Modem Theology 7:1 October 1990 ISSN 0266-71777 $3.00

A CERTAIN 'POLITICS OF SPEECH': 'RELIGIOUS PLURALISM' IN THE AGE OF THE MCDONALD'S HAMBURGER

KENNETH SURIN

Discourse can be dissociated today neither from the origins of its production nor from the political, economic, or religious praxis that can change societies and, at a given moment, makes various kinds of scientific comprehension possible. xjr. , , , „ , α

r r Michel de Certeau1

If it is incontestable that the prejudice of superiority is an obstacle in the road to knowledge, we must also admit that the prejudice of equality is a still greater one, for it consists in identifying the other purely and simply with one's own 'ego ideal' (or with oneself).

Tzvetan Todorov2

. . . in 1977-78, celebrating the unprecedented success of 'hamburger bars', 'coffee shops', 'fish and chip shops', and 'donut bars' in the Far East, where the fast-food multinational, McDonald's, has had enormous success, Business Week exclaimed: 'The Americanization of the Japanese, in full swing since the occupation, has reached a new peak. Fast foods are becoming a way of life'; and Advertising Age, 'It is the food of the jeans generation, the new people who are looking to a common culture. South-East Asians of a generation ago thrived on Coca-Colanisation. Now their children are in the middle of the hamburger happening'. Armand Mattelart3

Hendrik Kraemer, Karl Rahner, John Hick and Wilfred Cantwell Smith are well-known for their quite different attempts to delineate — philosophi­cally and/or theologically — the forms of relationship that Christianity has

Professor Kenneth Sunn, Department of Religion, Duke University, Durham, NC 27706, USA

68 Kenneth Surin

to the other world religions.4 The formulations, and the achievements, of Kraemer, Rahner, Hick and Cantwell Smith represent a significant and complex mode of cultural production. This mode, like all forms of cultural production, is historically, socially and politically constituted, and one of my primary purposes in writing this essay will be to construct a narrative which identifies and situates the historical, political and social forces, the 'con­tingencies' if you like, that provide the always 'material' conditions and contexts of the systems of knowledge produced by our chosen philosophers and theologians. I do not intend in any direct way to make an appraisal of the truth or plausibility of their accounts of the relationships between the religions. My aim here is rather to try and understand the understandings of 'Christianity', 'Buddhism', 'Judaism', 'the world religions', and so forth, that are produced and reproduced in the texts of Kraemer, Rahner, Hick and Cantwell Smith. This essay will conclude with a proposal for a somewhat different understanding of what it is that transpires in principle when we and others bring signifiers like 'Christianity', 'Judaism', 'Buddhism', and so on, into specific kinds of discursive proximity.5

I

In the published version of his 1986-7 Gifford Lectures, John Hick says that while there have been many theories of religion, these theories have invariably been of one or the other of two types. One type, says Hick, purports to provide an entirely 'naturalistic' account of religion. The second type of theory, while it may seek to provide a 'religious' account of religion, nevertheless does so from the perspective of a particular 'confession', thereby (in Hick's eyes) effectively subordinating other religious traditions to that 'confession'. Both these types of theory Hick finds to be problematic, and he therefore proposes an alternative account, one which will be 'religious' while at the same time refusing to privilege any particular 'confessional' standpoint.6 I mention Hick's classification of accounts of religion not because I find it to be probative (I do not), but because it seems to me that there is a sense in which the writings of people like Kraemer, Rahner, Cantwell Smith and Hick can helpfully be seen as differing responses to a powerful imperative addressed to the 'modern' philosopher of religion and/or theologian, an imperative (I am tempted to call it a temp­tation) which supplies the underlying motivation for Hick's classification, and which calls the person who is dealing with the question of the relation­ships between the religions to treat this question from an explicitly and rigorously 'non-confessional' perspective. Hence, by Hick's standards, he and Cantwell Smith (among others) pass this 'test', while Rahner, for all his attempts to distance himself from a benighted Christian 'exclusivism', fails in the end despite his best intentions because he will not relinquish the axiom that the church is the decisive locus of human salvation. Kraemer of course

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fails this 'test' from the outset because in Hick's view his position is so flagrantly, so irremediably, 'confessional'.7 This pressing question of the delimitation, even the merely possible delimitation, of 'the confessional' in understanding the relationships between the religions is what links thinkers of such seemingly divergent views as the 'later' Kraemer and Hick.

But why, according to these thinkers, did this question of 'the con­fessional' become urgent for those who confront the question of the relationships between Christianity and the other major religions? The answer to this question lies in a certain historical narrative which has a quite irresistable appeal for Kraemer, Rahner, Hick and Cantwell Smith. This narrative goes something like this. Once upon a time, when they admin­istered empires, the European powers and their peoples were able to get away with the blind presumption that because their religion — Christianity — was unquestionably the supreme religion none of its 'rivals' was really worthy of our serious and unqualified attention. Then the world changed. The colonial powers were increasingly unable to maintain their dominance, and the lands they controlled became independent nations. As this transformation was taking place, it became progressively more difficult for Christians to maintain, 'unthinkingly', that the religions of these lands were in a relationship of 'automatic' subordination to Christianity. Kraemer calls this historical change a 'minor earthquake' for Christians.8 Cantwell Smith gives a lucid description of this change and its impact on Christianity in a passage which bears extended quotation:

The religious history of mankind is taking as monumental a turn in our century as is the political or economic, if only we could see it. And the upsurge of a vibrant and self-assertive new religious orientation of Buddhists and Hindus and the like evinces a new phase not merely in the history of those particular traditions, but in the history of the whole complex of man's religiousness, of which the Christian is a part, and an increasingly participant part. The traditional relation of the Christian Church to man's other religious traditions has been that of proselytizing evangelism, at least in theory. The end of that phase is the beginning of a new phase, in which the relation of the Church to other faiths will be new. . . .

The new generation of the Church, unless it is content with a ghetto, will live in a cosmopolitan environment, which will make the work of even a Tillich appear parochial.9

Karl Rahner expresses very similar sentiments in a passage which also bears full quotation:

. . . in the past, the other religion was in practice the religion of a completely different cultural environment. It belonged to a history with which the individual only communicated very much on the

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periphery of his own history; it was the religion of those who were even in every other respect alien to oneself. . . . Today things have changed. The West is no longer shut up in itself; it can no longer regard itself simply as the centre of the history of this world and as the centre of culture, with a religion which even from this point of view (i.e. from a point of view which has really nothing to do with a decision of faith but which simply carries the weight of something quite self-evident) could appear as the obvious and indeed sole way of honouring God to be thought of for a European. Today everybody is the next-door neighbour and spiritual neighbour of everyone else in the world. And so everybody today is determined by the inter-communication of all those situations of life which affect the whole world.10

Likewise, John Hick maintains that:

Today Western Christianity finds itself in a new historical environment in which it is inevitably becoming conscious of itself, no longer as the one-and-only but now as one-among several. . . . The developments of Christian outlook, belief and practice which are called for in a consciously pluralistic world can only become clear through prolonged thought and discussion, debate and argument, reflection and heart-searching on the part of the present and, perhaps even more, the next generation of Christian thinkers. . . . Thus if, for example, the idea of divine incarnation comes to be seen as having metaphorical rather than literal truth, and if the policy of converting the world to Christianity comes to be seen as an anachronistic by-product of a past imperial age, the changes involved will be as great as, but probably no greater than, those brought a hundred years ago by the impact of modern biology and the historical study of the scriptures.11

That these sentiments were expressed, and continued to be expressed with hardly any real qualification, throughout a decade (the 1960s) which saw the Vietnam War, the Biafran Civil War, the post-independence civil war in the Congo, the Sharpeville massacre, and so forth, is a tribute to the intractable and remorseless optimism which united these otherwise very different thinkers. It is not difficult to see that each of our four thinkers subscribes to a particular periodization with certain correlative alignments in a Christian theology of religions: the period of Western imperial expansion and government (associated by them with the 'absoluteness' of Christianity, Christian 'exclusivism', 'non-dialogue', et cetera) versus the period of 'post-colonialism' (aligned by them with the 'non-absoluteness' of Christianity, 'inclusivism' and 'pluralism' and even a 'liberal exclusivism', 'dialogue', et cetera). While it would be silly to deny the deep and protracted affili­ations of a white European Christianity with the imperial enterprises of the European powers during what can be called 'the age of Europe'

A Certain 'Politics of Speech' 71

(c. 1400-1945), it is just as easy, nevertheless, to see that the periodization and the accompanying correlations favoured by Kraemer, Rahner, Cantwell Smith and Hick are hopelessly simplistic and deeply problematic.12

This periodization is too simplistic, first of all, because there is ample evidence to suggest that the much-heralded 'independence' of the former colonial territories has not in fact been accompanied in the end by a real transfer of economic and effective political power from the metropolitan centre, and that, on the contrary, national bourgeoisies largely created by the former colonial power have continued to retain the exploitative structures and forces created by this power — instead of 'liberation' after 'withdrawal' of the imperial power we therefore have the replication and perpetuation of these old structures and forces by the new, admittedly 'independent', national-state. Thus churches in the new nations undergo 'indegenization', learned and liberal-minded religionists from their newly-established national universities can now join in 'dialogues' with 'westerners' like Kraemer at UNESCO conferences or travel to places like Harvard and Claremont to take part in colloquia with Cantwell Smith and Hick, but those who do not belong to the ruling elites in these 'emergent' countries — peasants and the members of the new international proletariat and underclass — continue to live the same lives of unrelieved toil and unabated poverty.13 The periodizations of these thinkers therefore betoken a thoroughly 'Eurocentric' or 'First World' perspective on their parts: only someone who is not sufficiently aware of the always particular 'space' from which he theorizes can celebrate 'the new global city' and propound a 'world' or 'global theology' in this apparently unreflective way. Thus, the impoverished peasant from Kedah in Malaysia finds it well-nigh impossible to accept that (s)he and a wealthy landowner from her own village are situated in the same moral or social 'space', and yet we are urged by Cantwell Smith and Co. to believe that this Malay peasant, her/his landlord and even the Duke of Westminster or the Hunt brothers inhabit the same 'global city' or share a 'common human history'.14 The 'global space' of the discourses of 'religious pluralism' (Cantwell Smith), 'inclusivism' (Rahner), and 'liberal exclusivism' (the 'later' Kraemer), effectively incorporates, and thereby dissolves, the localized and oppositional 'spaces' of people like the peasant in Malaysia. Local attachments, with their always specific histories and politics, are displaced and dispersed by a global and 'globalizing' top­ography as the local is subsumed under the regime of the universal.15 The project that has been called 'the rise and dominance of the West' has metamorphosed, or been 'sublated', into a 'new' project, that of 'the rise and dominance of the global'. 'The age of Europe' (c. 1400-1945) had given way to 'the age of America' (1945-1972), but the 'age of America' was not to last for too long — the United States, while still powerful, is today no longer universally perceived to be a dominant economic and military power, a realization that had already begun to be driven home with the 'oil crises' and their accompanying recessions in the early 1970s.16 From that point, the

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gaze of the West (which had supplanted the preceding gaze of Europe) started to be 'sublated' into the 'global' gaze: the Cantwell Smiths and John Hicks of this world 'look' at the practices, convictions, texts, traditions, and so forth, of Buddhists, Sikhs, Muslims, Christians, et cetera, in what can be only be described as a placeless and deculturated kind of way. (I shall come back to this in a moment.) Having never of course been 'Indian' or 'Egyptian' or 'Hindu' or 'Muslim' in respect of their intellectual or other practices, they are now no longer avowedly or recognizably the kind of subject who in a previous historical conjuncture would immediately have been characterized by such terms as 'British' or 'Canadian' or 'Christian' or whatever. The Cantwell Smiths and Hicks of this world are seemingly a new kind of subject, one that is 'universal' or 'global' in the way that the McDonald's hamburger has become the 'universal' or 'global' food. Kraemer had greeted the beginnings of this 'sublation' with, as it were, a resigned shrug of the shoulders and the counsel to Christians that they had little alternative but 'to make the best of it' (albeit very much as 'westerners' and Christians of an 'exclusivist' orientation). Rahner was more welcoming of this change than Kraemer, but his response appears positively lukewarm when placed alongside the unrestrained enthusiasm shown by Cantwell Smith and Hick for the 'project of the global' in their accounts of the relationships between the religions. For Cantwell Smith and Hick, who sometimes project themselves as missionaries of the new 'look', the acquisition of the 'global' gaze obviously represents a deep and powerful liberation from the constraining ethnocentrism of previous understandings of the relationships between the religions. The problem with this 'global' gaze, however, is that it systematically overlooks real relations of domination and subordination which make it impossible — politically — for the Malaysian peasant or the Bolivian miner to reverse or repudiate this gaze. Faced with it, this peasant or miner may be just as disempowered, 'officially' or otherwise, as (s)he had been when it came to reversing the European or 'western' antecedents of this gaze. There is, pace Cantwell Smith and Hick especially, nothing intrinsically 'liberating' about the 'global' project: no equation of 'liberation' with this project can be sustained because this project can only be what it is — a celebration of (merely) factitious unities and commonalities — by systemati­cally overlooking, among other things, the real and persistent asymmetries of power which exist between the 'First' and 'Third' Worlds.17

The periodization endorsed by the 'later' Kraemer, Rahner, Cantwell Smith and Hick is problematic for another reason: it never acknowledges that the part played by Christianity in shaping the understandings that Europeans had of the peoples of other continents was itself something that changed over time, that there were several radical shifts in the bases of such understandings in the time between (roughly) 1400 and the 1960s and 70s (so that the place of Christianity in characteristically European or 'western' knowledges of the non-European or 'non-western' 'other' came necessarily to be different with each such shift, and had therefore to be theorized anew

A Certain 'Politics of Speech ' 73

with each such change). A more satisfactory periodization of the relationships that Christianity had to other cultures and religions may have to be sought from other sources.

