Thesis: the diversity of religious beliefs do not present the believer with the choice, "One (probably mine) is right, and the others are wrong." Rather, some philosophers argue that

a) underlying diverse religions is a single Divine reality (John Hick);

b) we must endorse a religious pluralism which acknowledges and celebrates the legitimacy of diverse traditions as culturally diverse expressions of the same divine truth (Vivekananda).

A contemporary example of "b": Huston Smith, in his World's Religions (1989) and The Illustrated World's Religions, takes the major religious traditions to stand as "the wisdom traditions of mankind" which speak in a single voice concerning:

ethics: the decalogue captures it

virtue: the kind of person we should become - humility, charity, veracity:

Humility is not self-abasement. It is the capacity to regard oneself as fully one, but not more than one. Charity shifts the weight to the other foot; it is to consider one's neighbor to be as fully one as you are. As for veracity, it extends beyond basic truth-telling to a sublime objectivity - the capacity to see things exactly as they are, freedom from subjective distortions.

The Asian religions extol these virtues by noting the obstacles that debar them. The Buddha called these obstacles poisons, and identified them as greed, hatred, and delusion. To the degree that they are expunged, selflessness (humility), compassion (charity) and seeing things in their Suchness (veracity) replace them.

Finally vision - the wisdom traditions' perception of the ultimate nature of things.

It begins by seeing things as more integrated than we normally suppose. Mortal life gives no view of the whole; we see things in dribs and drabs, and self-interest skews perspective grotesquely. It is as if life were a great tapestry which we face from its wrong side. This gives it the appearance of a maze of knots and threads that look chaotic. From a purely human standpoint, the wisdom traditions are the species' most prolonged and serious attempts to infer from the hind side of life's tapestry its frontal design. As the beauty and harmony of the design derives from the way its parts interweaves, the design confers on those parts a significance they are denied in isolation. We could almost say that seeing ourselves as belonging to the whole is what religion - religio, rebinding - is. It is mankind's fundamental thrust at unification.

This first motif - unity - leads to a second. If things are more integrated than they seem, they are also better than they seem. Paralleling the astrophysicists' report that the world is bigger than it looks to our unaided eyes, the wisdom traditions report that it is better than it feels to our unregenerated hearts. And in comparable degree we should add, which means that we are talking about light years. Yahweh, God and Allah; T'ien and the Tao; Brahman and Nirvana, carry the signature of the ens perfectissium - perfect being. This perfection floods the wisdom traditions with an exuberance nowhere else to be found. It includes their estimates of the human self which, as we have seen, is astounding. Wherever human beings go (a Rabbinic tradition relates), they are preceded by a host of angels, crying, "Make way! Make way for the Image of God!" In Saint Paul's formulation, "Beholding the glory of the Lord, we are ourselves changed from one degree of glory to another."

To the unity of things and their inestimable worth, the wisdom traditions add (as their third surmise) mystery. Murder mysteries have debased that word, for detective mysteries are not mysteries at all for having solutions. a mystery is that special kind of problem which has no solutions because the more we understand it, the more we see that we don't understand. In mysteries, knowledge and ignorance advance lockstep. As known unknowns become known, unknown unknowns proliferate; the larger the island of knowledge, the longer the shoreline of wonder. It's like the quantum world. The more we understand its formalism, the stranger that world becomes.

Things are more integrated than they seem, they are better than they seem, and they are more mysterious than they seem; this is the vision that the wisdom traditions bequeath us. When we add to this the baseline they establish for ethical conduct and their account of the human virtues, one wonders if a wiser platform for human life has been envisioned. At the center of the religious life is a particular kind of joy, the prospect of a happy ending that blossoms from necessarily painful beginnings, the promise of human difficulties embraced and overcome. In daily life we have only hints of this joy. When they arrive, we do not know whether our happiness is the rarest or the commonest thing on earth, for in all earthly things we find it, give it, and receive it, but cannot hold onto it. when we possess those intimations, it seems in no way strange to be happy, but in retrospect we wonder how such gold of Eden could have been ours. Religiously conceived, the human opportunity is to transform epiphanies into abiding light. (247-8)

He endorses listening - beginning with one's own tradition:

If one of the wisdom traditions claims us, we begin by listening to it. Not uncritically, for new occasions teach new duties; but nevertheless expectantly, realizing that it houses more truth than a single lifetime could fathom, let alone enact.

But in addition to our own traditions, we listen to the faith of others, including the secularists. We listen first because our times require it. Daily the world grows smaller, leaving understanding the only place where peace can find a home. Those who listen work for peace, a peace built not on religious or political hegemonies, but on mutual awareness and concern. For understanding brings respect, and respect prepares the way for a higher capacity which is love.

