Philosophical Perspectives on Religious Diversity

Bivalent Truth, Tolerance and Personhood

Dirk-Martin Grube, Walter Van Herck

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351591140
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Addressing the question of what kind of theoretical foundations are required if we wish to have a constructive attitude towards different religions, this book scrutinizes aspects of the human condition, personhood and notions of (exclusive) truth and tolerance.

In the book, Wolterstorff suggests that persons have hermeneutic and related competences that account for their special dignity, and that this dignity implies the right to practice religion freely. Margolis emphasizes the contingent character of all religious pursuits – being products of a unique form of evolution, humans need to create convincing purposes in an otherwise purposeless world. Respondents criticize both views with an eye on the question of whether those views promote religious tolerance.

Grube criticizes the tendency for interreligious dialogue to be pursued under the parameters of an exclusive, bivalent notion of truth according to which something is necessarily false if it is not true. Under those parameters, religions that differ from the (one) true religion must be false. This explains why religious pluralists attempt to minimize the differences between religions at all costs and why others suggest implausibly strong concepts of tolerance. As an alternative, Grube proposes to drop exclusive concepts of truth and to conduct interreligious dialogue under the parameters of the concept of justification which allows for pluralisation. The following discussion takes up this criticism of bivalence and its consequences for dealing with religious otherness. This book was originally published as a special issue of the International Journal of Philosophy and Theology.

Toleration, justice, and dignity. Lecture on the occasion of the inauguration as professor of Dirk-Martin Grube, Free University of Amsterdam, September 24, 2015

Nicholas Wolterstorff

After discussing the nature of toleration, giving a brief history of the emergence of religious toleration in the West, and presenting my understanding of religion, I develop what I call ‘the dignity argument’ for religious toleration: to fail to tolerate a person’s religion is to treat that person in a way that does not befit their dignity. And to treat them in a way that does not befit their dignity is to wrong them, to treat them unjustly.

Before I begin my discussion, let me warmly congratulate Dirk-Martin Grube on his inauguration as professor of theology at the Free University. Let me also express my pleasure at being invited to share this occasion with him by delivering a public lecture on the overall topic that he has chosen, ‘Religious Diversity: Philosophical Perspectives.’ It will be evident to everybody here that Professor Grube could not have chosen a more timely topic, timely both for you in Europe and for us in North America.

Professor Grube opens the inaugural lecture that he will be giving later today by remarking, ‘Tolerance toward other religions than our own is an important commodity.’ He then asks, ‘But what reasons are there for being tolerant?’ He has put his finger on the fundamental question in this area. Religious toleration is important. But why be tolerant? What good reasons are there for being tolerant? The answer to this question that I will propose is different from, but compatible with, the one that Professor Grube will develop in his lecture.

The nature of toleration

I begin with some brief remarks on the nature of toleration. Suppose that I am Protestant and that you are Catholic. Suppose, further, that though it is not a matter of indifference to me that I am Protestant rather than Catholic – I strongly prefer being Protestant – it is a matter of indifference to me that you are Catholic rather than Protestant. I just do not care.

In that case, I do not tolerate your Catholicism. My indifference means that the issue of whether or not I should tolerate your religion does not even arise. Indifference makes toleration irrelevant. That is not true just for religion; it is true for mundane matters as well. Suppose it is a matter of indifference to me whether you communicate with me by email or by phone. Suppose further that you communicate with me by email. My indifference means that the issue of whether or not I should tolerate your preferred method of communication does not arise.

Change the imagined example. Suppose that, rather than being indifferent to your Catholicism, I prize it. ‘So interesting to have a Catholic in the neighborhood. Being surrounded by nothing but Protestants and secularists was getting to be so boring.’ If I prize your Catholicism, I do not tolerate it. When John Stuart Mill urged that disagreement be prized on the ground that the clash of opinions makes the attainment of truth more likely, he was not urging toleration of disagreement. (It is a nice question to what extent Mill prized disagreement by others with his views!)

A good deal of what passes for religious toleration in the Western world today is not toleration of religious diversity but indifference. It should be added, however, that very few people are indifferent to all religious diversity. The liberal Christian who not only tolerates but prizes having a progressive Hindu in the neighborhood is likely to be upset if a right-wing American evangelical Christian moves in. Being upset by having the evangelical Christian in the neighborhood offers him/her an opportunity to practice religious toleration; his/her prizing having the progressive Hindu in the neighborhood does not offer him/her an opportunity to practice religious toleration.