Bernard McGrane, in a short but interesting monograph titled Beyond Anthropology,1* argues that four 'general paradigms' have been used by Europeans and 'westerners' to 'interpret' and 'explain' non-European cultures and peoples.

i. Up to and including the sixteenth century, the dominant cosmography represented the non-European 'other' in terms of a typically Christian intellectual and practical horizon. Where this horizon was concerned, says McGrane, '[it] was Christianity which fundamentally came between the European and the non-European Other' (p. ix). The demonology was the characteristic discursive mode used to articulate the differences between Europeans/Christians and non-Europeans/non-Christians: as McGrane says, '[it] was in relation to the Fall and to the influence of Sin and Satan that the Other took on his historically specific meaning' (ibid.). The 'other' was this because, as a manifestation of the 'infernal', (s)he could never be anything but a 'pagan', and hence (s)he inhabited a 'space' that was necessarily the inversion of the only real 'space' — the Christian 'space', the 'space' of divine salvation. Christianity is the only religion, and those who did not profess it simply had no religion.19

ii. In the Enlightenment, the preceding Christian paradigm was largely supplanted by one which interpreted non-European humanity in terms of an epistemology — such categories as 'ignorance', 'error', 'untruth' and 'superstition' were used in this epistemological paradigm to articulate the differences between the European and the 'other'. The 'other' was this precisely because (s)he belonged to a society that was 'unenlightened'. Those who belonged to this kind of society were typically to be regarded as 'primitives'.

iii. In the nineteenth century there was another paradigm shift as the preceding Enlightenment paradigm gave way to one which took time to constitute the fundamental difference between the European and the non-European 'other'. In McGrane's words: '. . . there was a vast hemorrhage in time: geological time, developmental time lodged itself between the European and the non-European Other' (p. x). Anthropology, as practiced by, for example, E. B. Tylor, became the discipline which 'organized and administered the comparison between past and present, between differ­ent "stages of development", between the prehistorically fossilized "primitive" and the evolutionary advancement of modern Western science and civilization' (ibid.).20

iv. In the early twentieth century the dominant paradigm for representing the difference between the European and the non-European changed yet again — now it was 'culture' which accounted for this difference. As McGrane puts it: 'We think under the hegemony of the ethnological

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response to the alienness of the Other; we are, today, contained within an anthropological concept of the Other. Anthropology has become our modern way of seeing the Other as, fundamentally and merely, culturally different' (p. x).

I mention McGrane's 'archaeology' (the very evident Foucaldian provenance of his work is explicitly acknowledged by him) not because I find it to be wholly unproblematic, but because it charts so productively the historical trajectory which culminates in the full-blown 'global' project of Cantwell Smith and Hick. Indeed, it would be no exaggeration to say that McGrane's 'fourth paradigm' is constitutive of the episteme or grid of intelligibility which underlies any such 'global' project.21

With regard to this last 'paradigm', McGrane says that in the twentieth century

. . . difference is now for the first time, seen as cultural difference, as cultural diversity. Culture accounts for difference, rather than 'evolution', 'progress', evolutionary development through fixed stages of progressive civilization, as in the nineteenth century; rather than the various possible modalities of 'ignorance' and 'superstition' as with the Enlightenment; and rather than the demonical and infernal as with the Renaissance, (p. 113)

The upshot is that 'difference' now becomes 'democratized'. The non-European 'other' is no longer immured in the depths of some petrified 'past', for with this radical 'democratization of difference' (s)he is inserted into the present, Our' present, and (s)he is thus now 'our' contemporary. The 'culture' of this century has shown itself to have no room for Comtean panoramas of an inexorable human progression or Tylorian evolutionary schemes or Hegelian historicisms. The unitary and totalized 'culture' of these now discredited visions of human progression, evolutionary theories and historicisms gives way to the pluralized, heterogeneous and consti-tutively democratized 'cultures' of our multivocal 'anthropological' century. The non-European 'other' is still 'different' of course, but now (s)he is merely 'different'.22 McGrane makes no mention of Troeltsch, but his delineation of the 'fourth paradigm' shows it to encompass the saliencies of the position Troeltsch was edging towards in his later writings, especially in Der Historismus und seine Probleme (1922) and the posthumously published, undelivered lecture 'The Place of Christianity among the World Religions' (1923).23 For someone like Cantwell Smith or Hick, Troeltsch was never quite able to bring himself to be a genuine 'pluralist' — he was too wedded to the proposition that Christianity had made European civilization what it was, and that this civilization had therefore yielded certain 'fruits' for Europeans which the other religions, 'true' though they may be for their own adherents, were not really able to furnish. In Troeltsch's words (which

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for the 'true pluralist' constitutes as good a self-damning apology on Christianity's behalf as any): '. . . the only religion we can endure is Christianity, for Christianity has grown up with us and has become a part of our very being' ,24 So for this kind of 'pluralist' it would take someone else to reach what had almost been within Troeltsch's grasp at the end of his life (but which alas he himself had not been able to secure), that is, the formulation of a resolutely non-ethnocentric version of the 'pluralistic hypothesis'.

John Hick is of course well-known for having attempted to provide a strictly non-ethnocentric version of the 'pluralistic' hypothesis. It is perhaps just as well-known that his presentation of this 'hypothesis' has gone through several epicycles. All Hick's epicycles, however, rely on a Kantian-type distinction, crucial for him, between a noumeno! transcendent focus common to all the religions which Hick calls 'the Real', and the culturally-conditioned and hence 'culture-specific' phenomenal images which are a schematization or concretization of 'the Real'. The latest epicycle of Hick's 'pluralistic hypothesis' is to be found in the Gifford Lectures:

Each of these two basic categories, God and the Absolute, is schematised or made concrete within actual religious experience as a range of particular gods or absolutes. These are, respectively, the personae and the impersonae in terms of which the Real is humanly known. And the particularising factor . . . is the range of human cultures, actualising different though overlapping aspects of our immensely complex human potentiality for awareness of the transcendent. It is in relation to different ways of being human, developed within the civilisations and cultures of the earth, that the Real, apprehended through the concept of God, is experienced specifically as the God of Israel, or as the Holy Trinity, or as Shiva, or as Allah, or as Vishnu . . . And it is in relation to yet other forms of life that the Real, apprehended through the concept of the Absolute, is experienced as Brahman, or as Nirvana, or as Being, or as Sunyata . . .

On this view our various religious languages — Buddhist, Christian, Muslim, Hindu . . . — each refer to a divine phenomenon or configuration of divine phenomena. When we speak of a personal God, with moral attributes and purposes, or when we speak of the non-personal Absolute, Brahman, or of the Dharmakaya, we are speaking of the Real as humanly experienced: that is, as phenomenon.25

This must surely be the most 'democratic' version of the 'pluralistic hypothesis' that has so far been, and maybe can in principle ever be, presented. Even Cantwell Smith has so far retained — whether by in­advertence or otherwise it is not possible to tell — a number of vestigial Bultmannian notions (e.g., the 'presentness' of 'faith-events', 'God's mission to all the world') which show him to be something of a laggard when it comes to matching the vigour and range of the 'democratic' impulses

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displayed in these Gifford Lectures. For what this version of 'the pluralistic hypothesis' does is to relativize all the images, symbols, dogmas, et cetera, of the particular religious traditions. Hick makes this clear when, for example, he says that

. . . Hindu language concerning Brahman and the gods; Buddhist language concerning Sunyata and the Trikaya; Christian language concerning the triune nature and the metaphysical attributes of God. . . is mythological throughout in the sense that it constitutes discourse in human terms which is ultimately about that which transcends the literal scope of human language. . . . The truthfulness or untruthfulness of mythological stories, images or conceptions does not consist in their literal adequacy to the nature of the Real an sich — in this respect it is not so much that they miss their target as that their target is totally beyond their range — but in their capacity to evoke appropriate or inappropriate dispositional responses to the Real.

. . . we can identify the various sysems of religious thought as complex myths whose truth or untruth consists in the appropriateness or inappropriateness of the practical dispositions they tend to invoke.26

Hence when a certain kind of Christian affirms that Christ's death is a ransom for the sin of human beings, this, says Hick, is in the end only a 'culture specific' way of saying that Jesus Christ has an unsurpassable significance for that person when (s)he endeavours to make the transition from self- to Reality-centredness. In Hick's formulation of this 'hypothesis' the adjectives 'culture specific' and 'mythological' are thus virtually co­extensive and mutually substitutible. The different religions are just so many 'different' ways of saying or experiencing or striving for the 'same' ultimate thing, that is, 'Reality-centredness'.27

It will be recalled from my necessarily selective account of McGrane's sketch of the 'fourth paradigm' for constructing the 'other' that in the twentieth century 'difference' is seen for the first time (merely) as 'cultural difference, as cultural diversity' (p. 113). The reader who finds McGrane's sketch persuasive will be disposed to view Hick's position as a compelling manifestation of the cultural development charted by this 'paradigm'. Hick's 'knowledge' is thus a particular instance of a more general 'knowledge' lodged in our presentday consciousness, that is, the knowledge that our culture is one among many, that it is therefore ineluctably 'relative', and that moreover this knowledge is indisputably 'valuable'.28 This 'pluralistic hypothesis' permits, indeed exhorts, the Buddhist, the Hindu, the Sikh, and so forth, to speak, to narrate, in the way that the old Christian 'exclusivisme' did not. But when non-Christians speak, they are informed by our representative 'pluraliste' that what they say is in the final outcome not any different from what every and any other 'devout' person professes. Thus Cantwell Smith sagely announces that 'the

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truth of all of us is part of the truth of each of us', and Hick concludes his Gifford Lectures (as published) with the declaration that 'the great world traditions constitute different conceptions and perceptions of, and responses to, the Real from within the different cultural ways of being human'.29 All the adherents of the major religious traditions are treated 'democratically' in the 'pluralist' monologue about 'difference' (which of course is entirely relativized because 'difference' or 'otherness' is for the 'pluralist' always only 'cultural'). In this monologue, the 'pluralist', like McGrane's anthropologist, speaks well of the 'other' but never to the 'other', and indeed cannot do otherwise because there really is no intractable 'other' for the 'pluralist'. Constitutive features of the 'pluralist' position — for instance, its claim that since we 'all' partake of a 'universal soteriological

process' (a claim that in itself is not necessarily problematic) all claims to particularity must therefore be deemed to be 'mythological'; its ceaseless 'relativizing' of just about everything else; and its making 'complementary' of any surplus that cannot be homogenized by such powerfully 'relativizing' strategies — serve effectively to decompose or obscure that radical historical particularity which is constitutive of the truly 'other'. Where a certain Christian barbarism presumes its 'superiority' in order to justify the elimination or the conquest of the non-Christian 'other', this monological 'pluralism' sedately but ruthlessly domesticates and assimilates the 'other' — any 'other' — in the name of a 'world ecumenism' and the 'realisation of a limitlessly better possibility' (to use Hick's phraseology from the Gifford Lectures).30

