ECSIP Leuven 2016
Dr. Gregory Moses, r0029725
Other Topic
Apart from a continuing fascination with Boeve, the topic which has most to do with my own (mostly past) scholarly interests was Interreligious Dialogue. I much enjoyed the introductory lecture from Prof. Dr. Marianne Moyaert: the history, the challenge, context in the Theology of Religions, the three classic answers and a run through them, Exclusivism, Inclusivism and Pluralism, implications of each for Interreligious dialogue and difficulties with each, Particularism as a more recent 4th Model, the focussing of the issue through the problem of translation and how this might make for a species of interreligious hospitality. There was an article in one of the collections sent to us in advance which I printed out and read, along similar lines to the lecture. In comparison, the journey though Ricoeur in the printed supplementary reader we actually got I found more difficult- of course. Though there are plenty of resonances with my own work, explaining the value for the tradition itself to construct itself as an open versus a closed tradition. Come back to this later.
At a certain stage in my past, late 1990's into the 2000's, I did quite a lot of work on interreligious dialogue, meshed in with an interest in faith and reason and in the philosophical analysis of religious experience. The latter was stimulated very much in response to the work of Steven Katz, who, in Dr. Moyaert's language, in this field is very much the original 'Particularist'. I gave a number of conference papers here and there and even got some of it published, as Gregory Moses, "Faith and Reason: Naturalised and Relativised", in Faith and Reason: Friends or Foes in the New Milllenium (ATF Press, Adelaide, 2004), pp. 37-57. This book is not in the library, or at least I couldn't find it, either in the electronic index or on the shelves, though there is a reference to a review of it. Thankfully it is available online: Google "dialogal inclusivism"! You will also get a reference to a conference paper, the title of which is a better clue to the proposed rather delicate position, "Towards a Non-Melioristic Dialogal Inclusivism Nesting within a Pluralism of Reasonable Believing". 'Non-Melioristic' from the Latin, 'melior', for 'better': you don't go into the dialogue thinking you are better, you still have your commitments, you don't come as if a view from nowhere, you still come from and bring the richness of your particular place, and you still have your critical faculties switched on but you go in truly listening not knowing in advance what you will find.
You will find themes like: all empirical belief is contextually determined; there is therefore something like a hermeneutics of believing alongside and co-determined by the more familiar hermeneutics of meaning; empirical believing happens inside more or less particular, more or less general traditions of experience and interpretation, with epistemic gain and loss in both directions as you move between more particular and more general, no view from nowhere, nothing completely bereft of particularity, just degrees thereof; there are however some reasonably general criteria for judging between traditions, enough to eliminate various extremes for the vast majority of people; but the criteria in concrete application tend to be interpreted and deployed in tradition dependent ways; which is how you get to the point of a recognition of a pluralism of reasonable believing, rather that a pluralism of truths, somewhat analogous to Rawl's pluralism of reasonable comprehensive doctrines. This is just the first half. You then have to figure out a place and a spirit from which to do dialogue from the particular reasonable place you occupy, a place for which you have an epistemic right, and sometimes an epistemic obligation, something rather delicate and finely balanced like the above or like Boeve or like Dr. Moyaert.
After reading and listening to Prof. Dr. Moyaert and reflecting some more: I am wondering whether I should change the name of my position from a Non-Melioristic Dialogal Inclusivism to an Open Particularism, or, even better, a Dialogue Motivated Open Particularism. The latter is probably more accurate at the descriptive level, though the former might bring out better the element of starting commitment. Either way, as both Moyaert and Boeve contend, it does really help to have tradition specific motivations, motivations for dialogue coming from within the tradition itself. Only thus will the dialogue be engaged in with any passion.
Whatever the name, there are a number of such motivations.
The one I emphasised in my work was the epistemic advantage of being an open rather than a closed tradition. If no experience can make any difference to the tradition, then experience can't be counted in favour of it either, the tradition ceases to be empirical or based on experience. This is the old Popperian point, but interpreted in a 'sophisticated' Lakatosian rather than in a Popperian manner.
Then there is the advantage pointed out by Moyaert, quoting Ricoeur. From p. 157 of In Response to the Religious Other: "Tradition", he claims, "represents the aspect of debt which concerns the past and which reminds us that nothing comes from nothing. A tradition remains living, however, only if it continues to be held in an unbroken process of reinterpretation." Nourishing one's tradition with strange and unfamiliar meanings keeps it alive. The challenge, according to Ricoeur, is to rethink and renew traditions in and through mutual understanding. That is why, he argues, we need "translators,"...
These are sort of more general motivations, which might be held from within any particular tradition: we want our tradition to be and to remain epistemically credible, and we would really like to do whatever we can to keep our tradition alive. And so we have dialogue schools, for example, not just because we have little choice, but because they may even contribute to the project of keeping our tradition alive!
But there might be also motivations based in the content of the tradition, and this is where the real spiritual passion might come from. Moyaert mentions the doctrine of the Incarnation, which could not be more central to our tradition: if God translated Godself into the language of human beings, displayed to us this linguistic hospitality, we should not be afraid to display this linguistic hospitality to each other. Then there is all the stuff in the second half of Boeve's Interrupting Tradition, uncovering the resources in our tradition to enable us to be an open narrative and to do authentic recontextualization.
There are other possibilities I like to try out, albeit with an at first sight Inclusivist tone and probably theologically childish. But first to set the scene. You may know of the author Terry Pratchett, the author of the Discworld series of novels, also one of the so called New Atheists. There are gods aplenty in the Discworld. But they all have a very interesting characteristic, namely that they wax and wane in power and even in respect of existence depending on the number of their believers and the strength of that belief. The point, obviously, is that our God is not a Terry Pratchett god, and this goes for such central in-house doctrines as the Sovereignity of God or the Universal Lordship of Jesus or the Ubiquity and Wilfulness of the Holy Spirit. We go into dialogue precisely because of these central beliefs, not in spite of them, you never know what surprises, what little gifts, our Good Lord may have in store for us, as we take the trouble to show hospitality to each other.
This tends to sideline or undermine the supposed tension between universal salvific will and the centrality of Jesus. Though we may be giving up on the claim that you have to believe in Jesus for Jesus to be able to save you: Jesus is not, after all, just a Terry Pratchett Lord.
Note, also, that we are not making claims about the dialogue partners. They are who they are, in all their otherness, they are not anonymous Christians or implicit believers or anything like that. It is just that we go into the dialogue with certain in-house convictions about our God, which opens us up to the possibility that this engagement with the other could even turn out to be a truly spiritual experience, Our God coming to us in the otherness of the other, possibly in the most surprising ways. It is like an unexpected gift, which we get, maybe in both directions, as we show hospitality
to each other. Although not to be overly romantic about it all, I am sure it will often be just a lot of hard work.
Or something similar but slightly better, giving witness to the tenderness of God in the world of today (Boeve, Theologie in Dialoog, p. 221-222). Our entry into the hospitality of dialogue is potentially a response to tenderness we ourselves have experienced, an expression of that tenderness in the entry itself, central to what we witness to in the content of our witness, and something we just possibly might experience some more of in the course of our engagement.