A SCIENCE OF RELIGION?
LETTER TO AN EDITOR

© 2003 by Orchid Land Publications

[20030203, updated 20030219]

Dear Editor, 

      The import of R. Wuthnow’s Jan. 24th article in the Chronicle, “Is there a place for ‘scientific’ studies of religion?” appears to imply that any “scientific” study of religion would (have to) be carried out in the field of sociology.  At all events, Wuthnow ignores existing paradigm studies of the three paradigmatically differing kinds of established Christianity, although such analyses fit the characteristics of his and others’ understanding of what is involved in being “scientific”—rigor, coherent systematicity, replicability, prediction, etc.  Two points seem obvious to me:

     First:  Whereas belief is the essence of most philosophies, and behavior (piety and diacony) characterizes service organizations, what constitutes the essence of religion is worship.  A religion can substitute slogans for beliefs and obedience for ethics, but it cannot lack cultus, the worship of someone or something.  The sociological approach goes at it from the other end—the human end.  This does not necessarily make that approach more scientific than a precise cognitive analysis.

     Second:  Of the many possible combinations (i.e. excluding incompatible combinations) of the axiomatic building blocks of religious paradigms, three feature patterns constitute the matter (which will be one or another kind of ontological reality) and the hermeneutic form of the three established varieties of Christianity.  The axioms of a given form impose specific interpretations on common materials or, as is the case even more often, exclude given interpretations from them.

     The building blocks are:

—ONTOLOGY:  the relevance of material things (sacraments) and time (development or evolution in creation, doctrinal tradition, etc.) for religion.  The minus value of this feature is gnosticism.  The plus value is sacramentalism (incarnationalism), which is sub­divided into static ontology and energy ontology.  (The positive evaluation of materiality and temporality in religion derives from Hebrew religion.)  Aristotle characterized dynamis as a potential, in the present instance, a capacity in human essence to reason and choose freely.  He considered energy or an energy, which is not an essential part of an essence, to be what makes a dynamis actual and functional for a given purpose. These notions were built into Hellenistic Greek and hence into the thinking of those who spoke and wrote in that language.  (This could account for the timing of the Incarnation and its location in a rather Hellenized part of Jewish Palestine—in the region of Tiberias.)  In the Greek New Testament, we find 26 instances of energy terminology in Paul’s letters alone; James has one instance.  The matter of Eastern Orthodoxy and Latin Christianity is sacramental ontology.  The hermeneutic form of Eastern Orthodoxy is the energetic subcategory of sacramental ontology. 

—JURIDICALITY, also derived from the outlook found in Judaism’s Torah as well as (see a few lines below) in Islam’s Shari‘a.  Its subtypes are intellectual juridicality and, more naturally, volitional juridicality.  These subtypes respectively form(at) Latin and Protestant thinking.  The juridical outlook was indirectly derived from the founders of Western theology—Punic Tertullian, Cyprian, and above all Augustine, but also not least the Milanese judge, Ambrose, as well as the much later Anselm; all except the last-named had been law students or court orators.  More immediately and tellingly, the sources of Western juridicalized theology at the end of the Dark Ages were the juridically influenced philosophical writings of Islamic and Jewish scholars at Córdova (the largest city of that time).  Nearly all popes from 1100 to 1300 are said to have been lawyers; and Calvin and other Reformers had been law students.

     Since Aquinas did not distinguish energy from essence (he called God’s Essence pure existence, and held that that Essence includes other energies like reasoning and willing), and given that all parties agree that God’s uncreated Essence is imparticipable by created beings, unity with God is predictably virtual in Western theology.  It is intentional (conceptual) for Thomists; covenantal (will-based), for the Nominalist Reformers.  Orthodox Christians posit an ontological union, not with God’s Essence but with His divine, uncreated Energies, His Life:  The Assimilation to God culminates in Theosis (“Divinization”), for Salvation is participating in God's uncreated Glory through the divinizing Vision of uncreated Light--the same Light that a few of our Savior's disciples were miraculously privileged to see at His Transfiguration on Mt. T(h)avor.  (Light cannot be properly understood except as energy in an energy paradigm.)  

     Note that Luther called himself a modernus; his two modernisms—the gnostic-inclined piety of the devotio moderna and the via moderna philosophy (Nominalism)—respectively constituted the matter and form of his thinking.  Both mod­ernisms fostered individualism.  Incidentally, where the older varieties of Christianity were vision-oriented, Reformation Christianity has (like Semitic religion) been decidedly hearing-oriented:  It is book-oriented and word-oriented.  Even the Creator is a “Word” in Western misunderstandings and mistranslations of John 1:1,3.  

