PARTIAL REVIEW OF P. J. GRIFFITHS,
AN APOLOGY FOR APOLOGETICS:
A STUDY IN THE LOGIC OF
INTERREGLIOUS DIALOGUE

© 1999 by Orchid Land Publications

[updated 2-12-99 (tris)]

Chapter One

     The reviewer's interest in this volume lies in what its Roman Catholic author calls (it is the title of Sect. 1.3 and part of the title of Ch. 2) the properties of "doctrine-expressing sentences" (hereafter DESs)--a topic that the present reviewer has been interested in (in religion and other fields) since writings of 1954.  My view lies in the way that frameworks of reality--or paradigms, as Thomas Kuhn phrased it--determine the senses of terms that may be common to, say, different forms of Christianity:  Though a given term may be used on different sides, it sense can be radically different (CLICK HERE, HERE, & HERE) as a result of differences in underlying presuppositions or premises about what is really real.   I've been concerned at how interfaith discussions degenerate into meaninglessness and cross-purposes when (i) crucial distinctions in one framework are ignored by a critic of another framework and when (ii) crucial terms have different senses and implications in different frameworks of what is really real. 
       The following citation from Griffiths' book shows that his prefatial promise or aim to produce a volume "sufficiently free of the jargon of philosophers and theologians to be capable of being understood by any literate and interested individual" is not maintained:

. . . a particular claim is an alien religious claim with respect to some religious community if and only if it is a DES of another religious community that does not express a proposition also expressed by a DES of the religious community with respect to which it is alien.  [p. 12]

A DES has got to have have "some salvific importance, or (which in not always the same thing) . . . some importance for the religious life of the community" (p. 12).  That a religious claim that is alien to a given religious community means "only that what is expressed by it is not also a doctrine of that religious community:  it is neutral with regard to acceptability" (p. 13).
     The principal reason for the author's writing the volume under scrutiny is that apologetics is "of a genre now almost entirely démodé in the academic world"--a fairly startling statement in view of all of the "left-brain" apologetics on the Internet; but he means that apologetics is not found in the curriculums of prominent university divinity schools.  However that may be, we are initiated at the beginning of Ch. 1 into the NOIA principle--the necessity of interreligious apologetics.  (This is not the formative, -noia, found in paranoia and many other formations in Greek.)  There is no need here to go into his defence of this principle against the idea that it "offends . . . against . . . the theological orthodoxies of our time, including the orthodoxy that the very idea of orthodoxy has no sense" (p. 1).  Let it suffice to say that pluralism is an experience many religions face today for the first time in many regions of the world; even in the North America, Australia, and New Zealand, various religions have begun their existence as ghetto religions, hardly needing to deal with religious pluralism outside of the ghetto in question.  There is the question of what the adjective Christian can mean. 
     The more specific conceptualization of the NOIA principle is that

IF representative intellectuals belonging to some specific religious community come to judge at a particular time that some or all of their own DESs are incompatible with some alien religious claim(s), THEN they should feel obliged to engage in both positive and negative apologetics . . . [p. 3]

presumably in the interest of truth.  Griffiths proceeds to discuss the semantic problems of some of the terms in the preceding conceptualization--including the determination of whether Christian Science and other variants of "Christianity" are Christian.  (One might add the problem of the fifteen or more forms of Anglicanism, the 93 or more forms of something called "Catholicism," and the approximately 45 forms of Orthodox Christianity on the Internet, not to mention the myriad forms of the Baptists and other subdivisions of Protestantism.  Then there is the consideration that observing that observing monastics may be representative in some religions--or forms of Christianity--but not in others.)  For the rest, Ch. 1 proceeds through necessary but not very interesting elaborations--largely focused on the contrast of Christianity with Theravada Buddhism--on the foregoing points.  But the author does make the interesting points that value expressions can be converted into true-false statements that underlie them.  And he defends the use of "sentences" in defining the NOIA principle.  Perhaps the necessity of a sentence's having salvific importance in order to be relevant is not all there is to the essence of a meaning-bearing religious sentence:  Perhaps latreutic significance is just as important as salvific significance--at least for a traditionalist Christian and indeed members of many non-Christian religions. 
     At any rate, there are two kinds of incompatibility among DESs--logical (if one is true, the other cannot be true) and practical (sentences prescribing or proscribing "a certain course of action," thus expressing a value [p. 13]).  Moreover

the NOIA principle requires not that there actually be incompatibility between a DES and an alien religious claim, but only that some representative intellectuals of some religious community should come to judge that there is. . . . an alien claim with respect to one community will by definition be a DES with respect to another . . . Where negative apologetics is defensive, positive apologetics is offensive . . .  [p. 14] 