In this connexion Todorov's discussion of Bartolomé de Las Casas is perhaps instructive. Las Casas upheld the cause of the Indians during Spain's brutal conquest of South America in the sixteenth century. So horrified was Las Casas by the treatment meted out to the Indians by the conquistadors that he described his compatriots as 'wolves' and 'ravening wild beasts'. He even identified them with the Devil. The Indians, by contrast, Las Casas identified as 'lambs' and as 'Christians' (the Spaniards were 'Moors' in opposition to these 'Christians'). Todorov 'acknowledges an incontestable generosity on the part of Las Casas who refuses to despise others simply because they are different'. But so strong is Las Casas's commitment to equality that he will not characterize the Indians as 'different'. Good proto-Rahnerian that he is, he is prepared to see them as 'unwitting' Christians, and so, as Todorov points out, Las Casas's 'postulate of equality involves the assertion of identity'. The upshot is that Las Casas does not really know the Indians (they are essentially like him and that takes care of everything), and having used a demonology to vilify his compatriots, he is not in a position to understand the historical and economic forces which underpin the mentality that is the true source of their rapacity and cruelty. Las Casas, says Todorov, ended up by knowing neither Indian nor Spaniard.31 Las Casas, of course, was, if anything, what we today would call an 'inclusivist' (at least with regard to the Aztecs). He was certainly no

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'pluralist', and so it could perhaps be argued by proponents of 'pluralism' that he would probably not have domesticated his beloved Indians had he been a good 'pluralist' and not an inevitably benighted proto-Rahnerian. I do not wish to appear too assured here — for it would be a sheerly egregious speculation to ask what a Cantwell Smith or a Hick (here of course I speak of them as types) would possibly have done had they been in Las Casas's shoes — but it seems to me that a comprehensive 'assertion of identity' likewise lies at the core of their positions. This 'assertion' is certainly not explicit. It cannot be, because it is of course never declared. What actually gets to be declared is something quite modest and very nearly unexcep­tionable, namely, that while this 'pluralism' seeks to promote a 'world ecumenism', this 'will not entail an eventual single world religion'.32 But if one regards the discourse of 'pluralism' as a species of rhetorical activity then a somewhat different story can perhaps be told. For Hick makes it clear that in the final analysis we are all 'unwittingly' holders of his position, i.e. 'pluraliste'. Hick's position is set out in the form of a 'hypothesis', and is thus intended, in the conventional but now largely discredited understanding of this term, to be a proposal designed to account for 'the data'. But Hick leaves his readers with very little doubt that his 'hypothesis' is the only one that is adequate to this task — the discussion is always conducted as if no other thoroughly plausible 'hypothesis' were in sight, and indeed none can really be, because the 'data' are always specified in such a way that 'pluralism' is virtually guaranteed from outset to be the only 'hypothesis' that is seriously in the running when it comes to accounting for 'the data'. In the Gifford Lectures, moreover, the constituency for the ideology of 'pluralism' is explicitly identified: we are told that it is among 'educated younger people' that this 'outlook' has shown 'marked growth'.33 The 'pluralist' therefore is someone who knows that all worshippers, regardless of their explicit religious affiliations, 'respond' alike to 'the Real' or 'the Transcendent', whereas rébarbative 'exclusivists' and 'inclusivists' (likely in any case to be less educated and maybe 'religious fundamentalists' or 'political nationalists' to boot) are at best only 'unwitting' 'responders' to 'the Real' or 'the Transcendent'. The 'unwitting' 'responder' to 'the Real' or 'the Transcendent' is thus the Hickiân counterpart to Las Casas's 'unwitting' (Aztec) Christian. The 'assertion of identity' which Todorov rightly finds problematic in Las Casas's 'proto-inclusivism' is simply transposed, one could say elevated, to another discursive level in Hick's philosophy of religions. It would seem that where the Hickian 'pluralist' is concerned 'all' good and devout persons gather round manifestations of 'the Real' or 'the Transcendent' whether they acknowledge this or not, just as for Las Casas the 'good' Indians are 'Christians' whether they know it or not.

The McDonald's hamburger is the first 'universal' food, but the people — be they from La Paz, Bombay, Cairo or Brisbane — who eat the McDonald's hamburger also consume the American way of life with it.34 Equally, the adherents of the 'world ecumenism' canvassed by the religious 'pluraliste'

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align themselves with a movement that is 'universal', but they too 'consume' a certain way of life. Not quite the American way of life itself (though it is no accident that Cantwell Smith, a Canadian, and Hick and Ninian Smart, both Englishmen, have largely based themselves in the United States), but a single, overarching way of life which has become so pervasive that 'the American way of life' is today simply its most prominent and developed manifestation; namely, the 'life' of a world administered by global media and information networks, international agencies and multi­national corporations. The dominant ideology of this new world reality declares that nations, cultures, religions, and so forth, are simply obsolete if they are maintained in their old forms as fixed and intractable 'particu­larities'. It is this new world reality and its ideological concomitants (e.g. the 'global gaze') which both makes the McDonald's hamburger into a 'universal' food and sustains the 'world ecumenism' advocated by the exponents of religious 'pluralism'. It creates the episteme or 'paradigm' which renders both sets of phenomena intelligible. To resist the cultural encroachment represented by the McDonald's hamburger, therefore, is of a piece with resisting the similar depradation constituted by this 'world ecumenism'.35 It is to seek to resist the 'world-view' which makes both possible. The questions is: how do we 'theorize' relationships between Hindus, Buddhists, Sikhs, Jews, Christians, Muslims, etcetera, without underwriting this episteme? How can such people talk to each other with­out endorsing, even if only tacitly, the presumptions embodied in the formulations of the Kraemers, Rahners, Cantwell Smiths and Hicks of this world? What is needed here, I am trying to suggest, can ultimately be nothing less than the displacement of a whole mode of discourse.36

7/

Common to Kraemer, Rahner, Cantwell Smith and Hick is the assumption that the task of 'theorizing' the relationships between the religions is one that is pre-eminently, or even solely, a matter of affirming, clarifying, defending, and perhaps discarding certain philosophical and theological formulations. For example, Kraemer's attempt to refine his 'exclusivist' position in such later works as World Cultures and World Religions is notable for his efforts to explain and render intellectually acceptable the 'Barthianized' Christianity which Kraemer found so compelling. Again, Rahner's theory of the 'anonymous' Christian derives its immediate motivation from his perception of a specifically theological need to widen the scope of the long-held maxim extra ecclesiam nulla salus ('outside the church there is no salvation'). And yet again, the 'pluralism' advocated by Cantwell Smith and Hick requires the jettisoning and in some cases the modification of some of the central affirmations of the Christian faith regarding the person of Christ, the nature of God, and the shape and substance of salvation. It is also significant that the highly suggestive theory of religions propounded

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by George Lindbeck in his The Nature of Doctrine hinges crucially on his adaptation of the traditional Protestant fides ex auditu doctrine. The idea seems to be that most, if not all, the difficulties that stand in the way of an adequate understanding of the relationships between the various major religious traditions can be overcome if only we are able to get our theories and doctrines 'right'. The inevitable outcome has been an inattentive-ness on the part of these thinkers to the intricacies and complexities of the cultural and political configurations which circumscribe their reflections. I want now to outline, albeit very briefly and roughly, a theory of discourse which holds that a less inadequate account of 'inter-religious dialogue' would be one which focused not so much on theological or doctrinal popositions as on the particular histories, the specific social locations, the varying repertoires of signifying practices, et cetera, of those engaged in such dialogue.37 This is not to say that there is no place for such theological formulation. There is, but only in conjunction with an account of those processes and practices of signification which precisely underlie the always historically specific characterizations a speaker/theologian/philosopher/ historian gives of the particular religious traditions.

In his Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, V.N. Voloshinov insists that language is an irreducibly social activity, and is therefore dependent on social relationships.38 Speakers are thus always active participants in a virtually unending chain of communication, a continuing and extended social process into which they are inserted at birth and which in principle shapes them just as much as they shape it. Not all the details of Voloshinov's vastly suggestive theory of communication need concern us at this point. Two of his emphases are germane for the understanding of 'inter-religious' dialogue being canvassed here. The first is his claim that since meaning is contextual, 'there are as many meanings of a word as there are contexts of its usage' (p. 79). The second is his contention that speech is ineluctably dialogical because utterances are always the product of specific relationships between speakers and listeners, addressers and addressees. These two emphases merge in Voloshinov's insistence that 'to understand another person's utterance means to orient oneself with respect to it, to find the proper place for it in the corresponding context. For each world of the utterance that we are in the process of understanding, we, as it were, lay down a set of our own answering words' (p. 102). In doing this, i.e. grasping the meaning of an utterance, we do not only register the appropriate sense of its 'content', but have also to grasp the 'value judgments' which are inextricably bound-up with that content. Voloshinov believes it is necessary to grasp this emotive-evaluative element because linguistic forms exist for their speakers only in the context of specific utterances, and hence exist only in a specific ideological context. It follows that 'in actualilty, we never say or hear words, we say and hear what is true or false, good or bad, important or unimportant, pleasant or unpleasant, and so on. Words are always filled with content and meaning drawn from behavior or ideology' (p. 70. Emphasis as

A Certain 'Politics of Speech' 81

in original). Speech, therefore, is actively received, and according to Voloshinov it is received in a twofold way: first the received utterance 'is framed within a context of factual commentary', and second a reply is prepared by the hearer.39 The speaker anticipates this 'commentary/reply' from his or her hearer, and does this by taking into account what Bakhtin calls the 'apperceptive background' of the hearer's perception of the speaker's utterance. This 'apperceptive background' includes such items as the hearer's familiarity with the situation, the hearer's knowledge of the cultural configurations which circumscribe that particular act of communi­cation, the hearer's views and convictions, his or her 'prejudices' (as viewed by the speaker), his or her likes or dislikes — all these, say Voloshinov/ Bakhtin, determine the hearer's active response to an utterance by a particular speaker.40 Meaning is constructed between speakers (who are always also hearere) and hearere (who are aleo alwaye epeakers): speakers and hearers being oscillating 'moments' in a ceaseless 'flow' of culturally (and therefore materially) constituted discourse.

