to in practice. What needs to be stressed is that such a project cannot be carried out only by the scholars and leaders of the world’s religious and ethical communities, though obviously their vigorous participation is vital. The ideas and sensitiv​i​ties must also come from the grassroots. Moreover, it is also at the grassroots, as well at the levels of scholars and leaders, that consciousness must first be raised on the desperate need for the conscious development of a global ethic; then, once drafted and accepted, the convic​tion of its validity must be gained. The most carefully thought out and sensitively crafted declaration will be of no use if those who are to adhere to it do not believe in it. A global ethic must work on all three levels: scholars, leaders, grass​roots. Otherwise it will not work at all. Hence, I urge first that all religious, ethical, ethnic, and geographical communities and organizations (either alone or in concert with others, but always in a dialogic spirit)—and most especially the myriad nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) of the world—need to move seriously but quickly to the drawing up of their own draft of a “Universal Declara​tion of a Global Ethic.” Second, these groups need to strategize on how to maneuver their drafts to gain the greatest influence in all the theaters in which each oper​ates: the United Nations, other NGOs, scholarly groups, religious groups, the vast world of the Internet, myriads of grassroots organizations—in short, wherever aroused imaginations will lead. Third, each group should send its draft declara​tion to the Dialogue Institute at Temple University (dialogueinstitute.org), and the Global Ethic Foundation at the University of Tübingen (weltethos.org)—which will serve as collection and distribution centers. When the time is appropriate, a facilitator would synthe​size a final draft and devise a method in as democratic a way as possible for worldwide adoption. In sum, having studied, listened, and thought, I challenge us all to take up this vital task and act!

57. Sigal, The Halakhah of Jesus of Nazareth, 6. 58. “Intention (Judaism),” in Smith, gen. ed, HarperCollins Dictionary of Religion, 492–93. 59. See Wikipedia, s.v. “Consequentialism,” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consequentialism. To those who sneer at finding a reference to a Wikipedia article, I argue that it has become increasingly serious in its scholarship; just to find an introduction to or definition of a term, it is as reliable and appropriate as a dictionary reference. 60. Broad, Five Types of Ethical Theory. 61. Stoicism is a moral philosophy started by Zeno in Athens around 300 BCE. He taught that the rational life, one in which a firm will follow its reason, is the proper human life. It followed from this view that it is the nature

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of the human being to be a rational, free-deciding being; this set up the basis for the doctrine of natural law. Stoicism became the philosophy of choice of the Roman Empire and is also reflected in much of the ethical thought of Saint Paul of Tarsus, though not in that of Rabbi Yeshua, Jesus of Nazareth. 62. Gratian was the mid-twelfth-century founder of the science of canon law, the law of the Catholic Church. 63. The International Theological Commission of the Vatican issued a new study on natural law in 2009: In Search of a Universal Ethic: A New Look at Natural Law. http://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/cti_documents/rc_con_cfaith_doc_20090520_leggenaturale_en.html/.. 64. See Wikipedia, s.v. “Situational Ethics,” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Situational_ ethics/. 65. Sigal, Halakhah of Jesus of Nazareth, 192–93. 66. Porter, “The Vatican and Globalization.” 67. Hoche, “Die Goldene Regel,” 371 (this and other German sources are my translations). 68. Ibid., 372. 69. Schmidt, Das Geheimnis der Goldenen Regel. 70. Hoche, “Die Goldene Regel,” 372. 71. Hadith: Muslim, chapter on iman, 71–72; Ibn Madja, Introduction, 9; Al-Darimi, chapter on riqaq; Hambal 3, 1976. The first quotation is cited in Das, Essential Unity of All Religions, 298. 72. Hein, “Goldene Regel.” 73. “A Yoruba Proverb (Nigeria),” cited in Wilson, World Scripture, 114. 74. Kant, Critik der practischen Vernunft (Critique of Practical Reason), A 5 4 (my translation); and Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, BA 66–67. 75. Effendi, Gleanings from the Writings of Baha’u’llah. 76. Chon, ed., The Scripture of Won Buddhism, 309–10. 77. Das, The Essential Unity of All Religions, 303. 78. See Küng, Projekt Weltethos; and Küng, Global Responsibility. 79. Küng and Kuschel, A Global Ethic, 47. 80. They included “Muhammed Arkoun (Muslim), Julia Ching (Confucian/Catholic), John B. Cobb (Methodist), Khalid Duran (Muslim), Heinrich Fries (Catholic [my “Doktorvater”]), Claude Geffré (Catholic), Irving Greenberg (Jewish), Norbert Greinacher (Catholic), Riffat Hassan (Muslim), Rivka Horwitz (Jewish), John Hick (Presbyterian), Gerfried Hunold (Catholic), Adel Khoury (Catholic), Paul F. Knitter (Catholic), Karl-Joseph Kuschel (Catholic), Pinchas Lapide (Jewish), Johannes Lähnemann (Protestant), Dietmar Mieth (Catholic), Paul Mojzes (Methodist), Jürgen Moltmann (Protestant), Fathi Osman (Muslim), Raimon Panikkar (Hindu/Buddhist/Catholic), Daniel Polish (Jewish), Rodolfo Stavenhagen (sociologist), Theo Sundermeier (Protestant), Tu Wei-Ming (Confucian)” (ibid., 47–48n2). See Swidler and Küng, “Toward a ‘Universal Declaration of Global Ethos.’” 81. Küng and Kuschel, A Global Ethic, 52; italics original. 82. Swidler, For All Life. The scholars who wrote the responsive essays were Chung Ok Lee (Won Buddhist, Korean), Khalid Duran (Muslim, Spanish), John Hick (Presbyterian, English), Michael Kogan (Jewish, American), Shu-hsien Liu (Confucian, Taiwanese), Kana Mitra (Hindu, Indian), Mutombo Nkulu N’Sengha (Catholic, Congolese), Ingrid H. Shafer (Catholic, Austrian), Brian A. Victoria (Zen Buddhist, American), Moojan Momen (Baha’i, Iranian), and Fusan Zhao (Anglican, Chinese). 83. Swidler, “A Global Ethic.”

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The Search for Ultimate Reality: Deep-Dialogue Most people do not understand themselves as philosophers or theologians. Rather, they think of themselves as practical persons who want to get on with living a good life, however they understand what a good life is. Hence, philosophical/theological questions about the Ultimate Reality seem to most not only very abstract—and therefore both difficult to understand and uninteresting—but also totally impractical. This is a serious error. How we conceive of reality determines how we will act. Whether I think, for example, that my child’s illness is because of the karma of a previous life, or because someone is sticking pins in a doll image of her, or because she has had contact with some bacteria, determines how I act in response—and doubtless whether or not my child lives. Thus, philosophy and theology—how I understand reality ultimately—are profoundly practical. The first question that almost asks itself is: Why are there so many differing descriptions of Ultimate Reality at the basis of everything? That at first seems strange, because all of us start out with the same possibilities—our bodies and the world around us. Yes, we are all born equal, but we do not stay that way very long. The family, community, and culture into which we are born quickly shape the way we experience our bodies and the world around us—which, among other things, is why humankind has over the millennia made such huge advances. Take just one development as an example, namely, writing. The simple fact that a new child will grow up reading will massively affect that child’s perception of her- or himself and the world and, hence, action therein. Children born into its shaping culture will also quite early begin to develop a perception of Ultimate Reality by asking different forms of the “Carmel question.” The child will gradually learn to perceive Ultimate Reality as his or her culture does. Hence, different cultures provide the experiential/mental “bowls” into which the perception of all reality, and eventually of Ultimate Reality, is poured, thereby shaping its image. All cultures recognize that Ultimate Reality, being infinite, is beyond our finite comprehension, so each culture necessarily focuses on one or another finite category in which to express its experience of Ultimate Reality. An investigation of the varying descriptions of Ultimate Reality that humankind has developed—in the different religions and, more recently, various secular ideological systems—reveals that Ultimate Reality is described in terms of one or another of the ways we humans experience the rest of reality—Ultimate Reality’s creation—around us. This is reflected in Genesis 1, “And God made humanity in God’s image and likeness” (Gen 1:26), which conversely also means that God is like us. That, I believe, will become

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ever clearer in the analysis below. Briefly, here are some of the major “families” of attempts to conceive and name Ultimate Reality. Of course, there can be other ways of grouping them—including the attempt that claims that such an attempt is chasing a chimera, an illusion—but this grouping has, I believe, a certain plausibility. I will also be interested in learning how others might group them differently. Then, I want to suggest a candidate for this perennial attempt to conceive and name Ultimate Reality, which will not negate all these attempts, but will make a “Copernican Turn” in helping to bring them together in their quest: in dialogue, in “Deep-Dialogue.”84 The attempts at conceiving and naming Ultimate Reality can be grouped within the seven “families” by their ultimate vision, as follows in this chapter.

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Polytheism: The Many Many scholars of religion are convinced that the earliest human reflection on Ultimate Reality came up with multiple sources of existence. Some few scholars have argued that the initial thought was that there was one ultimate source but that this primal notion then disintegrated into polytheism. Perhaps henotheism (the idea that there are indeed many gods, but one chief god over them all) was a stopping place either on the way down from monotheism or the way up to it or both. In any case, the polytheistic understanding of Ultimate Reality focuses on the obvious reality that there is an immense diversity out there. It seems from one point of view that, the more we learn, the greater appears the variety in the cosmos. In the distant past, humans lived in a very circumscribed geographical area and consequently had only a limited knowledge of the variety, even here on earth. With the advancement of the means of knowledge and of movement and communication, we humans constantly learn more and more about the seemingly limitless variety on earth, let alone in the cosmos with its billions of galaxies, each of which contains billions of stars, and who knows how many circling planets. To paraphrase the Bible (see Matthew 8; Mark 5; Luke 8): Reality, thy name is legion! For the polytheist, this gargantuan multiplicity can come only from a like source, that is, from an endless multiplicity of Ultimate Reality. Thus, even for “pure” polytheists, untempered by henotheism, all existence flows from plural sources, the many gods. The insight that polytheism captures for us is that there really are many, many things, and this manyness is somehow reflective of their Ultimate Sources.

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Hinduism: The One and the Many While many may think of Hinduism as simply polytheism, this is a serious mistake. On the popular level doubtless many Hindu devotees are polytheistic, but for the most part Hinduism stresses that there are many manifestations (avatara) of the one Ultimate Reality (Brahman), often called upon with the sacred word Aum (or Om). The main goal in mainstream Hinduism is for each individual “self” (atman—the Sanskrit word for “breath,” as in the English cognate “atmosphere,” and, like the English “spirit,” coming from the Latin spiritus, “breath”) to be united ultimately with the one Source of all reality, Brahman. Sometimes Brahman is named Atman, so that the goal of human life is for the individual atman to be united with the Atman. Thus, there is in mainstream Hinduism an acknowledgment of the Many avatara and atmana on the one hand and the One Source and Goal, Brahman or Atman, on the other. This is true whether one looks at the more extreme “semimonist” doctrine of Advaita Vedanta of Shankara (788–820) or the more moderate “semidualist” position of Ramanuja (1017–1137). For Shankara all reality was ultimately one, so that all that we humans perceive as multiplicity is finally maya, illusion. Nevertheless, for us humans there really is maya, which finally is taken up into Ultimate Oneness—there are both Many (though maya) and One. For the vastly more popular position of Ramanuja (even if his name may not be very widely known), there clearly are both the Manyness of diversity and Ultimate Oneness. There is a profound attractiveness to this position of the One and the Many, for it corresponds to the human combination of our senses, which are many, and our intellect, which abstracts from the many what we see as the inherent oneness in things. For example, we see numberless dogs but do not hesitate to name the many animals with a single word, “dog.” Even in the latest cosmology, the countless billions of stars are seen all to have come from a single “Big Bang.” Thus, Hinduism preeminently preserves the doctrine of the One and the Many by seeing it in One God with many manifestations, which corresponds to our many human experiences of oneness and manyness, as with many sense images of one concept: e pluribus Unum.

