The Whiteheadian Complementary Pluralism of John Cobb

David Ray Griffin (Copyright February 2001)

Prefatory Note: The intention is that this essay, being sent as a background paper to all participants, will be included as the first chapter in the volume of essays to come out of the conference on “Whiteheadian Philosophy and Genuine Religious Pluralism.” This paper, written as a continuation of the introductory paper, presupposes the references already established in the footnotes to that paper.

If the task before us is to make available an alternative to the identist form of religious pluralism that is free from its inherent problems, the first part of this task is simply to draw attention to the fact that such an alternative is, to a significant extent, already available, primarily thanks to John Cobb, who has been developing a Whiteheadian Christian version of pluralist theology over the past three decades.^[1] 

      To point to an alternative to identist pluralism in the introductory chapter, I referred to “pluralistic pluralism.” But just as there is more than one type of identist pluralism, there can also be more than one type of pluralist pluralism. One type, which says that different religions emphasize the salvific implications of different aspects or dimensions of the total truth, sees a central task of theological dialogue to be the discovery of how these various doctrines are complementary rather than contradictory. This “complementary pluralism” can itself have multiple versions, one of which is the Whiteheadian.^[2]  There can, in turn, be more than one version of Whiteheadian pluralism. I here explicate it here primarily in terms of the version that has thus far been most fully developed, that of John Cobb. Although Cobb’s version of pluralistic Christian theology was referred to frequently in the introductory essay, those references were primarily aimed at showing that it provided an alternative to the kind of pluralism criticized by Heim and his sources. Here Cobb’s position is laid out more systematically and in terms of its rootage in Whitehead’s philosophy.

      In the first section, I discuss the relation between science and theology, suggesting that the Whiteheadian attempt to see them as providing complementary truths leads to naturalistic theism. The second section brings out the connection between naturalistic theism and the distinction between God and creativity, which provides the basis for Cobb’s view of theistic and nontheistic religions as complementary. The third section discusses Cobb’s complementary pluralistic hypothesis. The fourth section brings out the distinctiveness of Cobb’s position by contrasting his position with that of Schubert Ogden. The final section points out how Cobb’s view of complementarity is fundamental for his articulation of pluralism without relativism.

1. Science, Theology, and Naturalistic Theism

In a section of Religion in the Making headed “The Three Traditions,” Whitehead begins by speaking of two of them, Buddhism and Christianity. Having earlier described them--in terms of the combination of “clarity of ideas, generality of thought, moral respectability, survival power, and width of extension over the world”--as “the two Catholic religions of civilization,”^[3] he had also described them both as in decay, as having “lost their ancient hold upon the world” (RM 44).^[4] Whitehead now suggests that this decay “is partly due to the fact that each religion has unduly sheltered itself from the other. . . . Instead of looking to each other for deeper meanings, they have remained self-satisfied and unfertilized” (RM 146). Whitehead, who published this statement in 1926, would surely be pleased to see, three quarters of a century later, not only that Buddhist-Christian dialogue is a going enterprise but also that Whitehead-inspired thinkers have been playing a major role in it.

      This dialogue by itself would not suffice to arrest the decay of Buddhism and Christianity, Whitehead notes, because that decay has been due in part to “the rise of the third tradition, which is science” (RM 146). Whitehead can put science in the same category as Buddhism and Christianity because, he says, it

appeared as a third organized system of thought which in many respects played the part of a theology, by reason of the answers which it gave to current theological questions. Science suggested a cosmology; and whatever suggests a cosmology, suggests a religion. (RM 141)

The reason why the first two universal traditions lost their hold on the world partly because of this third one, with its new cosmology, was that “neither of them had retained the requisite flexibility of adaptation” (RM 146). Theology and science, Whitehead insists, cannot be sheltered from each other. Each must allow its doctrines to be modified in the light of the truths discovered by the other (RM 79-80). The key to this mutual modification is the recognition that thinkers tend to formulate the truths they have seen in an “over-assertive” way that implies “an exclusion of complementary truths” (RM 145, 149). A clash between the doctrines of science and religion, he says elsewhere (SMW 185),^[5] provides the opportunity for a reconciliation resulting in “a deeper religion and a more subtle science.” The reconciliation will involve a modification of either the scientific doctrine, or the religious one, or (often) both, so that neither excludes the truth expressed in the other.^[6]

      Whitehead meant his own philosophy, of course, to provide a basis for such a reconciliation, and Whitehead-inspired thinkers have continued this effort. Such a reconciliation would involve, as Whitehead indicates, mutual modifications, with received ideas from the scientific tradition as well as received ideas from the religious tradition being modified, so that neither will exclude complementary truths from the other. Our concern here, however, is with what the Christian tradition needs to incorporate from modern science. This concern is expressed in Cobb’s statement, cited in the introduction, about the church’s need to appropriate “the universal truth offered by modern science” (BD x). The liberal tradition in theology has, of course, been modifying itself in the light of the alleged truths of science for a long time, and much of this self-modification has been ill-advised, as liberal theologians have all too often evacuated theology of its traditional substance on the basis of doctrines that, while claiming science’s imprimatur, did not deserve it. Theologians need to ask, more critically than have many in the past, exactly which part of the so-called scientific worldview now reigning really deserves to be considered “the universal truth offered by modern science.”

