Peter Slater

Three responses to Faith and Belief: * A review article

Though the appearance of any new book by Wilfred Cantwell Smith is always a great occasion for those engaged in religious studies, the publication of his Faith and Belief (Princeton: Princeton University Press,1979) was felt to warrant special attention, with the result that Studies in Religion/Sciences Religieuses invited several scholars to contribute a response. The result is the following three-part review article. Peter Slater of Carleton University, immediate past-president of the CssltIscEx, considers the specific content of Smith’s view of faith; Donald Wiebe, whose labours on behalf of the recent xlvth I.A.H.R. Congress will long be appreciated, and who is now teaching at the University of Toronto, directs his attention to Smith’s argument against belief,~ and Tibor Horvath, s. J., of Regis College, author of Faith under Scrutiny (Notre Dame: Fides, 1975), here scrutinizes Smith’s treatment of the Roman Catholic view offaith in Chapter5. It is hoped that these three responses will set in motion the kind of high-level discussion the book deserves.

Interreligious foundations for a shared future: A Canadian example in a pluralistic world

to acknowledge this motif in the major world religions. Yet in popular imagination religion seems to be only tradition. People forget that the tradition is a tradition of promise. The future will not simply be a repeat of the past. What is important from the past is what points us to the new future. It is this which must be the starting point for any discussion of foundations for today. Contemporary faith is notably more interested in our this-worldly future than was classical faith. Our transcendent hope is more ’horizontal’ than ’vertical,’ oriented towards the promise of a new earth as well as a new heaven, rather than towards the escape of isolated souls from a cosmic hell. This secular shift marks a deepening of faith, not a loss of faith, insofar as it signals a concern to place our neighbours’ futures ahead of our own. I propose to illustrate this point by reference to recent actions of the Christian churches in Canada. In conclusion, I shall return to this question of transcendence to ask what its implications may be. In recent years the Canadian churches have faced very concrete challenges concerning the value to be given to the traditional ways of life of Canada’s native peoples. These ways are based on patterns of hunting and fishing which are threatened by technological developments urged upon us by multinational corporations, controlled mostly by business interests in the United States. An example was the permission obtained by the Amax Corporation, a mining company, to dump toxic waste material far in excess of stated government guidelines in the Naas Valley, where the Nishga tribe lives by fishing. The Anglican Church of Canada became involved five years ago when a Vancouver parish in British Columbia asked a tribal leader to be its after-dinner speaker. He reported his people’s fears that the fishing grounds would be ruined. Government officials refused to rescind the dumping permits until sufficient evidence was gathered to prove the waste would be harmful. By the time such evidence could be collected, it would be too late. The church therefore bought four shares of the company in order to present a motion at the shareholders’ meeting, urging the

Compte rendu / Review of book: Religion and Truth: Towards an Alternative Paradigm for the Study of Religion Donald Wiebe The Hague: Mouton, 1981. Pp. xiv + 295

This is a good book in the sense that it tackles an important issue, makes clear where the author stands and why, and gives the reader the data on which to disagree with him. Disagreement is likely, since Wiebe adopts an uncompromising secularism in his approach to the study of religion. The important issue is the question of truth, especially propositional truth, in any critical assessment of the nature and meaning of religion. Too many of us for too long have accepted the dogma that questions of truth can be bracketed while exploring the meaning of claims made in the different traditions. This axiom of ’phenomenological’ studies in religion is what Wiebe seeks to demolish, as the first step towards a more ’scientific’ paradigm in the academic study of religion. Through a critique of both subjectivism and descriptivism, Wiebe shows that the question of truth is methodologically unavoidable. He does this through an extensive survey of such authors as Kraemer, Otto, Tillich, Durkheim, Baird, Smart, Spiro, Cantwell Smith, F. Ferre, W. A. Christian, Stace, Schuon, Wieman, Hick, Miles, Horton, Karl Rahner, and Ortega Y. Gasset. The text and notes include judgments on these and others. Gadamer is mentioned but not used. Wiebe

Comptes rendus / Reviews of books: The Challenge of Religion Today: Essays on the Philosophy of Religion: John King-Farlow, editor Canadian Contemporary Philosophy Series New York: Science History Publications, 1976. Pp. 205