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Judaism/Islam: The One The blazing insight of Judaism is reflected in the image of the One God in the Burning Bush that was not consumed, who named her- or himself Yahweh, “I Will Be Who I Will Be,” a both unitive and processive self-naming. There was no element of manyness expressed here, only the “I” of Yahweh. This personal name of the Hebrew Ultimate Reality is clearly singular. However, there was a certain ambiguity about the Hebrew general name most often used for God, ’elohim. The root of the term is ’el, as is often found in names of humans and angels (Michael, Gabriel, Ezekiel, Emmanuel, Israel), even though ’el was originally a Canaanite male god (at times in the Bible the female form ’eloah is also used to refer to the one true God). The suffix -im denotes the plural of a noun and is at times matched in the plural form of verbs, as in, “Let us make humankind in our image” (Gen 1:26); and “Look, they [the man and woman] have become like one of us, knowing good and evil” (Gen 3:22).85 It is most likely that the Hebrews started out in prehistoric times as polytheists, then moved on to being henotheists. See the first commandment of the Decalogue: “I am Yahweh your god . . . you shall have no other gods before [or beside, ahl in Hebrew] me” (Exod 20:1, my translation); that is, there were other gods, but they were not to be revered before or beside Yahweh. In any case, no scholar disputes that the Hebrews uniquely in history held to pure monotheism, certainly by the sixth century BCE. (Primeval prehistory might be disputed by some scholars.) The Egyptian pharaoh Ikhnaton (1353–1336 BCE) may have been a monotheist, but his belief, however understood, was quickly eradicated after his death. Thus, there came into the world an extremely strong stress on Ultimate Oneness. In contrast to all the other creation stories—and there are myriads of such stories, for every culture and subculture had one—the Hebrews were unique in their emphasis on the unique origin of all reality. Genesis 1 makes it clear that everything that exists was created by the one God, and that everything that God created was “good.” Much of the history of the Hebrew people (named “Israel” after the “nickname” of the third patriarch, Jacob, whose twelve sons generated the “Twelve Tribes of Israel,” and after which number Rabbi Yeshua named his twelve closest followers the “Twelve Apostles”) is about Israel’s worshiping and obeying (or disobeying) the one God Yahweh. According to the Bible, when Israel believed in and obeyed the one true God, all went well, but when it strayed into polytheism or in any way drifted from the oneness of God and God’s teaching (Torah), it suffered terribly. The oneness of Ultimate Reality was/is the central focus of the Israelite people and of one of its subsequent “religions,” Judaism (named after one of the twelve sons of Jacob, Judah), as reflected in the Jewish prayer, the Shema Israel: “Hear, oh Israel, Yahweh your God is one (’eḥad)!” (Deut 6:4). Islam followed hard on the heels of Judaism in its stress on the oneness of God, and

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even surpassed it in some ways. The oneness of God is the cornerstone (and almost the whole building) of the Muslim credo, the Shahada (Arabic, “testimony”): la ilaha illa ’llahu (“there is no god but God”—’llahu being pronounced allahu, is simply the generic Arabic word for “god.” Many use it as a proper name, like Yahweh in Judaism, which, of course, it is not; ’l, or al, is the Arabic parallel to the Hebrew ’el—both being Semitic languages—meaning “god.” To the above statement about there being only one God, the Shahada adds only: “and Mohammed is his prophet.” Islam went farther than Judaism in stressing the oneness of God, as is reflected in the doctrine of Tawhid (Arabic, “making one”). Here, not only is it claimed that there is only one God but also that there is total oneness in the very reality of this one and only God. The negative doctrine matching that of Tawhid is Shirk (Arabic, “associating”—see the Qur’an 4:51, where it says that Shirk is an unforgivable sin). Both Tawhid and Shirk are aimed by Islam at any kind of associating of anyone or anything with God, for God is One. That is, they clearly were aimed at polytheism, which was widespread in Mecca at the time of Mohammed, and even at the Christian doctrines of the Trinity (wherein God is mysteriously Three Persons in One God) and of the Incarnation (wherein Jesus is said to be the Son of God become human). Perhaps ironically, this very notion of Tawhid led within Islam to a stress by many Sufi Muslims on the oneness of all, eliminating the distance between Creator and creature (Fana’, Arabic, “fading away”), melting in its extreme form into a kind of pantheism. The most famous, or infamous, of such Sufi mystics were Bistami (804–874), and alHallaj (858–922), both Persians. They were so profoundly moved by their experience of oneness with God that the former declared: “Glory to me, how great is my mystery”; and the latter: “When you see me, you see God.” Both were condemned, and al Hallaj was tortured and put to death for such “heretical” understandings of Oneness. Thus, the oneness of Ultimate Reality was the major focus of both Judaism and Islam. This oneness was/is understood in both transcendent and immanent forms. On the one hand, the more “orthodox” versions of both Judaism and Islam stress the radical separation between one Creator and creation, and on the other hand, the more “mystical” versions emphasize the unity between Creator and creation; both in their own ways stress Ultimate Reality’s oneness. Once again, even in modern subatomic and cosmological physics there seems to be looming a kind of ultimate oneness with the interchangeability of matter and energy, all rushing out of the one “Big Bang.” Thus, both Judaism and Islam capture the insights of the Oneness of Ultimate Reality and that all creation is good, flowing from the one good Source.

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Zoroastrianism/Manicheism/Yin-Yang: The Two It is normally obvious to humans that there are basically two kinds of reality, matter and spirit: that which occupies space and can be apprehended by the senses, and that which does not occupy space and can be apprehended only by the abstract intellect. Such a metaphysics is called “dualism.” Ultimate Reality was then also thought by some to be two. Hence, Zoroaster (Greek, in his original Persian, Zarathustra [628–551 BCE]), who affirmed a single supreme creator God, Ahura Mazda (the God of Light), also posited an evil principle, Ahriman (the Principle of Darkness), which is the source of evil in the world. Although in Zoroaster’s teaching Ahura Mazda would triumph in the end, there was a certain ambivalence, and so there was a tendency among later followers to move toward a full dualism of good and evil. This tendency became full-blown much later in another Persian, Mani, who taught that there were two Ultimate Principles, the “Father of Greatness” and the “Prince of Darkness.” Here, clearly, body was bad and spirit good. The soul was imprisoned in the body; therefore, asceticism, mortification of the flesh, was the path to salvation. Manicheism thus can be called “extreme dualism.” It had a large impact in later Christianity, especially through Saint Augustine, perhaps the most influential thinker in Christian history, for he was a Manichee before becoming a Christian and carried many of his dualist ideas with him into Christianity. Quite unrelated causally is a third dualist emphasis on the twoness of Ultimate Reality, namely, the Yin-Yang Principle of China, stemming from the fourth century BCE. Yin is the female, negative, dark principle; Yang, the male, positive, light principle. However, the Yin-Yang doctrine does not set up antitheses of good vs. evil, as in Zoroastrianism or Manicheism. Rather, Yin is the power of the Earth and Yang the power of Heaven, and all life comes from the harmony of these two forces (more of harmony below). In any case, these religions focus on the twoness found in the cosmos and, they argue, also in Ultimate Reality, the source of the cosmos. They thereby lift up an insight into reality and its Source of which we must not lose sight—the bipolarity of the world we live in: positive-negative, light-dark, male-female, body-soul, in-out, up-down, and so on.

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Christianity: The One and the Three The “founder” of Christianity is Jesus or, rather, Rabbi Yeshua ha-Notzri (Jesus the Nazarene). As a very devout and learned Jew, Yeshua (whose name means “Yahweh Saves”) naturally deeply believed in the oneness of God. Much like the later Muslim Sufi mystics, he also spoke of himself and God as being one, which also got him into trouble and, according to the Gospel narratives, was the tearing point leading to his condemnation before the court of the High Priests—though it obviously was the political concern of Yeshua’s being thought of as a king that led the man with the power, the Roman Pontius Pilate, to execute him in typical Roman fashion, on a cross. Nevertheless, it is also true that Yeshua spoke of God as Father, in a way typical of Galilean holy men and the Pharisees, and spoke of the spirit of God, as was also typical of the whole biblical tradition, starting from the very first verse of the Bible: “And the spirit of God brooded over the abyss.” For Yeshua and his first followers, as good Jews, such talk was naturally understood as typically Jewish metaphorical language, as picture language, not as abstract, philosophical, empirical, ontological language. Such thought patterns and language—as the very Greek terms “philosophical,” “empirical,” “ontological” reflect—were typical of Greeks, not Semites. Later followers of Yeshua, now known in the Greek (Iēsous) or Latin (Jesus) form, along with the Greek form (Christos) of the Hebrew title Meshiaḥ, or Messiah, were apparently unaware of this profound difference in the use of language. These later followers, now calling themselves Christians, more and more came exclusively from the Greek-speaking world and tended to think as Greeks did: philosophically, empirically, ontologically. By the fourth century the Father, Son, and Spirit were ontologized in Christian thought, leading to the doctrine of the Trinity, declared at the first ecumenical council held under the aegis of the first Christian emperor, Constantine, in 325 in Nicaea, basically a suburb of his new city, Constantinople, built on the old Byzantium. It is clear to me that the Greek Christians misunderstood what the Jews of the Bible were saying and that the Jews who wrote the Bible, and Yeshua, would not only have been shocked at the “answers” that the Greeks gave but would have been even more utterly puzzled at their “questions.” For Yeshua and the Jews in general, the big question was not what to think, but what to do. The “ontological” questions seemed perfectly obvious to the Greeks to ask, though to the ancient Jews of two thousand years ago they were nonstarters. The Jew Yeshua made it clear that it was not what one thought but what one did that saved or condemned one: “Giving drink to the thirsty, food to the hungry, clothe the naked, visit the sick and those in prison . . . what you did to the least of these, you did to me” (Matt 25:31–46). As a result of asking Greek ontological questions, fourth-century Christians came up with an amazing understanding of Ultimate Reality. They reaffirmed the oneness of

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Ultimate Reality, of God, but at the same time affirmed the threeness of God as well. At first this might seem like just a slight variation of the “One and the Many” understanding of Ultimate Reality. However, it really is something more profound. There are three unique relationships at the beginning of the infinite list of numbers. Not only is each unique in itself, but all of them together are radically differentiated from all other numbers. After 0, 1, 2, and 3, the relationships between each other number and the rest are basically the same; they are simply The Many. However, think, first, of the incredible difference between 0 and 1, between “no-thing” and “some-thing.” Then, there is the unique relationship between 1 and 2—it moves from one, aloneness, to more —to togetherness. As Hegel pointed out, one cannot think of being without relating it to nonbeing. Or, in more everyday fashion, it makes no sense to speak of female without there also being male, of up without implying down, and so forth. Then there is the fascinating, unique relationship of three. For example, when we move from two dimensions to three, we move from the “unreal” world of the picture or drawing to the “real” world of “three-dimensional” things. Think of the relationship between two subjects, two persons. First, each is aware of her- or himself; second, each is then also aware of the other; third, both are then aware that each is aware of the other. This third level of awareness reaches a third qualitative difference from each of the first two. The awareness—or the love—between the two persons now becomes a third reality. This triadic relationship is also reflected in fundamental interpersonal relationships when (1) a man and a woman each becomes aware of or loves her- or himself, then (2) becomes aware of or loves the other, and (3) their awareness of or love for each other moves to the third dimension in the embodiment of that awareness of or love for each other in the child. We find this triadic structure in many other places in our experience. A further fundamental example is human knowledge. Knowing is fundamentally a triadic relationship: There is (1) the knower, (2) the known, and (3) their merging, the “knowing.” In a seven-syllable mantra, it would be, “Subject, object, then knowing.” Hegel saw a similar triadic pattern in all reality, and especially human history: “Thesis, antithesis, synthesis” is how he put it. So, it apparently “felt” right to those early Greek Christians to think and speak of Ultimate Reality as trinitarian. Because they were of Greek mentality, they were profoundly interested in ontological questions, in the same way that the first Semitic followers of Yeshua were profoundly interested in ethical questions; this is not to say that neither had any interest in the other’s major questions but only to point out where the main mental focus was for each. Here was Yeshua being referred to by some of his followers as the son of God (the Greeks were apparently unaware that for the Jews this simply meant that the person

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lived according to God’s teaching). Here, Yeshua was referring to God as Father (as did many other Jews of Yeshua’s time). Finally, here was the Bible’s frequent speaking of the spirit (ruach) of God—indeed, the holy spirit (ruach ha kadosh) of God. Presumably not realizing that to the Jewish mentality all this was metaphorical, picture language—not abstract, philosophical, ontological Greek language—the Greek Christians put those terms together with their broad human experience of threeness and declared that Ultimate Reality, God, was also Three in One. After all, humanity—man, woman, and eventually child—was made in God’s image (imago Dei, Gen 1:6). The Creator God’s inner reality would of course be reflected in God’s creation, so finding threeness at the heart of so much of creation naturally led to the conclusion that creation’s threeness was a mirror of the one Creator’s Threeness—therefore, a triune, Three-in-One, Ultimate Reality. The psychological/physical human pattern of relationship as the imago Dei led Augustine to develop at great length his reflection on the Trinity, explaining that, in the One God, the Father (1) knows and therefore loves himself, (2) this self being the perfect image of himself, the Son, and (3) the love for each other is embodied in the Spirit. It should be added that this threeness of creation as a reflection of Ultimate Reality manifests itself in at least three other major world religions, though not with such centrality of position as in Christianity. In Hinduism there is the trinity of Ultimate Reality, the Trimutri: Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva. In Daoism there is the T’ai I (Grand Unity), T’ien I (Heavenly Unity), and Ti I (Earthly Unity). In Mahayana Buddhism there is the Trikaya: the threefold body of the Buddha, that is, of Ultimate Reality. In this doctrine the three bodies are named, first, the manifestation body, Nirmana-kaya; second, the heavenly body, Sambhoga-kaya; and third, Dharma-kaya—in ascending order, as it were. The Nirmana-kaya is like the various human manifestations of Ultimate Reality: for example, Moses, Yeshua, Buddha, Mohammed. The Sambhoga-kaya is like the several personal Gods affirmed by the various traditions: for example, Yahweh, the Holy Trinity, Allah, Ishvara, and Amida (of Pure Land Buddhism), who have various virtues, characteristics, names, and so forth. At the highest point is Ultimate Reality itself, Dharma-kaya, which the Zen Buddhist Masao Abe described as “formless Emptiness or boundless Openness.”86 Thus, Christianity preeminently, and other major religious streams in lesser ways, lifted up another key insight into our cosmos, its unity in threeness—thesis-antithesissynthesis = “being”; length-width-height = a single space; man-woman-child = a family, a generation—and concluded that it was at least a faint mirror image of the Threeness in Oneness of Ultimate Reality.

