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- Herausgeber: IVP Academic
- Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
- Serie: Introductions in Seven Sentences
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023
Understanding the beliefs and practices of other faiths is essential not just to the task of interreligious dialogue, but also to grasping one's own faith. In this brief volume in IVP Academic's Introductions in Seven Sentences, philosopher Douglas Groothuis creatively uses a single sentence representing each of several world religions as a way to open readers to their depth and complexity, including: - Atheism: "God Is Dead." - Judaism: "I Am Who I Am." - Hinduism: "You Are That." - Buddhism: "Life Is Suffering." - Daoism: "The Dao That Can Be Spoken Is Not the Eternal Dao." - Christianity: "Before Abraham Was, I Am." - Islam: "There Is One God, and Mohammad Is His Prophet."With a sympathetic but not uncritical approach, Groothuis welcomes readers to a vital and global conversation. The accessible primers in the Introductions in Seven Sentences collection act as brief introductions to an academic field, with simple organization: seven key sentences that give readers a birds-eye view of an entire discipline.
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World Religions in Seven Sentences
A SMALL INTRODUCTION TO A VAST TOPIC
To James W. Sire,who taught me to think in terms of worldviews.
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
My thanks to my editor at IVP Academic, David McNutt, for his patience and insights on this manuscript and to my wife, Kathleen, for her support and encouragement in my ministry. Although he did not write primarily on comparative religion, the late James Sire has helped me greatly in approaching religions in terms of their worldview.
Introduction
Just Seven Sentences?
Although I have written a small book on a vast topic using the trope of “seven sentences” called Philosophy in Seven Sentences, I think it is still fitting to defend and explain this idiosyncratic method.1 One defense is that my publisher has released a few other titles using the same sevenfold strategy for other disciplines and—I hope in good judgment—gave me a contract for this book. But there is more.
First, we need to know something—beyond clichés—about religion and the major world religions to be good neighbors. Steve Prothero underscored this a few years ago in Religious Literacy, which—in a more curmudgeonly fashion—could have been called Religious Illiteracy.2 He rightly claimed that Americans are more religious than Europeans but know less about religion than their generally irreligious counterparts across the pond. His book admirably addressed and endeavored to correct this unfortunate American ignorance. I hope this book will do so as well.
Second, while one can find vast tomes on particular religions and on how religions differ and relate to each other, not all of us have the wherewithal to read such lengthy volumes. Thus, we find a need for a responsible and concise introduction to the major world religions. While the “for dummies” approach will be resisted, this book does not assume much previous knowledge of world religions, nor will it be encumbered by weighty academic prose or scholarly apparatus. However, the footnotes will document key claims and can be used to lead readers into deeper waters without fear of drowning.
The seven sentences idea uses particular and paradigmatic statements from the world religions—and one from the irreligious Nietzsche, representing atheism—as windows into their worldviews and ways of life. My angle is more from the philosophy of religion than from the psychology or history of religion, but these elements—and others—will come into view. The sentence approach is meant not as a reduction of any religion to a mere statement but rather as an entry point of intellectual exploration. Nor would adherents of the religions I address necessarily choose my statements as the best representations of their religions. Part of the challenge—and fun—of these volumes is selecting just one sentence to represent a broad religious or philosophical tradition. I’m sure that some would chose other sentences, but I hope that my selections will be helpful.
Third, since I have taught a course called Religious Pluralism at Denver Seminary since the early 1990s, as well as taught about religions in other settings for even longer, I hope my background and interests are adequate to the task. Moreover, my approach to apologetics—whether in writing or in teaching—has always involved the relationship of Christianity to other religions.3Contrast is the mother of clarity. Notwithstanding, my interest is more than academic since I have had conversations and dialogues with many adherents of religions outside my own. While knowing about religions is necessary for engaging religious people rightly, and especially “religious others,” it is not sufficient for a kind interaction. A “religious other” is a rather impersonal and sociological-sounding phrase for a person—who is made in the image of God—who does not share your religious commitments. However, the religious other is anything but impersonal or abstract.
PLAY FAIR
We ought to adhere to the golden rule taught by Jesus to treat others the way we would want them to treat us (Mt 7:12). Just as a Christian would not want one of another religion, or no religion, to misrepresent Christianity, so too Christians should strive to properly represent other religions and open a listening ear to their adherents. All humility aside, years ago I was delighted when, after a lecture on Buddhism and Christianity, a young man told me that I had given the clearest and fairest description of Buddhism that he had heard. He had been raised a Buddhist. I had gone on to challenge Buddhism in light of Christ’s identity and teaching, but he was still appreciative. That is my aim.