      Whitehead believed that many of the ideas now associated with science are not true. One of these is the mechanistic theory of matter, according to which the ultimate units of nature are devoid of experience and spontaneity--an idea that, besides making the mind-body problem insoluble, has made the idea of divine influence in the world seem impossible. Another of these ideas is the notion that all perception is through our sensory organs--a notion that rules out not only the extrasensory perception documented by parapsychology but also the possibility of genuine moral and religious experience. Still another widely held idea that Whitehead rejected is the Darwinian doctrine of evolution, according to which evolutionary developments have occurred without any divine influence in the process. I have argued elsewhere that the empirical facts support Whitehead’s rejection of these ideas.^[7] 

      Whereas, I hold with Whitehead, these and many other allegedly scientific truths are at best half-truths, there are many other ideas produced by modern science that really are true. Many of these true ideas are of a purely factual nature, such as the idea that our universe is billions of year old and that the present state of the universe came about through a long evolutionary process. But at least one of these true ideas is of a philosophical nature, being the doctrine that I call naturalism_ns, according to which there are never any supernatural interruptions of the world’s normal cause-effect principles.^[8] I have argued that, although Whitehead does not explicitly say so, part of his own attempt to reconcile science and religion, by producing a worldview that is adequate for both, is his naturalistic theism.^[9] Although Whitehead affirms ongoing divine influence in the world, even variable divine influence,^[10] this influence is always a dimension of, never an interruption of, the normal causal processes. This denial of divine interruptions of the causal principles exemplified in other actualities is implicit in Whitehead’s dictum that “God is not to be treated as an exception to all metaphysical principles” but as “their chief exemplification” (PR 343).^[11] 

      Implicitly, therefore, Whitehead has accepted the naturalism of the modern scientific worldview as a “universal truth offered by modern science.” He does not, however, simply accept what has passed, since about the time of Darwin, for the “scientific worldview.” He is mainly critical of this worldview, which, because of its sensationism, atheism, and materialism, I call naturalism_sam. He argues the need, for the sake of science as well as for the sake of religion, to replace naturalism_sam with what I call naturalism_ppp, with the first “p” standing for Whitehead’s prehensive doctrine of perception (according to which sensory perception is derivative from a more fundamental nonsensory prehension), the second for panentheism, and the third for panexperientialism.^[12] With regard to theism in particular, Whitehead’s view is that traditional theism rightly saw the need to posit a divine being, but exaggerated the truth it saw, whereas atheistic naturalism has rightly seen that there is no omnipotent being with the power completely to determine events in the world, but has exaggerated this truth by denying the reality of divine influence altogether. Whitehead’s panentheism, which is his version of naturalistic theism, is his reconciliation of the truth in these two views.

      This distinction between the two kinds of naturalism is relevant to the question, raised in the introduction, of the extent to which religious pluralism is based on modern liberal ideas. Whereas some pluralists have said or at least implied that their position is based on some universal perspective, neutral with regard to all particular traditions, Tom Driver, in his contribution to The Myth of Christian Uniqueness, says: “It will be the better part of wisdom to acknowledge, even to stress, that the whole discussion about ‘religious pluralism,’ as it is represented in this book, belongs to Western liberal religious thought at the present time.”^[13]  Although I agree, I would also stress, a least with regard to “religious pluralism” more broadly construed, that it is not necessarily in agreement with much that is widely thought to be included in “Western liberal religious thought” (or “modernity,” or “Enlightenment thinking”). Pluralism is connected by Heim (S 108), for example, with what Raimundo Panikkar calls the “modern Western myth.”^[14] But Whiteheadian pluralists certainly would not accept many of the beliefs said by Panikkar to belong to this myth, such as individualism, social Darwinism, and the neutrality of technocracy.

