The Wall Street Journal-20080111-WEEKEND JOURNAL- Taste -- Houses of Worship- Faith Without Borders
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WEEKEND JOURNAL; Taste -- Houses of Worship: Faith Without Borders
In Matthew 6, Jesus warns his disciples against trying to serve two masters, God and mammon. An overly strict interpretation of that injunction would seem to leave economics outside the realm of Christian theological inquiry.
But the most fundamental of all economic endeavors, pursuit of a livelihood, is rather essential to human existence, a prerequisite of spiritual development. Jesus was decrying the worship of mammon, not its necessity for human sustenance. The study of how best to create wealth and use it efficiently for human advancement is seldom deemed a sin.
This truth was acknowledged in 1999 when the Center of Theological Inquiry (CTI) in Princeton, N.J., launched a study project called "God and Globalization." The 20 participants from a variety of disciplines recognized that the burgeoning integration and interdependence of national and regional economies resulting from reduced barriers to trade and finance has had profound social and political implications. It has raised millions of human beings out of poverty. The theologians among the CTI scholars are largely friendly toward the role free- market capitalism has played in this remarkable transformation. That's a welcome relief from the style of theology that too often distrusts the normal impulses of human beings to improve their material well- being.
As of late last year, the scholars had written four books. The final volume, "Globalization and Grace," is a wide-ranging work of scholarship by Max L. Stackhouse, a professor emeritus of Princeton Theological Seminary and general editor of the series. An eloquent foreword was provided by the Cuban-born church historian Justo Gonzalez.
The CTI scholars see globalization as far more than an economic phenomenon. The spread of new ideas, images and cultural artifacts by modern information technology, even to peoples once isolated from the main currents of human thought, is having a powerful cultural impact. It has the potential of opening minds to a broader tolerance of differing religious beliefs.
That would seem counterintuitive in an era when headlines and newscasts daily feature horrible examples of religious fanaticism. But another way of looking at the mayhem holds that the fanatics are fighting a losing battle against the threat that greater tolerance poses to their fundamentalism. Prof. Stackhouse challenges the Samuel Huntington theory of a continuing religion-centered "clash of civilizations." He believes that Prof. Huntington doesn't allow sufficiently for the transformation of religious convictions, doctrines and practices as individuals become more cosmopolitan. Religious conflict has a long history, but globalization is ameliorating the passions that fuel religious warfare.
Prof. Gonzalez writes in his foreword that when he was growing up in Latin America it was common to hear people say that "I am a Catholic after my own fashion." Today, he says, "after my own fashion" is true in most major world religions. "Methodists and Presbyterians are such after their own fashion. Many Hindus are Hindus after their own fashion. Even among Muslims, an increasing number are Muslims after their own fashion. In all these traditions, so-called fundamentalism -- although quite vociferous in claiming that it is the true form of religion -- is in fact a reaction against the changes that are taking place as a result of globalization."
For example, under Shah Reza Pahlavi, Iranians became more westernized as oil riches fostered a middle class. The 1979 coup led by the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini was a fundamentalist, primitive backlash. It held (and still does) that the main engine of globalization, America, is Islam's arch-enemy. Today, young Iranians increasingly reject the harsh diktats of the theocrats, which supports the idea that the mullahs are fighting a rear-guard action. This makes them no less dangerous. It in fact adds urgency to their war against the "Great Satan."
Prof. Stackhouse nonetheless doubts that the "slender public theology" of the overtly Christian Bush administration is sufficient for building the wider civil society promised by globalization. He scorns as well the Chicago school of market economists for treating religion as a "subjective want that functions by market forces and that can best be understood as a consumer commodity."
But he is most scathing of the "Marxist social analysis" applied by such bodies as "the World Council of Churches, the World Reformed Alliance and the Lutheran World Federation" that holds globalization to be immoral, driven by capitalist greed. "This baptism of class analysis as the guiding mode of interpreting globalization is, I think, a substantive theological mistake, a misreading of history and an inaccurate social analysis as faulty on its terms as the previous two are on theirs."
Prof. Stackhouse believes that a public theology must offer a "compelling view of transcendence" to "fuel the spiritual capital" of a civilization and thereby sustain its moral fiber. He argues that Christianity is particularly adaptable as the basic component of a public philosophy that would serve the world-wide civil society that is coming into being, in part because of Christianity's tolerance for individual belief. Public theology, he believes, must embrace classical norms but also be able to "encounter secular, philosophical and non-Christian" beliefs and explain its theological claims in a language that can be universally understood. It must show that it can "form, inform and sustain the moral and spiritual architecture of a civil society so that truth, justice and mercy are more nearly approximated in the souls of the persons and the institutions of the common life."
A tall order, no doubt, and the resistance to any such efforts to rise above prevailing orthodoxies and create a universal ethos will be fierce and at times deadly. But the scholars at CTI can be congratulated for launching this debate on the profound philosophical implications of a primarily economic phenomenon, globalization, that is raising living standards and eroding ethnic and class distinctions throughout the world.
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Mr. Melloan retired in 2006 as a Journal editorial page editor and columnist.