While Christians are justifiably concerned that those in other religions or no religion discover the truth of the gospel and experience the severe goodness of life in Christ, their interactions will include much more than bearing Christian witness, doing apologetics, and evangelism (although those should not be minimized). We should be civil in a religiously pluralistic society. Pluralism, in this sense, does not mean claiming that all religions are equally good or true or that religions can somehow be fit into a larger viewpoint in which they are all deemed equally legitimate as roads to salvation.4 That is an unsupportable philosophical claim, which I will briefly address in another chapter. Here, pluralism is taken in a sociological and political sense, with descriptive and normative elements. First to the descriptive element.
PLURALISM AND RELIGIOUS LIBERTY
The roots and general character of America and Western civilization in general have been Judeo-Christian, with the majority of Americans being or at least identifying as Christian. However, Judaism has contributed not only religious adherents but also contributed much to the political philosophy of the American founding.5 However, given the First Amendment’s brilliant balance of neither establishing any national religion nor prohibiting the free exercise of religion, American commitment to religious liberty—however imperfectly discharged—has created a country in which no religion is prescribed and no religion is proscribed. This, along with liberal legal immigration policies, has led to a nation that is legally friendly to diverse religions.
In many American cities, we find numerous churches across many denominations, as well as religious worship places for Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, Muslims, and others. As sociologists Roger Finke and Rodney Stark have noted, the American political arrangement for religion has led to the flourishing of various religions, all of which must compete with one another for adherents.6 There is no established church. Nor is there the official enforcement of secularism, as was true in the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) and in China today. Religions in America, therefore, must be entrepreneurial to gain followers. Consequently, we face the fact of religious pluralism in America.
Given what I’ve said about the First Amendment, we should likewise value religious pluralism on the political level. This is the normative dimension of pluralism. Although Christians cannot endorse other religions as conduits of salvation, they can affirm the right of all Americans to practice any religion or no religion. That is how the United States as a republic ought to be ordered. Just as we desire religious liberty, so too we should desire it for others. Christianity, properly understood, should be propagated by persuasion, not by coercion or by legal or political pressure of any kind. Jesus bid his followers to disciple the nations by teaching them what Jesus had taught them (Mt 28:18-20). Paul should be the Christian’s example.
Rather, we have renounced secret and shameful ways; we do not use deception, nor do we distort the word of God. On the contrary, by setting forth the truth plainly we commend ourselves to everyone’s conscience in the sight of God. (2 Cor 4:2)
We should wince, pray, and act when we hear of the suppression of any religion in any country, not because we equally value all religion but because we endorse freedom of conscience and the freedom of religion. The very notion of freedom of conscience and religion is traced to Christian roots, which in turn have borne fruit in Western history, and especially in America, as Robert Wilken has persuasively argued in Liberty in the Things of God.7
Not only should we support religious liberty for all as well as aiming for an accurate understanding of other religions, but we should also seek to be civil and even compassionate with religious others. If our fellow students, coworkers, and neighbors are adherents of a religion other than our own, it behooves us to know something about their beliefs and to treat them with civility. You don’t offer a Muslim a glass of wine, for example. Since most Hindus do not eat meat, it is best not to invite them to a barbeque (unless there is a meat substitute available). Love of neighbor demands that we be polite and respectful of anyone’s religion, including how we act at a Jewish funeral, a Hindu wedding, or any number of other events to which we may be welcomed.8
TRUTH IS ONE, RELIGIONS ARE MANY
Nevertheless, while religions are many, truth is one; and all religions cannot be one, given their differing truth claims about the ultimate reality, humanity, morality, spiritual liberation, the afterlife, and more.9 There are many approaches or methods to the study of religion, but mine is self-consciously cognitive and apologetic. I address the central doctrines of each religion (1) in relation to Christianity (to show similarities and differences) and (2) attempt to ascertain how each religion testifies before the bar of truth. You should not be surprised, then, to find my evaluations of each faith after discussing their central tenets. My conviction is that truth is found in the gospel of Jesus Christ, so it will serve as the lens through which I understand other faiths and other claims to the truth. But our first sentence concerns the rejection of all religion and of any sacred aspect of reality. It was uttered by the son of a Lutheran pastor, Friedrich Nietzsche. If Nietzsche is correct, then false could be written over all the subsequent six sentences. To him we now turn.
- one -
Atheism
“God is dead.”
