DEVELOPING A WORLD THEOLOGY
A sermon by Dean Scotty McLennan
University Public Worship
Stanford Memorial Church
April 15, 2007
“History has brought us to a point…where it is now requisite…to have…a theology that
emerges out of ‘all the religions of the world.’”i So wrote a divinity school professor of mine,
Wilfred Cantwell Smith, over twenty-five years ago. He was a scholar of Islam, but he also
taught a hugely popular course in comparative religion to undergraduate and graduate students at
Harvard for many years, long before 9/11. He served as the Director of Harvard’s Center for the
Study of World Religions, having previously founded the first institute of Islamic Studies in
North America at McGill University in 1951. As a Presbyterian minister, who spent almost
seven years as a missionary in India early in his career, he challenged Christians to seek to
understand Islam and other religions of the world with the perspective that faith is a universal
human quality which comes in different forms – Christian, Islamic, Hindu, Buddhist, and so on.ii
In fact, he took a classically Indian approach to religion, much like that of the nineteenth
century Hindu saint, Ramakrishna, whom I quoted in the reading.iii Smith affirmed that God is
one and that God may be reached by many different paths, some shorter and some longer, but all
leading to the same destination. He also felt that there’s no reason to convert from one religion
to another, since each of the great religions has great depth and breadth.iv Yet, perhaps even
more importantly, Smith felt that we can no longer afford to practice, study, and understand our
own religious tradition in isolation. The world has become too small, globalization has
progressed too far, communication is too good, and a little, incomplete knowledge of the other
can become downright dangerous – breeding bigotry and violence.
1
The historical fact is that religions have been deeply intertwined for thousands of years,
but that’s not always recognized by current practitioners of one tradition or another. Take the
Roman Catholic devotional practice of using the rosary, for instance. A historian like Smith can
document for us that Roman Catholic Christians lived for a thousand years without the use of
prayer beads, but then adopted them from the Muslims around the time of the Crusades. As any
visitor to the Middle East knows, the Islamic use of prayer beads remains widespread now. But
the earliest documented use of these kinds of beads was actually in India among Hindus.
Buddhism, which began around 500 B.C in India, then picked up this practice and took it
eastward through Tibet and China to Japan. The Dalai Lama came to this campus a year and a
half ago with prayer beads in his hands. Later, Muslims picked up the practice from Hindus and
moved it westward into the holy lands of Palestine, where the Christians eventually adopted it as
the rosary.v
Religions have been intertwined in their theology as well as their practice. For example,
the idea of the Devil has a world history,vi having first arisen in Zoroastrianism in the sixth
century B.C. in Persia. This destructive Fiend, according to Zarathushtra, was able to defile the
Good Lord’s creation, and human beings were caught in a continuous cosmic battle between
good and evil. The idea of the devil made its way into Judaism, where it’s seen, for example in
the book of Job. There Satan kills his animals, servants and children and then inflicts Job with
terrible sores from head to foot – all in a challenge to God that this blameless and upright man’s
faith can be broken. Later in Christianity, the devil takes on other names besides Satan, like
Lucifer and Beelzebub. The devil is then incorporated into Manichaeism in the third century
A.D. By the time of the Islamic Qur’an in the seventh century A.D., the tempter of Eve is
2
described explicitly as Satan,vii rather than as the serpent that was used in the pre-Zoroastrian
story of the Garden of Eden in Genesis.viii
Wilfred Cantwell Smith did not claim that all religions are the same, however, even as he
was speaking of the coherence of humankind’s religious history. There’s not a unity among the
religions of the world, just as there’s not a unity within any one particular religion. In his study
of Islam, in particular, he explained that “The more I learned, the more impressed I was by a
discovery of a rich and marvelous diversity.”ix Moreover, the religions of the world “have in
common something so much less than each has separately as to distort or to evacuate the
individual richness and depth and sometimes grotesqueness of actual religious life.” As he put it,
“If every Christian man an woman throughout history is to be requested to renounce whatever in
the fullness of their Christian living and aspiration they do not share with every other Christian,
of other denominations and other centuries, let alone whatever they do not share with a Jewish
scholar of the Law and a Hindu villager and a Muslim mystic, what violence is not being done to
the integrity of their personal faith.”x
For example, the Catholic name for prayer beads comes from the rose, a flower said to be
sacred to Mary, the mother of Jesus, while the Hindu name, rudraksa, comes from the shrub
whose hardened berries are used to make the beads. Originally the term “rosary” was used for a
particular Christian prayer, which was later transferred for use with the beads. Christians and
Muslims have 33 beads on their string, while Hindus and Buddhists have 108. Catholics speak
