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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 February 2024
I am one of many people of faith active in the African National Congress and the Mass-Democratic Movement in South Africa. What I propose to do in this paper is to make you party to a discussion about religious pluralism which presently exercises people of faith like myself in the ranks of the ANC and the Mass-Democratic Movement. As part of a discussion in progress, conducted in a context which values collective work and the achievement of consensus, it is deliberately rough-edged, tentative and open-ended, intended to facilitate the extension of the discussion rather than to say the last word in it.
What Hick calls ‘the universe of faiths’ is well-represented in the ranks of this liberation movement. In it people of different faiths are united in a common struggle for justice and peace in their land. People of faith involved in the struggle for justice and peace do not lead lives in which the religious and the political are split one from the other. On the contrary, the political and the religious come to form a seamless whole in the lives of people of faith involved in the struggle. If I may borrow a phrase from Albert Nolan, the struggle is experienced in a religious mode by people of faith, and this religious modality of the struggle for unitary non-racial democracy is a common feature of the experience of comrades of different faiths. But struggling for fundamental change in a country makes theological demands upon people of faith, not the least of which concerns religious pluralism.
1 This article is a slightly modified version of a paper entitled ‘Theology, Religious Pluralism and the ANC Experience’ presented at a Conference in July 1989 at St John's College, Cambridge on ‘Issues in Contemporary South African Theology’. As such, it was written before the unbanning of the African National Congress on 2 February of this year. The direction taken by South African politics in the last few months has, if anything, made the question of pluralism in the struggle for change more important than before.
2 See Hick, John, God and the Universe of Faiths (Glasgow, 1977)Google Scholar.
3 See Nolan, Albert, God in South Africa (Cape Town, 1988), pp. 192–194Google Scholar.
4 See Hick, ibid.
5 This qualification is important, and will be explained later.
6 It should be noted that I have restricted the core‐theology to theists, and that this is in fact a bit more restrictive than one might have thought. There are some Buddhists in South Africa, and Buddhists (or Theravâda Buddhists, at least) are not theists. The overwhelming majority of religious people in South Africa are theists of one sort or another, and a line needs to be drawn somewhere if the very notion of a core‐theology is not to be impossibly vague. In any case, the term ‘theology’ itself implies a concern with theism. The forms of theism with which I am concerned are all monotheistic in some sense, which excludes Hinduism as it is popularly construed. There are many Hindus in South Africa, and ‘Hinduism’ as it is popularly construed is polytheistic. That said, the advaita monism of Shankarâcharya is highly influential among observant Hindus in South Africa. The framework does need to take account of the involvement of non‐theists in the struggle and the patent goodness of their actions; and a way of doing so will be suggested.
7 The Kairos Document: A Theological Comment on the Political Crisis in South Africa (London, 1986). The Kairos Document, the product of the collective deliberations of many Christian theologians and believers involved in the struggle in South Africa, was publicised as a challenge to the Churches after the declaration of a state of emergency and the promulgation of draconian emergency regulations in South Africa in 1985.
8 Level‐3 Jewish‐Christian theologies, that is to say, theologies espoused by Jewish‐Christians, must be distinguished from level‐1 Judeo‐Christian theologies, theologies acceptable to Jews and Christians.
9 I am not in fact sure whether such perspective‐specific theologies should be at this level or not. The thought behind putting them in at level‐3 is that members of different denominations can share perspective‐specific theologies while sharing a level‐2 theology and while also sharing major areas of level‐3 denominational theology with other members of their own denominations. One way around this would be to type perspective‐specific theologies as higher‐level, that is to say, level‐4 theologies. This move would have strong disadvantages. It would suggest, for example, that there are absolutely distinct Catholic and Lutheran black theologies, and I do not wish to argue that each perspective‐specific theology is quite so divided along denominational lines.
10 See Vatican II, Unitatis Redintegratio 2, 11, in Flannery, Austin OP (ed.), Vatican Council II: the Conciliar and Post Conciliar Documents (Dublin, 1980), p. 462Google Scholar. I am using this notion in a somewhat more general sense than that found in Unitatis Redintegratio, which uses it in a purely intra‐Christian sense. The sense of the notion with which I am operating in this paper also owes a great deal to Quine's ‘web of belief’ metaphor. For an account of this metaphor, see Quine, W.V. and Ullian, J.S., The Web of Belief (N.Y. 1978)Google Scholar.
11 I do not wish to suggest that distinctively Christian doctrines such as the Incarnation and the Trinity and their Jewish and Muslim functional equivalents among others are less fundamental in Christian, Jewish and Muslim terms than level‐0 doctrines. It is consistent with this to argue that such level‐2 doctrines are not foundational in the way that level‐0 doctrines are. Christian belief in the Trinity, for example, presupposes belief in a Creator, but the converse is not necessarily true. Of course, Christians cannot divorce their belief in a Creator from their Trinitarian theological commitments, and the same is true, mutatis mutandis, of other level‐0 doctrines and other faiths. What this means is that a level‐0 theology is accepted in different senses, the senses being functions of the particular higher‐order theologies in which they are nested, as I shall explain.