What are the implications of this theory of language for the philosopher or theologian of religions who is interested in the questions which have traditionally been posed under the rubric of 'inter-faith dialogue'? The first thing, this account of language would counsel is an attentiveness to the 'apperceptive backgrounds' of the participants in such dialogues. These backgrounds could range from the enormously different to the extremely similar. Each particular similarity or difference, and the particular modes of such similarities and differences, would have greater or lesser repercussions for the shape and content of the discourse that takes place between persons belonging to different religions. Thus, and this is merely to cite one example, it is not surprising that 'pluraliste' who originate from 'Third World' natione invariably belong to the weetern-trained elitee who conetitute the ruling claeeee of euch natione: ae Arif Dirlik pointe out, membere of euch elitee owe their power and eocial poeition to their etrong affiliatione with what Dirlik calle a 'Weetern cultural hegemoniem', and if the ideology of 'pluraliem' ie a component of thie 'hegemoniem' (ae I have been arguing), then 'pluraliem' will invariably be a conetituent of the ideological identity of euch Third World intellectuale.41 Being eituated in the eame eocial or cultural 'epace' ae one'e fellow 'pluraliete' eeeme therefore alwaye to be an operating condition of 'pluraliem'. Hence when, eay, the 'pluraliet' Hindu and the 'pluraliet' Chrietian engage in 'dialogue', they each bring a doubly reified Hinduiem and Chrietianity to thie convereation ae part of their reepective 'apperceptive backgrounde'. 'Hinduiem' and 'Chrietianity', ae Cantwell Smith hae indi­cated, are already reificatione abetracted from the 'flow' of practicee, convictione, évente, artifacte, texte, pereonagee, movemente, traditione, et cetera, which make up the 'religion' that ie called 'Hinduiem' or 'Chrietianity', and eo forth.42 The 'pluraliet' compounde thie reification by eubmitting thie 'flow' to a eecond, and more 'elevated', abetraction — that repreeented by hie compreheneive and homogenizing écheme which

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'brackete', by deeignating ae 'mythological' and 'culture-epecific', all the denee particularitiee, the fine epecificitiee, of eomething that hae already been hypoetatized or reified, in thie caee the 'religione' called 'Hinduiem' and 'Chrietianity'. The outcome of thie 'tranelation' of an already reified 'Hinduiem' and Chrietianity' into the hyper-abetracted idiom and con­ceptually of 'religioue pluraliem' ie not eomething that ie only 'theoretically' problematic. A major 'practical' problem ie aleo created, becauee thie 'pluraliem' decreee, in advance and 'a priori' ae it were, that anything which the Hindu and the Chrietian bring to thie 'dialogue' (mainly, but not exclueively, through their 'apperceptive backgrounde') hae an 'equivalence' that ie impoeed, by the mechanieme of thie eubtending 'pluraliem', indepen­dently of their eocially- and culturally-governed languagee and forme of life. In Hick'e écheme, for inetance, all 'phenomenal' inequalitiee and non-equivalencee are effectively overridden by the 'noumenal' unavailability of 'the Real'. Of couree it ie virtually axiomatic for Hick that, eay, the devout Hindu leade a more 'Reality-centred' life than doee the unfaithful Chrietian, and in thie eenee there are for Hick certain differencee, eetabliehed 'a poeteriori' and anew in each particular caee, that cannot be levelled-out by any philoeophical or theological écheme. But ae 'generically' Hindu and ae 'generically' Chrietian thie particular Hindu and thie particular Chrietian are for Hick in etrictly equivalent poeitione where their relationehip to the 'noumenonal' 'Real' ie concerned: eince both their poeitione are eubeumed by Hick'e 'common eoteriological etructure' the one ie no nearer to, or no further from, 'the Real' than ie the other. What thie meane, at leaet where Hick'e delineation of the relationehip between this Hindu'e 'Hinduiem' and this Chrietian'e 'Chrietianity' ie concerned, ie that eignificant political, eocial and cultural differencee — differencee which feed their way into the 'apperceptive backgrounde' of our Hindu and Chrietian epeakere — have neceeearüy to be diecounted or deemphaeized. That, ae a generality, the Hindu will expreee 'Hinduiem' characterietically ae eomeone who epeake the language of a 'Third World' eociety, while the Chrietian will beepeak hie/her faith typically ae a member of a 'weetern' eociety, ie eomething that becomee an overwhelming inconeequentiality where the 'pluraliet' ie concerned. That the 'pluraliet' whoee doctrinee regiment thie convereation between our Hindu and Chrietian ie invariably a member of a 'weetern' eociety (or elee a member of the ruling-claee in an 'ex-colonial' eociety) ie aleo eomething that ie typically dieregarded by the 'pluraliet'. Even if the participante in thie 'dialogue' are willing to reproduce the etructuree of their reepective die-coureee within each other'e languagee, and of couree within the idiom of 'pluraliem', the inetitutionalized diecrepanciee that exiet between 'weetern' and 'non-weetern' eocietiee in the field of power which circumecribee theee eocietiee will eneure that the language of the ('weaker') 'non-weetern' eociety ie likewiee 'weaker' in relation to the language of the ('etronger') 'weetern' eociety. Thie point, and ite implicatione, are well-put by Talal Aead

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in an analyeie of the problème of tranelation between 'unequal languagee' (Asad hae Arabic and Englieh in mind):

. . . thie puehing beyond the limite of one'e habitual ueagee, thie breaking down and reehaping of one'e own language through the proceee of tranelation, ie never an eaey bueineee, in part becauee . . . it depende on the willingneee of the tranelator'e language to eubject iteelf to thie traneforming power. . . . I want to emphaeize that the matter ie largely eomething the tranelator cannot determine by individual activity (any more than the individual epeaker can affect the evolution of hie or her language) — that it ie governed by inetitutionally defined power relatione between the languagee/modee of life concerned. To put it crudely: becauee the languagee of Third World eocietiee . . . are 'weaker' in relation to Weetern languagee (and today, eepecially to Englieh), they are more likely to eubmit to forcible traneformation in the tranelation proceee than the other way around. The reaeon for thie ie, firet, that in their political-economic relatione with Third World countriee, Weetern natione have the greater ability to manipulate the latter. And, eecond, Weetern languagee produce and deploy desired knowledge more readily than Third World languagee do. (The know­ledge that Third World languagee deploy more eaeily ie not eought by Weetern eocietiee in the eame way, or for the eame reaeon.)43

There can be few more apt illuetratione of Aead'e point than Hick'e recouree to Kant'e epietemology when he needed another epicycle to bail out hie 'hypotheeie': Hick eimply never raieee the queetion of the poeeible dietortive effecte thie appropriation of Kant might have on thoee religione which have Arabic, Urdu, Hindi, Punjabi, Swahili, Thai, et cetera, ae the typical languagee of their adhérente. What if the eocietiee which deploy theee particular languagee are not themeelvee able to accommodate thie Kantian epietemology, or indeed epietemology simpliciter (and thie becauee euch thinge ae epietemologiee are put in place and 'authorized' by inetitution-alized forcee which may or may not be preeent in a particular eociety)? Why doee Hick propoee a theory of 'religion' which givee an account of 'Hinduiem', 'Ielam', 'Buddhiem', and eo forth, precieely by incorporating concepte and principlee that very likely the practitionere of theee 'religione' are unable to be in a poeition to acknowledge, let alone interrogate?44 The ideology of 'pluraliem' therefore not only circumecribee the poeeibilitiee of 'inter-religious' interrogation that exist when the members of one tradition confront those of another (because in the end all they can disagree significantly about are those merely 'mythological' or 'culture-specific' features of their traditions); it also immunizes itself against any such inter­rogation by doing its most 'effective' work behind the veil of the 'noumenal'. The radical contingencies which lie at the heart of the 'apperceptive back­grounds' of thoee who take part in 'inter-faith dialogue' undergo a

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gentle excieion or are just prodded aside into irrelevance as the participants in such 'dialogue', when it is conducted under the auspices of this 'pluralism', find themselves dragooned into the 'common structures' proposed by its proponents.

This systematic indifference to historical contingencies and their many and varied imports can be discerned in Hick's claim that 'Islam may be expected to go through essentially the same traumas as Christianity in its encounter both with modern science and with the emerging ecumenical outlook; only whereas the Christian trauma has been spread for a century or more Islam is having to adjust in a single generation to an already modern culture'.45 Hick's implication that Islam and Christianity confront very much the 'same' modernity is somewhat implausible, especially since the 'languages' of 'modernity' have overwhelmingly been the 'languages' of 'western' cultures where Christians have always been present in very large numbers. 'Modernity' was not only constructed on a terrain shared with (but also contested by) Christianity, but since 'modernity' emerged out of Christendom, the 'project' of 'modernity' derived all its initial problem­atics from the mediaeval cosmographies produced and sustained by Christendom. Thus, to cite only two very well-known examples, the doctrine of the 'hidden' God promulgated by late-mediaeval nominalism promoted the novel idea that nature was an object of harmless inquiry that could be investigated by means of the newly developed scientific method (and so William of Ockham paved the way for Roger Bacon, Copernicus, Galileo and Descartes); and Isaac Newton, having produced a 'celestial mathematics' predicated on the infinity of space, and having thus landed himself with the conundrum of two 'infinites' (space and God) sought a resolution of this difficulty by invoking the idea of (infinite) space as the 'sense organ of God' (sensorium Dei) — a theological proposition if ever there were one. Any half-decent traditional intellectual history will turn up numerous other examples of the varied and complex ways in which the 'project' of 'modernity' established itself through a sustained, and not always adversarial, engagement with Christianity.46 'Modernity' was 'produced' along with the 'western' society that emerged out of Christendom, a society which, though it may today largely repudiate Christianity, is none the less one that is thoroughly inflected by its Christian past. European and North American Christians, individually and collectively, will consequently always find it relatively easy, and tempting, to claim 'modernity' because both Christianity and 'modernity' happen to be inextricably bound-up with the historical, social and cultural trajectory of 'the west'. Islam, by contrast, has never had this 'privileged' relationship to the distinctive trajectory of 'the west', and so the politics of its relationship to 'modernity' will inevitably be a quite different politics: for Islam 'modernity' is not just the (threatening) onset of the 'new' and the 'different', it is also that which (for Islam) is decisively encoded in terms of the hegemonic and 'strong' (in Asad's sense) languages of 'western' society.

A Certain 'Politics of Speech ' 85

For Islam, 'modernity' is saturated with those 'strong' languages, and Islam is therefore out of joint with 'modernity' in a way that Christianity never was and presumably never could be. Since Islam and Christianity appropriate and negotiate 'modernity' through radically different systems of representation, only a political innocent would be able to concur with Hick's sentiment that Islam today is in the same boat as Christianity was in the nineteenth century, except that this time the ride is bound to be rougher for Islam because 'modern culture' is 'already formed', and Muslims, so to speak, have had much less time in which to prepare themselves for this journey to the culminating-point of 'modernity' (a journey which Hick, with a Weberian fatalism, believes is one 'we' all have no option but to embark upon). (I shall deal with the question of the politics of Hickian 'pluralism' more fully in a moment.)

The theory of language put forward by Voloshinov/Bakhtin, by contrast, allows the philosopher and theologian of religions to acknowledge that such complex notions as 'Hinduism', 'Islam', 'Christianity', 'modernity', et cetera, can be, and are, imbricated in radically different epistemes, and are therefore registered in very diverse and maybe even 'incommensurable' ways in the 'apperceptive backgrounds' of those who engage in 'inter-faith dialogue'. And it is not difficult to see that the effects of this unavoidable heterogeneity of epistemes will be less predictable and much harder to assess when more specialized and culturally contained notions — for example, nirvana, samsara, Trinity, Torah, jihad, et cetera — come to feature in such 'dialogue'. The 'space' in which such 'dialogue' takes place is vast and complex, and the simplicities of 'religious pluralism' are simply not adequate to the task of characterizing the modalities and patterns of speech typically involved in conversations between persons who belong to different religions. It is extraordinary that Rahner, Hick and Cantwell Smith (and Lindbeck to a slightly lesser degree) should concentrate so exclusively and with such doggedness on getting 'the' theory' or 'the doctrinal formulation' which they hope will give or reflect the most satisfactory account of the relationships between the religions. I can only guess why this is so: these were scholars formed in a historical conjuncture which apparently did not emphasize the things that have come to be considered important in the USA and Western Europe at any rate since the 1970s: that is, the need to attend to the effects on our understanding of particular interpretive horizons, to acknowledge the rhetorical force which theories always possess, to be heedful of the politics of textual production and of canon formation, to see writing and reading as practices that always subserve 'material' interests, to regard 'meaning' and 'truth' as matters always involving questions of context and perspective, and so forth. These figures, who became the thinkers they are before the age of the McDonald's hamburger, are in a sense very much the last of the philosophical and theological modernists. In the epoch of the McDonald's hamburger (i.e. the twenty first century, which effectively began in the 1970s, just as the nineteenth century 'really' ended

86 Kenneth Surin

in 1914), however, we have more and more to contend with the knowledge that learning to speak or write about the 'other' is necessarily something that has a great deal to do with learning to live another form of life, that the matter of gaining 'knowledge' of the 'other' is indissolubly bound-up with the matter of the 'knowledges' that produce and reproduce 'us', and that since our world is a social world that includes the 'other' and 'us' we have necessarily to analyze both these figures and this social world (and the standpoints from which we gain epistemological or hermeneutical access to it) if we are to hope to understand what happens when individuals or groups belonging to different religious traditions (and to changing historical and discursive conjunctures) 'come across each other'.47 We need, that is, a political hermeneutics or semiotics of the myths of power and knowledge which subtend representations of 'us' and the 'other'. This work has already begun to be done. Charles Long, in a fascinating collection of essays, has explored the discursive 'logics' which enable 'the religious' to be enunci­ated, indeed 'invented', in historically specific ways, and Philip Almond's pioneering study of the British 'invention' of Buddhism in the nineteenth century provides in my view a model for future endeavours in this field.48

My concern in this paper has been with the discursive politics of another 'invention', that of 'religious pluralism', and I want to conclude by making a few remarks about this politics.

