Abstract
From examining the work of Lindbeck, Tracy, and Burrell, we have learned valuable lessons, both in terms of interpreting Wittgenstein theologically as well as in terms of the possibilities of applying a (more or less) Wittgensteinian approach in theology to the topics such as interreligious incommensurability, (un)translatability, dialogue, communication, and disagreement. In this chapter, my focus will narrow down somewhat: I will present my perspective on interreligious disagreement which builds on the critical explorations in previous chapters but goes a step further. From a Wittgensteinian perspective—that is, according to my interpretation of Wittgenstein on religion outlined in previous chapters, especially in Chap. 2—I want to shed light on the aspects of interreligious disagreement which were not addressed at any length by Lindbeck, Tracy, and Burrell.
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- 1.
All three, however, have been personally involved in interreligious conversations where such disagreements may, or may not, have been expressed.
- 2.
Teaching attention to differences between what might seem to be the same kind of phenomena has sometimes been described as Wittgenstein’s main didactic goal. According to Rush Rhees, Wittgenstein at one point even wanted to use the sentence from King Lear, ‘I’ll teach you differences’, as a motto for Philosophical Investigations. He is also reported as having said: ‘Hegel seems to me to be always wanting to say that things which look different are really the same. Whereas my interest is in showing that things which look the same are really different’ (Malcolm 1981, 17).
- 3.
A political commentator later argued that this disagreement concerned a ‘primarily political question, [a question] for political scientists, not for theologians’ (‘Glavni Muftija…’ 2012).
- 4.
For the Bosnian-Serb media, bishop Grigorije has later clarified his statements, and in his interpretation he even sharpened the accusation against Reis ul Ulema: ‘It is perhaps time that respected Reis wakes up. … I have told him about the event which I witnessed in Washington D.C., and repeated his own words which he has said, in my presence, to the Rabbi Schneier, that he wants an Islamic Bosnia and Herzegovina, that is to say, that he wants a state in which Islam is above everything else, and he talked that there is no proper Islam without an Islamic state’ (‘Vladika Grigorije…’ 2012). Again, it should be emphasized that this statement was given before the emergence of the terrorist entity called ‘Islamic State’ in Syria and Iraq, meaning that this entity is not implied in Bishop’s statement.
- 5.
Technically speaking, the close association between the meanings of ‘Muslim’ and ‘Bosniak’ in Bosnia and Herzegovina can be, in some contexts, the matter of conventional implicatures (Grice 1975) and in other contexts, a complete fusion of meanings or synonymy.
- 6.
The relevant section of the interview (Azam 2005) is Cerić’s answer to the following question by the interviewer, ‘Will Bosnia remain a secular state or develop into a theocracy?’, to which Cerić responded:
‘As far as Islam is concerned, all countries belong to one of the following categories: Dar al-Islam, Dar al-Harb or Dar al-Sulh. … In the first category, Islam must be implemented to the furthest extent. Islam can never be implemented perfectly, but in dar al-Islam the government ought to try their best and continue trying; Islam is an ideal that people in nations in this category must strive for. In a dar al-Harb state, non-Muslims form the majority of the population and Islam is not recognized by the legislature. Hence it cannot be implemented to any degree. This category applies to most Western states. In the third, intermediary category, Sulh, the situation is such that Islam or the shariah cannot be implemented fully, but the government should endeavour to put it into practice as much as possible. Bosnia is not in the first category, but the third. Therefore we are obliged to try our best to put Islamic legislation into practice, but it is unrealistic to expect us to implement shariah completely. That’s what I want, of course, but it will not happen just like that.’ (Azam 2005)
- 7.
The statement says that ‘[both] Christianity and Islam look on marriage between a man and a woman as an expression of God’s order of creation. … Marriage between a man and a woman is an integral and important part of the creation theologies of both religions’ (‘Skjebnevalg for Norge?’ 2005).
- 8.
Leirvik has personally contributed to both. For his comparative theological exploration of Muslim and Christian perspectives on Jesus, see Leirvik (2010).
- 9.
On different TV channels and in Bosnian Herzegovina where the highly visible Grigorije-Cerić disagreement has been reported and analysed, the exchange has also been described in the following Terms: ‘debate’ between religious leaders (‘Vladika Grigorije…’ 2012), ‘sharp polemic’ (‘Žustra rasprava…’ 2012), ‘polemical dispute’, ‘exchange of opinions’, and ‘little verbal excess’ (‘Glavni Muftija…’ 2012). All of these expressions imply, or significantly overlap with, ‘disagreement’.