The subtitle for this collection is more informative than the title. The main challenge is from philosophy to various philosophers’ ideas of religion. The collection is ’Canadian’ in the sense that the contributors happened to be working in Canada at the time of writing. Jay Newman opens the volume by examining proselytizing from actand rule-utilitarian and deontological ethical perspectives. He tacitly assumes that proselytizers are always less educated than their liberal critics and overtly states that the best way to improve the cosmos is to improve oneself. This and the two essays by Wayne Grennan and Catherine Dafoe, on faith as a Christian virtue or

Comptes rendus / Reviews of books: Satan and Mara: Christian and Buddhist Symbols of Evil J. W. Boyd Supplements to Numen, 27 Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1975. Pp. 188

tions et la valeur philosophique de son auteur. Le considerer comme le simple reflet d’une 6tape de la pens6e qu6b6coise, 6tape d6pass6e par les 6v6nements actuels, serait oublier que la Culture au nom de laquelle on mene le combat pour un Quebec maitre chez-lui n’est pas n6e aujourd’hui, que ses sources vitales vont tr6s loin dans le pass6 de notre peuple, que les 61ites qui ont permis ~ quelques 60 milles colons de traverser la crise de la d6faite par un peuple d’une autre langue et d’une autre culture que la n6tre, que ces 61ites n’ont pu naitre et poss6der les instruments de leur lutte incessante pendant deux si6cles que parce qu’ils possedaient une pens6e fortement structur6e dans le domaine des valeurs et dans leur vision du monde et de 1’homme. Or, ~ cette solidite de leur pens6e, la discipline philosophique a joue plus qu’ un role accidentel, et elle doit continuer à remplir cette fonction si nous voulons demeurer qui nous sommes sur un continent de 250 millions d’êtres humains dont le

Towards a responsive theology of religions

Peter Slater is Associate Professor of Religion and Chairman, Department of Religion, Carleton University, Ottawa. This paper is based on my reading of some unpublished work by Robert Lawson Slater and on many conversations. It is thus to some extent a reflection of as well as a reflection upon his thinking on the comparative study of religions. Of course, I like to think that the influence has not been all one way. Since I was five, if not before, I have not ceased to try to educate him (see the credit in the Preface of World Religions and World Community).’ Be that as it may, I take responsibility for the ideas presented here while acknowledging a general debt. In fact, those of us who were his students either at McGill or at Harvard University probably owe more to his attitude than to specific ideas with which he alone is associated. Like all good teachers he has a gift for introducing one to the ideas of others and for opening up horizons of relationship among Christians and between Christians and others. As a systematic theologian he did this as part of a general apologetic concern, and as a teacher of world religions he did this as part of a concern for the truth in religion to which no single partisan group can claim sole title. Nevertheless under the heading ’responsive theology’ he has begun to organize ideas in a way distinctively his own and from which thinking on a theology of religions might proceed. To say that theology is responsive is to assert a number of things. In the first place it acknowledges the fact of revelation or that experience in religion is experience of the divine. Theological thinking starts with certain given insights whether it is focused on the Christian tradition or on the

The Reality of the Devil: Evil in Man RUTH NANDA ANSHEN New York: Harper and Row 1972. 142.

the interest of their director, Robert W. Funk, in the structure of the New Testament letters. All are painstaking analyses of the Greek letter form as found in the papyri; in addition, the first devotes a great deal of space to an analysis of some of the major letters of Paul. The assumption behind all three books is that the New Testament letter is both related to and different from the secular

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In this paper I want to suggest that often instead of solving our problems of evil we mitigate their impact by relating our experience of radical evil to some more ultimate reference in our cosmologies, theologies, and anthropologies. However if we talk of the mystery rather than the problem of evil we seem to enter a quagmire of mystification. Even though too many philosophical charges of literal nonsense concerning theistic statements on evil wrongly presuppose that the authors of such statements intended to make literal sense, the suspicion persists, nevertheless, that religious paradoxes cover a tissue of contradictions and equivocations.2 To allay this suspicion I believe that we must learn to take

Evil and ultimacy

as being no different from other cultural patterns. By emphasizing what religion does as opposed to what religion is, sociology encourages an instrumental view of religion that legitimates the development of religious surrogates. The author suggests that the popularity of immanentist theology signals the end of competition. Like Stark and Glock in American Piety, Robertson claims that recent theology is moving toward a religious legitimation of areligiosity. This is an excellent book for those