Ill

Any attempt to make a political criticism of 'religious pluralism' finds itself confronted with an immediate problem, one posed by the fact that the proponents of this 'pluralism' are in a sense totally on the side of the angels. Racism, the oppression of women, the exploitation perpetrated by 'western' colonialism and imperialism, the wanton destruction of the physical environment, are invariably condemned in forthright terms. And yet these matters are broached by our representative 'pluraliste' in a peculiarly abetract and defueed way. The armed etrugglee in South Africa, Angola and Mozambique, for inetance, do not appear to be poeitioned in their condemnatione of raciem. European colonialiem ie condemned, but the neocolonialiem into which it hae been largely tranemuted ie again not poeitioned in their diecoureee: thue, David Livingetone and the Eaet India Company will be rightly criticized, but not the United Fruit Company or the Union Carbide Corporation or the International Monetary Fund or the World Bank or any of the other tranenational organizatione that portray themeelvee ae harbingere of 'economic freedom' to the placee that ueed to be the dominione of Britain, France, Germany, Belgium, Holland, Spain, Portugal and Italy. Inetead we have a barely concealed enthueiaem for 'our timee': Livingetone and the Eaet India Company have obviouely to be condemned becauee they belonged to the bad (paet) timee of a 'weetern

A Certain 'Politics of Speech' 87

exclueiviem and triumphaliem', but thinge are different now, eo that (in Hick'e worde)

. . . we ehall now eee the traneformation of human exietence going on in varioue waye and degreee throughout the world and throughout human hietory, rather than only within the bordere of our own tradition. Thie meane that the entire human etory, with all ite light and dark, ite triumphe and ite tragediee, ie to be affirmed ae ultimately good in the eenee that it ie part of a univereal eoteriological proceee. . . . the coemic optimiem of each of the great traditione ie inteneif ied when we eee them all ae pointing to the poeeibility of a limitleeely better exietence and ae affirming that the univeree ie euch that thie limitleeely better poeeibility ie actually available to ue and can begin to be realieed in each preeent moment.49

There ie of couree a reference here to 'tragediee' (but noticeably 'tragediee' ie predicated of 'the human etory' (whatever that ie), and the inevitable rhetorical effect ie a diepereal, a levelling, of the deecriptive force of thie term — 'we ' are all of ue 'human' , eo it ie 'natural' that 'we ' ehould (all?) 'ehare' or be implicated in the 'tragediee' which belong to Our (human) etory').

The eame rhetorical effect ie evident in a number of placee in Hick'e eeeay 'The Non-Abeoluteneee of Chrietianity'. In it Hick eeeke to deecribe the hietorical and political forcee which underpin the claim to 'abeoluteneee' which many Chrietiane have made on behalf of their religion, and while he doee a 'good job' in expoeing the outright raciem and blinkered etupidity which motivated the making of theee claime, the eame levelling etrategy ie deployed. For example, in hie attempted 'deconetruction' (Hick'e term) of the 'picture of the relatively affluent, juet, peaceful, enlightened, democratic, Northern hemiephere, owing ite virtuee to Chrietianity, in contraet to the relatively poor, unjuet, violent, backward, and undemocratic Southern hemiephere, held back by ite non-Chrietian faithe', Hick eay e the following:

. . . Buddhiet-Shinto Japan ie not poor or technologically backward, and eeveral other non-Chrietian natione of the Pacific rim are aleo rapidly becoming major induetrial powere. Muelim Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf etatee are far from poverty-etricken; and Hindu India, which hae recently produced a number of front-rank phyeiciete, ie aleo the largeet democracy in the world. Social injuetice ie indeed endemic in varying degreee in all theee countriee; but it ie, alae, endemic in virtually every country in the world, affluent ae well ae poverty-etricken, Weetern ae well ae Eaetern, Chrietian ae well ae non-Chrietian.50

Thie paeeage, however, ie eueceptible to a 'deconetruction' motivated by another, eomewhat different, politice. The 'picture' which Hick eete out to

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'deconetruct' and oppoee ie a piece of propaganda, and could have been diepoeed of immediately by recouree, eay, to the kind of 'political criticiem' which Edward Said ueee in expoeing the 'incitemente to diecouree' which generate hoetile and overeimplified characterizatione of Ielam in the United Statee (in particular).51 Hick, though, elevatee thie propaganda-piece into an argument and triee in all earneetneee to reepond to it with what ie oeteneibly a counter-argument. But eince he ie countering propaganda maequerading ae an argument, Hick'e reeponee can iteelf only be a piece of (counter)-propaganda, etraining all the time to preeent iteelf ae an argument. Pagee could be devoted to an analyeie of the rhetorical etructure of Hick'e 'argument', but I will limit myeelf to hie deecription of India. There are whole groupe in Indian eociety which, 'etructurally', would not be in a poeition to 'experience' the 'truth' of Hick'e claim that India ie 'the world'e largeet democracy'. We can be fairly certain, for inetance, that many Sikhe living in the vicinity of Amritear would put in a demurrer if they came acroee thie claim. So too would thoee who belong to the three-hundred or eo Indian tribee who are coneigned to the loweet lévele of Indian eociety and whoee religione are not among the religione lieted in the Indian national anthem (Hinduiem, Buddhiem, Sikhiem, Jainiem, Zoroaetrianiem, Ielam, Chrietianity).52 So who ie Hick epeaking for in thie text? He eay e explicitly that hie eeeay ie an 'intra-Chrietian' diecueeion, but why doee he epeak to Chrietiane about India (which in the terme of hie text ie certainly not 'their' country) in a way that occludee, eyetematically, the'experience' of precieely the people who (unlike the Chrietiane he ie addreeeing) really belong to the country he ie talking about? Why ie their own country rendered 'unknowable' to them in hie text? Why are they themeelvee rendered 'unknowable' in hie text? Again, the repreeentation of India ae the producer of 'a number of front-rank phyeiciete' ie not likely to be one that will regieter readily with the millione of elum-dwellere who live in Bombay, Calcutta, Delhi, et cetera, for moet if not all of whom it ie materially irrelevant whether or not Indian phyeiciete are coneidered good enough to be hired by MIT or CalTech or Imperial College (London) or whatever. The etrategic exclueion of euch eubaltern groupe and individuale from Hick'e diecureive 'epace' muet prompt the related queetion of who it ie that ie included in thie 'epace', and here the anewer ie not too difficult to find: thie 'epace' ie occupied by thoee of whom euch notione ae 'democracy' (in the 'weetern liberal' eenee) and 'the production of front-rank phyeiciete' can be recognized and accepted ae diecureive currency, and who are aleo diepoeed to be 'democratic' (in thie way) and to produce good phyeiciete. In other worde: Hick'e diecureive 'epace' ie the typical 'epace' of an educated liberal 'weeterner'. Thie 'epace' ie pervaeively ethnocentric, deepite the unbiaeed proficiency ite occupante can dieplay when it comee to recognizing a wealthy or technologically advanced nation anywhere in the world (and eepecially in the Pacific Baein or the Pereian Gulf); and deepite the acknowledgement that 'eocial injuetice ie . . . endemic in virtually every country in the world', and that torture ie

A Certain 'Politics of Speech ' 89

practiced in numeroue countriee regardleee of their particular 'religioue' affiliatione. The occupant of thie 'epace' ie eomeone who ceaeeleeely dieeolvee the denee particularitiee of etrugglee againet domination and injuetice, who cannot allow for the impingement and encroachment of one eocial and political 'epace' upon another becauee he ie totally reeolved to maintain the abetract equivalence of all euch 'epacee'. The reeult ie a complete occlueion of the alwaye contingent forcee, 'the powere', which deetroy, reconfigure and realign theee 'epacee'. An expaneive 'plurality' of eocial and political 'epacee' ie of couree affirmed by our 'liberal weetern' eubject — yee, there ie torture in Turkey and aleo in Sri Lanka and . . . and . . .; yee, there ie eocial injuetice in Britain and aleo in Zaire and. . . and. . .; and, well, not only in theee placee, becauee after all there ie torture and eocial injuetice 'everywhere'! But becauee of thie unquenchable urge, in the name of 'pluraliem', to affirm the abetract equivalence of all euch 'epacee' (' "good" here, but aleo there; "bad" here, but aleo there'), the outcome ie the production of what S. P. Mohanty, in the couree of making a 'political criticiem' of a certain kind of relativiem, hae called 'debilitatingly ineular epacee': thie eubject rangée over the globe only to conclude that while of couree everything ie different everywhere, in the end thinge are perhape not all that different after all ('Buddhiet-Shinto' Japan builde the beet computere, 'Taoiet' Taiwan manufacturée the moet ehipe, 'Hindu' India producee good phyeiciete, 'Muelim' Saudi Arabia hae eheikhe with more money than Donald Trump or Paul McCartney, 'Chrietian' Britain employe torture in the north of Ireland and goee to war over the Malvinae Ielande, and moet important of all for the 'religioue pluraliet', devout men and women can be found in every corner of the world).53

I want to conclude by making eome remarke about the kind of intellectual practice that ie typically involved in the production and dieeemination of the doctrinee aeeociated with the 'pluraliem' of Cantwell Smith and Hick. Theee commente will apply mutatis mutandis to the other brande of 'pluraliem' variouely epecified by the other contributore to The Myth of Christian Uniqueness, but they are not directly applicable to the poeitione aeeociated with Kraemer and Rahner. Kraemer (and here again I uee thie name to deeignate a type — I could, e.g., juet ae well be referring to Leeelie Newbigin) and Rahner (deepite the eterling efforte once made on hie behalf by Gavin D'Coeta) take poeitione on a 'problem' — that of reconciling the solus Christus with the 'salvation' of non-Christians — that are simply not patient of any kind of solution. Let me try to suggest why by making a brief excursus into the history of Christianity.

George Lindbeck, in his interesting book The Nature of Doctrine, rightly notes that 'Christians in the first centuries appear to have had an extraordinary combination of relaxation and urgency in their attitude toward those outside the church'.54 This attitude characteristically manifested in the early church is rather different from the one displayed by the phil­osophers and theologians discussed in this essay, who regardless of the

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divergent proposals they make in their search for a resolution (or dissolution, in the case of the 'pluralists') of the 'problem' of reconciling the solus Christus with the 'salvation' of non-Christians, nevertheless all show a great deal more of the 'urgency' and relatively less of the 'relaxation' which Lindbeck identifies as notable features of the regnant attitude of the early church to this 'problem'. Clearly a different episteme was in place then, and an interesting question for historically-minded theologians or philosophers will be the one which asks about the kinds of change that took place to bring about this shift of epistemes. Here I can advert only very briefly to a few things that are of some significance. If we are considering the church from its earliest times, one of the several possible historical reasons for this 'combination of relaxation and urgency' was that emergent Christianity only demarcated itself from particular Jewish groups in an ad hoc and unsystematic way. Thus in his impressive survey of the beginnings of Christianity, Christopher Rowland studies the available historical evidence and concludes that early Christians were in dispute only with certain Jewish groups, and that it is therefore misleading to suggest that there was from the beginning a clearly-defined dispute between two 'religions', namely, 'Judaism' and 'Christianity'. Rather, disputes between early Christian groups and certain Jews focused on their respective interpretations of a common ancestral tradition — and in this respect Christianity was not unique among apostate Jewish movements.55 It would seem that the early Christian groups could afford to be 'relaxed' in their attitude to non-Christians primarily because their adherents, while they were fairly uncompromising in their affirmation of the decisiveness of the Christ-event, did not (or were not able to) reify their faith into an 'essence' which could then be set over against 'competing' alternatives in a neat and easily distinguishable way. I am suggesting, in other words, that the question of a religion's 'unsurpassability' only becomes urgent, or can only be perceived to be urgent, when that religion is presumed to have an 'essence' which can then be placed alongside other 'competing essences' and as it were subjected to a 'good look'. It now amounts to something of a consensus among historians of early Christianity that the early Christian movements did not burden themselves with this presumption. This view receives further support when attention is paid to the way the doctrinal structure of the early church functioned. Citing Irenaeus's Adversus Haereses and Tertulliano Scorpiace, R. A. Markus argues that for the early church '. . . criteria of orthodoxy . . . seem to meet a more fundamental need. They enabled men to answer the question: "where, really, is the church to be found?", rather than the different question — closely related though it is — "What is the true teaching of the church?". . . . [W]hat mattered was not the precise shades of the true teaching, but the identity of the Christian church. . . Z56