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Buddhism: Ultimate Nothing To begin with, Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha, was not interested in Ultimate Reality. He thought of himself as a physician of the soul. The essence of Gautama’s teaching is found in his Four Noble Truths, which were only about how correctly to understand human life and live accordingly—not about Ultimate Reality. Nevertheless, Gautama’s followers did develop a doctrine about Ultimate Reality, a very unusual one. Gautama rejected the idea that there were separate independent existing beings. Rather, all beings were ultimately a web of relations. It was in the nontheistic, nonpersonal, relational process mode of thought that Gautama and early Buddhism thought and taught, with the result that when they eventually spoke of Ultimate Reality, they developed the key concept of “Emptiness,” Sunyata, which is another name for the Buddhist doctrine of Pratitya Samutpada, “Dependent Co-origination.” This means that nothing exists as a self-subsisting, isolated thing; rather, everything is ultimately a net of relationships and, consequently, is always in flux, is “becoming.” The second-century-CE Nagarjuna (150–250), the second patriarch of Mahayana Buddhism, developed the doctrine of Sunyata. Clearly denying that there were any selfsubsisting substances, he insisted that whatever “is” at any moment of space-time consisted of conditions or relationships, which were also dependently co-originated: “The ‘originating dependently’ we call ‘emptiness.’” “Emptiness is dependent coorigination.”87 Thus, Sunyata does not mean simply the lack of everything, but it has the quite positive meaning of being the Ultimate Source of all reality; Sunyata’s very “nature” is that of unspecified relatedness in process. In a way, the Mahayana Buddhist doctrine of Ultimate Reality as Emptiness, as Sunyata, is like an inverse version of the Aristotlean and Thomistic doctrine of Ultimate Reality, where God is Being Itself, Pure Actuality, Actus Purus; the Buddhist version, rather than being positive, is negative: Ultimate Reality was Emptiness, Pure Potentiality, Potentia Pura. It is also like the Hindu Brahman Nirguna, Ultimate Reality with no attributes or specifications, as distinct from Brahman Saguna, which is Ultimate Reality with attributes. An analogy (which must not be taken any farther than is helpful) is the following: Electricity can take the form of heat or light or locomotion, but it ultimately has no particular form originally when it exists in its source in the dynamo (Sunyata). Thus, there is expressed in the doctrine of Sunyata the insight that in Ultimate Reality there are no limitations, no particularities; all is possible—infinite possibilities.

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Confucianism/Daoism: Ultimate Harmony Confucianism has had a long history of over two and a half millennia; consequently, it has gone through many transformations. It became so dominant in China that it grew somnolent and rigid by the beginning of the twentieth century so that it was violently rejected (in the May Fourth Movement, 1919—though, ironically, that also dates the beginnings of its revival in the New Confucianism Movement).88 Until then, no one spoke of Confucianism’s not being a religion, for everyone realized that it was. From even pre-Confucius times, in the Shang period (1766–1123 BCE) the term Shang-Ti (Lord on High) or Ti (Lord) was used to refer to the highest of the gods and eventually to a transcendent being, perhaps even a creator god. In the Chou period (1122–249 BCE) the term most often used for God was T’ien (Heaven), symbolized by a large human head. After the Chou conquered the Shang, both Ti and T’ien were used to refer to God, understood as a personal God.89 To Confucius, Ultimate Reality was still personal, but by the tenth century CE, if not long before, T’ien tended to be understood more nonpersonally. Nevertheless, T’ien was affirmed as real, and its laws were to be followed. The fundamental belief was that humans (ren) needed to pattern themselves after God or Heaven: T’ien ren he yi (The Unity of Heaven and Human). The fundamental law, thus, was He, harmony. “There is harmony when we have certain things which are mutually different, but which still find a way of relating to each other meaningfully. Harmony is the foundation of the existence of all beings in the universe.”90 This expresses the core Confucian doctrine of Tai He, the “Great Harmony,” or, as one contemporary mainland Chinese scholar put it, the “Universal Harmony”: “In Confucian thought, the concept of Tai He actually comprises four levels: harmony within nature, harmony between humans and nature, harmony among humans themselves (that is, harmony in social life), and harmony within a person (harmony of body and mind, of inside and outside). In these four elements we basically have the structure of ‘universal harmony.’”91 Here the He, harmony, between T’ien and Ren, has been “smoothed out” in Marxist fashion so that Ultimate Reality is folded into nature, but another mainland Chinese scholar of the Chinese Academy of Science makes it clear that “A Confucian strove to obey T’ien Ming, the Will of Heaven, and to practice his religious teachings in social life . . . In every moment he felt that Shangti was at his side watching. The sincere piety of a Confucian toward Shangti was not inferior to that of a believer of any other religion.”92 The ancient Confucian ideal of He, harmony among all things, and finally with Ultimate Reality, is perhaps best expressed on the contemporary scene by Fang Dongmei’s (1899–1977) Philosophy of Comprehensive Harmony, which, while built on the core of Confucian thought, harmonizes with it the Daoist thought of Laotsu (sixth

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century BCE), as well as the thought of Mohtsu, India, and the West: The distinctive traits of the life of the Chinese nation are represented in Laotsu, Confucius, and Mohtsu [470–391 BCE]. Laotsu expresses the mysterious working of the Dao; Confucius describes the archetypal principle of cosmic change; Mohtsu expounds the holy feeling of love. The one who unites Laotsu and Mohtsu [who taught the love for all] and teaches the Middle Path is but Confucius. Only the Dao of the school of the peerless sage Confucius is the most balanced . . . It not only can digest and amalgamate Laotsu and Mohtsu, and even the latecomer, Buddhist thought. It can as well absorb the wisdom of Greece, of Europe, and of India, and create an immensely broad sphere of “creativity and harmony,” where the finite living human being is able to experience the infinite being and value.93 The whole thrust of Daoism is that the human should learn the Way (Dao) of reality and follow the Way, should harmonize with it. For Laotsu and Daoism the Dao is transcendent, for “the Dao that can be known is not the Dao.” Thus, there is at the heart of Chinese religious thought and practice the stress on the Middle Way, as also with Gautama’s Majjhima Patipada (“Middle Path”) and Aristotle’s In medio stat virtus (“virtue lies in the middle”), a stress on the human need to learn the structure of reality and to align, to harmonize her- or himself with it. This Ultimate Structure is T’ien, transcendent and dynamic, as is reflected in the very term used, the Way, and in our human experience of the ever-moving cosmos.

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Summary of Insights from World Religions There are, thus, at least these seven key insights into how to conceive and name Ultimate Reality, which then have enormous consequences on how we humans see the world and live our lives. In brief they are the following: 1. The Many: Polytheism reflects the fact that there really are many, many things in the cosmos; therefore, this Manyness is somehow reflective of their “divine” Sources. 2. The One and the Many: Hinduism in a preeminent way preserves the doctrine of the “One and the Many” by seeing it in One God with Many Manifestations, which corresponds to our many experiences of oneness and manyness, as with many sense images of one concept: e pluribus Unum. 3. The One: Both Judaism and Islam capture the insight of the Oneness of Ultimate Reality, and that all creation is good, flowing from the one good Source. 4. The Two: The Zoroastrian, Yin/Yang, and other dualist traditions lift up an insight into reality and its Source, of which we must not lose sight—the bipolarity of the world in which we live: positive-negative, light-dark, male-female, body-soul, in-out, up-down, and the like. 5. The One and the Three: Christianity preeminently (and other major religious streams in lesser ways) lifts up the key insight into our cosmos of its threeness in oneness: thesis-antithesis-synthesis = being; length-width-height = space; man-woman-child = a family, a generation. Hence, Ultimate Reality must also be Three in One. 6. Ultimate Nothing: There is expressed in the Buddhist doctrine of Sunyata the insight that in Ultimate Reality there are no limitations; all is possible; there are infinite possibilities. 7. Ultimate Harmony: There is at the heart of Confucian and Daoist religious thought and practice a stress on the human need to learn the structure of Reality and to align, to harmonize oneself with it. This Ultimate Structure is T’ien, transcendent and dynamic.

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The Move to Deep-Dialogue There are often specific names behind each of these worldviews, and, though each has something significant to contribute to the perennial human effort of conceiving and naming Ultimate Reality, they are, as worldviews, seemingly mutually incompatible. The very fact that they are each worldviews tells us that they are totalizing, encompassing of the whole world. We can, of course, see many similarities but never complete congruity; otherwise they would not be different worldviews. Moreover, some of the positions taken regarding Ultimate Reality are mutually exclusive. For example, the polytheistic, Islamic, and Buddhist positions seem at first blush to be not just contrary but even contradictory. What to do? In the past several thousand years, we humans have tended to deal with these differences through indifference, aggression, or absorption. Given the rapidly accelerating contemporary process of globalization, we can no longer be indifferent to those with different worldviews; they are becoming our neighbors in numberless ways. Aggression (the reaction of choice for Christianity, Islam, and modern ideologies, such as Fascism, Nazism, Stalinism, and Maoism, for example) is increasingly found to be unacceptable, for it violates the Other’s human rights, and human rights are being insisted upon worldwide. Absorption (the reaction of choice for Hinduism, Buddhism, and Daoism) is likewise increasingly found wanting, for it is seen to hide a hidden superiority sense, a smugness. Humankind is staggering out of the darkness of the Age of Monologue (wherein we talked only with ourselves, that is, persons who thought as we did—or who should) into the dawning Age of Global Dialogue, wherein we want to talk with those who think differently from us so we can learn. All the adherents of the several families of religions listed above, with their varying views and naming of Ultimate Reality, have something to learn from the others, without abandoning their particular insight—in fact, enriching it. This is happening through dialogue, through transformative “Deep-Dialogue.” Deep-Dialogue is something far beyond mere conversation between two or more persons. It means to stand on our position and, at the same time, seek selftransformation through opening ourselves to those who think differently. Together with its counterparts, Emotional-Intelligence, Competitive-Cooperation, and Critical-Thinking, it is a whole new way of thinking—a fuller way of living! To open ourselves to DeepDialogue, however, we must also first develop the skills of thinking carefully and clearly, of Critical-Thinking (“critical,” from the Greek, krinein, “to choose, to judge”). DeepDialogue and Critical-Thinking are two sides of one reality. Beyond being a whole new way of thinking, I see the several dialogic​al principles at the very basis of all reality.

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All reality is dialogic, operating on a continuum: Destructive Dialogue →

Disinterested Dialogue →

Dialogical Dialogue →

Deep-Dialogue

Elements are polarized against each other

Elements are tolerant of each other

Elements learn from each other

Elements are mutually transformed

The Reality-Is-Dialogic Principle All reality is basically interactive, mutual, “dialogic,” which structure is present from the subatomic to the cosmic (where on both levels matter and energy are convertible; and, further, a growing number of thinkers believe that the binary structure of computers— that is, an endless series of ones and zeroes in “dialogue” with each other—is reflective of the fundamental nature of all reality), through the intrapersonal to the interpersonal, still further to the intercommunal, and ultimate​ly the global—and beyond to the Source and Goal of all reality.

The Integrative Principle Not only is all reality “dialogic,” but it is also integrative. This “dialogue” of all reality oscillates in polar tension between the destructive and the integrative. For example, when the dialogic relationship among the electrons, protons, neutrons, and other “particles” and “waves” in an atom is not “integrat​ed,” when the centrifugal and centripetal forces are not balanced in creative polar tension, the atom will “disintegrate” into either a black hole or a nuclear explosion. As matter becomes ever more complex, the integration of the “dialogue” becomes more and more that of a delicate network, which makes a qualitative leap when it reaches living matter—and a still greater leap when it arrives at reflexive, ratio​nal/intuitive, affective, “spiritual” human beings.

The Knowing-Is-Dialogic-Integrative Principle All knowing is interactive, mutual, dialogic, and integrative between the known and the knower, for knowing is a kind of unifying of the object and the subject—a kind of “integration.” For example, the surface of a table becomes one with, “integrated with,” the surface of my fingers. The interactive, mutual, unifying, dialogic-integrative character is doubly true when the knower is also the known, as in my learning about what it means to be human. This is very especially true when I learn what it means for me to be human. That dialogic-integrative character, then, is endlessly and infinitely true of all knowing. From (a) when the known and the knower are separate object and subject, through (b) when the known and knower are interpersonal, further through (c) when the known and knower are communities of persons, to ultimately (d) when they embrace the whole globe—and beyond to (e) the Source/Goal of all reality.