12 This discussion of ‘family resemblance’ depends heavily upon Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (Oxford, 1958), 66–71. Aquinas discusses the analogical uses of terms in Summa Theologiae la, 5 and 6. I am greatly indebted to lectures given by Fr Herbert McCabe OP which made the connexion between Aquinas ‘analogical terms and Wittgensteinian ‘family resemblance’ terms clear to me.
13 The debate between W.V. Quine and Donald Davidson about indeterminacy of translation and the incommensurability of different conceptual schemata, which exercises philosophical logicians, philosophers of language and of science among others, has some bearing upon the discussion in this paragraph. Quine argues that different and incommensurable conceptual schemata operate in different languages and areas of discourse, which results in an inherent indeterminacy of translation. Davidson, by contrast, while accepting that radical interpretation involves indeterminacy, argues that Quine's position, if correct, would mean that language was not possible. The fact that we do communicate with one another defeats the claim that different and incommensurable schemata are at work in the way that Quine suggests. I think that Davidson's position is more compelling than Quine's, and that it has implications for the issue discussed in this paper. A statement of Quine's position can be found in Quine, W.V., Word and Object (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1960)Google Scholar, chapter 2; while Davidson's counter to this claim is most clearly stated in Davidson, Donald, ‘On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme’, in Davidson, , Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation (Oxford, 1984)Google Scholar. See also Lukes, Steven, ‘Some Problems about Rationality’ and Martin Hollis, ‘The Limits of Irrationality’, both in Wilson, Bryan R. (ed.), Rationality (Oxford, 1970)Google Scholar, and Newton‐Smith, W., ‘Relativism and the Possibility of Interpretation’, in Hollis, Martin and Lukes, Steven (eds), Rationality and Relativism (Oxford, 1982)Google Scholar.
14 I hope that the influence of Aristotle's Nichomachean Ethics and Aquinas will be apparent in this sketch.
15 Shalom, the Hebrew word for peace, is cognate to the word shalem, which means ‘whole’. The state of shalom is not mere passivity; it is a state of completeness and fulfilment, something which is the fruit of labour and commitment.
16 The Freedom Charter was produced by the ‘Congress of the People’, to date the most representative gathering of South Africans, which was held in Kliptown, South Africa, in 1955. It was attended by 3000 delegates from all over South Africa, and the Freedom Charter was promulgated just before police dispersed the gathering. The Charter guides the actions of the ANC and of its allies. For the text of the Charter and an account of its history and contemporary influence, see Suttner, Raymond and Cronin, Jeremy, 30 Years of the Freedom Charter (Johannesburg, 1986)Google Scholar.
17 Readers of Albert Nolan's God in South Africa might have noted certain passages which appear to argue that eschatological theologies and theologies of struggle cannot co‐exist. The target of his attack is in fact the deterministic eschatology of apocalyptic literature, and he made it clear to me in conversation that he does not reject eschatology as such. To the contrary, his book seeks to construct a prophetic eschatology for South Africa. Nolan's eschatology is heavily influenced by Rad, Gerhardt von, The Message of the Prophets (London, 1968)Google Scholar.
18 My summary remarks about Islam owe much to a paper, unpublished as far as I know, by Maulana Faried Essack.
19 On the Noachide Commandments see T 'Abodah Zarah 8.4, b Sanhedrin 56a‐60b, b Hagigah 11b, Bereshit Rabba 16.9, 24.5, Moses Maimonides, Mishne Torah Hilkhot Melakhim 8.10–11 and 10.12, and Moses Nahmanides. Perush ha‐Torah on Gn 34.13. According to Maimonides, one who observes these commandments in practice ought not to be deemed righteous unless they are observed in the belief that God commands their observance. Maimonides does not deny that the judicious use of reason might lead the wise to behave in a way that is consonant with these commandments though it is not believed that they are divinely commanded, but he wishes to say that moral behaviour guided by reason alone cannot justify. There are Rabbinic authorities who disagree with Maimonides and hold that the consonance of actions with the Noachide commandments justifies gentiles.
20 See Ryle, Gilbert, The Concept of the Mind (Harmondsworth, 1963), pp. 28–32Google Scholar, and Michael Dummett ‘What do I know when I know a language?’, Stockholm, 1978, pp. 1–4. A number of Dummett's papers on the philosophy of language explain this distinction very clearly.
21 Without this qualification, talk of implicit proclamation of the gospel would be rather patronising and dismissive of the claims of non‐Christian religious traditions. With this qualification, it amounts to the recognition that our Christian commitment is fundamental to our appreciation of and sympathy for non‐Christian religions, just as Muslim or Buddhist, or Jewish commitment is fundamental to the Muslim's, Buddhist's or Jew's appreciation of other religions. It recognises that we have no vantage‐point other than some tradition or other from which we can survey the ‘universe of faiths’.
22 I am greatly indebted to my comrades in the U.K. Religious Affairs Committee of the ANC, especially Cedric Mayson and John Lamola, with whom the issues presented here have been discussed over a long period of time, to my brother in St Dominic Fr Timothy Radcliffe OP, and to Professor Maurice Wiles who kindly looked at a rough outline of the framework presented here and offered encouraging and perceptive comments.
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