Defining Religion by Robert Cummings Neville

Author:Robert Cummings Neville
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Published: 2018-10-14T16:00:00+00:00

PRAGMATIC INQUIRY

The second recommendation concerns the methodological frameworks of liberal theology and is that liberal theology ought to embrace a pragmatic approach to theological knowledge. Pragmatism insists that all knowledge is fallible and subject to correction. In fact, the most plausible hypotheses are those that have been made most vulnerable to correction. But that an hypothesis is fallible does not mean it is wrong, or only possible. It means that most everything we know makes it appear to be true, even though something might come up to require its modification or rejection. Religious thinking and experience rests on many cubic acres of tested engagements with ultimate realities as well as the non-ultimate ones. We should not say that our claims to universal knowledge are only possible, or even probable, although alternatives might be possible and we should be happy that our claims are more probable. The claims rather should be regarded as true until proven otherwise.

Of course, we should go on to make such claims with appropriate arguments. The appropriate arguments for theological claims are enormously complicated and varied, as liberal theology and its critics have learned. I distinguish four main families of arguments for theological claims, those oriented to imagination, assertion, system, and practice.12

Arguments oriented to imagination pertain to sorting and assessing the development of religious symbols expressing religious claims and presuppositions. Here is where appeals to scripture, to ancient stories, to rituals, music, and other cultural forms that articulate the religious imagination are important. Broadly construed, the disciplines of biblical studies and ritual studies are central here, as well as the social sciences that give thick descriptions of how religious imagination plays out in life. The concern with imagination is not so much with whether specific claims are true, but rather with whether the imaginative terms pick up on what is important religiously (which is not disconnected with the concern with what is truly important!).

Arguments about theological assertions, by contrast, are aimed to discover their truth or falsity. Following from pragmatic semiotics, we know that assertions are interpretations within some particular context or contexts, and what might be true in one context might be false or misleading in another. We know that assertions interpret their subject matter in certain respects and not other respects; identifying the respect of interpretation is crucial to assessing validity. Assertions refer in at least three modes of reference. All assertions refer symbolically and therefore need to be understood in terms of the symbolic systems involved; confusions occur when a symbol from one system is construed as being in another symbolic system. Many theological claims are asserted to refer iconically, claiming that the reality is like what the symbols say. Many other claims, however, do not refer iconically: God is not really up. The third mode of reference is indexicality, where the function of the assertion is to point to subject matter from which the interpreter is otherwise disconnected. Religious assertions, for instance, doctrines, sometimes have to “work on” people for many years before the people are transformed enough to pick up on what the assertion refers to.

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