All religion is defeated and refuted if it can be shown that there is no God and no sacred reality. Monotheism affirms that there is one transcendent and personal God who created the world and who deserves worship and obedience on his terms. Other religions demur but affirm a sacred reality that is irreducible to any material state, such as the Buddhist idea of Nirvana, the Hindu concept of Brahman, or the Daoist concept of the Dao. We will evaluate these claims shortly, but our attention is first drawn to the pronouncement of a famous eighteenth-century German atheist, a man who stripped the cosmos of God or any sacred reality or purpose. So opposed was he to Christianity that he penned a book called The Anti-Christ to make it clear. If he is right, all religions are wrong, and we must make our way alone in an uncaring and godless cosmos.
NIETZSCHE’S WORLD WITHOUT GOD
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) was a passionate writer whose literary brilliance and sweeping philosophical judgments have left a deep and wide mark on philosophy and beyond. Walter Kaufmann, who translated and edited The Portable Nietzsche, writes of Nietzsche’s “brilliant epigrams and metaphors, his sparkling polemics and ceaseless stylistic experiments.”1 As a freshman in college, I was dazzled by both the style and the philosophy for a time, and carried around my Portable Nietzsche like an atheist Bible.2
Having received his doctorate without needing to write a dissertation, Nietzsche quickly gained status academically as a philologist and a philosopher.3 However, bad health caused him to leave the classroom, and he spent the rest of his life on a pension as an intellectual nomad, traveling through Europe, looking for healthy climes, and writing his iconoclastic books while chronically ill.
Nietzsche is most known for a bold three-word statement and for a sad twelve-year condition. The condition is insanity, which overtook him in 1884, thus ending his writing. After seeing a horse being beaten on the street, the great advocate of the hypermasculine overman threw his arms around the beast and fell into insanity. His statement, God is dead, was made in his right mind and with a flourish as part of a parable called “The Madman,” from The Gay Science. It must be quoted in full, given the drama and craft of it.
Have you not heard of that madman who lit a lantern in the bright morning hours, ran to the market place, and cried incessantly, “I seek God! I seek God!” As many of those who do not believe in God were standing around just then, he provoked much laughter. Why, did he get lost? said one. Did he lose his way like a child? said another. Or is he hiding? Is he afraid of us? Has he gone on a voyage? or emigrated? Thus they yelled and laughed. The madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with his glances.
“Whither is God” he cried. “I shall tell you. We have killed him—you and I. All of us are his murderers. But how have we done this? How were we able to drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What did we do when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving now? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there any up or down left? Are we not straying as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night and more night coming on all the while? Must not lanterns be lit in the morning? Do we not hear anything yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God? Do we not smell anything yet of God’s decomposition? Gods too decompose. God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we, the murderers of all murderers, comfort ourselves? What was holiest and most powerful of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives. Who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must not we ourselves become gods simply to seem worthy of it? There has never been a greater deed; and whoever will be born after us—for the sake of this deed he will be part of a higher history than all history hitherto.”
Here the madman fell silent and looked again at his listeners; and they too were silent and stared at him in astonishment. At last he threw his lantern on the ground, and it broke and went out. “I come too early,” he said then; “my time has not come yet. This tremendous event is still on its way, still wandering—it has not yet reached the ears of man. Lightning and thunder require time, the light of the stars requires time, deeds require time even after they are done, before they can be seen and heard. This deed is still more distant from them than the most distant stars—and yet they have done it themselves.”
It has been related further that on that same day the madman entered divers churches and there sang his requiem aeternam deo. Led out and called to account, he is said to have replied each time, “What are these churches now if they are not the tombs and sepulchers of God?”4
This episode, taken from The Gay Science, gives no arguments against the existence of God, although we will address three of them below. Rather, it assumes the nonexistence of God and poetically and dramatically draws out the personal and social implications of atheism. God is dead means that (1) there is no God and never has been; (2) the belief in God’s nonexistence has dire and dramatic implications for culture, politics, history, and religion; and (3) these world-historical implications will inevitably be worked out over time, thus changing everything in human affairs where Christianity has held sway.
This parable can be read as a prediction or as a warning or as both. It is a warning in two senses. First, to Nietzsche’s sense.
