A Topic on Religion

Dr. John Thatamanil, a professor of theology.
On the topic of how Christians in particular have taken up questions about the meaning of religious diversity, Thatamanil has stated, “Perhaps the oldest way that Christians have struggled with questions about religious diversity is to ask, ‘Can persons find salvation outside of the church or can we be saved by other means outside of faith in Jesus Christ, or is salvation found in the Christian religions alone?’”

Thatamanil points out that contemporary conversation regarding faith often has the word “religion” in it.

“I think we can say with some confidence that neither Jesus nor any New Testament author, nor perhaps even any person in the first 1600 years of Christian tradition had any conception of religion that resembles our own,” he said.

“I think this imposing of the category of religion is distorting our conversation with other traditions,” Thatamanil continued. “It’s distorting our capacity to even recognize the internal diversity within our own tradition.

“The idea that you can only be one religion at a time, that each religion has only one religious aim – these ideas, I think, is open to interrogation.”
Thatamanil said, “I want to diagnose the problem that we won’t get very far in the conversation if we assume that the category of religion is valid for all of these religious traditions.”
Thatamanil asks, “Where are the boundaries between religions? Are religions the sort of things that have boundaries?  These are the kinds of questions we have to start asking ourselves, especially in an age when the old distinction between religion and politics, religion and economics are becoming highly fluid.”
“When we think of these more fluid categories I think we will find better options,” he added.
Over the last decades, an immense and still growing body of literature has demonstrated that our ideas about "religion" are relatively recent and Western in origin. Many of the traditions we think of now as religions only became religions rather recently. So, just what is "religion" and what are "the religions?" Most importantly, what does it mean to speak of some aspects of our lives as "religious" and others as "secular" and not religious? Do all cultures recognize this distinction between the religious and the secular? And how do our definitions and theories about religion/the religious shape (and perhaps distort) our efforts at interreligious dialogue? Is religion something that requires exclusive allegiance like marriage in a monogamous society? Can one learn from and be transformed by the resources of more than one religion? Is that kosher? In this lecture, we can argue that our ideas about religion, like our ideas about race, must be rethought from the ground up if we are to move into a richly pluralistic future.