Importantly, Griffiths states (p. 15) that apologetics "usually uses only methods of argumentation and criteria of knowledge acceptable to the adversary"--a necessary condition of meaningful apologetics more often than not ignored in Internet apologetics--a source of frequent frustration to the present reviewer.  Griffiths cites differences in writings that are accepted as authoritative; but the condition applies equally to distinctions required on one side but not made by the other.  I would personally add another consideration: 

It leads nowhere to argue for or against an item in a list made (i) without reference to their consistency with other items in what must rise above the level of a mere list (from which one can add or subtract items at will) to the level of a system and one made (ii) while ignoring differences in presuppositional frameworks that give each item its specific meaning and significance.

Violations of this principle are rampant in Internet apologetic endeavors.  The argument by one side based on a claimed promise to St. Peter that his successors would never defect from truth is worthless against another side that does not accept that interpretation of Scripture and rather argues that promises of indefectibility made by Christ to His Church are lost by any group that unilaterally breaks a prior consensus.  This argumentation exemplifies a breakdown in apologetics.  It is found on all sides.  A Gnostic who rejects the religious role of (i) materiality and (ii) time will make no sense of a traditionalist Christian argument about (i) resurrection, Mysteries (sacraments) or about (ii) tradition.   A Reformer who regards Grace, Justification, or Christ's bodily Presence in the Lord's Supper as as-if realities willed by God--virtual realities more real than than reality itself--will be speaking nonsense to one who does not accept this framework--and conversely.  Conversely, the Reformer will be unimpressed by the idea that Grace is God's uncreated Energy or that a believer's unity with Christ is ontological.  All of this is (as Griffiths would say) "a degenerate form of apologetics."  The situation would be improved if one argued thus: 

IF Christ promised that the inheritors of Peter's chair in Rome (but not in Antioch, where he was bishop prior to going to Rome) are indefectible, THEN &c.  IF a party that unilaterally breaks a prior  unity and consensus loses the promises given to the united body, THEN Rome cannot claim any truth or indefectibility for its unilateral innovations.  IF matter and time are irrelevant to true religion, THEN Incarnation, Resurrection, Mysteries (Sacraments), icons, relics, etc., as well as development and tradition, have no place in Christianity.  IF will is subordinate to being and has validity only when a decision is made with knowledge and reason, THEN the virtual (as-if) reality of Grace and Justification based on the whims of divine will in Reformation teaching is unconvincing and indeed unacceptable.

The foregoing would constitute rational and indeed irrefutable argumentation in interfaith discussions.
     Griffiths concludes Sect. 1.5 with a distinction between the merely necessary and sufficient conditionality of what DESs aver.   (Suppose some Evangelical says that agreeing that Jesus is Lord and Savior is sufficient for Salvation, while another says that it is necessary but not sufficient--because one must exhibit certain behaviors in addition to the belief.)   Weaker "links" may be involved in assenting to a DES:  Assent may be helpful or more helpful to Salvation, or more quickly or more easily lead to Salvation, than assenting to other statements; so the assent is important. 
     The last section (1.6) deals with Salvation--something that logically presumes being lost in some way.   Without the presupposition, there will be little meaning in being saved--from being lost in some way.  Griffiths tries to exempt the idea of salvation from its Christian-specific meanings--for example, Nirvana in Buddhism--itself obviously dependent on a given negative view of the material cosmos.  I would note that being saved from inherited guilt makes no sense to one who does not believe in inheritable guilt--though that person may see sense in being saved from the ontological defects (e.g. death) resulting from original sin.  The whole matter depends on belief in original sin; but original sin does not imply inheritable guilt for that sinning--a confusion rampant in some Internet apologetics among its less-clever exponents.   So what one is saved "from" is relative to this or that religion--or even this or that form of Christianity.