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Deep-Dialogue and Ultimate Reality This fundamental advance in human consciousness, Deep-Dialogue/Critical-Thinking, opens the way to think in nonexclusive ways about Ultimate Reality. This is a Copernican turn, the “dialogical-critical turn” in human evolution. It opens the way to a global consciousness that can build bridges between worldviews and perspectives. This awakened global dialogical/critical perspective between worlds is a profound revolution in how we see, experience, and process reality in every aspect of our lives. It gives us the capacity to hold widely variant worldviews together in creative communion. This dramatic shift in thinking discloses deeper global patterns of reality that could not be detected or processed in the monocentric habits of thinking. The inner drive in every worldview to express the primal infinite principle is apparent from the primal names presented by the great enduring traditions, as has been partly seen above: In Africa, Traditional Religion spoke of Nomo (Infinite Word); in China, Daoism and Confucianism wrote of Dao (Way); in India, Hinduism wrote of Aum (Infinite Word), and Buddhism talked of Sunyata (Void); in the Near East, Judaism spoke of Ḥokmah (Lady Wisdom); in Europe the Greeks wrote of Logos (Reason, Word); Christianity also spoke of Logos (“In the beginning was the Logos,” John 1:1); contemporary science speaks of a “field of energy.” All were understood as the Ultimate Principle (literally the “Final First”). Beginning especially in the early nineteenth century, with the growth of a strong sense of history, followed by the development of a series of “hermeneutics of suspicion,” it has become increasingly clear that all statements about reality, including Ultimate Reality, are necessarily limited: spoken always in particular contexts; addressing particular questions; utilizing particular thought categories; employing particular kinds of language; and viewing all from particular viewpoints of social place, gender, religious conviction, and so forth. However, there cannot be only particular views, for then we would have no way to speak with an Other; we can speak to each other only on the basis of what we have in common (beginning with our common language) of what unites us. There clearly is also an underlying commonality; otherwise, we would not even be able to discern that there was difference—difference from what? The very fact that we can differ is built on a fundamental commonality, a unity, within which context we can perceive differences, particularities. To be fully human, then, it is vital that we be aware of both the limited, particular character of all statements and at the same time the underlying unity within which differences can even appear. Therefore, because no single narrative and no single name can fully comprehend or name the Final First (given the particularity of all language), we humans must also be in endless dialogue with each other in order to approach endlessly the infinite Ultimate Principle as an ever-visible, yet ever-receding, horizon—thus

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recognizing the underlying unifying dialogic context within which all language should ultimately be placed. Thus, I am speaking about the concept “Dia-Logos” (Greek: “reason/word-across”) as a global expression of the Ultimate Principle. Therefore, when speaking English or another Indo-European language, I use the term “Dia-Logos.” Other languages will use their own corresponding terms to express the concept, for example, Chinese dui hwa.94 We know that from subatomic physics to astronomical cosmology to the inner and inter workings of humanity, all reality is not static (Greek: stasis: “standing still”) but dynamic (dynamis: movement, energy). Hence, at the foundation of all reality is not just Logos as expressed in the specific Greek and Christian cultural languages, but Dia-Logos on a global, intercultural, interlanguage level. It is vital here to recall that, as a global name for “what is first,” Dia-Logos does not compete with or displace the many primal names that have emerged across time and cultures. Rather, the force of Dia-Logos helps us to be mindful that the Ultimate Principle inherently generates alternative primal names, each of which has unique creative force. Thus, Dia-Logos designates the plurality that must resonate: Dao, Aum, Sunyata, Hohmah, Logos, Nomo, energy—the boundless range of genuine primal names. This does not suggest that these diverse primal names for the Ultimate Principle are “synonymous” or “equivalent” in any naive or uncritical sense. Rather, Dia-Logos opens space for diversity—which nevertheless coarises in unity. This “unity in plurality,” e pluribus unum, is the power of Dia-Logos. Thus, we might say that Dia-Logos is the matricial concept—the term within which all the culturally specific concepts and terms for Ultimate Reality can be found, affirmed, and brought into interminable and always fruitful Deep-Dialogue, leading to an emerging and always expanding global ethic,95 forming the framework within which we all will live our lives.

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Critical-Thinking If dialogue is at the foundation of the whole cosmos, with the human as its conscious pinnacle and the lead dancer of the “Cosmic Dance of Dialogue,” it is also true that logos, thinking, is at the center of dialogue, at the center of the cosmos (Greek: cosmos = “order”; chaos = “confusion”). We humans are constantly learning more and more about the logos, the “order,” the cosmos—which persists even in the midst of, seemingly at times to us, chaos, “confusion”—that permeates all reality. If we are seriously to engage in dialogue, in Deep-Dialogue, we necessarily must also engage in logos, logic, denken, thinking: Critical-Thinking. The first thing to recognize about the term “Critical-Thinking” is that it does not mean negatively “criticizing” someone or something. Rather, the term “critical” comes from the Greek krinein, “to make a judgment, a decision.” However, we can make a judgment—a decision—thoughtfully (with systematic denken, logos, “logic”) only if we have the data in front of us so that we can first analyze it (Greek: ana, “up”; lysis, “break”), that is, to break up the ideas, the information, into component parts to see how they fit together, and then move to synthesis (Greek: syn “together”; thesis, “put”): that is, after seeing how the component parts fit together, to explore the relations of the parts to other things —or, at times, to put the parts together in new ways.

The Three “W” Questions: What? Whence? Whither? If analysis and synthesis are the fundamental ways we humans think, in order to think critically—to make a judgment, a decision, on the basis of gathered data and systematic, analytic-synthetic thought—we must first address three basic “W” questions: What, Whence, Whither? What? means that we need to develop the habit of striving to understand as precisely as possible what it is we are talking about. This principle is so obvious that it tends, as so often in life, to be violated in proportion to its simplicity. Often, it helps to ask what the etymological roots of the term in question are (as I have been doing here) to help us get a clear grasp of what we are talking about. For example, to believe means having faith in someone or something. “Faith” comes from the Latin fides, “having trust.” Hence, believing something or having faith in something means affirming that something is true, not because we have proof of it, but because we trust the source of that information. We also need to make sure that I and my interlocutors have precisely the same understanding of the idea or term being discussed; otherwise, we will simply be talking past each other. It is also especially vital that we keep precisely the same meaning of the term when we move from one statement to another. If we do not, we will end up with a four-term syllogism. A typical syllogism runs like this:

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A is E E is C Therefore, A is C We need to be certain that the meaning of the connecting term, “E,” has precisely the same meaning in the second premise as in the first. If, however, deliberately or inadvertently, we change the meaning, however slightly, of the connecting term—E to È —while keeping the same sound, we will have a four-term syllogism: A is E È is C Therefore, ...? Therefore, nothing—simply because we have four terms: A, E, È, and C. Hence, it is vital to know precisely What we are talking about. In thinking, alone or with others, aloud or in writing, we start with an idea or term— and, as just noted, in answering the first question of What? we need to be clear about its precise meaning. Second, we need then to ask ourselves, Whence? Where does the basis for affirming this idea come from? Are we beginning by simply defining something to be the case? Is this idea an unexamined presupposition? Do we have factual evidence for it? Is it a valid, logical deduction from solidly proven data? Is it based on a trustworthy source? And so on. Any truthful results of thinking, alone or with others, will depend on the validity of the answer to this question: Whence the evidence for what we are talking about? If we have been careful in understanding precisely What we are talking about and have carefully tested the bases—the Whence—for our affirming the idea in question, then we need to ask ourselves where—Whither?—this idea leads us. What are its implications, for if the idea is true, then we want to base our subsequent actions on it. In other words, ideas have consequences! For example, if the “Golden Rule” is judged to be a valid ethical principle, then I need to respect others, tell the truth to others, help others —because I would want them to treat me the same way. Further, it is important to follow out these implications to learn whether or not they lead to a reductio ad absurdum (“reduction to absurdity”). If that turns out to be the case, then we will need to reinvestigate our data bases and whole line of reasoning from the beginning in order to find the flaw of fact or logic. For example, some Christian theologians (for example, Augustine, Luther, Calvin) argued that nothing can happen except that God causes it happen, including causing humans to commit sins that will condemn them to hell for all eternity—the doctrine of “Predestination.” But, for

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followers of Yeshua, who depicted God as his loving Father who reaches out to all humans to lead them to himself, this is a clear contradiction, a reductio ad absurdum—a loving God who deliberately created humans not to lead them to God but to hell! This line of Critical-Thinking led many Augustinians, Lutherans, and Calvinists to reject the doctrine of Predestination.

Unconscious Presuppositions A further fundamental move that we must strive to make in order to engage in CriticalThinking concerns our unconscious presuppositions. To be conscious of something is, of course, to be aware of it. Obviously “unconscious” means to not be aware of something. Also clearly, pre (Latin) means “beforehand,” and sup-position (Latin: sub-positio = under-position) means something under-lying. Hence, a presupposition is an idea that ahead of time underlies another idea or set of ideas. An unconscious presupposition is one that we already have in our mind, but of which we are unaware; it is unconscious. For example, previously, and unfortunately still today, many men (and women) thought that women were incapable of clear, rational thought. This was a presupposition, a prior underlying assumption, that prevented women from attending the university. For the most part it was unconscious; that is, most did not think about it but just assumed it without being aware that they were doing so. As long as a presupposition remains uninvestigated, we cannot know whether we are acting on the basis of reality or of mirage. We cannot truthfully tell ourselves that we are acting thus in a rational manner. The situation is even vastly more devastating when the presupposition is unconscious. Then we are controlled totally by an idea that might be partially, or even totally, unwarranted—and we can do absolutely nothing about it, for we are powerless to analyze an idea and change the consequent action if we do not even know of the existence of the idea—the “motor” that secretly drives our mind and behavior. We all have endless numbers of unconscious presuppositions, which we need to seek out, bring to the conscious level, proceed to analyze and to judge (Greek: krinein) whether they are valid or not. This is an endless task, for all the information we gather is accepted into our cognitive faculties, that is, they are necessarily poured into our mental containers, our presuppositions, or, in a term frequently used today, into our paradigms. A typical example of a paradigm follows: Earlier all astronomical data was poured into the paradigm (presupposition) that the earth was the center of the planetary system, rather than into the later paradigm that the sun was the center. How do we find our unconscious presuppositions so that we may analyze and judge them? There is no sure way other than endless reflection and self-examination. However, one major help is to enter into ongoing dialogues, for, when sufficient mutual trust is built, our dialogue

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partners then will be able to point out some of our unconscious presuppositions, which they can see but we cannot; our trusted dialogue partners thus become for us mirrors in which we can see how at least a part of the world perceives us.

Emotional-Intelligence/Imagination Since the latter decades of the twentieth century increased attention is being paid to what is often referred to as “emotional-intelligence.” This is an important, but not crystal clear, field of investigation. Our emotions can lead us to do many wonderful, and not so wonderful, things. We often claim that we want to bring our actions out from under the sway of our emotions and under the guidance of our clear-thinking intellect. In general, such a goal appears desirable, but that is not the focus of the investigation of our “emotional-intelligence.” Rather, the focus of emotional-intelligence is learning how we humans can effectively mature “emotionally.” Basically, that means learning to know and understand (1) oneself, (2) other persons, and (3) how appropriately to relate to each other. You may have learned to analyze a situation with impeccable syllogistic logic (critical-thinking) but be totally unaware about how you yourself or others, or both, fit into the puzzle. An example of such an extreme disjunction might be that of a brilliant critical-thinker in the body of a socially “clueless” person. I am not speaking here of autism, which appears to have a neural basis. Rather, emotional-intelligence deals with the general human population in how they come to know themselves—especially their emotional selves—even better, and their relations to others. Here, too, is where the older term “imagination” fits. In many ways “imagination” seeks to name what the recently more popular term “paradigm” is also after, but in a more limited, “ideational” way. The way we “imagine” the world, or a particular portion of it, massively affects how we think about the world, or that portion of it, and how we act in it. It is the Imagination that is the main source of human creativity. It is what makes a human “like God,” an “Imago Dei,” “image of God.” For example, if you imagine the world flat, you will act in one set of ways, but, if you imagine it a globe, you will act in another set of ways—like being the first human ever (Magellan)—to sail around it! The goal of the maturing of our emotional-intelligence/imagination is not something new under the sun. Saint Augustine of Hippo pointed to it when, in the fifth century, he uttered the prayer, asking, “To know you, O God, and myself!” Clearly our emotionalintelligence/imagination needs to be expanded in tandem with our critical-thinking, and then expressed in competitive-cooperation action—all of which clearly takes place within the all-encompassing embrace of Deep-Dialogue.