- 10.
See Chap. 6, 197–198.
- 11.
While Lindbeck treats more or less all interreligious disagreements as grammatical and stops there (see Chap. 3), the subsequent theologians of the postliberal tradition, such as Nicholas Adams, have taken the grammaticalist understanding of interreligious disagreement as a rule and offered strategies to ‘manage’ them. Adams suggests ‘reparations’ of what he sees as misguided strategies of interreligious dialogue: those which affirm or seek only agreement and avoid, or are not apt to deal with, disagreements (Adams 2006, 2013). But in Adams’s hands, the postliberal tabuization of liberal theology’s quest for understanding ‘the ground’ of interreligious understanding, which is already strong in Lindbeck, gets in the way of acknowledging the possibilities of interreligious ways of making sense of interreligious communication and dialogue. Accordingly, the postliberal perspective on interreligious disagreement avoids any theological acknowledgment of anything similar to what I have called the ‘third language’ of dialogue. One gets an impression that, for Adams, sense-making of the possibilities of interreligious communication and understanding can either be ‘tradition specific-speculations’ or ‘error’ (Adams 2006, 388). In addition, the lack of space for existentialist, nonsensicalist, or instinctivist conceptions of religion I explore here makes Adams’s postliberal approach to interreligious disagreement theologically somewhat unfitting for my purposes, although he addresses similar questions and offers some interesting insights.
- 12.
See PI §206.
- 13.
See Chap. 5, 163–164.
- 14.
See Chap. 2, 45–46.
- 15.
Compare Wittgenstein’s criticism of ‘dogmaticism’ (CV 32–33) which he perceived in strands of Catholicism of his day. He describes dogmatic Catholicism as a religious system which lays down ‘dogmas governing thinking’ and considers these ‘unshakable’ for believers. Such an approach to religious believing and thinking is for him an ‘absolute, palpable tyranny’ (ibid.).
- 16.
See Chap. 2, 38–40, 45–46.
- 17.
See, e.g., what Langmuir (1996), in his historical-cultural analysis of Anti-semitism, has to say on the medieval Christian attitudes towards the Jews: ‘The xenophobic assertion that “Jews are Christ-killers” reflects awareness that Jesus’ death was a consequence of the refusal to believe of most of the people who should have been most able to understand his message, a refusal that undermined and threatened the convictions on which Christianity relied for their eternal salvation and on which the Christian community was based’ (1996, 333, italics added).
- 18.
The agreement between Tillich and Wittgenstein in their respective criticisms of the intellectualist/evidentialist interpretation of religious belief is striking. See Andrejč (2015, 75–78) for more inter-textual comparisons and analysis. There are also interesting differences. One is in the fact that, by often being more suspicious of historical claims in religion than Tillich, Wittgenstein’s approach can be seen as ‘more liberal-theological’ than Tillich’s. Recognizing that ‘theology is necessarily existential’ (Tillich 1973, 32) and not affirming a complete literal historicity of the Gospel accounts, Tillich nevertheless puts the historical event of Jesus at the centre of his systematic theology (ibid. 42). On the other hand, Wittgenstein’s exploratory comments on this topic are not meant to be very consistent, but he did write the following: ‘Queer as it sounds: the historical accounts of the Gospels might, in the historical sense, be demonstrably false, and yet belief would lose nothing through this: but not because it has to do with ‘universal truth of reason’! rather (sic) because historical proof … is irrelevant to belief. This message (the Gospels) is seized on by a human being believingly (i.e. lovingly): That is the certainty of this ‘taking-for-true’, nothing else.’ (CV 37–38). This sounds like severing the connection between the Jesus of the kerygma and the historical Jesus completely, something Tillich would reject. On the other hand, Wittgenstein did remark, in his exploratory reflections on Resurrection, that ‘Redeeming love believes even in the Resurrection; holds fast even to the Resurrection’ (CV 39). Also, when he expounds on his claim that Christianity is not resting ‘on an historical basis’, he qualifies this statement by linking it to the question of the justification of this belief, not to the question of whether it contains any historical truth or not: ‘It doesn’t rest on an historic basis in the sense that the ordinary belief in historic facts could serve as a foundation. Here we have a belief in historic facts different from a belief in ordinary historic facts. Even, they are not treated as historical, empirical, propositions. Those people who had faith did not apply the doubt which would ordinarily apply to any historical propositions. Especially propositions of a time long past, etc.’ (LC 57).
- 19.
See previous footnote.
- 20.