Chapter Two

     At the very outset of the second chapter, which deals with the properties of DESs, the reader is told that DESs must be capable of having three important attributes "if the NOIA principle is ever to come into operation."  To reduce some very hard reading about the three attributes to simple speech, the intelligibility of DESs must not be limited to a given religious community but be intelligible and analysable across religious boundaries and be capable of being true or falsifiable.   Without methods of assessing and analysing DESs outside of the communities in which they are asserted,   "apologetics cannot exist as an intellectual discipline."  The chapter is devoted to warding off objections to these principles in sections laden with academic jargon whose titles respectively refer to the comprehensibility , commensurability, and cognitive content of DESs--the third of these including subsections titled "Conceptual relativism," "Experiential expressivism," and "Rule theory."  Before launching on this enterprise, however, Griffiths refers to the historical validity of his definition of DESs and its assumption in missionary enterprises.  He says that he will "call the interpretive principle to be derived from th[e] historical claim the principle of hermeneutical charity."   This characterization--charity--may be hard to grasp in the immediately following recapitulation--without IF and THEN--of the statement of the NOIA principle quoted above.  But the idea is that intellectuals who have engaged in writing DESs should be given credit for being serious in writing or uttering DESs of universal applicability "because they took these sentences to be true."  This of course states the obvious for apologetes but is issued because one will seriously distort "the object of one's study" by telling those that one is intellectually engaged with--not that they are wrong--"but that they are not even playing the game they think they are playing."  This lengthy exposition could have been rather more simply put by urging everyone to be fair and to give credit where credit is due. 
     But in fact one is not playing the game one may think one is playing if one interprets others' beliefs in terms of distinctions and categories that differ from those of whoever one is interpreting, or if one tries to prove to another any assertion based on an assumption or premise that the other party does not accept--unless, as suggested by me above, one proceeds with conditionals like:  "IF assumption x is true (where x is either the premise or presupposition of a given framework or a claimed fact) THEN it follows that y is such and so."  Yet, one can easily verify that apologetics is rife with misguided attempts to prove y on the basis of a premise x that either lies outside of the scope of the other party's presuppositional framework (the way in which any claim for a salvific rôle of materiality or corporeality or of time lies outside of the framework of a Gnostic) or on the basis of a claimed fact x that the other side does not acknowledge (e.g. the claim that Jesus bestowed indefectibility or infallibility on a diocese or patriarchate headed by St. Peter--first Antioch, then Rome--regardless of whether it should adhere to or violate the consensus of the [five] authentic patriarchates).  That is why I have argued that it makes more sense to discuss each other's xs before proceeding to any discussion of any proposition y.
     The section on the comprehensibility of DESs begins with an anecdote whose moral is to put oneself in the other person's shoes in order to understand what the other person is asserting.  But then we meet with the "mutual incomprehensibility thesis," from which it "follows that any restatement (or translation) of a DES of one religious community by the representative intellectuals of another is for them [which party?] as good as any other"--a "lunatic view, not least because it is self-defeating"!  (To understand this self-defeating "thesis," one needs to rephrase the foregoing as ". . . any restatement (or translation) of a DES that is unintelligible to the representative intellectuals of another religion by the representative intellectuals of that religion is for the intellectuals of that other religion as good as any other.")  This strange discussion is obtruded "because it exhibits . . . a feature of many of the intellectual perspectives to be discussed . . . that is, the application of the equivalence-principle [hyphenated in the original] to all" DESs.   One is beginning to get dizzy with this piling up of successive principles.  Plunging doggedly ahead anyhow, we learn that the principle of equivalence seems merely to restate the mutual-incomprehensibility thesis. 