      The modern ideas that do belong to religious pluralism as such, I have suggested, are two: the acceptance of naturalism_ns and (thereby) the rejection of the authoritarian method for determining truth, including religious truth.^[15] In fact, combining Cobb’s reference to “the universal truth offered by modern science” with Heim’s (evidently ironic) reference to “the revelatory conditions of pluralism” (S 104), I would argue that pluralism (in the generic sense) is based on a distinctively modern revelation of a universal truth, revealed primarily through modern science and reflection thereon--the truth of naturalism_ns (which the divine spirit, as the spirit of truth, has led us to see).^[16] It belongs to complementary pluralism to assume that every great tradition is based on some deep insight into, some revelation about (whichever language one prefers), the nature of things. It would be strange to assume, as some postmodern and postliberal thinkers seem to, that “modernity,” or “the Enlightenment tradition,” is the one tradition that is an exception. Generic religious pluralism, in any case, is based, at least implicitly, on the belief that the universal truth offered by modernity, especially as represented by modern science, is the truth of ontological naturalism (and thereby the appropriateness of epistemic naturalism). The Whiteheadian version of pluralism embeds this naturalism_ns in a naturalistic theism.

2. The Distinction between God and Creativity

Part and parcel of this naturalistic theism is Whitehead’s distinction between God and creativity. Creativity, which takes the place of Aristotle’s prime matter and of the “being” or “being itself” of other philosophers, is, to use Paul Tillich’s synonym, the “power of being.” It is, more precisely, the twofold power to exert efficient and final (or self-)causation. This twofold power is necessarily embodied both in God and a world of finite actualities. Traditional theism, of course, also said that power is embodied both in God and in finite beings, but it said that all power essentially belongs to God alone, so that any power embodied in finite beings is there only contingently, due to a divine grant. This contingency of the world’s power, even its existence, was expressed in the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo, with the “nothing” meaning absolutely nothing. Whitehead denies this doctrine, holding instead that the creation of our particular universe (our “cosmic epoch”) was “not the beginning of [finite] matter of fact, but the incoming of a certain type of order” (PR 96).^[17] Because creativity is embodied in the world as naturally and necessarily as it is embodied in God, there can be no divine interruptions of the principles normally involved in the causal processes between finite beings. Those causal principles, being simply the principles inherent in creativity as such, are metaphysical principles, inherent in the very nature of things, including the nature of God. Supernaturalistic theism’s doctrine of creatio ex nihilo implied that God could suspend the causal principles of our world now and then, because what has been freely created can be freely interrupted. Whitehead’s naturalistic theism exists, therefore, in a relation of mutual implication with his distinction between God and creativity. This distinction between God and creativity is at the heart of Cobb’s version of complementary pluralism, to which I now turn.

3. Cobb’s Complementary Pluralistic Hypothesis

John Hick’s hypothesis arises out of a combination of three factors: his recognition that religious experience gives rise to two fundamentally different conceptions of ultimate reality--as personal and as nonpersonal; his belief that there is only one ultimate reality, which leads him to say that “when the different traditions speak of the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, or of . . . Brahman, or the Dharmakaya/Nirvana/Sunyata,” they are affirming the same “putative transcendent reality” (IR 10); and his desire to take religious experience as cognitive without showing favoritism to one kind of religious experience over another. Hick’s way of reconciling all these factors is to hold that ultimate reality as it is in itself is neither personal nor impersonal, so that neither type of religious experience is more correct than the other. What this amounts to, however, is saying not that each type of religion is correct, but that each is equally mistaken. This drastic conclusion follows from Hick’s apparently unshakable commitment to the idea that there is only one ultimate reality.^[18] As Heim points out, “were Hick not so intent that the traditions should express the same truth, they would have more room to be simultaneously accurate. . . . If God and the Dharma are each real, for instance, then the Muslim and Buddhist traditions are both much more concretely correct than Hick would allow” (S 34).^[19] The alternative hypothesis to which Heim points is the one that Cobb has long been developing.^[20] 

      Hick presents his view as the best hypothesis to take account of the fact of different experienced-based concepts of ultimate reality. But Cobb, finding it unilluminating to say that God, who is worshipped, and Emptiness, which is realized, are “two names for the same noumenal reality,”^[21] believes that “the evidence counts in favor of a different hypothesis” (BD 43). One element of this hypothesis is that “the totality of what is, is very complex, far exceeding all that we can ever hope to know or think” (TCW 135). A second element is that “in different parts of the world at different times, remarkable individuals have penetrated into this reality and discovered features of it that are really there to be found,” so that “alongside all the errors and distortions that can be found in all our traditions there are insights arising from profound thought and experience that are diverse modes of apprehending diverse aspects of the totality of reality” (TCW 135, 74). A third element in this hypothesis is that “in the full complexity of reality . . . , ‘Emptying’ identifies one truly important aspect, and ‘God’ another” (DOD 6).^[22] 

      The connection with Whitehead’s distinction between God and creativity is the idea that the term “creativity” points to the same reality as some Buddhists point to with the term “emptying” (or “emptiness”). More generally, Cobb’s hypothesis, which he calls “a pluralistic metaphysics” (TCW 88), is that there are at least two ultimates. One of these, corresponding with what Whitehead calls “creativity,” has been called “Emptiness” (“Sunyata”) or “Dharmakaya” by Buddhists, “Nirguna Brahman” by Advaita Vedantists, “the Godhead” by Meister Eckhart, and “Being Itself” by Heidegger and Tillich (among others). It is the formless ultimate reality. The other ultimate, corresponding with what Whitehead calls “God,” is not Being Itself but the Supreme Being. It is in-formed and the source of forms (such as truth, beauty, and justice). It has been called “Amida Buddha” or “Sambhogakaya,” “Saguna Brahman,” “Ishvara,” “Yahweh,” “Christ,” and “Allah” (BD 124-28; TCW 184-85; DOD 116).  