     The patterning of any paradigm in which materiality has no positive role in religion makes Incarnation (and the ontological role of the Mother of God in that Event) as well as Resurrection of the flesh (whether Christ’s or a believer’s) incidental.  On the other hand,  Anselm’s juridical-penal assumption that God does not forgive without demanding a satisfying of justice through a condign punishment has prevailed in the classical treatments of Western Christianity.

     At the end of the barbaric and (despite the brief Carolingian revival) largely illiterate Dark Ages in the West, Western Christianity discovered formative assumptions in the juridicalized Arab and Jewish learning of Córdova, the largest city of the world in its day (it had 700 mosques).  (This learning culminated several centuries of brilliant accomplishments, including the invention of algebra, alchemy, etc.  If the Arabs had not translated Greek learning at the Beit al Fikr in Baghdad in the middle third of the ninth century, important Greek scholarship would have been lost for all time.)  Though embracing different subtypes, the Latins and Orthodox accept sacramental ontology as the matter of religion; the Reformers agree with the Latins on a juridical hermeneutic form.  These are the cross-paradigm links.

      If Grace is uncreated Energy—God’s Life—in Eastern Christianity, the Latins understand Grace to be neither uncreated nor energetic.  Sanctifying Grace is non operativa; it is a static quality of a believer’s soul.  For the Reformers, Grace is God’s declaring sinning and sinful trusters in Him to be virtually righteous.  Righteousness is imputed, and belief becomes fideistic—will-based fiducia “confidence, trust.”  (Cf. Luther’s views:  “Sin strongly [fortiter]” and his claim (in his famous Prelude on the Babylonian captivity of the Church)  that the true evening sacrifice of a Christian is “the slaughter of reason [occisio rationis].”)  In the Eastern paradigm, the soul is not immortal by nature, as in pre-Christian Greek philosophy and the Western Christian thought world.  The Orthodox accept that the soul has immortality through Grace, the uncreated Energies and Life of God.  In the East, the Fall is ontological:  When the Assimilation to God (homoiosis Theo in Genesis 1:26; the final formative of homoiosis shows that it is an energization noun in Greek) got lost, death predictably followed.  (More precisely, God permitted satan [written with lower-case “s”] to impose death on humanity in order to prevent sinning’s being perpetuated.)  In the West, the Fall is juridical, and its predictable consequences are juridical:  Death is a divine punishment.  In the East, guilt is volitional, not ontological, and as such cannot be inherited--let alone  physically ("by natural generation," as they say in Western theology).  If the Fall is ontological, as in the East, it follows that the reversal of this in Salvation is an ontological regaining of the lost Assimilation and becoming an ontological “new creating” that shares God’s Life.  In the West, Salvation depends on satisfying justice by the penal immolation of a “Victim” of infinite Worth in a propitiatory Sacrifice.  Where the West makes will to be the essence of Salvation, the East treats will as a condition of what is essentially an ontological new birth.  In the East, the Crucifixion was an expiatory act of ontological Worship, sacrifice being the giving back to God of a perfect creature in acknowledgement of His ownership of and dominion over everything created.  (This Sacrifice is somehow shared in by the faithful.  In Protestantism, its benefits are imputed to believers by the divine will.  For the Orthodox, Christ’s ontological, not metaphorical, members ontologically share in all that their Head has done.)  If in the East, the Crucifixion of Jesus is essential and hence all-important for removing the ontological and moral impediments to ontological union with the risen Christ and for Theosis, which is what Salvation is:  It is the Incarnation and above all the Resurrection of the Christ that ontologically unite Christ’s worshipers with Him as new creatings sharing the Life-giving Energies of God.  Hence, the Incarnation and especially the Resurrection of Christ are focused on as the positive aspects of Orthodox soteriology.  (I will not complicate this exposition by discussing the Trinity, the most important dogma of Orthodoxy.)

     If a few simple axiomatic building blocks of paradigms encapsulate and generate hosts of complex coherences in various kinds of Christianity (in a manner that evokes something of complexity theory), that is something that surely deserves mention in an article bearing the title of Wuthnow’s piece.  Theology is not a laundry list but a system whose building blocks cohere, influencing one another with the holistic mutuality of the nodes of a cobweb.  Paradigm analysis is (if anything is) a “scientific” approach to religion.

                                                         Yours,

FURTHER ON CHRISTIAN PARADIGMS

SEE ALSO HERE ON HOW ONE CAN JUDGE WHAT IS TRUE