To be sure, there are some liberal Christian theologians who deny any relevance of the historicity of Jesus for theology whatsoever. See, e.g., Danz (2013, 193). I am thankful to Klaus von Stosch who directed me to this most recent example.
- 21.
See Philipp (2008) for a brief account of a very public controversy which ensued in Germany in 2008, when the first person to hold a Chair of Islamic Religion, Professor Muhammad Sven Kalisch at University of Münster, publicly announced his conclusion—as an Islamic theologian—that Prophet Muhammad never existed. As a result, Islamic communities in Germany ‘discontinued its co-operation with the Centre for Religious Studies at the University of Münster’ (meant to coordinate Islamic religious education in the country), since it was felt that Prof Kalisch has abandoned a core Islamic belief (ibid.).
- 22.
Muslims and Christians, e.g., can use historical criticism of the New Testament and/or the Qur’an in their disagreements in very different ways. The goal of involving higher criticism can be to show that literal historical accuracy of either New Testament or the Qur’an ‘is not the point’, but rather that, e.g., the different theological understandings by Christians and Muslims of the revelatory status of their respective Holy Books is more about the existential meaning-making power of these books in people’s lives. In reality, however, when the arguments from higher criticism are used in Christian-Muslim disagreements, these are often aimed at ‘proving the other wrong’, even while at the same time upholding the historical-literal infallibility of one’s own Holy Book (see Leirvik 2010, 127–144)!
- 23.
See also Bennett-Hunter (2010).
- 24.
E.g., notable sections of his Dynamics of Faith (2001) consist of analyses of how the concept of ‘faith’ often is understood (which often means ‘misunderstood’—for example Tillich 2001, 35–46). Only then Tillich suggests how it should be understood.
- 25.
In comparison, consider the way in which Lindbeck’s heavy focus on the grammatical aspect of religion loses the possibility of conversion from sight completely. If ‘to become religious—no less than to become culturally or linguistically competent—is to interiorize a set of skills by practice and training’ (Lindbeck 2009, 21), and if all experience is ‘derived’ from the language/culture of one’s tradition (ibid. 20), a change of religion is primarily, or indeed completely, a matter of socialization. In this picture, any experiential moment of ‘being seized’ (let alone ‘turned round’) has to be entirely linguistically/culturally produced: if so, hearing the language of ‘the true’ religion or perhaps partaking in its practice should in and of itself ‘turn one around’. But this, of course, is a strange, counter-intuitive, as well as historically false picture of religious conversions. If there is no existential-experiential aspect that is not fully determined by some language, one cannot sensibly reflect on the potential power of a particular language to frame or express some aspects of experience ‘better’ than others.
- 26.
Peter Harvey explains the place of guilt and ‘remorse’ in Theravada Buddhism in the following way: ‘However much Buddhism may value genuine remorse, it does not … encourage feelings of guilt… Such a feeling might arise as part of the natural karmic result of an action, but is not to be actively indulged in. In the Mahayana, Santideva says that a Bodhisattva should not be excessively regretful for wrong actions, … Bodhisattva retains his great virtue if he returns to the aspiration for Buddhahood not more than a few hours after doing an evil deed’ (Harvey 2000, 28).
This provides an answer to a typical question which is often raised by postliberals and Radical Orthodox about the salience of this or that felt experience in religion. In relation to guilt, then, the question ‘Which comes first: the feeling of guilt (as typically experienced by a Western Christian) or the Western Christian theology of guilt?’ does not have a one-sided answer since the relationship between the conceptualization of and beliefs about guilt on one hand, and the feeling of guilt on the other, is dialectical. In other words, the question presents a false and a far too simplistic picture. Of course, religious/secular and other cultural categories in which we think and believe certainly contribute to how guilt is felt, what role does it have in moral reasoning (if any), and so on—as the discussion between Christianity and Buddhism we are examining demonstrates. But the claim that language fully determines the experience of guilt is as wrong as the claim that feeling of guilt is entirely pre-conceptual.
- 27.
See also Stosch (2015, 126–127) for a similar point in relation to interreligious translations.
- 28.
The relationship between the liberal Christian theologies of the early and mid-twentieth century, and both Catholic and Protestant liberation theologies that arose from 1960s onwards, is complicated and includes both significant continuities and discontinuities. For a historical analysis of a particular trajectory from Liberal Protestantism to Liberation theologies in North America, see Dorrien (2006, 4–6, 133–189).
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Andrejč, G. (2016). A Wittgensteinian Approach to Interreligious Disagreements: Descriptive and Normative Investigations. In: Wittgenstein and Interreligious Disagreement. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-49823-6_7
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