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If our actions are to be compatible with Deep-Dialogue/Critical-Thinking/EmotionalIntelligence/Imagination, they must strive toward being competitive-cooperative. Let me explain this seemingly contradictory double term. If the way we understand the world determines the way we act in the world, then action completes the circle of perception-thought-imagining-decision-action. We first perceive, then try to understand/imagine, in light of which we make a decision and finally act, putting our perceptions, understanding, desires, and decisions into concrete behavioral form. If we have begun to engage the world in a deeply dialogical manner and critically analyzed/synthesized/imagined our perceptions and thoughts, we will want to make decisions on their bases, and carry out our actions in the world in an analogously dialogic/critical/emotionally-intelligent/imagined manner. I am suggesting that the most appropriate way to describe such action is “competitive-cooperation.” The outcome of our Deep-Dialogue and critical-thinking/emotionalintelligence/imagination must be our free/responsible action, because the core of being human is freedom and its corresponding responsibility. This freedom/responsibility core has always been the case since the emergence of homo sapiens sapiens two hundred thousand years ago in central Africa, even though this core freedom/responsibility did not begin to be de facto widespread and recognized until around two hundred years ago with the Enlightenment. Our core human freedom/responsibility flows from our humanly developed rational intellect, which allows us to “abstract” (as noted above, Latin: ab, “from”; tractus, “pulled,” as in “tractor”) from our myriad sense perceptions various concepts and possibilities, on the bases of which we can choose or decide to act one way or another. This is another way to say we “love,” that is, we reach out to become one with what we perceive to be the “good”—for example, becoming one with the “good” ice cream, the “good” Mozart music, the “good” friend—each in its appropriate way. Humans have long recognized that we are something unique in the cosmos (there may be other free beings we have not yet discovered—or perhaps never will) because of our radical freedom (despite its limitations, of which we are increasingly becoming aware), based on our rationality. I have written extensively—and am very deliberately restressing here!—about how humanity has in the last two centuries increasingly come to realize that because all knowledge is necessarily limited and is interpreted by the knower—“Nobody knows everything about anything!”96 Hence, we have no other intelligent choice but to reach out in dialogue, Deep-Dialogue, to those who think differently from us in order to learn increasingly/endlessly more about reality. I have also increasingly stressed the other side of our “coin of humanity,” critical-thinking, wherein we constantly pose the critical three “W” questions: What precisely are we talking about? Whence comes the basis for affirming it? Whither do its implications lead—reductio ad absurdum, or not? Steven

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Pinker has most recently brilliantly shown that it is the increasing human rationality, in the sense of the increasing development of reasonable habits of mind, abstract thinking, and thence actions, that is leading to an increasingly peaceful human world (counterintuitive though that may seem at first blush).97 Even before him, in a more philosophical than social-scientific manner, Bernard Lonergan also argued that increasing intelligence was a necessity for an increasingly ethical behavior.98 Since we humans are also bodies, our perceptions, reflections, and decisions need to result in actions in the world. Through fostering our critical-thinking/emotionalintelligence/imagination and reaching out to increasingly expand our necessarily myopic view of reality through Deep-Dialogue, we will want to act in a manner that is a reflection of our “both-and” Deep-Dialogue/Critical-Thinking/EmotionalIntelligence/Imagination, namely, through competitive-cooperation. The “cooperation” half of this term is relatively easy to understand. So long as the Other is not acting in a destructive manner, then we would want to act, at a minimum, not negatively toward the Other, but as much as possible in tandem, so as to create a win-win situation as much as possible. But “competitive”? That would seem necessarily to aim at a win-lose, a zero-sum approach. To a certain extent, that is accurate. However, I am thinking first of all of this “competition” as being with ourself, striving to be as effective, efficient, and creative as possible. If I may borrow from Islam the initial meaning of jihad, the Great jihad (Arabic: “struggle”)—the competition is first with ourself to live out our inner principles, placed there by God, according to Islam (and Judaism and Christianity as well). This creative competition may at times mean that one individual, one group, will get the contract, will be chosen to provide the requested product or service—win-lose, zero-sum in that sense. But, the creative competitive individual and group should thereby be led to create, develop, new alternatives—as, for example, renewable energy sources as alternatives to fossil fuels, or President Obama’s inviting Hillary Clinton into his cabinet. In the business field, an ever more human organization increasingly searches for the most creative, expansive, all-inclusive way of operating—a “both-and,” a “win-win” for both the producers and users, reflecting the creative balance of Deep-Dialogue, “pro-andcon,” critical-thinking/emotional-intelligence/imagination in a balance of creative competition and cooperation. A striking example of such thinking—and action—in the global corporate world was given by Ryuzaburo Kaku, Board Chair of the Japanese multinational, Canon Inc. His vision in leading his company convinced me that what I in English terms describe as competitive-cooperation was, in fact, doable. He expressed his vision as the Kyosei principles: “Living and working together for the common good.” He argued that this concept of Kyosei should be a creed that all corporations and nations follow and outlined

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the progress of ethical companies through four stages, describing the fourth stage as the “corporation assuming global social responsibilities,” a “truly global corporation.” This type of company cares for its direct stake-holders, including its local community, but it goes beyond as “it strives to fulfill its corporate obligations on a global scale. Its social responsibilities transcend national boundaries.” Kaku was not a naive “do-gooder” but a creative business entrepreneur, insisting that constant innovation was the key to creating ever more wealth for humanity—and his company: “By creating new products and processes . . . the company will not only succeed financially, but will also have made the world a better place to live. That is what it means to be an ethical business leader!” He also wrote: “Competition is vital for efficiency, but it must be ‘fair’ competition, based on innovation, quality and efficiency,” thereby combining “competition” with “cooperation”: “Innovative corporations with specialties in different areas can also work together in the spirit of Kyosei to produce outstanding products. In this way a synergy is created and products can be produced that neither company alone could develop.” Impressive as this vision is, Kaku Sensei (a Japanese term for a revered teacher) later projected a stunningly challenging fifth stage: I have recently come to believe that a fifth category is needed in my analysis of companies as they evolve into ethical social institutions. This fifth type I see as a company that seeks to change the world for the better. Companies in the fifth stage also try to increase the number of like-minded partners that assume global social responsibilities and that are actively concerned with global problems . . . Companies in the fifth stage realize it is not right for the enormous number of corporations existing in the world to remain apathetic about the various perplexing problems emerging on our planet. They know it is it not enough for a corporation to transform itself only into a fourth type of corporation and simply strive to correct imbalances—it knows it must go further.99 Kaku Sensei would have Kyosei serve as a key principle in the new world order emerging after the end of the Cold War. He insisted that democracy, human rights, and peace are indeed indispensable values, but alone they are not adequate. In other words, they are necessary, but not sufficient, causes of the commonweal; Kyosei needs to augment them. In English, for Kyosei I offer competitive-cooperation. In summary, the competitive-cooperation person or group in putting into action in a manner in keeping with Deep-Dialogue/Critical-Thinking/EmotionalIntelligence/Imagination (1) is not satisfied with the passable but reaches for the best; (2) strives to make decisions within broader frameworks; (3) is not satisfied with the

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standard but stresses constant creativity; (4) as much as possible avoids zero-sum, winlose solutions but seeks creatively win-win ones; (5) prefers not either-or but both-and choices. Therefore, I propose that our most authentic human way to be and act is, DeepDialogue/Critical-Thinking/Emotional-Intelligence/Imagination/CompetitiveCooperation.100

84. My friend and colleague Ashok Gangadean and I coined this term and described our understanding of its meaning in laying out the basic documents of our Global Dialogue Institute, as found in The Technology of DeepDialogue/Critical-Thinking. 85. For a more detailed discussion of the questions of number and gender of God in the Bible, see Swidler, Biblical Affirmations of Woman, esp. 35–73. 86. Abe, “A Dynamic Unity in Religious Pluralism,” 170. 87. Nagarjuna, cited in ibid., 175. 88. See Bresciani, Reinventing Confucianism; and Liu, Confucianism in Dialogue Today. 89. See Julia Ching in Küng and Ching, Christentum und Chinesische Religion, 42. 90. Qian Xun, as paraphrased in Bresciani, Reinventing Confucianism, 441; italics added. 91. Tang Yijie, quoted in ibid., 442. 92. Li Shen, quoted in ibid., 444. 93. Fang, Zhexue san hui, 6; quoted in ibid., 295; italics added. 94. The Chinese equivalent for the English word “dialogue” is dui hua. Dui in the phrase dui hua corresponds to dia- in the English word “dialogue.” Dui as a prepositional verb, means “to confront, to face,” or “being towards”; as a noun, it means “a pair, a couple of,” which is composed of two things, referring to the “togetherness” of beings; further, it might refer to the primordial state of beings in the world, in which human beings always already find themselves in the world of beings. Hua in the phrase dui hua corresponds in some sense to -logue in the English word “dialogue.” Hua means words spoken or written, or speech. This word is composed of two separate characters that are combined. The radical part or root-meaning one is “to speak, to say” (yan in Chinese), which, in ancient Chinese, as a verb, is not used by itself but always together with another verb, to tao, in the form of yan dao. As a noun, yan means the words (or the language). The phonetic or soundgiving character in the word hua is the character for “tongue.” (Guan Ping) 95. See Swidler, For All Life. 96. See, e.g., Swidler, “Nobody Knows Everything”; and Swidler, “Reflections at the Scottish Parliament.” 97. Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature, chapter 9. Amazingly, it is a massively proven fact that the popular IQ level has steadily gone up in the U.S. over the past century in the area of abstract thinking. 98. See Lonergan, Method in Theology, 253. For more details, see Swidler, After the Absolute. 99. The text of Ryuzaburo Kaku’s presentation appears in Swidler, ed., International Codes of Business Ethics and Other Resources for Business Ethics. http://astro.temple.edu/~swidler/swidlerbooks/codes.htm/. 100. See the Deep-Dialogue/Critical-Thinking/Emotional-Intelligence http://astro.temple.edu/~swidler/course/index.htm.

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Light and Dark Sides of Major Religions There is in the major religions of the world much wisdom, as well as no small measure of foolishness. We need to learn to discern both, embracing the former and dispatching the latter. I would, as a last bit of advice, start you the reader on that path—or reinforce your already ongoing efforts—by lifting up just a single plus and minus for each of the major religions of the world, leaving it to you to continue your lifelong Critical-Thinking. Everything that we humans know, it seems, has polarity: “Is” makes no sense except in contrast to “is not.” We cannot think “being” except as over against “nonbeing.” “Up” automatically implies “down,” as “left” implies “right,” “good” implies “bad,” “positive” implies “negative,” and so on. Presumably it also is true with religions. Many religions, however, claim that following their direction to the fullest will lead to a “unitive” experience in which all dualism falls away, where persons, or at least some “religious virtuosi/ae,” experience a oneness with God, Being, or Nothingness. Nevertheless, even the most mystical human still has to attend to such minimal bodily activities as breathing, taking in water and food, and eliminating, and it has to be done “here” rather than “there.” If one takes as at least a minimal description of religion as “an explanation of the ultimate meaning of life and how to live accordingly, based on some notion and experience of the Transcendent,” then, given the finitude of all reality, the very strengths of a given religion will automatically entail its opposite. Its light will necessarily imply darkness. Many religious and philosophical thinkers saw this clearly in the area of action. Aristotle in book 2 of his Nicomachean Ethics stressed that the virtuous person is the one who strikes the “mean” between two extremes. Aquinas in following him maintained the same: In medio stat virtus, “Virtue stands in the middle.” So also did Confucius with his Zhong Yong, the “Doctrine of the Mean,” and Siddharta Gautama the Buddha and his Majjhima Patipada, the “Middle Path.” Hence, every strength of a religion brings with it the temptation toward exclusivity or at least imbalance. Those drawn to belief, to religion, need to be aware of the temptations to extremes in all religions—indeed, in all human activity!—so as to avoid them and be guided by the “Golden Mean” (which need not be a fifty-fifty balance). Therefore, I will try to lay out ever so briefly some of the strengths and temptations of the major religions, as I discern them. In many aspects, all the major religions are very similar, and what today are frequently held up as fundamental differences among religions really point more to the division between tradition and Modernity rather than to differences among the religions. For example, when I first became involved in Jewish-Christian dialogue in the wake of Vatican II in the 1960s, my Jewish dialogue partners would frequently point out that

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Judaism is a religion that prescribes for the whole of life, seven days a week, twenty-four hours a day, whereas Christianity focused on only limited aspects of “religious” life. Well, that may be true of much of urban modern Western Christianity, but basically Christianity everywhere before the Enlightenment (and for many, many decades since and in many places in the world today) also was a “totalizing” religion—as was every religion until the Enlightenment. Christianity prescribed and proscribed everything from infant baptism to funereal rites; from morning to night prayer, with the three-times-daily angelus in between and at every meal; from Sunday church services and rest to scores of saints’ days and other liturgical celebrations, including fasts/abstinences.The same is true of all other religions. There is also much writing and talk today about how the wave of secularization in the aftermath of the Enlightenment is being turned back by a resurgence of religion that is replacing secularization. Such a view is quite unhistorical. I am convinced that there will always be religion because of the combination of the self-consciousness of us humans and our finitude. We will always raise limit questions—the Carmel question: Wer dann hat die Regenwürme gemacht?—and then devise our answers. I will lift up only a very tiny sample of the strengths and temptations of each of the major religions to stimulate critical reflection on each of them. Let me start with the Abrahamic religions—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—and then follow with the large East Asian religions: Hinduism, Buddhism, Daoism, and Confucianism. I realize that there are other significant religions, including Sikhism, Jainism, Baha’i, and all the African, American, and other indigenous religions—but I am not trying to write a textbook on world religions. There are already many excellent ones on the market. The above-named religions are by far the largest in the world—with the exception of Judaism, which is included because it is the very foundation of the two largest religions in the world: Christianity and Islam.