If this account of the function of doctrine in early Christianity is accepted, it could plausibly be said that the function of the solus Christus is to enable Christians to locate the church, which, precisely as the body of Christ, is for

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Christians the divine basis of their salvation. It would not be the function of this doctrine, necessarily, to provide Christians with a resource for adjudicating the question of the salvation of 'non-Christians'. There is of course nothing intrinsic to the solus Christus that prohibits its employment by Christians who desire to pronounce on this question, and there can be no denying that it was so used with painful frequency after the eighth century. But what cannot be overlooked is the essentially heuristic nature of the deployment of this and other Christian doctrines in the early centuries: these doctrines were brought to articulation in a theological context that took scripture and the preceding tradition as its point of departure, but which was also shaped by the liturgy, the sacraments, the preaching of the good news, the catechizing of those awaiting baptism, the practice of prayer, and the felt need for repentance and conversion. The solus Christus was thus brought to expression in a fairly narrowly circumscribed theological domain as an instrument for the regulation of these practices. Doctrines were texts, and were thus imbricated in the speech-practices of textual (or 'faith') com­munities. Within these always distinctive communities, with their some­times very different internal and external interests, forms, and modes of membership, doctrines/texts like the solus Christus were used in a variety of ways (i.e. they were embedded in 'speech-acts') to do certain things (e.g. to establish the self-identity of the group, or to confirm or disconfirm a particular mode of relationship with another group, or to reform the group, or to maintain it in its present form, et cetera).57 If, as I have been saying, the solus Christus has nothing intrinsically to do with the question of the salvation of 'non-Christians' (qua 'non-Christians'), but is instead intended, heuristically, to guide faithful Christian practice, it then becomes con­ceivable that a Christian could have no view on the question of the salvation of 'non-Christians' (qua 'non-Christians') and still be an upholder of the solus Christus. This, I think, accounts for the 'relaxed' attitude of early Christians to this question. With a shift of episteme, however, a situation is created in which the Kraemers and Rahners of this world believe themselves to be compelled to relate the solus Christus to the question of the salvation of 'non-Christians', and, equally, the Cantwell Smiths and Hicks of this world then find themselves obliged to undo the attempts of the Kraemers and Rahners. It would, I believe, be more productive for us to stand aside from such sterile controversies and get on instead with the business of registering, in the manner of a Foucault-type 'genealogy', the historical and political forces which brought about this shift of episteme (and of course to characterize the epistemes in question as well).

This is not to say that the matter of having or not having 'inter-faith dialogue' becomes something of no real consequence. Far from it (though an interesting question, one which cannot be pursued here, remains to be asked about what is entailed by such notions of 'consequence' or 'inconsequence'). All that follows from the position I have been outlining is that those who have an interest in such 'dialogue' would be far better served if they focused

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not on the irresolvable question of whether 'we' (the reference of 'we' is nearly always left unspecified by thinkers like Cantwell Smith and Hick) have to retain or revise or eliminate the solus Christus — this inevitably being the crux of the debate which engages the theologians and philosophers mentioned in this essay — but on the question of the contours and pressures which circumscribe 'dialogical' and 'heteroglossic' encounters between very diverse kinds of speakers and hearers. What 'we' (and I shall specify the designation of this 'we' shortly) need, in other works, is a theory of speech along the lines of the one adumbrated by 'the Bakhtin School'.

Thus I propose that we move towards the kind of position sketched in this essay, a position I would be disposed, tentatively, to call 'post-pluralistic'. But who is this 'we' whom I am urging? In the context of this discussion, it would be anyone who saw the need to move beyond the faded and fading modernist intellectuals who define themselves in terms of the large and impressive narratives they provide, narratives which invoke such notions as 'the human story', 'the truth of all of us', 'the world community', and so forth. In telling such stories this 'traditional' intellectual remorselessly 'homogenizes, neutralizes, and defuses the circumstantial reality of oppositions and contestations for dominance and hegemoney' (to use the words of Rajagopalan Radhakrishnan).58 This 'traditional' intellectual has been demystified in other intellectual disciplines, but not, alas, in the philosophy and theology of religions. This intellectual 'gestures' at, or 'cites', struggles and antagonisms, but precisely because these are addressed in a 'gestural' or 'citational' mode, the outcome is a politics, implicit or explicit, which, in Radhakrishnans's words, 'resists local, circumstantial, and historical identification' (p. 212). This 'traditional' intellectual prides himself on acknowledging heterogeneity and plurality, but this acknowledgement is always fatally compromised by his deployment of a homogeneous logic, a logic which irons-out the heterogeneous precisely by subsuming it under the categories of comprehensive and totalizing 'global' and 'world' theologies. It is very risky to venture such predictions, but I am convinced that the time of this modernist 'general' intellectual is over, even in the philosophy and theology of religions. Work now being done in other intellectual fields — Afro-American studies, feminist studies, the study of 'Third World' literatures, semiotic theory, cultural politics, and so forth — persuades me that it will not be too long before those who (like me) venture into the domain of the philosophy and theology of religions from the outside will read about 'exclusivism', 'inclusivism', 'pluralism', et cetera, only as part of the history of a certain set of ideas. (And then of course what I have written here will have to be read in just that way too.)59

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NOTES

1 Michel de Certeau, The Writing of History, trans Tom Conley, (New York Columbia University Press, 1988), ρ 30

2 Tzvetan Todorov, The Conquest of America, trans Richard Howard, (New York Harper & Row, 1984), ρ 165 In using this quotation from Todorov as an epigraph, I am also reminded of what S Ρ Mohanty calls the 'ambiguous imperial-humanist myth of our shared human attributes' See his 'Us and Them On the Philosophical Bases of Political Criticism', The Yale Journal of Criticism 2(1989), ρ 13 This myth bedevils many discussions of the relationships between the religions, and my paper essays a 'political criticism' of these discussions

3 Armand Mattelart, Transnationais and the Third World The Struggle for Culture, trans David Buxton, (South Hadley, Mass Bergin and Garvey, 1983), ρ 68 Mattelart quotes from Business Week, April 17,1978, and Advertising Age, November 21,1977 He goes on to say 'These definitions express the profound convictions m numerous transnational circles and the "international life-style" take as its reference point the "American way of life" This seems to conform to the argument of Marx who, m referring to the England of last century, wrote "The most industrialized country presents to other countries the image of their future" ' (ibid )

4 Kraemer, Rahner, Hick and Cantwell Smith are of course widely viewed as the most representative and distinguished exponents of the three 'paradigms' — 'exclusivism' (Kraemer), 'mclusivism' (Rahner), and 'pluralism' (Hick and Cantwell Smith) — now commonly invoked to categorize the relationships between the religions For a useful conspectus of these 'paradigms', see Gavin D'Costa, Theology and Religious Pluralism The Challenge of Other Religions (Oxford Blackwell, 1986)

5 It will be one of the principal contentions of this paper that far more attention needs to be given to the irreducibly specific 'locations' of particular kinds of speakers when philosophers and theologians talk about the different modes of practice and conviction designated by such terms as 'Buddhism', 'Islam', 'Judaism', and so forth, and when they characterize the particular relations that obtain between these respective systems of 'religious' action and understanding

6 John Hick, An Interpretation of Religion Human Responses to the Transcendent (London Macmillan, 1989), ρ 1

7 For Hick on Rahner and 'mclusivism' generally, see 'Preface to the 1988 Reissue' and 'The Copermcan Revolution in Theology', in God and the Universe of Faiths Essays in the Philosophy of Religion (London Macmillan, 1988), pp vu and 127 respectively, and Ά Philosophy of Religious Pluralism', in Problems of Religious Pluralism (New York St Martin's Press, 1985), ρ 33 On Kraemer, see Hick 'Christian Belief and Interfaith Dialogue', in God Has Many Names (Philadelphia The Westminster Press, 1982), pp 117-118 Hick characterizes Kraemer's position as one which repudiates 'interfaith dialogue' This may have been true of Kraemer's 'early' The Christian Message in a Non-Chnstian World (London The Edinburgh House Press, 1938), but it is not sustainable with regard to his Why Christianity of All Religions7, trans Hubert Hoskins, (Philadelphia The Westminster Press, 1962), in which Kraemer, on ρ 123, refers to a UNESCO conference in Manila m January 1960 m which he and his Hindu, Buddhist, Muslim, Jewish and Roman Catholic colleagues decided that 'for all the major religions the paramount problems are the same' It is for this reason that I would contend that Kraemer, ι e the 'later' Kraemer, has more in common with John Hick than he has with someone who espouses the 'post-pluralist' position I shall sketch later in this essay See below pp 89ff

8 SeeWhy Christianity of All Religions7, ρ 22 In World Cultures and World R.ehgwns The Coming Dialogue (Philadelphia The Westminster Press, 1960), Kraemer discusses the prospects for a 'coming dialogue' between the major religions in the time when 'the Western world is thrown into an agonizing attempt at getting rid of its spontaneous thinking and striving in terms of Western hegemony in the world and of a Western-centred view of the world' (p 15) Had Kraemer lived long enough, it would have been interesting to confront him with today's fashionable pronouncements about the 'triumphs' of 'western liberalism' or 'capitalism' — recent events appear to provide scant evidence for his sanguine utterances about 'the West's alleged attempts to relinquish its hegemony

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9 Wilfred Cantwell Smith, 'The Christian in a Religiously Plural World', in his The Faith of Other Men (New York: Mentor Books, 1965), pp. 109-112. Cantwell Smith's claim about Tillich's 'parochialism' needs to be qualified if one is persuaded by Hick's suggestion that Tillich's concept of 'ultimate concern' is a suitable starting-point for any enquiry into the phenomena which constitute 'religion'. For this suggestion, see An Interpretation of Religion, p. 4.

10 'Christianity and the non-Christian Religions', in Karl Rahner, Theological Investigations, vol. 5, trans. Karl-Η. Kruger, (Baltimore: Helicon Press, 1966), pp. 116-117. See also 'Anonymous Christianity and the Missionary Task of the Church', in Theological Investigations, vol. 12, trans. David Bourke, (New York: Seabury, 1974), p. 175. In 'Basic Theological Interpretation of the Second Vatican Council', Theological Investigations, vol. 20, trans. Edward Quinn, (New York: Crossroad, 1981), Rahner says that the Church could not fully realize itself as 'world-Qhmch' while it was complicit with colonialism in 'exporting to the whole world a European religion along with other elements of this supposedly superior culture and civilization. . . ' (p. 78).

11 'In Defence of Religious Pluralism', in Problems of Religious Pluralism, p. 101. See also 'Introduction', God and the Universe of Faiths, p. xviii; and 'The non-Absoluteness of Christianity', in John Hick and Paul F. Knitter, eds., The Myth of Christian Uniqueness: Towards a Pluralistic Theology of Religions (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1987), pp. 16-36.

12 Fernand Braudel's magisterial three-volume study Civilization and Capitalism: 15th-18th Century, trans. Siân Reynolds, (New York: Harper & Row, 1981-1984) takes 1400 as the starting-point of the 'rise of the West.' Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World-System, 2 vols., (New York: Academic Press, 1974-1980) begins his narrative at 1450. For discussion of this and related issues, see Janet L. Abu-Lughod, 'On the Remaking of History: How to Reinvent the Past', in Barbara Kruger and Phil Mariani, eds., Remaking History (Seattle: Bay Press, 1989), pp. 11-129; and Before European Hegemony: The World System A.D. 1250-1350 (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1989).

13 For descriptions of this 'neo-colonial' field, see Eqbal Ahmad, 'From Potato Sack to Potato Mash: The Contemporary Crisis of the Third World', Arab Studies Quarterly, 2(1980), pp. 223-234; Ahmad, 'Post-Colonial Systems of Power', Arab Studies Quarterly 2(1980), pp. 350-363; Ahmad, 'The Neo-Fascist State: Notes on the Pathology of Power in the Third World', Arab Studies Quarterly, 3(1981), pp. 170-180.

