Book Review
by John M. Frame
Wilfred
Cantwell Smith: Questions of Religious Truth.
These lectures argue four major theses:
1) The death-of-God movement (William
Hamilton to the contrary notwithstanding) is a religious system wherein
the phrase “God is dead” serves as a primal religious symbol, a presupposition
rather than a demonstrated conclusion.
2) All religions—and even commitments to
reason”—make similar presuppositions on the basis of “faith”. Only by noting
such presuppositions in others and in ourselves can we engage in a proper
examination of religions (one which is fair to them and honest with ourselves).
3) Religions are not “true” or “false”;
these terms may be applied only to behavior and thinking which is performed in
a religious context.
4) “Christian”, “Muslim”, “Buddhist”, and
analogous terms should be understood as adjectives, not as nouns. Thus there
are no “Christians”, but only “Christian” qualities of life (which may
characterize believers in, say, Islam as easily as believers in Christ).
Reformed readers will find the first and
the second points interesting, even appealing; the third and the fourth,
however, are clearly vitiated by a dogmatically asserted Kantian epistemology
which insists that God is unable to tell us anything which is true. Thus,
though Smith is most
WTJ 30:2 (May
68) p. 242
acute
at exposing the presuppositions of others, he is curiously blind to his own. If
they are read in context, then, even the first and second theses finally serve
only to relativize all religious claims in order to give full sway to a
meta-religious claim, the claim of the comparative religious specialist to know “what religion ought to be” (p. 70; cf. pp. 84ff). In the end, we must
judge this meta-religious claim to be just another religious claim, and to have
no more normative significance than any other human scheme to usurp the
interpretative prerogatives of God.
From the title and chapter headings, one
might unwarily conclude (at least this reviewer did!) that these lectures were
attempting to interact with recent discussions of “religious truth” by analytic
philosophers. In fact, however, though Smith deals with some of the same topics
as these men, he shows no acquaintance with their writings (except for a
footnote on p. 66) and sometimes even talks as though he were the first person
to ask seriously what “religious truth” might mean (cf. pp. 39ff, 65ff).
Despite this audacious independence, however, the book presents us with nothing
new. The author, Professor of World Religions at
What the field of comparative religions
needs is more good Reformed scholars who will interpret the data of the
religions from a biblical standpoint: not to prove the Bible “superior” by some
neutral standard of comparison, nor merely to show how the Bible differs from
other holy books; but rather, using the Bible as a critical tool,
to show concretely how man outside of Christ “changes the truth of God into a
lie”, and how such religions carry the logical elements of their own
destruction. Such a method would take religious presuppositions seriously, as
Smith’s does not, and thus could contribute much to current discussions of the
logical structure of religious truth and error.