Religion Booknotes

Seven Ways of Looking at Religion
The Major Narratives
Benjamin Schewel
Yale University Press, $40, 248 pp.

The key word in this title is “narratives.” What Benjamin Schewel offers is not so much seven distinct approaches to the subject of religion as seven representative accounts of religion’s survivability in contemporary conditions of secularity. Readers of Albert Schweitzer’s classic study of the quest for the historical Jesus will find Schewel’s approach familiar; like Schweitzer, he gathers all the books on the subject he can find, arranges them in piles, analyzes their commonalities and differences, offers criticism of each narrative, then comes up with a version of his own. A series of critical book reviews, in effect, and a summing up. 

Schewel picks three figures to discuss within each narrative rubric. The “subtraction narrative” (Daniel Derret, John Dewey, Marcel Gauchet) asserts that as science advances, religion (as a form of inferior science) should retreat; a purely secular account of reality is a good and proper thing. In direct contrast, the “renewal narrative” (Alastair McIntyre, Martin Heidegger, Muhammad Iqbal) argues that secularism is a huge mistake and the recovery of past truths is necessary, with religion as one of the key values necessary for cultural revival. The “transsecular narrative” (Charles Taylor, Rodney Stark, Jeffrey Stout), in turn, claims that modernity has caused not religion’s marginalization and decline, but rather its transformation; religion is pretty healthy, it just looks different now. The “postnaturalist narrative” (Thomas Nagel, Hans Jonas, Alfred North Whitehead) holds that recent developments in science actually revitalize the investigation of spiritual ideas, and therefore of religion. The “construct narrative” (Talal Asad, Guy Strousma, Jason Josephson) proposes that a general concept called “religion” was shaped by Enlightenment thinkers of the West and then imposed on others. (The “constructive narrative,” in all truth, does not fit with the other categories and probably could have been left out, or else identified as a peculiarly academic squabble.) The “perennial narrative” (Aldous Huxley, John Hick, Rudolf Otto) claims that all the world’s religions share common characteristics that are essential, while the differences among them are superficial and incidental; that essential core (of mysticism in one form or another) persists. Finally, the “developmental narrative” (G.W.F. Hegel, Karl Jaspers, Robert Bellah) suggests that religion has passed through several stages of evolution, the most important of which, according to Jaspers and Bellah, was a breakthrough called “the Axial Age”—represented by figures such as Isaiah, Plato, Confucius, and Jesus.

Noting the points Schewel himself has identified as adequate or inadequate in his review of each position, the reader is not stunned to discover him embracing the “developmental narrative” as found in Bellah’s massive Religion in Evolution (2011), adding to it a more complex account of modernity, and a less optimistic view of a possible second Axial Age just around the corner—around the corner, that is, if we’re not all done in by our clever inventions and their unintended consequences.

Schewel’s review takes place at such a level of abstraction that the reader yearns for something—anything—more specific than generalizations about the dialectics governing history and religion in the West (almost completely) and Christianity (almost totally). Neither Schewel nor the authors he studies touch ground very often. The book can best be appreciated as a stimulus to thinking about how such an account might be more concretely and less grandiosely formulated, or how “looking at religion” might actually include observation of how humans actually act religiously.

The Exodus
How It Happened and Why It Matters
Richard Elliott Friedman
HarperOne, $27.99, 304 pp.

Richard Elliott Friedman is a professor of Jewish Studies at the University of Georgia and the University of California, San Diego, now in his seventies and long associated with source analysis of the Bible (Who Wrote the Bible?). Here, he combines archaeology and literary analysis (what is attributable to J and E and P and D?) to write the sort of biblical-criticism-as-historical-detection that once made studying the Old Testament and ancient Israel an exercise in intellectual adventure, rather than careerist pedantry. He asks what precisely can be determined historically about the events, related in Scripture, concerning Israel’s liberation from bondage in Egypt. Acknowledging the mythic shaping of the stories, Friedman asks whether there are any historical facts behind them. He provides a set of facts and an intricate (yet perfectly lucid) argument that will make both conservative clingers and liberal skeptics sit back and look at the biblical stories with fresh eyes.