14 In his Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), James C. Scott shows how village-life in the village of 'Sedaka' in Kedah, Malaysia, comprises a number of terrains in which poor peasants and wealthy farmers engage in a constant ideological struggle by, among other things, placing radically discrepant constructions on even the most basic realities in their daily lives. See also Scott's interesting comparative study of peasant opposition to the Islamic zakat in contemporary Malaysia and to the Catholic tithe in pre-Revolutionary France, in 'Resistance Without Protest and Without Organization: Peasant Opposition to the Islamic Zakat and the Christian Tithe', Comparative Studies in Society and History 29(1987), pp. 417-452. See also Michael Taussig's important analysis of the role of devil imagery in the critical consciousness of plantation workers and miners in presentday South America, in The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1980).

15 In my 'Towards a "Materialist" Critique of "Religious Pluralism": A Polemical Examination of the Discourse of John Hick and Wilfred Cantwell Smith', in Ian Hamnett, ed., Religious Pluralism and Unbelief: Studies Critical and Comparative (New York and London: Routledge, in press), I explore the 'imaginative geography' (to use a phrase of Edward Said's) presupposed by Hick's 'global theology' and Cantwell Smith's 'world theology' and conclude that in the end this 'geography' is not materially different from the similar 'geographies' sponsored by such 'colonial' discourses as social anthropology and Orientalism. It is, however, important to heed Talal Asad's cautionary note regarding anthropology:

. . . it is a mistake to view social anthropology in the colonial era as primarily an aid to colonial administration, or as the simple reflection of colonial ideology. I say this not because I subscribe to the anthropological establishment's comfortable view of itself, but because bourgeois consciousness, of which social anthropology is merely one fragment, has always contained within itself profound contradictions and

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ambiguities — and therefore the potential for transcending itself. For these contradictions to be adequately apprehended it is essential to turn to the historical power relationship between the West and the Third World to examine the ways in which it has been dialectically linked to the practical conditions, the working assumptions and the intellectual product of all discipline representing the European understanding of non-European humanity.

See Talad Asad, 'Introduction', in Asad, ed., Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter (London: Ithaca Press, 1973), pp. 18-19. My paper seeks to do for the philosophy and theology of religions what Asad and others have done for social and cultural anthropology. I follow Asad's advice in not proposing to regard the accounts of Cantwell Smith et al. as 'simple reflections' of global capitalist ideology — these accounts are in a complex complicity with this ideology, and are certainly not its mere 'reflections'.

16 Here I am indebted to the reflections of Cornel West in his 'Black Culture and Postmodernism', in Kruger and Mariani, eds., Remaking History, pp. 87-96.

17 On this uneven dialectic of power between the 'First' and 'Third' Worlds, see Talal Asad, 'Introduction', pp. 16ff; and 'The Concept of Cultural Translation in British Social Anthropology', in James Clifford and George E. Marcus, eds., Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1986), pp. 141-164. See also Edward Said, 'Representing the Colonized: Anthropology's Interlocutors', Critical Inquiry 15(1989), pp. 205-225.

18 Bernard McGrane, Beyond Anthropology: Society and the Other (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989). Page references to this work will be given within the main body of the text.

19 Thus it was only 'natural' that those who were alleged to be Christian apostates should be taken to be indistinguishable from non-Christian 'infidels'. The Paris Orientalist Guillaume Postel, for example, in his Alcorani concordia (1543) regarded the Protestant Reformers as being hardly more than the bastard offspring of Muhammad. On this, see Lucien Febvre, The Problem of Unbelief in the Sixteenth Century: the Religion of Rabelais, trans. Beatrice Gottlieb, (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982), pp. 113-122.

20 For an historical account of the ways in which several of the major anthropologists of the nineteenth century — including Bachofen, Maine, Fustel de Coulanges, Lubbock, McLennan, Morgan and Tylor — discoursed about 'the primitive', see Adam Kuper, The Invention of Primitive Society: Transformations of an Illusion (London and New York: Routledge, 1988). Kuper's work bears out McGrane's primary contentions.

21 I should perhaps at this point mention briefly the reservations I have about McGrane's narrative. McGrane, like Tzvetan Todorov in his The Conquest of America (a work to which McGrane is much indebted), seeks to provide a narrative of narratives dealing with the 'discovery', conquest and colonization of the 'non-European' world (Todorov though only concerns himself with the Caribbean and Mexico). McGrane and Todorov analyse the narratives of Columbus, Cortes, Las Casas, de la Coruna, Duran, Sahagún, etal., but give us no indication of how these narratives were received or used by the 'textual communities' of those times, of the specific relations that existed between their authors, readers, listeners, and a real or projected public of that time. This must lead us to suspect some of McGrane's generalizations — e.g., that it was not until the Enlightenment that there really developed an understanding of 'religion' as a genus to which different 'religions' (i.e. Christianity, Judaism, et cetera) belonged. Bonaventure, Thomas Aquinas, and Duns Scotus, for example, had to contend with Jewish and Muslim appropriators of the Aristotelian corpus, and Gordon Leff describes this contention between the three faiths over the philosophy of Aristotle as 'the supreme challenge to Christendom in the thirteenth century'. See his Medieval Thought: St Augustine to Ockham (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1958), p. 166. The understandings that Christians had of their faith's relationships to Islam and Judaism were very much more complex and developed than McGrane's 'first paradigm' perhaps allows for.

22 McGrane notes one outcome of this 'democratization' of 'difference' : '. . . if all cultures are democratically relative, then in . . . this deep respect, none are different' (p. 117).

23 Troeltsch says in the lecture that those 'impressed. . . with the relativity and transitoriness of all things' can affirm the 'validity' of Christianity only in the sense of its 'validity for us' (i.e. for 'us' Europeans). See 'The Place of Christianity Among the World-Religions', in Troeltsch, Christian Thought: Its History and Application, ed. F. von Hügel,

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(London: University of London Press, 1923), pp. 3-35. This is in accord with the view, advanced in Der Historismus und seine Probleme that '[there] is for us only a world history of Europe. The old idea of world history must accept new and more modest form'. Quoted in Sarah Coakley, Christ Without Absolutes: A Study of the Christology of Ernst Troeltsch (Oxford: Clarendon Press), 1988, p. 37. Translation slightly altered. Coakley provides an excellent analysis of Troeltsch's 'relativism'. See especially pp. 5-44. Hick claims, albeit in a qualified way, the mantle of Troeltsch in his On Grading Religions', in Problems of Religious Pluralism, pp. 70-71. Cantwell Smith, it would seem, has little truck with Troeltsch: after professing to be 'an historian first', he says the following: '[the] line that led from Schleiermacher to Troeltsch, and as well the line, opposing this, that led to Barth and Kraemer, can be transcended now, if not indeed dismantled, as we begin as it were again with new categories'. See his Towards a World Theology: Faith and the Comparative History of Religion (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1981), p. 121. Cantwell Smith believes these 'lines' can be 'transcended' because 'theologians of another age . . . did not know about other people's faith. . . .' (p. 120). Those theologians of the early church who confronted the Marcionite heresy had perforce to try and understand what it was about Judaism and its relationship to Christianity that made Marcion a heretic, Aquinas pondered deeply on the relation his faith had to the Judaism of Maimonides and the Islam of Ibn Rushd and Ibn Sina, and so forth, and still Cantwell Smith can dream that it is only theologians of his ilk who are able to be 'in the know' where other religions are concerned!

24 Ernst Troeltlsch, 'Christianity among the World-Religions', p. 26. 25 John Hick, An Interpretation of Religion, pp. 245-246. Hick states explicitly on p. 350 that

'the Real an sich' is a Kantian-type 'postulate' of religious experience. For a judicious account of the Hickian epicycles prior to the Gifford Lectures, see Gavin D'Costa, John Hick's Theology of Religions: A Critical Evaluation (Lanham, Maryland: Univeristy Press of America, 1987), pp. 153-185. Cantwell Smith proposes, with some reservations, the term 'the transcendent' as providing the most appropriate equivalent for 'God', et cetera, in a 'theology of religious diversity'. See his Towards a World Theology, p. 184.

26 An Interpretation of Religion, pp. 352-3. I digress in order to say this, but the section on 'myth' in this work is somewhat confusing. To say, as Hick does, that 'the Real an sich' is 'totally beyond' the range of our linguistic resources, is tantamount to saying that (all) our languages are equivocal with respect to 'the Real an sich'. And yet he wants to say at the same time that there can be, and are, 'appropriate or inappropriate dispositional responses to the Real'. Thus a response can be judged to be 'appropriate' when 'the god or absolute to which we relate ourselves [is] an authentic manifestation of the Real and . . . our practical response [is] appropriate to that manifestation' (p. 353). I may have misunderstood Hick here, because if any language is equivocal with regard to 'the Real' then the users of that language can have no way of knowing whether or not their convictions about a particular deity (or deities) or absolute are truly 'an authentic manifestation of the Real'. This recalls Scotus's critique of Henry of Ghent's contention that creaturely speech about God is necessarily equivocal: Scotus argues in the Oxford Commentary that Henry's doctrine is inherently agnostic because it renders impossible any linguistic extrapolation from creatures to God. Hick saddles himself with a Kantian rendition of (what Scotus perceives to be) Henry's impasse — Hick is unable to indicate how the phenomenal sphere attains to noumenal truth, and no amount of talk about 'authentic manifestations' and 'appropriate dispositions' can extricate him from this Kantian ditch.

27 I discuss at greater length the 'political cosmology' of this aspect of Hick's work in my 'Towards a "Materialist" Critique of "Religious Pluralism" '.

28 McGrane, p. 120. 29 For Cantwell Smith, see Towards a World Theology, p. 79; and for Hick, see An Interpretation

of Religion, p. 376. 30 Edward Said rightly warns against a kind of 'fetishization and relentless celebration of

"difference" and "otherness" which takes no account of "the process of empire" '. See his 'Representing the Colonized', pp. 213-214. Here he echoes the strictures of Jonathan Friedman, 'Beyond Otherness or: The Spectacularization of Anthropology', Telos, #71(1987), pp. 161-170. I have sought to take this warning seriously by invoking the category of the 'other' in a way that tries always to be heedful of the politics and histories which produce and reproduce the 'other'.

A Certain 'Politics of Speech' 97

31 For Todorov's treatment of Las Casas, see his The Conquest of America, pp 165-168 My use of Todorov's work in this limited way does not signal my agreement with his substantive theses, which are pervaded by a European ethnocentnsm that has been powerfully criticized by, for example, José Rabasa, 'Dialogue as Conquest Mapping Spaces for Counter-Discourse', Cultural Critique #6(1987), pp 131-160, and Deborah Root, 'The Imperial Signifier Todorov and the Conquest of Mexico', Cultural Critique #9 (1988), pp 197-219 See also the critical response made by Henry Louis Gates, Jr to Todorov's ' " Race", Writing and Culture', m Gates, ed , 'Race', Writing, and Difference (Chicago University of Chicago Press, 1986), pp 370-380 Gates's response, titled 'Talkm' That Talk', is on pp 402-409 of this volume

32 John Hick, An Interpretation of Religion, ρ 379 Hick goes on to say 'The religious life of humanity will no doubt continue to be lived within the existing traditions, though with less and less emphasis upon their mutually exclusive claims' (ibid ) Cantwell Smith likewise avers that 'faith' will not 'cease to be specific' See Towards a World Theology, ρ 180

33 An Interpretation of Religion, ρ 377 We are also told that 'a powerful opposite trend [to "pluralism"]' shows itself in the forms 'of both religious fundamentalism and political nationalism' (ibid )

34 For a suggestive depiction of the cultural politics which makes the McDonald' s hamburger into the 'global' food, see A Sivanandan, 'New Circuits of Imperialism', Race and Class 30(1989), pp 1-19

35 The 'cosmopolitanism' promoted by this new episteme is discussed in a highly interesting way in Tim Brennan, 'Cosmopolitans and Celebrities', Race and Class, 31(1989), pp 1-20 For brief discussions of the institutionalization of ideologies of pluralism in the American academy (and the outcomes of such institutionalization), see Cornel West, 'Minority Discourse and the Pitfalls of Canon Formation', The Yale Journal of Criticism, 1(1987), pp 193-201, and Chandra Talpade Mohanty, 'Under Western Eyes Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses', boundary 2 12/13(1984), pp 333-358