His image of an earth unchained from the sun and spinning without purpose in space was a world stripped of deity and of every belief that God requires the existence of God to be true. Earth shorn of God makes a person an ersatz god, the god who murdered God. Nietzsche wonders what kind of “atonement” is required of such an act, indicating guilt and the need for redemption. But there is no such atonement. Atheistic executioners must face the severity of their act because a world without God does not remain the same, except that religion ceases to have an object. Rather, every value that required God as its root is uprooted, and what remains is a godless landscape lacking any map or compass or guide. Thus, Nietzsche called for the “revaluation of all values.”5
Nietzsche demanded that God’s murderers accept their plight with realism. Only a few brave men (and he meant males) would have the courage to forge their own values, deny any heaven of ideas or divine revelation, and assert their “will-to-power” over lesser folks. Nietzsche’s character, Zarathustra, a kind of prophet without God, thunders forth:
Verily, men gave themselves all their good and evil. Verily, they did not take it, they did not find it, nor did it come to them as a voice from heaven. Only man placed values in things to preserve himself—he alone created a meaning for things, a human meaning. Therefore he calls himself “man,” which means: the esteemer.6
When heaven is emptied of God, history will change radically. Any sense of providence, human rights, the priority of love, or divine judgment vanishes. It would take time, but it would happen. The nerve for altruism would be severed. Only the select few could hear and heed these words of Nietzsche, the atheist prophet.
To esteem is to create: hear this, you creators! Esteeming itself is of all esteemed things the most estimable treasure. Through esteeming alone is there value: and without esteeming, the nut of existence would be hollow. Hear this, you creators!7
What, if anything, could give meaning in Nietzsche’s world without God? Since “the nut of existence” is hollow in itself, all meaning stems from individuals, although few would have the courage to own it. Most would either pretend that atheism had no severe consequences or live by using religion as a crutch to compensate for their weakness. As an undergraduate, I attended a lecture by a historian who made an offhanded remark that although he did not believe in God, he still held most of the moral values of a religious person. He said this flippantly, and many laughed. I did not. Nietzsche would not have laughed either. That man had cheated philosophically.
The path to meaning, for Nietzsche, brings us to the doorstep of the overman. As he said in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, “Man is a rope, tied between beast and overman—a rope over an abyss.”8 Humans were not made in the image of God, as the Bible teaches, he argues, yet humans could be more than mere animals. “Overman” is Walter Kaufmann’s translation of Übermensch, a crucial idea for Nietzsche. The overman strives to overcome whatever would overshadow his own individuality and originality as a unique and incomparable creator of value. As Kaufmann puts it, the overman is
a human being who has created for himself that unique position in the cosmos which the Bible considered his divine birthright. The meaning of life is thus found on earth, in this life, not as the inevitable outcome of evolution . . . but in the few human beings who raise themselves above the all-too-human mass.9
As Zarathustra intones six times, “Man is something that must be overcome.”10 By “man,” Nietzsche means human beings understood as having a fixed and given human nature and as accountable to God. To that he says good riddance, and longs for overman. Rudolf Steiner (1861–1925) noted that Nietzsche did not find meaning in the newly developed scientific idea of evolution, which guaranteed no human excellence, only change. Nietzsche
asked himself how he could live with the new idea [of evolution]. His battle took place entirely within his own soul. He needed the further development to the superman [or overman] in order to be able to bear mankind.11
Thus, in order to find meaning, humans without God have to aspire to be more than humans but less than God—and to so endeavor while walking a tightrope strung over an abyss. “The overman is the meaning of the earth. Let your will say: the overman shall be the meaning of the earth!”12 Nietzsche often uses repetition and exclamation marks to do philosophical work since he vouchsafes little about just what an overman is. Whatever he is, he is not the result of mere evolutionary change. Optimistic humanism was not an option for Nietzsche since it cannot appeal to any good human potential, since human nature has to be overcome. And, of course, there is no transcendent standard or ideal. The overman seems stranded in a meaningless universe from which no meaning can be sculpted.
A second source of potential meaning for Nietzsche is “the eternal recurrence,” or the idea that everything that has happened will happen again, ad infinitum. This is not the biblical idea of eternal life—an unending and blessed afterlife in a linear series. Rather, it is a cyclical view—life in this world as it is, over and over again. As he puts it, the “eternal hourglass of existence is turned over and over, and you with it, a dust grain of dust.”13 He asks “how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life to crave nothing more fervently than this ultimate eternal confirmation and seal?”14 Some debate whether Nietzsche took this to be objectively true of the cosmos or instead as a poetic mode of embracing life.15 Either way, the idea fails to confer any purpose for life or death. The repetition of zero is still zero, even if zero is multiplied by infinity.
NIETZSCHE’S CASE AGAINST RELIGION
Nietzsche trained the heavy artillery of his philosophical objections against the religions of Judaism and Christianity specifically since they influenced Germany and the Western world more than other religions. He had some appreciation of Buddhism but not its essential worldview, which includes metaphysical elements—such as reincarnation, karma, and Nirvana—that his materialistic atheism disallowed. He preferred the Buddhist view of suffering to that of Christianity:
Buddhism, I repeat, a hundred times colder, more truthful, more objective [than Christianity]. It is no longer confronted with the need to make suffering and the susceptibility to pain respectable by interpreting them in terms of sin—it simply says what it thinks: “I suffer.”16
Nietzsche did not subject Buddhism to the severe criticism he reserved for Judaism and especially Christianity. Let us address his case against biblical religion.