        At this point, I have to give up; I cannot see what is going on, let alone being accomplished.  I realize that this is unfair to the author of the volume under scrutiny and apologize; but I've got more pressing things to do.  So I will simply sum up the titles of the remaining chapters and then discuss a few examples found online:

3. Incompatibility among doctrine-expressing sentences [with subsections on 
     "Universalist perspectivalism" and "Esotericist perspectivalism"]
4. The rejection of positive apologetics [with four arguments in different subsections]
5. Proper apologetics
6. Apologetics in action:  Buddhists and Christians on selves

      There is no point in a person who believes in discussing humanity's guilt for Eve's and Adam's sinning if that other party does not accept inherited guilt but only the physical effects on human nature (e.g. death and decay).   It will boot little to say that it is only virtual guilt.  What one needs to discuss (and then the guilt or innocence of a newborn infant will follow as a matter of course) is whether guilt or merit (a) can be transferred by any human from one individual to another or (b) would be so transferred by God.  Or one could discuss whether a nature can sin.  This is not discussed because the parties upholding inherited guilt (along with what most parties do not question--sinning by the first rational ancestors of human beings) would fail to convince others that guilt or merit can be transferred and that a nature (rather than an individual) can sin.  The discussion would also be hard on Christians of the Reformed persuasion, since the Reformers rejected (in accord with their fourteenth/fifteenth-century Nominalism or via moderna) the idea of ontological transindividual natures.
    There is likewise little point in discussing the Presence of Christ's Body in the Eucharist when one party believes that the bodily Presence is "spiritual" (not just in origin, end, or intent, but also in composition)--since body and spirit are quite different "substances."   On the other hand, the matter can at least be argued between those who believe in a real (if supernatural or at least preternatural) bodily Presence and either a virtual (divinely imputed) or metaphorical bodily "presence."
    If one party refuses to accept the investigations of an acknowledged expert on Philo, the Jewish philosopher at the time of Christ, and on Christian thought of that period--and particularly his determination of what LOGOS meant at the beginning of St. John's Gospel and in the Apocalypse--then it would be wholly without point for anyone accepting that scholarship to discuss the matter with the party that placed its subjective preferences ahead of the  scholarship of the acknowledged expert.  
    It is most difficult to argue against a world view or definition, say the idea that a material person or object can be a Sacrament or vehicle of uncreated Grace; but if that is difficult, it is totally unrewarding to argument for Sacraments, icons, relics, or the resurrection of the body with someone embracing that idea.   Of course, if the person is a lister or positivist, and you prove that resurrection of the body is in some Scripture accepted by the other,  you can gain the other's assent, though the idea will make no sense in his or her thought world.  You can quote 2 Thes. 2:25 as often as you wish, but if a Gnostic presupposes the valuelessness of time for religion, you will get nowhere advocating development or tradition with her or him.
    Judically-oriented and being-oriented turns of mind (phronémata) are nearly immune to the deductions of each other's frameworks.  Where the former accepts an imputative or virtual-reality concept of Grace, a volitional conceptualization of faith, a legal-fiction view of Justification, and a "covenantal" unity of believers with Christ, these ideas come pretty near to being sheer gobbledygook on the other side.  Conversely, the idea that the Incarnation is a Mystery (Sacrament) or that water, oil, bread, and wine convey Grace, as well as belief in the resurrection of the body, the idea that Grace is ontological   (either the uncreated Energy of the Orthodox or the static Latin concept of a created but supernatural quality of the soul), the teaching that Salvation is ontological unity with Christ and Divinization, and so on are pretty near to being sheer gobbledygook to a Gnostic who is juridically oriented; s/he will simply read passages like John 6:48-58 metaphorically or in terms of a virtual reality even while claiming to be a literalist and despite the non-metaphorical words for "eat" and "flesh" in the passage in question.
     If a traditionalist cannot get past the presuppositional framework of a fifteenth-century modernist, one's arguments concerning details will either get nowhere or they will be fitted into a different framework with significations that are congruent with the other framework but alien to yours.  It is really time for ecumenists and apologetes to get their categories straight.  In a two-valued framework, sin is sin, and you cannot argue with one of such a mindset that one sin is venial and another is mortal. 
     See further examples HERE.

     Happy reading!