Words Worth Noting - December 3, 2023

“It is just not the case that, under the skin, the world’s religious are really all saying the same thing, and one can question whether the attempt to impose pluralism on the traditions does not lead, as Schwöbel says, ‘to a personal construction of the history of religious and religious attitudes that very few who participate in them would recognise as their own’. The driving force of much pluralist thought is the desire to iron out differences in the search for tolerance, but this ‘can all too easily turn into a new guise of Western imperialism where subscribing to the principles of the Enlightenment becomes a precondition for participation in dialogue’. The particularities of the traditions must be respected, for to ask an adherent to give up what are perceived as the central truths of a tradition in order to find accommodation within a sufficiently unfocused universality is ‘akin to asking a native speaker of English to please try and do without nouns, since we have reason to believe that using them leads to an inappropriately reified view of the world’. But neither, it seems to me, can we take the second option of an exclusivist approach and say the truth is with us and the others are just mistaken. Our contacts with the other traditions make clear to us that they are the vehicles of a profound spiritual experience and understanding.”

John Polkinghorne The Faith of a Physicist [the 2nd quotation might be Schwobel too as both are from the same book by D’Costa; the third is from P.J. Griffiths in the same book.]