Who wants religious relativity?
Religious relativity conveys the idea that all religions are ultimately concerned with the same things, even if these are expressed with different images and metaphors. Religious specificity is therefore relative in relation to the ultimate values this specificity represents.
The impetus toward religious relativity resists religious particularity as a focus of unique claims to salvation, ethical probity and ultimate accountability.
Religious relativity offers a composite of selected religious motifs that are repeated across a number of religious traditions, though not by all and certainly not with the particular nuances within each. In the impetus for religious relativity, universally acceptable values are sought for the religious and the secular alike.
Advocates of religious relativity aim to make a case for the religious in the face of secular criticisms that go back to antipathy between reason and religious authority in the Enlightenment. Secularism exhibits antipathy to religious authority as an extrinsic imposition on human life; humans have the capacity to form their own contractual solutions and probity for the social good.
Inasmuch as the project of religious relativity takes cognisance of the secular critique of religion per se, it makes a rational case for religion. The composition of selected motifs within a relative approach to religious traditions seeks to sublimate particularity by the universal, yet particularity is resistant to assimilation.
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Religious commitment is expressed within the distinctive beliefs of a religion. Whatever degree of liberty exists in the deployment and understanding of language within a religious tradition, a primary assumption exists within religious adherence—personal concerns with ultimate significance and final accountability are at stake.
By definition, religion, in the particularity of its practices, is concerned with obedience to another authority—by whatever name or visage. Religious submission to another authority is as much a problem for religious relativity as it is for secularism. The deference to divine authority intrinsic to religious commitment is not feasible for either religious relativity or secularism and ultimately informs both in their responses to religious particularity.
The particularity of religious experience is given to an essential focus of commitment beyond any human claim, even if mediated by scriptures or priesthood. Such commitment resists relativity because it values one specific focus of allegiance and not another.
The levelling of religious traditions in a quest for universal ideals negates particular expressions of religious experience. Such levelling, in forging a universal accord of assumedly shared religious values, also stimulates the reassertion of particularity before the prospect of being subsumed under common ideals.
What the universalising impetus seeks to purge in the name of tolerance is actually stimulated; specific religious commitment resists the loss of its religious specificity in abstractions.
Religious relativity has no positive influence on extreme views within religion. These are only adequately addressed from a position of integral commitment within any particular religion.
In their desire to manage unwieldy diversity, humans exhibit a perennial impetus for common ideals; this in turn is a catalyst for allegiance to the particular. The quest to establish a universal religious vision that is acceptable to all religious traditions and amenable to secularism too, is promoted as plausible and achievable. Yet it is a flawed aspiration that conjures the opposite.
All-embracing ideals promoted under a pluralist umbrella can only be so general as to be irrelevant to specific religious practice. The particular appeal of a religious tradition is to highly specific imperatives and activities, so much so that these are expressed diversely within a single religious tradition.
The wider the pluralist net that is cast, the more difficult it is to include particularity under a common set of values. From theist to polytheist, from pantheist to animist, the range of possibilities is limitless and so too, the eventual diminution of religion when all are assumedly affirmed yet each is diminished in its particularity.
For all its appearance of being benign, religious relativity requires a levelling impetus that may be no less totalitarian than atheism in its open hostility to religion. Negation of particularity, however this is effected, gives licence to the totalitarian impetus.
The totalitarian impetus may speak of including diversity but it has no place for recalcitrant otherness. The otherness embraced in relativity is not real otherness but only assimilable otherness.
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Religious relativity has more in common with modern atheism than it does with classical religions. Religious relativity, like atheism, cannot accept unique claims concerning God or deference to divine authority. Yet in diminishing the unique claims intrinsic to particular religions, relativity alienates their religious sensibilities.
Religious relativity’s abstract projections of God are no different from atheist assertions that there is no God.
As necessarily pluralist, the forum of religious relativity cannot affirm anything more than either a higher being or a Romantic spirit of life. These are so general as to have no correlation with specific theologies of particular religious traditions and their practices.
Ultimately, the only all-encompassing affirmation that can be made within a pluralist religious forum is that we are all living toward death (Heidegger). This is an incontestable phenomenon.
Plotting the variations in this phenomenon within human life in specific times, places and interpretations has always been a human activity. Religion, in its reduction to relativity among plural options, has little more to say than that we are all living toward death in a variety of interesting ways. Death too, is the common leveller that should ameliorate all religious differences.
Yet religious traditions interpret the phenomenon of living toward death with definite expressions of human subjectivity in relation to salvation. These range from the elimination of human identity to divine affirmation of personal uniqueness. Salvation or transformed subjectivity within the reality of living toward death is expressed by religious believers through specific religious commitments.
Ironically, advocates of religious relativity disown and disdain the specificity of their own tradition’s teaching on salvation. Yet commitment expressed as an ultimate issue within the particularity of religion terminates the relevance of religious relativity.
Religious traditions interpret life within tangible commitments, personal and communal. Inasmuch as advocates of religious relativity seek to find the common factors of all religions, particularity becomes irrelevant. A quest for the universal human essence transcending human particularity, experience, decision and allegiance is idealism. Idealism is highly selective in its use of phenomena, texts and interlocutors in demonstrating its claims.
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Christian faith affirms particularity but without religion—God in grace and truth is disclosed in Jesus Christ as the way, truth and life. This scandal of particularity is not contingent on a religious apparatus for participation and resists ideological abstractions.
As the fruit of messianic inklings in Israel in its unique call to distinction or holiness, Christian faith is particular. As applicable to every time and place, Christian faith is a perennial critique of either religious conflation of God with phenomena (idolatry) or turning God into an abstraction (ideology).
Apart from unique disclosure given to faith in Jesus Christ, who is given to personal life and a radically different community in the world through the Holy Spirit, God as triune remains unknown.