What is required for tolerating your religious beliefs and practices is that, rather than prizing them or being indifferent, I must, for some reason, dislike or disapprove them. My dislike or disapproval can range all the way from mild to intense; but your religious beliefs and practices must for some reason concern me negatively if toleration is to enter the picture. Given that there is something about your religious beliefs and practices that I dislike or disapprove of, I can then decide whether or not to ‘put up with’ them. To put up with them is to tolerate them.

I may put up with them in certain ways and not in others. While being opposed to making it illegal for you to practice your religion, I may shun you on account of your religion, ridicule you, mock you, advocate that you not be treated equally with the rest of us by the state, and so forth. In being opposed to making it illegal for you to practice your religion I am, so far forth, putting up with your religion. In nonetheless shunning you on account of your religion, I am not putting up with it. My behavior is a mixture of toleration and lack of toleration.

Notice that tolerating your religious beliefs and practices in a certain way becomes a live option for me only if I believe that my own religion and morality permit me to tolerate them in that way. Therein lies the greatest obstacle to religious toleration: many religious people, down through the ages and yet today, believe that their religion obligates them not to tolerate other religions. God demands that heresy be stamped out. Allah demands that idols be destroyed and the infidel be eliminated. The emergence of widespread religious toleration in the West required a deep alteration in the religious mentality of Western Christians.

Before I leave my opening topic of the nature of toleration, let me bring into the picture what Professor Grube, in his lecture, calls ‘the classical pluralist paradigm’ of religious diversity. According to this paradigm, all religions – or at least all axial religions – are alike in a fundamental way, their differences being variations on that commonality. Those who hold this paradigm add that the variations are, for the most part, of equal worth. Different theorists have developed the paradigm in different ways; Grube singles out John Hick and Paul Knitter. Hick’s idea was that all axial religions are adumbrations of the ‘Real as such’ and equally valid responses to their adumbrations; they all provide paths to salvation. Knitter’s thought was that at the core of all axial religions is commitment to what he called ‘eco-human justice,’ by which he means well-being for human beings in general and for the poor in particular, and well-being for our endangered planet Earth.

Grube offers some astute criticisms of these two examples of the classical pluralist paradigm. The question raised by my discussion of the nature of religious toleration is whether those who espouse some version of the paradigm are urging that we be indifferent to religious diversity or that we be tolerant of it. Quite clearly the answer is the former. If I regard your religion as an equally good adumbration of the ‘Real as such’ as my religion, and equally good as a path to salvation, then I will be indifferent to the fact that you do not share my religion. I may well continue to prefer my own religion; but the fact that yours is different from mine will not bother me. And if it does not in some way bother me, the issue of my tolerating your religion does not arise. Those who espouse some version of the classical pluralist paradigm sometimes advertise it as a way to achieve religious toleration. I think it is not that. It is a way to achieve religious indifference.

A bit of history

Before I present my own rationale for religious toleration, let me insert a bit of history. For approximately a thousand years, from roughly the middle of the seventh century to roughly the middle of the seventeenth, it was far and away the dominant view in the West that it belonged to the calling of the civil magistrate to promote and protect public forms of Christian piety. John Calvin’s statement was typical. He wrote: civil government not only sees to it ‘that men breathe, eat, drink, and are kept warm.’ It also ‘prevents idolatry, sacrilege against God’s name, blasphemies against his truth, and other public offenses against religion from arising and spreading among the people’ (Institutes IV.xx.3).¹ Thus it was that Calvin went along with the decision of the authorities in Geneva to execute Servetus, though not with their decision to do so by burning at the stake. The heresy of Servetus had to be prevented from spreading. As historians have often noted, most other European authorities would have done the same had Servetus wandered into their jurisdiction.

So what accounts for the change from governmental intolerance of religious diversity to the governmental toleration that was encapsulated in the first amendment to the US Constitution: ‘Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof’? Two things, I would say.

First, the European wars of religion waged in the sixteenth and early seventeenth century, provoked by the fracturing of religious unity represented by the Reformation, persuaded a good many people that the price being paid in blood by attempts to maintain or reestablish religious unity was too high a price; it was not worth it.