Agreeing that the notion of 2 million Israelites escaping at once from Egypt, wandering for forty years, and then conquering Canaan, is both unlikely and impossible to verify from literary or archaeological evidence, Friedman argues for a more modest version. Archaeology suggests that “Israel” was in the land for a long time before Moses. The biblical literature—and a surprising number of archaeological interconnections—suggests that it was rather a much smaller group called the Levites who were aliens in Egypt, who escaped bondage and entered the Promised Land to become a “twelfth tribe” made up of priests. The Levites possessed no portion of the land like the tribes that were there before them. But they also had the privileged position of teachers, shaping the fundamental identity of Israel as an elect people belonging to Yahweh alone. It was, in short, the Levites who were responsible for cult and law, for the story of Yahweh’s choosing Moses to lead the people out of bondage and receive both law and cult on Mount Sinai.

This is already a bold but plausible reading of the evidence. But Friedman adds a theological and ethical dimension to his reconstruction. These same Levites, he argues, were responsible for the development of monotheism—again, with an Egyptian antecedent—and for the moral imperative, found repeatedly in the priestly literature, of love for the neighbor as the self (see Leviticus 19:18). It was the Levite experience of having been oppressed aliens in Egypt that made them particularly sensitive to seeing the alien as neighbor, and rejecting the sort of oppression they had experienced.

A bracing and well-argued analysis, Friedman’s book disappoints only through a sort of pedagogical jokiness in his main text; the impressive amount of evidence supporting his views is mostly buried in endnotes. The arrangement—seemingly standard now for publishers like Harper who want Bible books to sell—can encourage a reader to miss the serious points Friedman makes. And that would be a mistake.

The Religion of the Future
Roberto Mangabeira Unger
Verso, $24.95, 480 pp.

Roberto Mangabeira Unger is a professor of law at Harvard who combines relentlessly abstract theory with persistent zeal for reform. He writes large books across a range of disciplines—law, social theory, politics, economics, philosophy. He has also advocated small-scale reform within the academy, and (on a much larger scale) has been an active player in the politics of his native Brazil. Rather late in the game, he has turned to the reconstruction of religion as a key instrument for changing the world according to his vision, about the correctness of which he never expresses even a scintilla of doubt.

Mine is certainly a belated review. Published first in 2014 by Harvard University Press, this 2016 Verso version of the book sat on my desk for months, while I debated with myself over the ethics of ignoring such an ambitious project that at the same time promised to be boring in the extreme. Did I really want to slog through page after page of dense prose proposing a future religion without a god but with humans possessing increasingly “godlike” qualities? I finally decided that sometimes it is necessary to eat a giant plate of vegetables, even if no dessert is offered at the end. Now I am full, even a bit bloated, but also not noticeably better nourished.

The first sixty-one pages give the reader the entire argument. What follows, however, is a seemingly endless expansion (and repetition) of the basic points. In a nutshell, the human condition is unavoidably defined by three realities: we are mortal; we are “groundless,” that is, we can’t figure out the world or our place in it; and we are insatiable in our desires—the spirit of transcendence within us longs for immortality, fulfillment, meaning. The denial of these three truths constitutes “wishful thinking.”

Yet, says, Unger, that is exactly what religion (and for that matter, philosophy) has always attempted: to diminish the terror of death, the incomprehensibility of the cosmos and of human existence itself, and the longing for wholeness. In effect, religion in the past has served the function of “belittling” the truth about the human condition by offering a variety of escapes. Unger spends much of the book in a detailed critique of religions that seek to “overcome the world” (Buddhism and its cognates), “humanize the world” (Confucianism), and “struggle with the world” (the three so-called “salvation religions” of Judaism, Islam, and Christianity).