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Judaism Judaism has the great strength of its wonderful biblical wisdom stories, which have been given the highest ranking possible—divinely inspired. This gives the “explanation of the ultimate meaning of life” laid out with great weight and seriousness, as well as the actions that should follow therefrom, the “how to live accordingly.” Yet, that also opens the door to serious problems. If the Bible is the inspired record of a just, loving God, what does one do with texts such as these wherein God commands, “Now therefore kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman that has known man by lying with him. But all the women children, that have not known a man by lying with him, keep alive for yourselves” (Num 31:17). “You shall save alive nothing that breathes: But you shall utterly destroy them . . . as the Lord your God has commanded you” (Deut 20:16–17). These texts are not anomalies, but “the Bible depicts a world that, seen through modern eyes, is staggering in its savagery. People enslave, rape, and murder members of their immediate families. Warlords slaughter civilians indiscriminately, including the children. Women are bought, sold, and plundered like sex toys. And Yahweh tortures and massacres people by the hundreds of thousands for trivial disobedience or for no reason at all. These atrocities are neither isolated nor obscure. They implicate all the major characters of the Old Testament.”101 Since the early times Judaism has been concerned with not so much “how one should think,” but “how one should act.” Hence, on the positive side, the rabbis did not stop with the ethical prescriptions of the Bible, but through centuries studied and debated how to apply them to everyday life, eventually producing the Mishnah (c. 200 CE) and Talmud (c. 500 CE). However, then, for a variety of reasons, this ongoing dynamic interpretation and application of the traditional insights to the always new life situations began to stand still, so that increasingly Jewish life looked back to the Talmud to govern life in 1000, 1500, and 2000. This chronological fixedness was broken only with the European Emancipation (the eighteenth-century Enlightenment) of the Jews from the ghettos of Europe and the subsequent creation of the Reform Movement of Judaism, which snapped the cord to the Talmud and linked itself to the ethical/prophetic biblical tradition in constant dialogue with Modernity. So, the struggle to find and maintain a balance, a Golden Mean, continues in Judaism, with its main divisions of Orthodoxy at one end of the spectrum, Reform at the other end, and Conservative in the middle (with minor roles by Reconstructionism and other movements), and secular Jewry on the side. But, there is the constant temptation to slide into the worst sin of all, idolatry—as noted earlier, literally the worship (Greek: latria) of an image or idol (Greek: eidol). The various instructions on how to act clearly are not the good in themselves, but are fingers, eidole, pointing to the good action. The temptation is to mistake the eidol (for example, keeping

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the dietary laws) rather than the action toward one’s neighbor (“You shall love your neighbor as yourself,” Lev 19:18) for the good.

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Christianity Christianity is even more complex than Judaism, so doubtless whatever I lift up about it, its counterpart or even contradiction can be found. Think of these reflections as broad insights, each with a wide range of variations. The greatest strength of Christianity clearly is Rabbi Yeshua ha Notzri, also known as Jesus the Christ, Messiah. His appeal as an awesomely admirable person—as found in the Gospels: that is, as a wisdom teacher who reaches out to the oppressed, including women, children, the sick, the poor, and the ignorant—stretches far beyond the two and a half billion Christians in the world. He is, as the Gospels claim, a “light of the world,” whether one believes that in some way or another he is vere Deus et vere homo or not. He is, as in the title of an older book of mine, Yeshua: A Model for Moderns.102 On the shadow side, an oversharp focus on the abstract, divine side, the Christ, puts Yeshua more and more out of reach of moderns. Another great attraction of Christianity is its effulgent use of both the senses and the intellect. Orthodox and Catholic Christianity, as well as “High Church” versions of Protestantism, have regaled the world for two millennia with sacred art, architecture, and music that are stunning in their beauty and that support and reflect the spiritual, mystical dimension of our humanity. Christianity vigorously embraced the highly developed Greco-Roman culture within which it incubated in its early centuries, producing outstanding thinkers who adorned Christian history from the first century onward. One cannot name one without remembering scores and hundreds: Tertullian (160– 225), Cyprian (201–258), Origen (184–254), Gregory of Nazianzus (329–390), Gregory of Nyssa (335–395), Basil (329–379), Augustine, Pelagius, Abelard (1079–1142), Aquinas, Bonaventure (1221–1274), Luther, Ignatius, Schleiermacher, Newman, Barth, Karl Rahner (1904–1984), and Hans Küng, to name a few. But, there is the danger, being subject to what Lord Acton so aptly described: “Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” That is, having fanned the flame of learning during the Dark Ages, the hierarchical church too frequently succumbs to the temptation of power and seeks to drown its own child, the intellect.

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Islam One finds light in the very name “Islam.” Since the Arabic term islam comes from the Semitic root s-l-m, total nonexperts such as myself can immediately see that it is fundamentally connected to the Arabic salam and the Hebrew shalom, “peace.” The very foundation of Islam, then, is to bring peace between humans and God and among humans, which is accomplished first by the struggle (Arabic: jihad) within each person to carry out the tawrat (Arabic for the biblical Hebrew torah, “teaching”) of God found in the previous prophets, Moses and Jesus—and finally in Muhammed. This “greater” jihad is found in the Qur’an, which also speaks of a “lesser” jihad, an outward struggle against those who would restrict the practice of one’s religion, Islam. It is here that the potential dark side also too often appears. As with all institutions made up of humans, religious and secular, the siren call of power often easily leads many astray, covering up, sometimes even to themselves, their Nietzshean Wille zur Macht (lust for power), with unctuous religious motivations.

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Hinduism It is a strength in Hinduism that it has a clear vision of what life is about. It sees the world as a place where living selves (Sanskrit: atman, “breath”) rise up from lower forms of life through a series of reincarnations to return eventually to Brahman, Being Itself, whence it came. Thus, the ultimate goal is comparable to that of the Abrahamic religions —union with “God.” What is significantly different, however, is that one is not able to purify oneself, one’s atman, in one go-around; hence, depending on one’s moral merit, karma, one must pass through the recycling, the samsara, of birth-life-death-rebirth time and again until one can break the cycle through samadhi, enlightenment, and attain moksha, “release,” thereby uniting eternally with Brahman in bliss. The hierarchy of life does not cease, however, when it reaches human life, but it continues in ways that become very dark indeed. Every person is born—according to his or her previous merit, karma—into one of four major varnas (customarily given the Portuguese name, castes), or a fifth category, outcaste, and within each varna in one of a vast number of jati, that is, subcastes, such as trades. The darkness arises in that one can never in this lifetime rise above one’s jati or varna. Thus, if one is born into a family of street sweepers, one is expected to stay there for life. Human rights and democracy, then, are in total contradiction.

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Buddhism Buddhism (buddha, Sanskrit: “enlightened”) sheds a great deal of calm light on the way to live. It flows from Siddharta Gautama the Buddha’s Four Noble Truths: First, all life is dukkha, “suffering.” At first this seems counterintuitive in that at times life is pleasurable. However, Siddharta also points out that all reality is anicca, “changing, fleeting.” This is confirmed by the modern sense of history and evolution—by Modernity itself. The Second Noble Truth is that dukkha is caused by tanha, “grasping.” Now it is clear that if one tries to tanha (“grab and hold on to”) that which is anicca (“fleeting”)—like trying to grab and hold back with ones fingers the water of a flowing stream—the result is dukkha, perhaps best translated as “frustration.” The Third Noble Truth is to cease trying to tanha the anicca (because you cannot), thereby eliminating the subsequent dukkha. Having grasped the first three insights, it is now clear how to eliminate dukkha and attain sukkha (“joy”), but to make over this abstract understanding into the actual way we live (that is, the way we think, feel, and act) is what the last Noble Truth is about—the Eightfold Path: right thinking, right speaking, right work, and so on. Then, here comes the possible dark side. Having been a young adult during the sixties, I can hear Buddhism sound a bit like our “go with the flow” mood. But, again, there’s the rub. The temptation to passivism and complacency is seductive. Just “hang loose,” and things will work themselves out. The problem is that they often do not. You have to work at becoming a virtuous person.

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Daoism As with all other religions, Daoism (dao, Chinese: “way”) has many areas of light, but surely the one just mentioned, the “go with the flow” approach, is “copyrighted” in its “just follow the dao of the universe” by wu-wei, nonaction. Sometimes the idea is expressed as wei-wu-wei, “action by nonaction.” In many ways Daoism was and is the very opposite of Confucianism, which Daoism criticized vigorously for setting up so many rules and customs and stifling life. It surely makes sense to observe carefully to learn the rhythm of something before trying to utilize it. Otherwise, you may easily find yourself working against yourself. Again, there is the potential for darkness to creep in with an overstress on laissez faire, which can result in destruction rather than construction, vice rather than virtue—which, as said above, requires constant work.

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Confucianism The strength of Confucianism is that its goal, and the goal of human life, is for a man [sic] to become a shunzi, a “fuller person.” An even more universal Confucian way of describing the purpose of life is to become a Ren, a “human being.” (Ren is also variously translated as a “humane person” and a “loving person.”) In Chinese, the character on the left is a slightly distorted version (because it is written within a compound character) of a person walking, and the character on the right is “two,” implying that one becomes human only by interacting with other humans. “Fan Chi asked about humanness [Ren]. The Master [Confucius] said it is loving people. Fan Chi asked about wisdom. The Master said it is knowing people” (Analects 12:22). Accordingly, Confucius expressed the Golden Rule several times: “What you do not want done to yourself, do not do to others” (Analects 15:24). A corresponding darker side of Confucianism comes in the answer to the question, how does one expand the innate capacity of Ren to become the fully developed shunzi? One must follow the proper rituals, the Li, which in dialogic fashion both shape the inner person and give external expression of the inner person, all under the tien ming (the “mandate,” ming; of “heaven,” tien). In Confucius’s time T’ien still had a personal quality, but increasingly it became impersonal. The darkness arises in the strict hierarchical structure of the li, trapping persons by birth, rather than unleashing their native potentialities. This subordination was greatest for the largest “inferior” class of persons in the world: women. To be sure, this subordination was matched by Judaism103 and Christianity104—and more than matched by Hinduism and its caste system.

101. Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature, Kindle Locations 506–10. 102. Swidler, Yeshua. 103. See Swidler, Women in Judaism. 104. See Swidler, Biblical Affirmations of Woman; and Swidler, Jesus Was a Feminist.

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Conclusion Dear readers, I want to thank you for looking over my shoulder while I tried to write as clearly as I could my present thoughts as a reluctant believer and, in my particular case, a Reluctant Christian—that is, as a follower of Yeshua of Nazareth—what I am persuaded is the “explanation of the ultimate meaning of life and how to live accordingly.” I tried to bring in examples from religious traditions other than Christianity and Judaism. Since I not only know such examples best, and because I am writing in English, however, I also convinced myself that the majority of potential readers would also most likely be most familiar with Christianity and Judaism. Likewise, I have attempted to reflect and write in a way that is as honest as possible to my current modern way of seeing and acting in the world, which of course cannot help but be foundationally shaped by my being brought up in the Catholic Christian tradition—and an American born in 1929, who lived through the Great Depression, World War II, and the Cold War. Knowing that you were there has helped me be as forthright as I can and as sensemaking as possible. In that regard, I would hope that I might be as guilty of the same accusation as my longtime friend Hans Küng was when Cardinal Hermann Volk of Mainz accused him concerning his book, On Being a Christian: “For me your book is too plausible!”105 I have outlined my understanding of the four central characteristics of Modernity: freedom, reason, history, and dialogue, and then asked the question: How can I, and others like me, who live in this mental world of Modernity, at the same time be a religious believer—in my particular case, be a follower of Christianity, which was formed in premodern times? As you saw, I am persuaded that there is much wisdom in the great religious traditions of the world because they have addressed the fundamental human questions: Does life have meaning? If so, what is it? How do we know? How should we act? Is there life after life? These are questions that ooze out of us—as they did from Carmel: Wer dann hat die Regenwürme gemacht?—and the religions offer their wisdom of the ages in trying to deal with them. They are there for our use, in whole or in part, but always in dialogue. As long as I am within email reach, I invite you to dialogue with me on these matters ([email protected]), for I know that I will carry them with me until the grave—and who knows beyond that!

