261 - Doctrines of Religious Communities: A Philosophical Study

Doctrines of Religious Communities: A Philosophical Study
By William A. Christian, Sr.
New Haven, Yale, 1987. 234 pp. $21.25.

For several generations of Yale students and for the readers of his previous books (An Interpretation of Whitehead's Metaphysics, Meaning and Truth in Religion, and Oppositions of Religious Doctrines), William Christian has represented the highest standard of clear thinking and careful writing about the philosophy of religion. His latest book manifests his characteristic virtues.

Every religious community, Christian explains, has "primary doctrines" concerning "the setting of human life and the conduct of life in this setting." But it also has "governing doctrines"-beliefs about how to decide if a given assertion really is a doctrine of the community, whether some doctrines are more important than others, whether the community's doctrines embody all important truths, and so on. The Westminster Confession, for instance, sets forth such a "doctrine about doctrines" when it declares that "the whole counsel of God … is either expressly set down in Scripture, or by good and necessary consequence may be deduced from Scripture."

Such governing doctrines are the subject of this book, and Christian considers examples from Barth, Aquinas, al-Ghazzali, the Mahaparinibbanasutta, Nagarjuna, and other texts from many different traditions. His kind of careful analysis makes for sometimes slow reading, and impatient readers may grow frustrated with his cautious determination to qualify his conclusions. But this is a book with important things to say, important even beyond the field of the critical philosophy of religion.

For instance, a number of efforts at a "world theology" that will somehow synthesize the insights of the world's great religions have appeared recently. Adherents of such projects sometimes seem to think that the kind of intellectual sloppiness that afflicts them can be justified by a sort of moral imperative: After all, it would just be offensive and bigoted to suggest that other religions might be false. In an earlier book, Oppositions of Religious Doctrines, Christian warned, "in response to the generous impulse which often prompts people to harmonize the

262 - Doctrines of Religious Communities: A Philosophical Study

doctrines of the world religions, that understanding one another does not always lead to agreement and that respect for one another does not depend on agreement." His new book illustrates over and over again how the recognition of genuine disagreement can be the most respectful response to different religious traditions, and how much both sides might learn from honestly exploring such disagreements.

A second issue is addressed by Christian. Several of the later chapters of George Lindbeck's increasingly influential book, The Nature of Doctrine, make subtle points about the ways religious communities assert truth-claims, but Lindbeck began the book by distinguishing three views about how doctrines function: they assert truth-claims, they express experiences, or they set out the "grammatical rules" for a religious community's language and practice. A too simple reading of Lindbeck would conclude that doctrines function only in the third way. On the other hand, the theological world these days is full of those who think that religion involves only finding symbols that somehow express certain kinds of human experience. In this book, Christian once again reminds us that, among other things, religions often do want to assert claims about the way things are, claims their adherents believe to be true. It seems an obvious point, but somehow, in theological and philosophical discussions, it keeps getting lost.

I have tried to set a context for this book's importance rather then systematically reviewing its contents, about which much more could be said. Christian emphasizes that defining right practices is as doctrinally important as defining true beliefs. In perhaps the most original part of the book, he considers the alternatives that face a religious community in deciding how to relate its doctrines to secular truths. In these matters, and many others, William Christian has much to teach us.

William C. Placher

Wabash College
Crawfordsville, Indiana