Abstract
Max Charlesworth’s work in the late 1990s on ‘the scandal of religious diversity’ raises serious questions that have not yet been sufficiently recognized and certainly not resolved. How does ‘religion’ as a universal or at least very widespread phenomenon relate to the concrete world religions as institutions? This and other issues raised by Charlesworth are explored here: Are diverse ‘revelations’ incommensurable or is this the result of linguistic and cultural difference? Does relabelling such as ‘the Absolute’ or ‘Ultimate reality’ for ‘God’ resolve any difficulties? Is pluralism descriptive or prescriptive? The chapter concludes with an appraisal of Charlesworth’s unjustly neglected ‘Credo for the religious believer’.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
See ‘Essay 2: The invention of Australian Aboriginal religions’, in Charlesworth 1997, pp. 51–80.
- 2.
Two pages (pp. 8–10) are devoted to it in the Introduction to Religious Inventions: Four Essays (Charlesworth 1997), a brief but masterly summary of the debate about ‘the reception of revelation’ in modern Christian theology. The theological and philosophical problems inherent in revelations is a universal problem in the study of religions and one often underestimated. I have argued that it was the unrecognized central issue in the controversy over Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses. See Rule 1995.
- 3.
Another tantalizingly brief section (pp. 12–13) in the Introduction to Religious Inventions under the heading ‘The Interpretive-Inventive Perspective’ ends with an appeal that satisfies a pragmatic historian like me but, I fear, would not satisfy many philosophers: ‘Nevertheless, despite all opportunities for mistakes and misunderstandings and misrepresentations, and the lack of any court of appeal, languages work successfully most of the time and we do not in fact end in subjectivism or linguistic anarchy’.
- 4.
See Rule 1999.
- 5.
See Davies 1992.
- 6.
In a TV mini-series called ‘Out on a limb’.
- 7.
Not, as one might think, in Waiting for Godot, but in Watt. Beckett, apart from his usual provocativeness, is also invoking the Greek roots of the English ‘ineffable’.
- 8.
The note in the original reads: ‘“God” is taken here to mean any source of revelation or disclosure of “the divine”.’
- 9.
It should be noted that Charlesworth begins his list with the term ‘operationally’ which may be the equivalent of my ‘functional’.
- 10.
It would be useful to discover whether Max himself or the editor omitted it from the symposium volume. Perhaps he thought it too personal, too ‘mystical’ even, for a philosophico-theological discussion.
References
Charlesworth, M. (1995). Ecumenism between the world religions. Sophia, 34(1), 140–159.
Charlesworth, M. (1997). Religious inventions: Four essays. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Charlesworth, M. (1999). Religion and religions. In G. Bouma (Ed.), Managing religious diversity: From threat to promise (pp. 28–46). Sydney: Australian Association for the Study of Religions. Also published in Australian Religion Studies Review, 12(2) (Spring 1999), 28–48.
Davies, P. (1992). The mind of God: The scientific basis for a rational world. New York: Simon & Schuster.
Rule, P. (1995). The Rushdie affair: Tolerance, pluralism or secularism? Sophia, 34(1), 226–232.
Rule, P. (1999). (Review of) Max Charlesworth, religious inventions: Four essays. Sophia, 38(1), 122–126.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2019 Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Rule, P. (2019). Religion and Religions. In: Wong, P., Bloor, S., Hutchings, P., Bilimoria, P. (eds) Considering Religions, Rights and Bioethics: For Max Charlesworth. Sophia Studies in Cross-cultural Philosophy of Traditions and Cultures, vol 30. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18148-2_16
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18148-2_16
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-18147-5
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-18148-2
eBook Packages: Religion and PhilosophyPhilosophy and Religion (R0)