105. Swidler, Küng in Conflict, 277; italics original.

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Bibliography Abe, Masso. “A Dynamic Unity in Religious Pluralism: A Proposal from the Buddhist Point of View.” In The Experience of Religious Diversity, edited by John Hick and Hasan Askari, 163–90. Avebury Series in Philosophy. Aldershot, UK: Gower, 1985. Allport, Gordon W. The Individual and His Religion: A Psychological Interpretation. New York: Macmillan, 1950. Barrow, John D., and Frank J. Tipler. The Anthropic Cosmological Principle. Oxford: Clarendon, 1986. Börner, Gerhard. “Blick ins Unendliche—Vom Urknall zum Weltall.” National Geographic Deutschland, December 2003. http://www.nationalgeographic.de/reportagen/topthemen/2003/blick-ins-unendliche-vomurknall-zum-weltall/. Bratsiotis, P. “Das Menschenverständnis in der griechisch-orthodoxen Kirche.” Theologische Zeitschrift (1950) 376–81. Bresciani, Umberto. Reinventing Confucianism: The New Confucian Movement. Variétés sinologiques 90. Taipei: Ricci Institute for Chinese Studies, 2001. Broad, C. D. Five Types of Ethical Theory. International Library of Psychology, Philos-ophy, and Scientific Method. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1930. Brown, Cynthia Stokes. Big History: From the Big Bang to the Present. Rev. ed. New York: New Press, 2012. Chon, Pal Khn, ed. The Scripture of Won Buddhism. Rev. ed. Iri, Korea: Won Kwang, 1988. Das, Bhagavan, comp. The Essential Unity of All Religions. Benares: Kashi Vidyapitha, 1939. Effendi, Shoghi, trans. Gleanings from the Writings of Baha’u’llah. 2nd ed. Wilmette, IL: Baha’i Publishing Trust, 1976. Fang, Thomé H. Zhexue san hui (Three Types of Philosophical Wisdom). Taipei: n.p. 1970. Forman, Maurice Buxton, ed. The Letters of John Keats. 4th ed. London: Oxford Uni-versity Press, 1952. Fowler, James W. Stages of Faith: The Psychology of Human Development and the Quest for Meaning. New York: Harper & Row, 1981. Galling, Kurt, ed. Die Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart: Handwörterbuch für Theologie und Religionswissenschaft. 7 vols. 3rd ed. Tübingen: Mohr/Siebeck, 1957–65. Global Dialogue Institute. The Technology of Deep-Dialogue,Critical-Thinking. Phila-delphia: Global Dialogue Institute, 2000. Haight, Roger. Jesus, Symbol of God. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1999. Hein, N. J. “Goldene Regel.” In Die Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart, edited by Kurt Galling, 1:1688. 3rd ed. Tübingen: Mohr/Siebeck, 1958. Hick, John. Evil and the God of Love. New York: Harper & Row, 1966. ———. The Fifth Dimension: An Exploration of the Spiritual Realm. Oxford: Oneworld, 2004; orig., 1999. ———. Who or What Is God? And Other Investigations. New York: Seabury, 2009. Hick, John, and Hasan Askari, eds. The Experience of Religious Diversity. Aldershot, UK: Gower, 1985. Hoche, H.-U. “Die Goldene Regel: Neue Aspekte eines alten Moralprinzips.” Zeitschrift für philosophische Forschung 32 (1978) 355–75. Huntington, Samuel P. “The Clash of Civilizations.” Foreign Affairs 72 (July 1993) 22–49. ———. The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996. International Theological Commission of the Vatican. À la recherche d’une éthique universelle: Nouveau regard sur la loi naturelle. Documents des églises. Paris: Cerf, 2009. Jaspers, Karl. The Origin and Goal of History. Translated by Michael Bullock. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953. [German orig.: Vom Ursprung und Ziel der Geschichte. Zurich: Artemis, 1949.] Jens, Walter, ed. Um Nichts als die Wahrheit. Munich: Piper, 1978. Kant, Immanuel. Critik der practischen Vernunft. Riga: Hartknach, 1791. ———. Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals. Translated by Herbert James Paton. New York: Harper, 1956. Kittel, Gerhard, and Gerhard Friedrich, eds. Theological Dictionary of the New Testa-ment. 10 vols. Translated

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by Geoffrey W. Bromiley. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1964–76. Küng, Hans. Der Anfang aller Dinge: Naturwissenschaft und Religion. Munich: Piper, 2005. ———. The Beginning of All Things: Science and Religion. Translated by John Bowden. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans: 2007. ———. Does God Exist? An Answer for Today. Translated by Edward Quinn. 1978. Reprinted, Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2006. ———. Global Responsibility: In Search of a New World Ethic. Translated by John Bowden. New York: Crossroad, 1991. ———. On Being a Christian. Translated by Edward Quinn. New York: Doubleday, 1977. ———. Projekt Weltethos. Munich: Piper, 1990. Küng, Hans, and Julia Ching. Christentum und Chinesische Religion. Munich: Piper, 1988. ———. Christianity and Chinese Religions. New York: Doubleday, 1989. Küng, Hans, and Karl-Josef Kuschel, eds. Erklärung zum Weltethos: Die Declaration des Parliaments der Weltreligionen. Munich: Piper, 1993. ———. A Global Ethic: The Declaration of the Parliament of the World’s Religions. Trans-lated by John Bowden. New York: Continuum, 1993. Lakeland, Paul. Postmodernity: Christian Identity in a Fragmented Age. Guides to Theological Inquiry. Minneapolis: Fortress, 1997. Liu, Shu-hsien et al., eds. Confucianism in Dialogue Today: West, Christianity, and Judaism. Philadelphia: Ecumenical Press, 2005. Lonergan, Bernard. Method in Theology. New York: Herder & Herder, 1972. Pascal, Blaise. Pensees in Oeuvres de Blaise Pascal. Vol. 2. Nouvelle ed. Paris: Chez Lefevre Libraire, 1819. Pinker, Steven. The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. New York: Penguin, 2011. Porter, Eduardo. “The Vatican and Globalization: Tinkering with Sin.” New York Times, 7 April 2008, Opinion Page. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/07/opinion/ 07mon4.html. Rose, Kenneth. Pluralism: The Future of Religion. New York: Bloomsbury, 2013. Schillebeeckx, Edward. Jesus: An Experiment in Christology. Translated by Hubert Hos-kins. New York: Seabury, 1979. Schlesinger, Arthur M. Jr. “Folly’s Antidote.” New York Times, 1 January 2007. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/01/opinion/01schlesinger.html. Schmidt, K. O. Das Geheimnis der Goldenen Regel: Geist und Geld, der Schlüssel zum Wohlstand. Munich: DreiEichen, 1972. Schüssler Fiorenza, Elisabeth. In Memory of Her: A Feminist Theological Reconstruction of Christian Origins. New York: Crossroad, 1983. Sigal, Phillip. The Halakhah of Jesus of Nazareth according to the Gospel of Matthew. Studies in Biblical Literature 18. Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2007. Smith, Jonathan Z., ed. The HarperCollins Dictionary of Religion. San Francisco: Harper-SanFrancisco, 1995. Sorokin, Pitirim. The Crisis of Our Age. New York: Dutton, 1941. 2nd ed., 1992. Spengler, Oswald. Der Untergang des Abendlandes: Umrisse einer Morphologie der Weltgeschichte. 2 vols. Munich: Beck, 1922–23. Swidler, Leonard. After the Absolute: The Dialogical Future of Religious Reflection. Min-neapolis: Fortress, 1990. ———. Aufklärung Catholicism, 1780–1850. AAR Studies in Religion 17. Missoula, MT: Scholars, 1978. ———. Biblical Affirmations of Woman. Philadelphia: Westminster, 1979. ———. Club Modernity: For Reluctant Christians. Philadelphia: Ecumenical, 2011. ———, ed. For All Life: Toward a Universal Declaration of a Global Ethic; An Inter-religious Dialogue. Ashland, OR: White Cloud, 1999. ———. Freedom in the Church. Themes for Today. Dayton, OH: Pflaum, 1969. ———, ed. “A Global Ethic.” Special issue, Journal of Ecumenical Studies 42 (Summer 2007). ———. International Codes of Business Ethics and Other Resources for Business Ethics. 1997. http://astro.temple.edu/~swidler/swidlerbooks/codes.htm/. ———. Jesus Was a Feminist: What the Gospels Reveal about His Revolutionary Perspective. Lanham, MD:

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Sheed & Ward, 2007. ———, ed. and trans. Küng in Conflict. Garden City: Doubleday, 1981. ———. Making the Church Our Own: How We Can Reform the Catholic Church from the Ground Up. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007. ———. “Nobody Knows Everything about Anything! The Cosmic Dance of Dialogue.” Journal of Ecumenical Studies 45 (Spring 2010) 175–77. ———. “Reflections at the Scottish Parliament.” Edinburgh, Scotland, March 17, 2009, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nu4ssQHRLP0. ———. Women in Judaism: The Status of Women in Formative Judaism. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow, 1976. ———. Yeshua: A Model for Moderns. Kansas City, MO: Sheed & Ward, 1988. 2nd exp. ed., 1993. Swidler, Leonard J., and Hans Küng. “Toward a ‘Universal Declaration of Global Ethos.’” Journal of Ecumenical Studies 28 (1991) 123–25; Süddeutsche Zeitung, November 16–17, 1991. Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre. The Future of Man. Translated by Norman Denny. New York: Harper & Row, 1964. ———. The Phenomenon of Man. Translated by Bernard Wall. New York: Harper & Row, 1959. Thomas Aquinas, Saint. Summa Theologiae, cum textu rescensione Leonina. Cura et studio Petri Caramello. Rome: Marietti, 1950. Wilson, Andrew, ed. World Scripture: A Comparative Anthology of Sacred Texts. New York: Paragon, 1991.

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Suggested Reading The following is an extremely brief list of introductory books into the general area of religions and the six very major religions of the world. They are a tiny tip of a vast library of learned and popular volumes dealing with religion. Today through the Internet that vast library is literally at the fingertips of everyone who has access to the web. I have tried here merely to point inquiring readers in what I think are promising initial directions. Happy reading! ([email protected])

General Küng, Hans. The Beginning of All Things: Science and Religion. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2007. ———. Does God Exist? An Answer for Today. Translated by Edward Quinn. 1980. Reprinted, Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2006. Swidler, Leonard J., ed. For All Life: Toward a Universal Declaration of a Global Ethic. An Interreligious Dialogue. Ashland, OR: White Cloud, 1999. ———, et al. Trialogue: Jews, Christians, and Muslims in Dialogue. New London, CT: Twenty-Third Publications, 2007. Swidler, Leonard, and Paul Mojzes. The Study of Religion in an Age of Global Dialogue. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2000.

Hinduism Radhakrishnan, S. The Hindu View of Life. Upton Lectures, in 1926, Manchester College, Oxford. 1927. Reprinted, London: Unwin, 1980. http://isites.harvard.edu/fs/docs/icb.topic1172135.files/13047494-A-HinduView-of-Life-Dr-S-Radhakrishnan.pdf/. Doniger, Wendy. The Hindus: An Alternative History. New York: Penguin, 2009.

Chinese Religion Bresciani, Umberto. Reinventing Confucianism: The New Confucian Movement. Variétés Sinologiques n.s. 90. Taipei: Taipei Ricci Institute, 2001. Ching, Julia. Chinese Religions. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1993.

Buddhism Fernando, Antony, with Leonard Swidler. Buddhism Made Plain: An Introduction for Christians and Jews. Rev. ed. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1985. Yagi, Seiichi, and Leonard Swidler. A Bridge to Buddhist–Christian Dialogue. New York: Paulist, 1990.

Judaism Firestone, Reuven. Children of Abraham: An Introduction to Judaism for Muslims. Hoboken, NJ: Ktav, 2001. Heschel Abraham. God in Search of Man: A Philosophy of Judaism. New York: Farrar, Straus & Cudahy, 1955.

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Christianity Küng, Hans. On Being a Christian. Translated by Edward Quinn. New York: Doubleday, 1976. Swidler, Leonard J. Club Modernity: For Reluctant Christians. Philadelphia: Ecumenical, 2010.

Islam Rahman, Fazlur. Islam. 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979. Swidler, Leonard, ed. Muslims in Dialogue: The Evolution of a Dialogue over a Generation. Religions in Dialogue 3. Lewiston, NY: Mellen, 1992.