36 In a conversation at Loyola Marymount University in May 1988 Paul Knitter challenged me, in his irenic way, to say how I, as an avowed critic of 'pluralism', would understand what takes place — in principle — when the adherents of different religious traditions try to delineate the relationships that two or more of these traditions have to each other The next section of this paper is intended as a response to Knitter's invitation The basic premise of my position is that the philosopher or theologian of religions needs to divest him/herself of any urge to impute to certain kinds of person a status or knowledge they somehow 'unwittingly ' possess for example, that the devout and good non-Christian is an unwitting' Christian (Las Casas and Rahner), that the 'non-pluralist' is none the less

an 'unwitting' responder to 'the Real' or 'the Transcendent' (Cantwell Smith and Hick), that the non-Christian does not know (or worse still refuses to acknowledge) that (s)he is saved' through Christ alone (Kraemer), and so forth It is my conviction that the theoretical and practical imperialism which underlies this urge must be named for what it is and repudiated totally

37 V Ν Voloshinov's principle that '[each] period and social group has had its own repertoire of speech forms for ideological communication in human behaviour' will be central for my account See his Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, trans Ladislav Matejka and I R Titunik, (Cambridge, Mass Harvard University Press, 1986), ρ 20

38 To quote Voloshinov 'signs can only arise on intenndwidual territory It is essential that the two individuals be organized socially, that they compose a group (a social unit), only then can the medium of signs take shape between them' See Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, ρ 12 Emphases as in original All subsequent references to this work will be provided in parentheses in the text It is thought that 'V Ν Voloshinov' is one of the pen-names of Mikhail Bakhtin Since it is not my intention to intervene m the debate over the authorship of the the various works attributed to the 'Bakhtin School' I shall regard Voloshinov as the author of those works which bear his name, and refer to the writings of other members of the school where necessary

39 See Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, ρ 118 Bakhtin makes a similar point when he says that 'all real and integral understanding is actively responsive, and constitutes nothing other than the initial preparatory stage of a response And the speaker himself

98 Kenneth Surin

is oriented precisely toward such an actively responsive understanding. He does not expect passive understanding that . . . only duplicates his own idea in someone else's mind. Rather, he expects response, agreement, sympathy, objection, execution, and so forth. . . ' See Mikhail Bakhtin, 'The Problem of Speech Genres', in his collection of essays Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, trans. Vern W. McGee, (Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press, 1986), p. 69. The late Allon White coined a marvellous phrase for this aspect of Bakhtin/Voloshinov's theory of language when he refers to the 'vocalic intonational ghosting' which for 'the Bakhtin School' constitutes the sense of an utterance. See White's 'The Struggle Over Bakhtin: Fraternal Reply to Robert Young', Cultural Critique, # 8(1988), p. 228.

40 See 'The Problem of Speech Genres', pp. 95-96; Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, p. 93; and M. M. Bakhtin/P. N. Medvedev, The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship: A Critical Introduction to Sociological Poetics, trans. Albert J. Wehrle, (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985), pp. 122ff. Bakhtin uses the label 'semantic personalism' to characterize this account of the meaning of an utterance.

41 Arif Dirlik, 'Culturalism as Hegemonic Ideology and Liberating Practice', Cultural Critique, #6(1987), pp. 13-50. Also pertinent are Frantz Fanon's reflections on what he calls 'the national middle class' of the former European colonies. See his The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farringdon, (New York: Grove Press, 1968). Gauri Viswanathan provides an exemplary account of the construction of this class or group in British India in 'Currying Favor: The Politics of British Educational and Cultural Policy in India, 1813-1854', Social Text # 19/20(1988), pp. 85-104. Neither Dirlik, Fanon nor Viswanathan can be expected to analyse the phenomemon of 'pluralism' (nor do they), but their analyses of 'Third World cultural hegemonies' are broadly compatible with the points I have been making about 'pluralism' in this essay.

42 Wilfred Cantwell Smith, The Meaning and End of Religion (London: SPCK, 1978). The cover of this book carries the sub-title Ά Revolutionary Approach to the Great Religious Traditions'. John Hick, in his 'foreword' to the British edition of Cantwell Smith's book, concurs with the estimation conveyed in its sub-title. It should perhaps be noted that Troeltsch had several decades earlier formulated a position on Christianity displaying several notable affinities with the account of religion provided by Cantwell Smith. In his posthumously published lecture Troeltsch says that '. . Christianity is itself a theoretical abstraction. It presents no historical uniformity, but displays a different character in every age,. . . hence it can in no wise be represented as the finally attained unity and explanation of all that has gone before, such as religious speculation seeks. It is rather a particular, independent, historical principle, containing, similarly to the other principles, very diverse possibilities and tendencies'. See 'The Place of Christianity Among the World Religions', p. 13. See also the essay 'What Does "Essence of Christianity" Mean?', in Robert Morgan and Michael Pye, eds., Ernst Troeltsch: Writings on Theology and Religion (Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1977), pp. 124-179. Cantwell Smith, in a note in The Meaning and End of Religion, admits that he discovered, subsequent to his own writing, that, with regard to Christianity at least, Troeltsch was broaching the questions he was raising in this book. See note 111 on p. 271.

43 Talal Asad, 'The Concept of Cultural Translation in British Social Anthropology', in James Clifford and George E. Marcus, eds., Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1986), pp 157-158. Abdul JanMohamed's point that 'marginality is the "universal" of minority literature' can therefore be generalized: this marginality is the 'universal' of the language of the 'non-western' society. For JanMohamed, see his 'Humanism and Minority Literature: Toward a Definition of Counter-hegemonic Discourse', boundary 2,12/13(1984), p. 297.

44 On the politics of imputing convictions to members of a culture which these people are not themselves able to acknowledge, see Talal Asad, 'Anthropological Conceptions of Religion: Reflections on Geertz', Man 18(1983), pp. 237-259. See also Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven F. Rendali, (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1984), especially pp. 45-60.

45 The Interpretation of Religion, p. 378. 46 For discussions of the relation between mediaeval Christian theology and philosophy and

the rise of modern science (from which I take the example of the relation between nominalism and scientific method and that of Isaac Newton), see Hans Blumenberg,

A Certain 'Politics of Speech ' 99

The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, trans. Robert M. Wallace, (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1983), see especially pp. 181-203; and Amos Funkenstein, Theology and the Scientific Imagination From the Middle Ages to the Seventeenth Century (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1986).

47 Here I repeat points that Talal Asad and Edward Said have made with regard to ethnography and Orientalism respectively. See Asad, 'The Concept of Translation in British Social Anthropology', pp. 143ff; and Said, 'Orientalism Reconsidered', in Francis Barker et al., eds.. Literature, Politics and Theory: Papers from the Essex Conference 1976-84 (London: Methuen, 1986), pp. 210-229. See also Homi Κ. Bhabha, 'The other question: difference, discrimination and the discourse of colonialism', in Barker et al., eds.. Literature, Politics and Theory, pp. 148-172; and Gay atri Chakravorty Spivak, 'Who Claims Alterity?', in Kruger and Mariani, eds., Remaking History, pp. 269-292.

48 See Charles H. Long, Significations: Signs, Symbols, and Images in the Interpretation of Religion (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1986); and Philip C. Almond, The British Discovery of Buddhism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).

49 An Interpretation of Religion, p. 380. 50 'The Non-Absoluteness of Christianity', in Hick and Paul F. Knitter, eds.. The Myth of

Christian Uniqueness: Towards a Pluralistic Theology of Religions (Maryknoll, New York: Orbis, 1987), p. 24.

51 See, for example, Said's Covering Islam: How the Media and the Experts Determine How We See the Rest of the World (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981). The phrase 'incitements to discourse' can be found on p. 148, and is taken from Michel Foucault.

52 On these tribals or adivasis ('original inhabitants' in Hindi), see Gayatri Spivak, 'Who Claims Alterity?', pp. 282ff. Spivak's essay is an attempt to create a discursive 'space' that can be inhabited by such subaltern groups and individuals. Similar attempts are to be found in Spivak's 'Foreword' to Mahasweta Devi's story 'Draupadi', translated by Spivak in her In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (London: Methuen, 1987), pp. 179-196; and in Ά Literary Representation of the Subaltern: A Woman's Text From the Third World', In Other Worlds, pp. 241-268. My charge against Hick is that he obliterates this 'space' in his representation of India for a 'western'/Christian readership.

53 For Mohanty's phrase, see 'Us and Them: On the Philosophical Bases of Political Criticism', The Yale Journal of Criticism, 2(1989), pp. 14-15. Mohanty uses this phrase when arguing against a brand of 'relativism' he calls 'extreme relativism'. It would certainly need to be demonstrated that the 'religious pluralist' is necessarily committed to an 'extreme relativism' of the kind identified by Mohanty, but I cannot see how, given his formulations, Hick can avoid espousing some version of it. Hick, after all, is insistent that our traditional parochialisms can be eliminated only if we make the presumption of 'a common soteriological space' that is inhabited by the devout men and women of all religions. Gordon Kaufman claims to provide a version of 'pluralism' which eschews this (for him) troublingly 'universalistic' presumption, but is none the less wedded to the proposition that our 'particularities' have to be 'relativized', this being ordained by 'certain implications of our modern historical consciousness' (one of which is that '[r]eligious claims have always had to make their way . . . in the open marketplace of human experience and ideas'). See Kaufman, 'Religious Diversity, Historical Consciousness, and Christian Theology', in Hick and Knitter, eds.. The Myth of Christian Uniqueness, pp. 3-15. Constraints of space prevent me from undertaking a rhetorical analysis of such metaphors as 'the open marketplace' in the discourses of 'religious pluralism'.

It is important to stress that my aim in this paper is to characterize the implied political 'space' of the texts of Kraemer, Rahner, Cantwell Smith, Hick, et al. I am not identifying the political views as such of these writers. Thus, in Hick's own case, I can (having been his student) vouch for his unsparing efforts to combat the endemic racism of British society while he was H. G. Wood Professor at the University of Birmingham.

54 George Lindbeck, The Nature of Doctrine: Religion and Theology in a Postliberal Age (London: SPCK, 1985), p. 68.

55 Christopher Rowland, Christian Origins: An Account of the Setting and Character of the Most Important Messianic Sect of Judaism (London; SPCK, 1985), pp. 299-308. In support of Rowlands, it could be noted that Eusebius of Caesarea and Origen both used the plural 'churches', and that the term 'Christianos' was not used in Egypt before 256 when a papyrus document orders the arrest of a believer. For a helpful discussion of this and other

100 Kenneth Surin

matters (and to which I am indebted for the above examples), see Judith Herrin, The Formation of Christendom (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1987), pp. 54ff. Herrin argues that it was only in the third decade of the eight century that there emerged 'from a plethora of Christian beliefs and religious practices . . . an exclusive Christian faith, all-embracing and intolerant of deviance and pre-Christian survivals' (p. 138).

56 See R. A. Markus, 'The Problem of Self-Definition: From Sect to Church', in E. P. Sanders, ed., Jewish and Christian Self-Definition: vol. One (The Shaping of Christianity in the Second and Third Centuries) (London: SCM Press, 1980), p. 5. If Markus is right, this doctrinal structure is not easily assimilable into any kind of 'essentializing' discourse.

57 For an account of such matters, see Brian Stock, The Implications of Literacy: Written Language and Models of Interpretation in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1983). Stock reminds his reader that '[understanding heresy and reform . . . as both historical and social phenomena, must go beyond doctrinal questions and come to grips with the transformative power of such "writings", together with the role of hermeneutics and interpretation. For, within the small group, one's daily activities are structured according to such precepts. Behavioural norms are existential glosses on real or putative documents. They are part of the movement which binds the text, the speech-act, and the deed' (p. 101).

58 See R. Radhakrishnan, 'Ethnic Identity and Post-Structuralist Difference', Cultural Critique, # 6 (1987), p. 206. In this article, to which I am indebted, Radhakrishnan builds on Gramsci's distinction between the 'traditional' and the 'organic' intellectual to talk about a kind of intellectual — identified by Radhakrishnan as the 'specific' intellectual — who will eschew the telling of 'large' stories for an engagement in always specific and 'perspectivalized' struggles.

59 An abbreviated version of this essay is published in Gavin D'Costa, ed., Christian Uniqueness Reconsidered, (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 1990).

^ s

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