of the thirty-three years of Jesus’ life on earth. There are 99 names or attributes of God for
Muslims, symbolized by going over their prayer beads three times. Hindus have 108 names for
God, and Buddhists 108 for the Buddha. Prayer bead use has historical interconnections, but it’s
3
experienced utterly differently from tradition to tradition, and even within a single tradition, as
Catholics will tell us in explaining their individual rosary practice.xi
So, what was Smith’s point, and why did he write a book entitled Towards a World
Theology, with imperatives that I think are critical for all religious people, especially post 9/11,
as we can see large parts of the world self-destructing over religious differences? His point was
that we now live in a thoroughly pluralistic reality, radically different from that of many of our
ancestors, who never knew much beyond their Muslim or Hindu or Christian contexts. “We are
learning each other languages, both literally and figuratively.”xii We have an increasingly
common consciousness of the world round us. We are faced with the challenge to collaborate in
building and saving a world very much at riskxiii – from environmental desolation and nuclear
risk, not to mention various holy wars and genocides. It’s ultimately global suicide for us to
speak in terms of “we” and “they,” rather than in terms of a worldwide “we,” albeit within which
“we” there’s enormous and precious diversity. It’s no longer possible to develop a Christian
theology, or Muslim theology, or Hindu theology, without taking into account the other
traditions and their understandings and insights.
How do we do this? Smith hasn’t developed the substance of a world theology, first of
all because he affirms that it has to emerge from dialogue among the traditions and not from one
person embedded (no matter how openly) within his or her own tradition.xiv And, by the way, a
world theology can’t come from people who aren’t religious practitioners within some tradition
themselves, because subjective knowing is as critical as objective. One must have a personal life
of faith to understand faith more broadly, one must know what it’s like to worship God to
explore how others do so, and one must have participated in ritual to speak about its role in
human life.
Otherwise, this would be like developing a theory of art without ever experiencing
4
a painting or piece of sculpture, explaining music without ever singing or playing an instrument
oneself, or at least hearing a piece performed. None of this is to say that objective knowledge
isn’t important as well – about the history of one’s own religious traditions and others, about the
psychology of religious experience, about the relationship of religion to politics, to name a few.
Knowledge in the domain of the humanities develops through the constant interplay of the
subjective and the objective.xv
How Smith encouraged us to develop a world theology can be seen partly by what he did
in the centers he started and directed. At the McGill Institute of Islamic Studies, Smith insisted
that half of the students and faculty be practicing Muslims and that the other half come from
other traditions.xvi This was radical in two directions. In the early 1950’s, almost all of the study
of Islam in North America was being done by non-Muslims. Decrying “orientalism” long before
Palestinian scholar Edward Said,xvii Smith insisted that Islam couldn’t be understood without
active dialogue, day in and day out, with practicing Muslims. On the other hand, he felt it was
important that all traditions be held up to objective analysis by outsiders as well. So, Muslim
students and scholars needed the perspective of non-Muslims to understand their faith fully.
Subjective and objective must go hand in hand. Every afternoon at four o’clock, Smith would
ring a bell and call all members of the Institute to assemble for tea. It was a mandatory
gathering. There East and West met to discuss Islam and resolve misunderstandings.xviii
Similarly, when he directed Harvard’s Center for the Study of World Religions, he established a
“common room” where students of different religions and nationalities were asked routinely to
gather and discuss their worldviews together.xix
The world theology, which Smith has called us to develop, must articulate the faith of all
of us and of our modern perception of the world. It cannot be a Christian theology or a Muslim
5
theology or a Taoist theology of the “other” religions, however. It must emerge from within a
concept of a worldwide “we,” even though “we” have very different individual and communitybased forms of faith. “Not they, not you, but some of us are Buddhist, some Muslim, some
Jewish, some skeptic, some confused.”xx On the other hand, a world theology certainly cannot
be less than Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Hindu, etc. It must be recognizable within each of the
traditions, without trying to displace them with some sort of transcendent universalism. It must
emerge from genuine dialogue among practitioners and scholars of the various religions, and it
cannot be created by any one of them outside of that interaction.xxi The verification principle for
a world theology would be twofold: 1) Does it do justice to all the facts of human religious
history? 2) Does it do justice to the faith, experience, and insight of Buddhists, Zoroastrians,
Shintoists, Jews and the others?xxii Needless to say, this world theology does not yet exist,
although important initial contributions to it have been made from varying perspectives.