This consequentialist argument for religious toleration was never more eloquently stated than it was in a well-known pamphlet written in French that appeared in 1579, A Discourse upon the Permission of Freedom of Religion, called Religions-Vrede in the Netherlands. Though the author presents himself as Catholic, the predominance of scholarly opinion nowadays holds that he was the prominent Huguenot, Philip du Plessis Mornay. Here is what he wrote:

I ask those who do not want to admit the two religions in this country how they now intend to abolish one of them… . It goes without saying that you cannot abolish any religious practice without using force and taking up arms, and going to war against each other instead of taking up arms in unison against Don John and his adherents and delivering us from the insupportable tyranny of the foreigners. If we intend to ruin the Protestants we will ruin ourselves, as the French did. The conclusion to be drawn from this is that it would be better to live in peace with them, rather than ruin ourselves by internal discord and carry on a hazardous, disastrous, long and difficult war or rather a perpetual and impossible one. Taking everything into consideration, we can choose between two things: we can either allow them to live in peace with us or we can all die together; we can either let them be or, desiring to destroy them, be ourselves destroyed by their ruin… . As we cannot forbid these people to practise their religion without starting a war and cannot destroy them by that war without being destroyed ourselves let us conclude that we must let them live in peace and grant them liberty… .²

At roughly the same time that this consequentialist argument for religious toleration was gaining widespread acceptance, a certain understanding of true religion that led to the same conclusion was also gaining widespread acceptance. In the decade beginning in 1776, all the newly-freed American colonies composed constitutions in which the civil right to free exercise of religion was guaranteed. With the exception of the constitution of the State of New York, this civil right to free exercise of religion was based on the understanding of religion that was newly gaining acceptance. This understanding comes to expression more fully and lucidly in the Pennsylvania Constitution of 1776 than in any other; let me quote:

That all men have a natural and unalienable right to worship Almighty God according to the dictates of their own consciences and understanding: And that no man ought or of right can be compelled to attend any religious worship, or erect or support any place of worship, or maintain any ministry, contrary to, or against, his own free will and consent… . And that no authority can or ought to be vested in, or assumed by any power whatever that shall in any case interfere with, or in any manner control, the right of conscience in the free exercise of religious worship.

Everyone has a natural right to be free to worship God according to the dictates of his or her own conscience; hence, everyone should have the civil right to do so. That is the argument. Along with the consequentialist argument, it was the spread of this argument, and the spread of the view of religion implicit in the argument, that led to widespread calls for religious toleration.

True religion is the worship of God according to the dictates of one’s own conscience. It is a very different view of religion from that which came to expression in the passage I quoted from Calvin. Though it was not until the eighteenth century that it gained prominence in the West, it can be traced all the way back into some of the Church Fathers. Here, for example, is what the Latin Church Father, Lactantius, said on the matter:

[N]othing is so much a matter of free will as religion. The worship of God… requires full commitment and faith. For how will God love the worshipper if He Himself is not loved by him, or grant to the petitioner whatever he asks when he draws near and offers his prayer without sincerity or reverence. But [the pagans], when they come to offer sacrifice, offer to their gods nothing from within, nothing of themselves, no innocence of mind, no reverence, no awe. (Divine Institutes V.20)³

Unlike the US state constitutions of the late eighteenth ce...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction
• 1. Toleration, justice, and dignity. Lecture on the occasion of the inauguration as professor of Dirk-Martin Grube, Free University of Amsterdam, September 24, 2015
• 2. Conflations and gaps. A response to Nicholas Wolterstorff’s ‘toleration, justice, and dignity’
• 3. Tolerant because Christianity itself is a hybrid tradition: a response to Nicholas Wolterstorff’s ‘Toleration, Justice and Dignity’
• 4. Uncertain musings about the state of the world and religion’s contribution
• 5. Tolerance and religious belief: a response to Joseph Margolis
• 6. ‘What’s a nice girl like you doing in a place like this?’ or ‘What’s a feminist practical theologian doing amongst a bunch of distinguished philosophers?’ A riff on Professor Joe Margolis’ paper
• 7. Justified religious difference: a constructive approach to religious diversity
• 8. An epistemic argument for tolerance
• 9. Grube on justified religious difference
• 10. Response to Dirk-Martin Grube
• 11. What about unjustified religious difference? Response paper to Dirk-Martin Grube’s ‘justified religious difference’
• 12. A theological alternative to Grube’s notion of ‘justified religious difference’
• 13. Concluding Remarks – Reply to the respondents to ‘Justified religious difference. A constructive approach to religious diversity’
• Index