First, Nietzsche defied God more than he denied God’s existence. He was not able to bear the idea that God knew everything about him. “The god who saw everything, even man—this god had to die! Man cannot bear it that such a witness should live.”17 Again:
That we find no God—either in history or in nature or behind nature—is not what differentiates us, but that we experience what has been revered as God, not as “godlike” but as miserable, as absurd, as harmful, not merely as an error but as a crime against life. We deny God as God. If one were to prove this God of the Christians to us, we should be even less able to believe in him.18
Nietzsche’s critique is that the Christian God is antilife and untrue to the earth, which is our only reality. “I beseech you, my brothers, remain faithful to the earth, and do not believe those who speak to you of otherworldly hopes! Poison-mixers are they, whether they know it or not.”19
For his critique to stand, Nietzsche must find value in the naked earth sans deo [without God]. But this, as I have argued, is unavailable to him since all value is asserted by individuals whose intrinsic value is null and void, since the earth has been unchained from the sun and is spinning aimlessly through empty space.
Further, his critique of Christianity as antilife is false.20 According to Christianity, God created the world as “very good” and made humans in his image and likeness (Gen 1). But given the fall, some aspects of life—sinful thoughts and behaviors—need to be denied in order to affirm higher aspects of life, faith, and virtue. Jesus’ atoning suffering and death wrought the forgiveness of sin, but it did not deny the essential goodness of life for those who follow him. As he promised,
I am the gate; whoever enters through me will be saved. They will come in and go out, and find pasture. The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy; I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full. (Jn 10:9-10)
The apostle Paul concurs, “God . . . richly provides us with everything for our enjoyment” (1 Tim 6:17). Ecclesiastes repeatedly commends the enjoyment of life given by God, despite the ephemerality and disappointments of a world east of Eden and “under the sun” (Eccl 2:24-25; 5:18-20). Further, the Song of Songs celebrates the joys of erotic love between husband and wife.21
Nietzsche’s second attack on biblical religion is that it breeds ressentiment, a French word meaning “a feeling of bitter anger or resentment together with a sense of frustration at being powerless to express this hostility overtly.”22 For Nietzsche, Judaism was a slave religion and Christianity continued the grievance. Ressentiment is wielded by the losers in history against the winners, whom they condemn as immoral as a way to recompense their own lack of power. It is “slave morality,” not “master morality,” that thrives on the exercise of power. So, for Nietzsche, Jesus’ statement that “the meek will inherit the earth” (Mt 5:5) really means that the weak desire to depose the strong through the alien power of God (who does not exist). To cite Frank Zappa in a Nietzschean tone, “The meek shall inherit nothing.”23 Or as a graffito I once saw put it, “The earth inherits the meek.”
However, this critique only holds if there is no God whose judgments are true and whose ways are trustworthy. Nietzsche has not shown that. If there is no such deity, then the losers of history might well rely on ressentiment to compensate for their impotence. But even so, Nietzsche’s judgment about Christian morality and psychology is off base since Christianity teaches us to love and pray for our enemies (Mt 5:43-48) and offers salvation to all who will humble themselves before God and have faith in Christ as Savior (Eph 2:8). Both the high and the low will stand before the infallible and inevitable judgment of God. Moreover, not a few biblical characters are strong and prestigious socially, such as David and Solomon. Saul, who became the apostle Paul, was a high achiever intellectually and religiously before his conversion, and he did not cease to demonstrate his intellect afterward (see especially Acts 17:16-34).24There is no sign of ressentiment in his actions or teachings. However, in light of knowing Christ, he counted this all as nothing, as is proper if the goodness of eternal life outweighs all earthy achievements (Phil 3:8).
Nietzsche launched a third attack against God:
A god who is all-knowing and all-powerful and who does not even make sure that his creatures understand his intention—could that be a god of goodness? Who allows countless doubts and dubieties to persist, for thousands of years, as though the salvation of mankind were unaffected by them, and who on the other hand holds out the prospect of frightful consequences if any mistake is made as to the nature of truth?25
Thus, this God is like “a deaf and dumb man making all kinds of ambiguous signs when the most fearful danger is about to fall on his child or his dog.”26 This objection is now called “the hiddenness of God.” If God is who monotheism claims, why then do not more people believe in him? So, it would seem, the claim that (1) God exists and (2) many do not believe in God are incompatible.
I address this elsewhere in some detail,27
