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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2024
It is popular nowadays to claim not only that narrative is the most effective way to communicate religious knowledge but also that narrative provides the framework within which religious lifestyles and practices are meaningful. However, many today lack familiarity with the narratives of traditional religions. In other words, they suffer from ‘religious illiteracy’. This article considers the problem of how religion can become meaningful to such people. The view that religion can be divested of its outdated cultural accoutrements and presented in a form that resonates with postmodern secular culture is considered and found to be problematic. If acquiring a religion is like acquiring a culture, or a language, it seems unlikely that a deeper appreciation of a religious tradition will be facilitated by divesting it of its traditional cultural expressions. Moreover, the view that religious lifestyles should be emphasised rather than religious belief seems to be more a symptom of the problem of ‘religious illiteracy’ than a solution to it. The article concludes that both of these responses fail to provide a solution to the problem and that an alternative strategy is urgently required.
1 Friedrich Nietzsche seems to have anticipated this feature of postmodernism when he declared: ‘The falseness of a judgement is not for us necessarily an objection to a judgement; in this respect our new language may sound strangest. The question is to what extent it is life-promoting, life-preserving, species-preserving, perhaps even species-cultivating …’. Nietzsche, Friedrich, Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future, translated by Hollingdale, R. J. (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990)Google Scholar, I.4.
2 Milbank, John, Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), p. 267Google Scholar.
3 With respect to the narratives contained in the Christian Scriptures, John Thornhill claims that ‘the biblical story which reaches its climax in the life, death, and exaltation of Jesus of Nazareth discloses a truth about human existence which is universal. In the light of the biblical story, we can find the ultimate significance of our own stories. And conversely, the story of each of us can shed light on the ongoing story of the Christian people as a whole, the church’. Thornhill, John, Modernity: Christianity's Estranged Child Reconstructed (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 2000), p. 193Google Scholar. And one easily can regard the central narratives of the other Abrahamic faiths as functioning in exactly the same way.
4 Lyotard, Jean-François, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, translated by Bennington, Geoff and Massumi, Brian (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), p. 26Google Scholar.
5 Ibid., p. 27
6 Milbank, Theology and Social Theory, op. cit., p. 347.
7 Cf. George Lindbeck: ‘Pagan converts to the catholic mainstream did not, for the most part, first understand the faith and then decide to become Christians; rather, the process was reversed: they first decided and then they understood. More precisely, they were first attracted by the Christian community and form of life’. Lindbeck, George A., The Nature of Doctrine: Religion and Theology in a Postliberal Age (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1984), p. 132Google Scholar.
8 On how the appeal of a particular lifestyle might compel a person to adopt a particular religious tradition, see Harrison, V. S., ‘Human holiness as religious apologia’, International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 46 (1999): 63–82CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
9 MacIntyre, Alasdair, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (London: Duckworth, 1982), p. 216Google Scholar. Anthony Giddens seems to offer a parallel analysis when he claims that ‘[p]ersonal meaninglessness—the feeling that life has nothing worthwhile to offer—becomes a fundamental psychic problem in late modernity. We should understand this phenomenon in terms of a repression of moral questions which day-to-day life poses, but which are denied answers. “Existential isolation” is not so much a separation of individuals from others as a separation from the moral resources necessary to live a full and satisfying existence … .’. Giddens, Anthony, Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Era (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1991), p. 9Google Scholar. Although Giddens is concerned with moral knowledge, his remarks would also seem applicable to religious knowledge.
10 Lindbeck, The Nature of Doctrine, op. cit., pp. 130f.
11 See Larkin, Philip, ‘Church Going’, in Larkin, Philip, Collected Poems (London: Marvell Press, 1988), pp. 97fGoogle Scholar.
12 McGrath, Alister E., The Future of Christianity (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), pp. 61fGoogle Scholar.
13 For example, liberal forms of Protestant Christianity, Reform Judaism and Modernist Islam.
14 See Harrison, V. S., ‘The pragmatics of defining religion in a multi-cultural world’, International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 59 (2006): 133–152CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
15 Lindbeck, The Nature of Doctrine, op. cit., p. 124.
16 Ibid., p. 129.
17 Ibid., p. 22.
18 Ibid.
19 As Lindbeck notes: ‘[T]o become religious—no less than to become culturally or linguistically competent—is to interiorise a set of skills by practice and training. One learns how to feel, act, and think in conformity with a religious tradition that is, in its inner structure, far richer and more subtle than can be explicitly articulated. The primary knowledge is not about the religion, not that the religion teaches such and such, but rather how to be religious in such and such ways.’Ibid., p. 35.
20 Ibid., p. 37.
21 See, for example, ibid., p. 124.
22 Ibid., p. 133.
23 Ibid.
24 Hans Urs von Balthasar was a lone voice in the mid-twentieth century warning theologians of the consequences of the changed conception of theology. For a study of his analysis of the situation, see Harrison, Victoria S., The Apologetic Value of Human Holiness (Dordrecht: Kluwes, 2000)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
25 See Lee, Robert D., Overcoming Tradition and Modernity: The Search for Islamic Authenticity (Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1997), p. 88Google Scholar.
26 Neusner, Jacob, Judaism in Modern Times: An Introduction and Reader (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Blackwell, 1995), pp. 235fGoogle Scholar.
27 See ibid, pp. 236ff.
28 Indeed, such an outcome would seem to be predicted in Liebman, Charles, ‘Extremism as a Religious Norm’, Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 22 (1983): 75–86CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
29 Rabbi Wine founded Humanist Judaism in the 1960s. The movement was motivated by, what he perceived as, the urgent need to revise Jewish practices and beliefs in accordance with quintessentially modern values, such as gender equality and human dignity. Members of this movement do not believe in a supernatural deity, and they reject the traditional dual-Torah theory of revelation. Moreover, in contradistinction to the traditional view of Jewish identity, Wine argues that anyone who chooses to identify with the Jewish tradition can be a Jew, irrespective of that person's birth. See, for example, Wine, Sherwin, Judaism Beyond God (New York: KTAV Publishing House, 1995)Google Scholar.
30 See ibid., pp. 87f. As Wine also observes, by the end of the twentieth century, religious identity had shifted its locus from the whole of life (as in pre-modernity) to specific religious holidays and activities.
31 See Gadamer, Hans-Georg, ‘Reflections of the Relation of Science and Religion’ in Gadamer, Hans-Georg, Hermeneutics, Religion, and Ethics, translated by Weinsheimer, Joel (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1999), p. 127Google Scholar.
32 Nietzsche, Friedrich, ‘The Antichrist’ in Kaufmann, Walter (ed.), The Portable Nietzsche (New York: Viking Press, 1974)Google Scholar, paragraph 50.
33 Richard Holloway, ‘The Myths of Christianity’, Lecture 6: The End of Religion, Gresham College, 15th March 2001.
34 Rubenstein, Richard L., After Auschwitz: Radical Theology and Contemporary Judaism (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1966), p. xGoogle Scholar.
35 MacIntyre, After Virtue, op. cit., p. 216.