Understanding, then, breeds love; but the reverse also holds. Love brings understanding - the two are reciprocal. So we must listen to understand, while realizing that to the extent that compassion increases we will listen more attentively, for it is impossible to love another without hearing that other. If we are to be true to the wisdom traditions, we must attend to others as deeply and as alertly as we hope that they will attend to us. For as Thomas Merton once noted, God speaks to us in three places: in scripture, in our deepest selves, and in the voice of the stranger.

Said Jesus, "Do unto others as you would that they should do unto you."

Said the Buddha, "He who would may reach the utmost height, but he must be eager to learn."

If we do not quote the other religions on these points it is because their words would be redundant. (249)

Antithesis: we shall demonstrate that

a) the apparent commonalities of moral codes across the various religious traditions are not proofs of a deeper, underlying, single moral truth (Peter Donovan), and

b) as attractive as the pluralism endorsed in the thesis may be, it simply fails to capture the realities of religion as experienced by believers within specific traditions (Ninian Smart)

Examples:

a) Christian emphasis on the salvation of a soul for an eternal existence in an afterlife vs.

Buddhist, some Indian insistence on dissolution of self as key to "salvation"

b) emphasis in several religious traditions (Judaism, Christianity, Islam, some versions of Hinduism ["Way of Devotion" focus on specific deities], Shinto on "right relationship" with the Divine as central to "religion" vs.

denial of existence of Divinity/Divinities in Buddhism, some forms of Hinduism (Way of Knowledge vs. Way of Devotion), Taoism

c) over against apparent ethical commonalities (some form of the Golden Rule in all major religious traditions) - distinctive ethical practices in specific traditions -

Kosher food laws in Orthodox Judaism;

polygamy accepted in several traditions [Mormons; Islam];

Disciples' practice of communion every Sunday -

cannot be overlooked.

On the contrary, these specific practices are definitive parts of "religion" for practitioners, as essential to the religious life as, say, the Scriptural canon, liturgical language (cf. Latin for the Catholic Mass, Hebrew in Judaism, etc.), etc.

These differences, moreover, are not "just" over "small details" - but further encompass very large worldview issues, including:

relationship between the individual and the community:

prophetic vs. apocalyptic;

Modernity/Protestantism vs. traditional stress on the individual as part of the community

relationship between "religion" and other domains of life, including economic and social arrangements - most important for our purposes:

Modern/Western - religion as private, individual, divorced from one's economic practices

Traditional/West-East: "religion" as centering and defining all aspects of human existence, including the social and economic -

Example: prohibition against usury in Judaism, Christianity, early Protestantism

vs. embrace of collecting interest in modern West

--> current conflicts between Western nations and Muslim world: our capitalism and unabashed endorsement of profit and material "success" appear as idolatry to traditional Muslims

3) What is our Christian response? Our response as Disciples? How do we "love our neighbor" as ourselves, when our neighbor believe and practice differently?

a) Some of this will depend, of course, on our understanding of:

Christianity - in particular, how seriously do we take

i) the Gospel of John: I am the way, the truth, and the light - no one comes to the father except through me

ii) the Great Commission: Go forth to all the nations and make disciples...

or is it possible for one to be Christian and still ecumenical/pluralistic?

Several ways:

a) relativize the above texts as particular expressions of the early Church -

--> beyond the Bible:

b) recognize the historical facts concerning the emergence of Judaism and Christianity - a separation that was not complete in important ways until the 300's, when Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire /

recognize the role of Christian anti-Semitism in history, especially the Holocaust

--> we are guests in the house of Israel (Clark Williamson)

c) recognize the historical development of all religious traditions, as influenced by different economic and cultural developments, e.g.:

the role of women in early, "countercultural" traditions - and the shift from largely egalitarian roles to patriarchal/subordinate roles (apparent in the Christian Scriptures);

the role of oral traditions/interpretation vs. the role of scriptures, especially after the development of the printing press:

some religious traditions (Judaism first of all) stress the importance of the oral tradition over the simply scriptural - vs. a fundamentalist insistence on literal reading of texts;

the former would tend towards a more pluralistic understanding of diverse interpretations - and a welcoming of other traditions (as different interpretations of the single Divinity)

- while the latter would tend towards exclusivism, e.g., the Southern Baptist insistence that we must "evangelize the Jews"

most broadly, the difference between prophetic vs. apocalyptic traditions. The prophetic stresses social justice - and, in particular, acceptance of the stranger

vs. apocalyptic sense of urgency about the end-time, and the need for the right recipe for salvation.

"Where is the knowledge that is lost in information? Where is the wisdom that is lost in knowledge?" T.S. Eliot, quoted in Huston Smith, 13)