GOD-RELATIONSHIPS WITH AND WITHOUT GOD

GOD-RELATIONSHIPS WITH AND WITHOUT GOD

God-Relationships With and Without God J. Kellenberger Professor of Philosophy Ozlifomia State University, Northridge Palgrave Macmillan

ISBN 978-1-349-20332-1 ISBN 978-1-349-20330-7 (ebook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-20330-7 e J. Kellenberger 1989 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1989 All rights reserved. For infonnation, write: Scholarly and Reference Division, St. Martin's Press, Inc., 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 FU"St published in the United States of America in 1989 ISBN 978-0-312-03661-4 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Kellenberger, James. God-relationships with and without God / J. Kellenberger. p. em. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 978-0-312-03661-4 1. Religious ethics. 2. Religious pluralism. I. Title. BJ1188.K44 1989 291.5-dc20 89-36308 CIP

To Katherine Jane and John James

Contents Preface ix Introduction 1 I Religious morality and the question of praxis 1 IT The question of the variety of God-relationships and the issue of religious plurality 7 PART ONE Religious Morality and the Question of Praxis 11 1 Individual God-Relationships and Ethics 13 I The category of individual God-relationship 13 IT The central problem 16 III Abraham, Charles Manson, and Robert Wringham 27 IV Kierkegaard's two ways of thinking about faith and its God-relationship 32 2 The Ethics of God-Relationships 36 I The ethics of relationships 36 II The ethics of God-relationships and guilt morality 52 III The ethics of God-relationships and shame morality 57 PART TWO The Question of the Variety of God-Relationships and the Issue of Religious Plurality 69 3 Allowing Various God-Relationships 71 I Faith relationships to God or to Divine Reality in the various traditions 71 IT Abiding relationships 81 4 Religious Plurality 94 I The way of non-cognitivism 95 II The way of implicit belief 98 III The way of differential experience 108 vii

viii IV V VI Contents The way of the common core The way of logical indeterminacy The way of relationships Afterword 115 127 133 148 Notes and References Bibliography Index 152 167 173

Preface Though philosophy may address the eternal verities, it is invariably written within the scope of time, in or at the edge of some age. A philosophical work may escape merely reflecting the currents of its time, but perhaps inevitably it will to a degree reflect the concerns and temporal formulations of its age. This need not be all bad. In fact it may be desirable. Faddism is to be eschewed, but if matters that are of contemporary concern to others besides professional philosophers can be addressed by philosophy perhaps something may come of it. In this book I intend to address two such concerns in what may be called their religious aspect. To many of us it seems that we live in an unhappy age. Things fall apart, wrote an Irish poet in the early part of this century: the centre cannot hold. Things fall apart - a line taken by an African writer at mid-century to entitle a novel about the culture of his fathers in its encounter with the culture and Christianity of Europe. In our own time, in the last quarter of the twentieth century, we seem to live in a whirlwind of change within our respective cultures and, as well, in the midst of a cultural confrontation and intermingling in which the values of our culture - however we designate our culture and whatever those values may be - seem unable to speak to our concerns. We hear constantly of new, recently inconceivable moral issues and are humbled by our dismay. At once the world shrinks and becomes less simple. Instant communication makes us more aware of other peoples, nations, and cultures, but gives us no understanding. Whether we live in Beirut or Los Angeles, Rome or Tokyo, the rush of change impinges on us in two ways relevant to the concerns of this book. First, we are faced with both new moral questions and new expressions of old moral questions: the issue of morality; and, second, we are, with a new urgency, faced with the question of our relation to others in other nations, cultures, and religions: the issue of plurality. In the midst of our contemporary confusion some things abide. One of these is religion, by which I here mean being religious in individual commitment. Yet religion - even, or especially, in the ix

x Preface sense of individual commitment - has not been unaffected. In our time the twin concerns of morality and plurality have come to face religious individuals as they have come to face everyone. Of course religious individuals have always faced moral questions, which for them raise essentially an issue of religious praxis with its involved question of the relation between religious and ethical duty. In the same way, in many places and past epochs one religion has confronted another. Now, however, in the present age, the moral concern, the concern with religious praxis for the religious - even if understood as how merely to live a religious life in the era of secularity - seems to resist the religious formulas of our fathers; and, given the intermingling of religious cultures, it is no longer so easy to dismiss religious plurality and the religion of the other with the muttering of 'heathen' or 'infidel', or simply by turning away. This book will, in its way, address both of these features of contemporary life as they relate to religion and to being religious. It will address the first, the moral issue, from within a Western, essentially Judaeo-Christian, perspective, and the second, the plurality issue, from a widened perspective. Regarding the first I do not mean that particular moral issues will be resolved or that moral judgments will be made on specific issues. Rather, drawing upon the thought of Smen Kierkegaard and his conception of Godrelationship, I shall present and argue for the integrity of a certain way of addressing the question of religious praxis, which, in its tum, would yield an approach to moral decision. And, regarding the second feature of the contemporary world - the increased consciousness of other cultures and religions - I shall, using a wider category of relationship to the Divine, present a way of viewing the interrelatedness of the world's diverse religious traditions that offers an irenic answer to the question 'How is my religion related to others?' Several have given me aid and assistance in the writing of this book. I wish to thank Dean Jerome Richfield and the School of Humanities at California State University, Northridge, for granting me research reassigned time and to thank Daniel Sedey, Chair of the Philosophy Department, for his sympathetic scheduling of my classes. Thanks are due to Alyce Vrolyk, William Tomlinson, William Forthman, Frank McGuinness, Charles Crittenden, Richard Rodewald, and Narayan Champawat for comments made in discussion, and special thanks are due to John Kekes and Gavin

Preface xi D'Costa, who gave me careful comments on parts of the manuscript. My greatest thanks are reserved for my wife Anne, who always understood. I would also like to thank Margaret Leach for her many helpful editorial suggestions in preparing the manuscript for publication. Some of the material in this book has appeared previously in Studies in Religion/Sciences Religieuses and Religious Studies.