The Christian version of struggle with the world—stripped, to be sure, of God, the resurrected Christ, and a future life—offers Unger the best framework for his religion of the future; in addition to taking body, spirit, and time seriously, it perceives that individuals and the world itself can change. How can the religion of the future build on that heritage? First, by getting rid of God and instead seeking to become more godlike; second, by unswervingly facing the three constraints of mortality, groundlessness, and insatiability without flinching; third, through passionate political engagement and personal transformation, with social and personal changes interdependent.

This is a religion rather than a philosophy, Unger insists, because of the gap between the personal commitment required and the non-demonstrability of the premises—leaping that gap requires faith. But how can people locked in their present cells of denial (reinforced by societal structures and religions) make that leap? Mainly through better (more dialectical) education, more flexible economic policies, openness to change, and the virtues of attentiveness and courage. Thus humans will only die once, because they are fully alive in the moments of their mortal lives.

Unger is learned and thoughtful. The book is loaded with fine sentences. Many of his critiques ring true. But his positive vision simply does not convince. Above all, it fails to show how such a radical and demanding program could possibly motivate the sort of “up-by-our-own-bootstraps” reform for which he calls. It is refreshing to find a contemporary thinker who speaks positively of transcendence and of humans as embodied spirits with great if not infinite depth. But because he never speaks of, much less takes seriously, the deep flaws in humans as they exist, and above all the evil toward which they seem inclined no matter what their social arrangements, Unger’s utopian project becomes ultimately another form of “belittlement.”

Rebel in the Ranks
Martin Luther, the Reformation, and the Conflicts that Shape Our World
Brad S. Gregory
HarperOne, $27.99, 304 pp.

This is essentially a more accessible version of the argument that Brad S. Gregory, a professor of history at Notre Dame, made in his award-winning 2015 monograph, The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society. Gregory argues that even though Luther and Calvin could never have conceived of such an outcome (and would have vigorously opposed it), their religious reform bore within itself the seeds of modern secularization. The way from then to now was neither rapid nor direct. It passed through the great religious wars of the seventeenth century, the Industrial Revolution, the Enlightenment, and the combination of money and technology that made contemporary consumerism the functional replacement for the religious passion that drove both the Protestant and Catholic reformers of the sixteenth century. But Gregory asserts that Luther’s principle of sola scriptura, together with the primacy he gave to his own experience and individual conscience when they came into conflict with the magisterium, underlay all these changes and led eventually to the hyper-individualism of contemporary first-world existence.

After an introduction that states why an event of five hundred years ago still matters today, Gregory devotes a first chapter to a close analysis of Luther as “Reluctant Rebel,” managing to combine an impressive amount of historical data on Luther before and after his break with Rome with a brisk narrative pace. His second chapter, “A Fractious Movement,” is, in my view, the most valuable in the book. Gregory distinguishes between the “Magisterial Protestants” of Lutheranism and Calvinism, who enjoyed political support, and the “Radical Protestants” like Anabaptists and Mennonites who were persecuted not only by Catholics but by magisterial Protestants as well. He argues, correctly I think, that study of the Reformation too often focuses on the central rather than the marginal groups, and that the true “fractious” spirit of reform is best seen in these ever-splintering sects that found their supreme expression in eighteenth-  and nineteenth-century North America.

In “A Troubled Era,” Gregory sketches the centuries of religious conflict and war in which Protestants and a newly invigorated Catholicism engaged. As might be expected, the effort to give, in a single chapter, a sense of each region’s religious and political strife while also moving through an extended period of time threatens to overwhelm the author and to make this part of the book less successful than the first two masterful chapters. The final chapter, “A New World,” draws the reader into a succinct yet satisfying treatment of the importance of the Netherlands in inventing a form of religion and politics that pointed to the future—allow any religious expression that does not interfere with commerce—and of the intricacies of the state and religion in the early and present-day United States.

In his final reflections on how “freedom of religion” has become in America and the rest of the developed world a “freedom from religion,” Gregory becomes, in my view, just a trifle apocalyptic concerning capitalism, the election of Donald Trump, and global warming. He does not provide, as one might have expected, any sort of specifically religious response offered by the traditions whose stories he has so cunningly constructed. But perhaps that is the job of prophets, not professors of history.