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Index Adam, 28–32, 71–72 Allport, Gordon W., 11 American Academy of Religion, 94 Analysis, 16, 24, 32–33, 38, 42, 1. 57, 84, 98, 115–28 Aquinas, Thomas. See Thomas Aquinas Arkoun, Muhammed, 93 Aristotle, 22, 77, 82, 107, 109, 123 Aufklärung, 38, 39, 41, 43, 89 Augustine, 21, 27–28, 35, 83, 102, 105, 117, 119, 126 Axial Period, 10, 24, 53 Baha’i, 90, 95, 124 Barth, Karl, 27, 48, 127 Bauer, Ferdinand Christian, 42 Bible, 14, 24–26, 31, 42, 45, 48, 60–61, 71, 99–105, 125 Bohr, Niels, 59 Bosnia, 21, 22 Brahman, 66, 99, 107, 127 Bresciani, Umberto, 107–8 Broad, C. D., 82 Buddhism, 5, 20, 25, 33, 46, 53, 61, 71, 86, 88, 90, 93, 95, 106–13, 123–24, 128 Calvin, John, 21, 27, 117 Camus, Albert, 59 Catholic, 3–5, 10, 23–24, 35–39, 42–43, 50–51, 61, 68, 71, 77–78, 81, 82, 84–86, 93, 95, 126, 130 Ching, Julia, 93, 108 Christian, 4–5, 9, 10, 18, 20–21, 23–28, 32–38, 42–43, 45, 48, 52, 60–61, 63–64, 68–69, 71, 74–75, 77–81, 84– 86, 89, 94, 101–6, 110, 113–14, 117, 121, 124–26, 129–30 Churchill, Winston, 46 Clement of Alexandria, 28 Clinton, Hilary Rodham, 84, 121 Cobb, John B., 93 Code, 7, 12, 32, 75, 122 Competitive-Cooperation, 111, 119, 121–22 Confucianism, 5, 24, 60–61, 68 Consequential Ethics, 81, 83–84 Constantinople, 35, 104 Constitution, 23 Copernicus, Nicolaus, 38, 98, 138 Cosmic, 33, 35, 54, 56, 74, 109, 111, 115 Creed, 13, 72, 75, 121 Critical-Thinking, 1, 24–25, 37, 39–40, 58, 98, 111–12, 115, 117–23 Cult, 7, 75–76 Daoism, 88, 106–11, 113–14, 124, 128–29 Darwin, Charles, 47–48 Deep-Dialogue, 97–99, 101, 103, 105, 107, 108–17, 119–22 Deontology, 82 Depression, 4, 130

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Descartes, René, 38 Dialogue, 1, 4–5, 14–20, 25, 32, 47, 49–53–58, 65–66, 86–87, 91, 94–99, 101, 103, 105, 107, 109–25, 130–31 Drey, Johann Sebastian, 43 Duquesne University, 5 Duran, Khalid, 93, 95 Einstein, Albert, 54, 58–59 Emotional-Intelligence, 111, 118–22 Enlightenment, 23–24, 38–41, 53, 124–25, 127 Epistemology, 39, 44, 50, 77 Erikson, Erik, 15–16 Essenes, 34 Ethics, 5, 7, 17, 52, 55, 75–76, 78–87, 91–96, 105, 114, 116, 120–23, 125 Eucharist, 77 Eva/e, 9, 29 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 42 Fowler, James, 11, 15–17 Franklin, Benjamin, 38 French, 23, 38–39, 46, 48, 50, 71 Freedom, 1, 10, 19–24, 36–37, 64–65, 91, 119, 120, 130 Fries, Heinrich, 93 Gadamer, Hans Georg, 14, 20 46, 50, 56 Galileo, 38 Gangadean, Ashok, 98 Gautama, Siddhartha, 88, 106, 109, 123, 128 Geffré, Claude, 93 Genesis, 25–33, 44–45, 47, 64, 92, 98 German, 1, 5, 13, 26, 38–43, 46, 55, 68, 71, 87, 95 Gilbert, Arthur, 5 Girotti, Gianfranco, 85–86 Global Ethic, 5, 86–87, 91–96, 114 Golden Rule, 18, 85, 87–92, 116, 124, 126, 129 Gratian, 82 Green Bay, 3–4 Greenberg, Irving, 93 Gregory XVI, Pope, 23, 36–37 Gregory Nanzianus, 28, 126 Gregory Nyssa, 126 Greek, 1, 5, 12 20, 22–35, 40–41, 48–49, 53, 55, 58, 60, 69, 71–73, 77, 79–80, 82, 87–88, 93, 102–5, 109, 111, 113–15, 118, 126 Greinacher, Norbert, 93, Grundmann, Walter, 68 Haight, Roger, 36, 56, 68 Hamman, Johann Georg, 47 Hassan, Riffat, 93 Hefele, Karl Josef, 43 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm, 42–43, 104–5 Heidegger, Martin, 59 Heisenberg, Werner, 59 Herder, Gottfried, von, 41

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Hermeneutics, 14, 43–46, 56, 113 Herodotus, 41, 88 Hick, John, 27–29, 33, 71, 74, 93, 95 Hinduism, 24, 25, 71, 88, 99–100, 106, 109, 111, 113, 124, 127–28, 129 Hirscher, Johann Baptist, 43 History, 1, 5, 8, 10, 13–15, 19–20, 23–25, 34, 38, 41–47, 51–57, 64–65, 68, 71, 78, 84, 88, 92, 100–102, 105, 107, 113, 124, 126, 128, 130 Horwitz, Rivka, 93 Hunold, Gerfried, 93 Huntington, Samuel, 52–53 Ignatius of Loyola, 79, 127 Ikhnaton, 100 Iraq, 21, 31 Irenaeus, 28 Israel, 34, 53, 69, 71, 76, 88, 100–101 Islam, 5, 20, 24–25, 33, 61, 87, 89, 100–102, 110, 121, 124–25, 127 Instituto Italianl degli Studii Filosofici, 94 International Scholars Annual Trialogue, 94 Jainism, 71, 88, 124 Jaspers, Karl, 10, 53 Jefferson, Thomas, 38 Jesus, 33, 35–36, 56, 61, 68, 77, 82, 84–85, 101, 103, 126–27, 129 Jew 3–4, 7, 24–26, 32–35, 45–46, 60–61, 68, 71, 76, 81, 83–84, 89, 93–95, 101–5, 124–26 Journal of Ecumenical Studies, 5, 92, 95 Judaism, 5, 18, 20, 25, 33–34, 60–61, 71, 76–78, 85, 89, 100–102, 110, 113, 121, 124–26, 129–30 Julian of Norwich, 33 Kaku, Ryuzaburo, 121–122, 134 Kant, Immanuel, 38–39, 89–90 Keats, John, 29 Khoury, Adel, 93 Kogan, Michael, 95 Kohlberg, Lawrence, 15–16 Kuschel, Karl-Josef, 93–94 Küng, Hans, 36, 63, 73, 92–95 Kung fu, 79 Lähnemann, Johannes, 93 Lakeland, Paul, 56 Lapide, Pinchas, 93 Latin, 1, 4, 8, 13, 22–23, 27–29, 36, 40, 55, 57, 59, 64, 67–68, 70–71, 76, 78–80, 82, 99, 103, 115, 117, 127, 120 Law of Manu, 24 Lee, Chung Ok, 95 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 39, 42 Liu, Shu-hsien, 95, 107 Locke, John, 38 Logos, 53, 57–59, 113–2–115 Lonergan, Bernard, 14, 46, 50, 120 Liturgy, 78 Luther, Martin, 14, 21, 27, 117, 127

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Madison, James, 4, 38 Marx, Karl, 5, 8, 42–43, 86, 108 Maslow, Abraham, 117 Mekilta, 85 Methodius, 28 Mieth, Dietmar, 93 Miracles, 67–69 Mitra, Kana, 95 Modernity, 1, 8, 19–20, 23, 48–49, 58–59, 61, 63–65, 67–69, 72–73, 80, 102, 110, 124–26, 128, 130 Möhler, Johann Adam, 43 Mojzes, Paul, 93 Moksha, 70, 127 Moltmann, Jürgen, 193 Momen, Moojan, 95 Monotheism, 27, 98, 100 Munich, 5 Mutombo, NkuluN’Sengha, 95 Nagarjuna, 107 Natural Law, 15, 64, 67, 82, 84 Newton, Isaac, 38, 58 Nicaea, 35, 45, 104 Nirvana, 70–71 Nothingness, 123 Nuremberg, 21 Obama, Barack, 121 Orthodox, 4–5, 28, 37–38, 71, 102, 142 Osman, Fathi, 93 Paine, Thomas, 38 Panikkar, Raimon, 93 Parliament of the World Religions, 56, 93–95 Pascal, Blaise, 55, 74 Pelagius, 27, 127 Pharisees, 34, 71–72, 103 Philadelphia, 23, 49, 84, 92 Piaget, Jean, 15–16 Pittakos, 87 Planck, Max, 59 Plato, 22, 77 Polish, Daniel, 93 Polytheism, 98–99, 101 Pope, 10, 14, 23, 36–38 Postmodern, 1, 56, 58, 84 Presuppositions, 116–18 Ranke, Leopold von, 41–42 Rational, 19, 24, 27–28, 33, 35, 38, 51, 55, 59, 65, 73, 82, 87, 89, 112, 117, 120 Ratzinger, Josef, 5 Reconstructionism, 5, 126 Reimarus, Hermann Samuel, 42 Reincarnation, 39, 70–71, 127

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Religion, 1, 3–25, 33, 37, 40–44, 49–53, 55–56, 58–61, 64–65, 67, 70–71, 75–78, 80, 87, 89–94, 98, 101, 103, 106–9, 111, 113, 123–25, 127–29, 131 Ricoeur, Paul, 9, 13–14, 46, 50, 56 Russia, 3–4 Rwanda, 21, 52 Sacrament, 77–78 Sadducees, 34–72 Samsara, 70–71, 127 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 59 Schleiermacher, Friedrich, 42, 127 Schlesinger, Arthur M. Jr., 46–47 Schelling, Friedrich, 42 Scottish Parliament, 120 Shafer, Ingrid, 95 Shahada, 101 Shankara, 99 Sigal, Philip, 77, 85 Smith, Adam, 38 Sociology, 13, 46, 51, 93 Sorokin, Pitirim A., 51–52 Spengler, Oswald, 51–52 Spinoza, Baruch, 76 Spiritual/ity, 1, 7, 17–18, 28, 34, 48, 52–53, 55, 64–65, 72, 74, 77–78, 80, 112, 126 Stoicism, 82 Strauss, David Friedrich, 42 Sufism, 101, 103 Swidler, Arlene Anderson, 5, 72, 92 Swidler, Carmel, 5, 9, 26, 40, 59, 76, 97, 124, 131 Swidler, Eva, 9 Swidler, Jack, 5, 9 Swidler, Leonard J., 11, 36, 39, 45, 57, 69, 92–95, 100, 114, 120, 122, 126, 129–30 Swidler-Notte, Willow, 32 Sundermeier, Theo, 93 Synthesis, 57, 84, 105–6, 110, 115 Tawhid, 101 Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre, 48–49, 73 Thales, 87 Thomas Aquinas, 14, 22, 62, 77, 82, 123, 127 Tobit, 89 Transcendent, 7–8, 12, 14, 18, 20, 53, 65, 75–76, 78, 102, 108–10, 121, 123 Tu, Wei-ming, 93 Tübingen, 5, 42–43, 92, 96 Ukraine, 4 Una Sancta, 5 UNESCO, 94 Ultimate Reality, 62, 75, 97–114, United Nations, 52, 91, 93–94, 96 Utilitarianism, 83–84 Vatican II, 10, 24, 37, 39, 124

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Victoria, Brian A., 95 Virtue, 73, 83, 85, 106, 109, 123, 129 Wessenberg, Ignaz von, 39, 43 Wilde, Oscar, 46 World Conference on Religion and Peace, 94 Yahweh, 30, 100, 101, 103, 125 Yeshua, 33–35, 45, 68–72, 76–77, 79, 82, 85, 89, 101, 103, 106, 117, 126, 130 Yorubism, 89 Zealot, 34 Zeno, 82 Zhao, Fusan 95 Zoroaster, 87, 102

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Index Title Page Chapter 1: Invitation Chapter 2: Personal Self-Disclosure Chapter 3: The Meaning of Religion Religion and/or Spirituality Popular and Reflective Religion Mature and Immature Religion Excursus: Our Understanding of How We Understand Mature Religion’s Development

Chapter 4: Modernity

2 6 8 12 13 15 18 20 23

26

Modernity Is the Atmosphere in Which We Live Freedom at the Core of Being Human Critical-Thinking Reason, the Arbiter of Truth Case Study 1: A Critical-Thinking Reading of the Biblical Creation Story Case Study 2: A Rabbi Becomes the Messiah,Who Becomes the Christ, Who Becomes God The Expansion of Critical-Thinking Reason The Limits of Critical-Thinking Reason History Transforms All Human Reality Dialogue: Radicalizing All Thought A Radically New Age The “Cosmic Dance of Dialogue” Postmodernity? A Place for Religion in Modernity? Authentic Religion: Within Me and between Me and Thee The Existence of God Theology from Below More to Reality Than Meets the Eye?

Chapter 5: Reflections on Problematics Miracles Reincarnation/Samsara/Moksha/Nirvana or Resurrection/Immortality of Soul/Eternal Life—Or? 164

27 29 33 35 43 47 49 51 59 62 64 66 68 70 72 74 75

78 80 83

Chapter 6: Purposes of Religion—The Future Exterior Religious Life—Ritual Interior Life Ethical Principles and Practices A Global Ethic

88 89 93 95 100

Chapter 7: The Search for Ultimate Reality: Deep-Dialogue Polytheism: The Many Hinduism: The One and the Many Judaism/Islam: The One Zoroastrianism/Manicheism/Yin-Yang: The Two Christianity: The One and the Three Buddhism: Ultimate Nothing Confucianism/Daoism: Ultimate Harmony Summary of Insights from World Religions The Move to Deep-Dialogue Deep-Dialogue and Ultimate Reality Critical-Thinking

Chapter 8: Light and Dark Sides of Major Religions Judaism Christianity Islam Hinduism Buddhism Daoism Confucianism

111 114 115 116 118 119 122 123 125 126 128 130

139 142 144 145 146 147 148 149

Chapter 9: Conclusion Bibliography Suggested Reading

150 153 156

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