What does this mean practically and pragmatically for each of us in this church today?
First, Smith is asking us to remain firmly rooted in our own traditions, learning as much about
them and practicing them as fully as can, while at the same time understanding ourselves as part
of a global “we,” rather than separating ourselves from the “other” or the “outsider” as a “them.”
Most people in the world have a basic experience of “faith,” just the way we have a basic
experience of “love.” Faith, like love, comes in very different forms, but ultimately faith is a
common human attribute of finding sense, purpose and meaning in life. We can benefit in our
own faith from learning about different forms of faith, just as we can benefit from reading love
poetry or stories from many different cultures.
Second, a basic way to engage in dialogue with people of differing traditions is through
empathetic listening. Put yourself in the other person’s shoes as much as possible as you hear
6
what they have to say, or try to participate in their practices. Before you get involved in an
exchange, though, try to summarize what your discussion partner or partners said to you well
enough that they can say, “Yes, that’s it. You’ve understood me (or us).” Only then begin
speaking yourself – with the hope that they’ll listen as carefully to you and you’ve modeled for
them.
Thirdly, take the process of developing a world theology seriously, for in it may lay the
salvation of this earth and all who live on it. The world has grown too small for us to live in
ignorance and lack of respect of each other. Violence has grown too brutal, and with nuclear
weapons too terminal, to allow it to be used as a way to resolve our problems and differences.
Religion is too important and too precious to allow it to divide us, rather than to build
community, to degrade us rather than to make us fully human. “For other hearts in other lands
are beating with hopes and dreams as true and high as [ours]... For other lands have sunlight too,
and clover, and skies are everywhere as blue as [ours].”xxiii
7
NOTES
i
Wilfred Cantwell Smith, Towards a World Theology (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1981).
Salwa Ferahian, “W.C. Smith Remembered,” www.lib.umich.edu/area/Near.East/sferah.htm.
iii
Ramakrishna, “Many Paths,” as cited in Huston Smith, The World’s Religions
(HarperSanFrancisco, 1991), pp. 74-75.
iv
Ibid.
v
Wilfred Cantwell Smith, Towards a World Theology: Faith and the Comparative History of
Religion (Philadelphia: Westminister Press, 1981), pp. 11-14.
vi
Smith, World Theology, p. 15.
vii
“Devil,” Encyclopedia Britannica (Chicago, 1978), pp. 502-503.
viii
The oral tradition of the Garden of Eden story was likely put into written form around 900
B.C., according to biblical scholar Marcus J. Borg in Reading the Bible Again for the First Time
(HarperSanFrancisco, 2001), p. 63.
ix
Smith, World Theology, p. 4.
x
Ibid., p. 5.
xi
Ibid., pp. 12-14.
xii
Ibid., p. 180.
xiii
Ibid., p. 192-193.
xiv
Ibid., p. 152.
xv
See Chapter 4, “Objectivity and the Humane Sciences” in Smith, World Theology, pp. 56-80.
xvi
Ferahian, “W.C. Smith,” p. 3.
xvii
Hilary Putnam et al., “Wilfred Cantwell Smith: In Memoriam,” a minute of the Harvard
Faculty of Arts and Sciences as reproduced in the Harvard University Gazette (November 29,
2001).
xviii
Ferahian, “W.C. Smith,” p. 2.
xix
Ibid., p. 4.
xx
Smith, World Theology, p. 103.
xxi
Ibid., p. 112.
xxii
Ibid., p. 126.
xxiii
Lloyd Stone, “This is My Song,” in Singing the Living Tradition (Boston: Beacon Press,
1993), #159.
ii
8