Abstract
With his familiar careful scholarship and engaging eloquence, Miroslav Volf has written a book that will provide an unsettling challenge to both secular humanists and to scholars and practitioners of religion. The challenge is double-edged. To the secularists he argues that without the help of religions, the agents of globalization are not going to be able to achieve their goals of promoting human flourishing. To the religionists, he warns that unless they collaborate in better managing their universal truth claims and their relationships to political power, they will not be able to provide the help that globalization needs.
This bold agenda has impressive credentials. It gathers the fruits of research and conversation from the interdisciplinary “Faith and Globalization” seminars that Volf taught at Yale in the fall semesters from 2008–11 together with Prime Minister Tony Blair. Volf is up front about his own perspective. Inspired and guided by his Christian faith—presently Episcopalian but with “important impulses” from his previous Pentecostal experience (9)— he lays out a case that he hopes followers of other traditions, or no tradition, will be able to fundamentally affirm.
So what is it that globalization demands and that religions can supply? Throughout the book, Volf answers by repeatedly appealing to transcendence. This sentence summarizes his claim: “the world religions … insist … that we can properly attend to and truly enjoy ordinary life only when our primary attachment is to the transcendent realm” (44). Only through some such recognition of transcendence can humanity find the vision and energy to “limit consumption and strengthen global solidarity” (170), but can “the quarreling family of world religions” (2) speak to the “market-driven” and “capitalist” globalizers (6) with an audible common voice?
In response, Volf first registers his (required?) endorsement of the postmodern academy’s insistence that there is no “universal core” or “essence” to be found among the religions. But then he claims that after the “local religions” went through an “axial transformation” (he thinks Jaspers’s “axial period” is not identifiable) to make way for “world religions,” we can indeed identify “shared formal structural affinities” (67), “basic principles,” even “common convictions [that] can underpin a set of global rules and commitments necessary for global order” (92–93). So, no “common core,” but “common convictions.”
Even more courageously flaunting postmodern prohibitions of anything universal, Volf identifies “six key formal common features of world religions,” which, if not explicitly found in, are consistent with, the teachings of the religions: (1) Reality consists of “two worlds,” transcendent and mundane, both of which are “categorically distinct” though inherently related, with primacy given to the transcendent. (2) Humans bear individual responsibility. (3) Universal claims—“as to what is true, just, and good for all human beings”—are necessary. (4) Human well-being goes beyond ordinary, material flourishing, without negating it. (5) Religions are cultural systems that are distinct from, though critically related to, political systems. (6) There is something amiss in the present world and in need of transformation (68–71).
But if the world religions are going to be able to make their shared contribution to global flourishing and peace, they will have to figure out how to make universal claims without slipping into “the imperialism of the universal,” that is, without “fomenting violence” (99, 58). Religions forget at their peril Barth’s reminder that religion and government are “unrealizable allies” (85). When religions ally with governments, they all too easily become sacred canopies for armies.
But such dangers should not diminish, Volf insists, the need for a religious community to make not only universal but also exclusive claims “that it alone fosters authentic human flourishing” (139). After all, “most adherents of the world religions are religious exclusivists”—some 2.5 to 3.5 billion people (142)! Volf then unfolds an elaborate case that “a consistent religious exclusivist can be a political pluralist.” Examples thereof are Roger Williams and the Rhode Island colony, as well as Ralph Reed and many on the Christian Right (146–60). A pluralist, such as myself, would suggest that the question is not whether religious exclusivism can allow for political pluralism but whether it more readily promotes political exclusivism.
Volf might be questioned on this issue and other issues: Is his “two-world” common feature compatible with the non-dualism of Asian traditions? Should compassion be added to his list of common features? Such questions in no way diminish the value of this book—for both academic and undergraduate-parish levels—in making clear why we really do need religion in a globalized world.