The Absolute is That Which Has No Relation: Thoughts on Religious and Ontological Pluralism
“[Universalism]…is a lovely sentiment but it is dangerous, disrespectful, and untrue. For more than a generation we have followed scholars and sages down the rabbit hole into a fantasy world in which all gods are one. This wishful thinking is motivated in part by an understandable rejection of the exclusivist missionary view that only you and your kind will make it to heaven or Paradise. For most of world history, human beings have seen religious rivals as inferior to themselves—practitioners of empty rituals, perpetrators of bogus miracles, purveyors of fanciful myths. The Age of Enlightenment in the eighteenth century popularized the ideal of religious tolerance, and we are doubtless better for it. But the idea of religious unity is wishful thinking nonetheless, and it has not made the world a safer place. In fact, this naive theological groupthink—call it Godthink—has made the world more dangerous by blinding us to the clashes of religion that threaten us worldwide. It is time we climbed out of the rabbit hole and back to reality.”
The above passage comes from Steven Prothero’s book God is Not One. Prothero’s main assertion in this book is similar to the assertion folks like S. Mark Heim have made, that although many religious traditions may indeed share some similar disciplines, or even make similar ethical claims to some extent, we should be very careful not to minimize the differences of the world religions in favor of some “false universalism” or benign truth. I agree.
I’ve attempted to read sacred texts outside of the Judeo-Christian tradition before, and I know how easy it is to fall into the trap of applying my particular lens to the text and inadvertently colonize another tradition. For instance, I know the disorienting feeling of attempting to read something so strange and different that my immediate impulsive recourse is to take the strange and different thing and incorporate it into my established categories (e.g. Brahman equals the Judeo-Christian Creator God ((but does it tho?!?)). I understand how this works, and I’m aware that this happens, and because I’m aware of this I attempt to catch myself and do my best to let texts from other cultures speak on their own terms in an effort to recognize the unique beauty and distinctiveness of other faith traditions. If we really want to honor the multivalent nature of truth we might do well to recognize the wondrous diversity in which we live. I think Raimon Panikkar says it about as well as anyone:
“In fact, truth does not allow itself to be conceptualized. It is never purely objective, absolute. To talk about absolute truth is really a contradiction in terms. Truth is always relational, and the Absolute (absolutus, untied) is that which has no relation…I am convinced that each of us participates in the truth. Inevitably, my truth is the truth that I perceive from my window. And the value of dialogue between the various religions is precisely to help me perceive that there are other windows, other perspectives. Therefore I need the other in order to know and verify my own perspective of the truth. Truth is a genuine and authentic participation in the dynamism of reality. When Jesus says “I am the truth,” he is not asking me to absolutize my doctrinal system but to enter upon the way that leads to life.”
Over the years I’ve become more and more akin to ontological pluralism—or the notion that there are many ways of existing or many ways to be something—which has in many ways corresponded with my love of process-relational philosophy and, most notably for this post, the work of Catherine Keller and other Whitheadian influenced thinkers.
Keller is one of the first folks I had read who frequently made use of the term “multiplicity” in her writing. I sincerely love this term. Simply put, multiplicity is the idea that the cosmos is necessarily made up of diversity and plurality. This emphasis of diversity and plurality is, to me, a needed corrective to the seemingly endless human (primarily male) tendency to want to “unify,” collapse and conquer. Laurel Schnider makes this point over and over again in her fantastic book Beyond Monotheism, where she points out that the development of the classical theological concept of monotheism, while being a helpful human advancement in some ways, was also very useful in thronging people under the oppressive rule of empire.
Still, it may be impossible to completely get away from the idea of the One. Deep down I think all of life has a deep intuitive sense of the sacredness of which we are all a part. The idea of reality as nested levels of living, relational, processual societies seems like a good metaphor to me (as far as metaphors go of course), and as a di-polar panentheist in the Whiteheadian vein, it makes sense to me that God is one, but also that God is many. Like Catherine Keller likes to say, God is a multiplicity. Keller writes, “This “we” of the creator suggests, as does the Trinity much later, that God is not a “simple” but rather a “multiple” One.” This, for me, is perhaps one of the most exciting things about process-relational philosophy/theology. The notion that God is intimately related and connected with creation is so important and really does distinguish process-relational thinking about God from other sorts of classical monotheistic conceptions. The natural, creaturely God of process-relational philosophy/theology is intricately a part of the Whole, and the world is indeed intimately related to God, but therefore the world too (with all it’s rich diversity and multiplicity) is divine, and so is humanity. David Ray Griffin further explains just how different process-relational thinking is:
“The monotheism of process theology, however, is quite different. God is not, and could not be, the only being with power. The metaphysical ultimate is not God, but creativity, which is necessarily dispersed throughout the universe. Still more pluralism is entailed by the idea that the eternal objects, which are the eternal forms or possibilities, are not created by God but are required by God as much as they require God (PR 257). God, creativity, and the eternal objets, furthermore, require that there be creatures (PR 225). All the metaphysical principles, finally, are equi-primordial with these other realities, and are therefore not matters of divine volition. This monotheism is not monism.
Nor does this non monistic monotheism imply a “single way of being in the world,” which would involve an allegiance to a limited set of values to the exclusion of the remainder. Whitehead has rejected “the notion of the one type of perfection at which the Universe aims” (AI 291), and has said, furthermore:
“There is not just one ideal ‘order’ which all actual entities should attain…in each case there is an ideal peculiar to each particular actual entity.””
So what about other religions then? Are they all basically saying the same thing? Are they all one path up the same mountain? It’s hard to answer any of these questions with any sort of finality, but I will say that I personally am neither an inclusivist or an identist pluralist (as Heim and David Ray Griffin would say). At this point I do prefer a differential pluralism, or a deep pluralism, one that, as Griffin has written, “recognizes that religious diversity involves real differences in the diagnosis of the basic human problem, the type of “salvation” needed, and the nature of the ultimate reality [or realities] to which attention is directed.” So I’m perfectly fine with admitting that there is no neutral standpoint, no bird’s eye view that any religion may or may not have. We come to our views of reality through our particulars (historical, cultural, religious, etc.), and for me, that means remembering that (to paraphrase Whitehead) the only thing that is concrete is the Real, and the Real is dynamic, creative, pluralistic, relational processes; everything else is an abstraction.
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Photograph above by Matt Waples
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