      This recognition of two ultimates leads to two kinds of interreligious dialogue for the sake of discovering truth.^[23] Dialogue with those from other traditions that are attending to the same ultimate, as when Christians talk with Jews, Muslims, and theistic Hindus, can be a dialogue of purification. Dialogue with those who focus on the other ultimate can be a dialogue of enrichment, in which one’s comprehensive vision is enlarged (DOD 5-7).^[24] It is in this latter type of dialogue that the notion of complementarity plays an especially central role. Against those who “insist on a pre-established common ground as a basis for dialogue,” Cobb urges “complementarity as an alternative mode” (DOD 80). On the assumption that both types of religion reflect genuine insights into the nature of things, the challenge of dialogue is “to transform contradictory statements into different but not contradictory ones,” thereby moving “toward a more comprehensive vision in which the deepest insights of both sides are reconciled” (TCW 74; DOD 120).

      One basis for such reconciliation is to recognize that claims that may at first glance seem contradictory are really answers to different questions. “[T]here is no contradiction in the claim of one that problem A is solved by X and the claim of the other that problem B is solved by Y. . . . The claims are complementary rather than contradictory” (DOD 14). On this basis, Cobb argues, the different religions can each be seen as proclaiming universally valid insights, which can be synthesized.

Consider the Buddhist claim that Gautama is the Buddha. That is a very different statement from the assertion that God was incarnate in Jesus. The Buddha is the one who is enlightened. To be enlightened is to realize the fundamental nature of reality, its insubstantiality, its relativity, its emptiness. . . . That Jesus was the incarnation of God does not deny that Gautama was the Enlightened One. In that vast complexity that is all that is, it may well be that God works creatively in all things and that at the same time, in the Buddhist sense, all things are empty. . . . To affirm both that Jesus is the Christ and that Gautama is the Buddha is to move our understanding closer to the truth. (TCW 140)

Cobb suggests that this approach can reconcile the seeming contradiction between Christian theism and Buddhist atheism.

When a Buddhist says that no God exists, the main point is that there is nothing in reality to which one should be attached. When a Christian says that God exists, the meaning may be that there is that in reality that is worthy of trust and worship. If those translations are correct . . . , then it is not impossible that both be correct. . . . [T]he Buddhist could in principle acknowledge the reality of something worthy of trust and worship without abandoning the central insight that attachment blocks the way to enlightenment. And the Christian could come to see that real trust is not attachment in the Buddhist sense. (TCW 74)

      Although this notion of complementary truths plays its largest role in reconciling affirmations of theistic and nontheistic religions, it also can play a role in dialogue between religions of the same basic type, as Cobb illustrates with the tension between the Christian assertion “that Jesus is the Christ” and the Jewish insistence “that the Messiah has not come.” Jews and Christians, he suggests, should “work together repeatedly to clarify the difference between what Jews mean by ‘Messiah’ and what Christians legitimately mean by ‘Christ.’” Having made this distinction, Cobb adds, Christians should then “join the Jews in their longing for the coming of the Messiah and the messianic age” (TCW 86-87).

      Before concluding this section, I need to point out that Cobb’s complementary pluralism has another dimension. The idea of God and creativity as two ultimates has played by far the central role, partly because of its helpfulness in understanding how theistic Christianity and nontheistic Buddhism could both be oriented toward something ultimate in the nature of things. However, as I hinted earlier in saying that Cobb’s hypothesis is that there are “at least two ultimates,” he affirms three, with the third being the cosmos, the universe, “the totality of [finite] things” (TCW 185). Cobb relates these three ultimates to the three types of religion described by Jack Hutchison: theistic, acosmic, and cosmic.^[25] The distinction between God and creativity helps us understand only the theistic and acosmic types of religion. But there is also a type of religion, illustrated by forms of Taoism and many primal religions, including Native American religions, that regards the cosmos in general and the Earth in particular as sacred. By recognizing the cosmos as a third ultimate, we are able to see that these cosmic religions are also oriented toward something truly ultimate in the nature of things (TCW 120-23, 136-37, 140, 185).

      Although traditional Christian theology, with its doctrine of creatio ex nihilo, could not regard the cosmos as in any sense ultimate, Whitehead’s philosophy does. Although our particular cosmos--our “cosmic epoch”--is contingent, being originally rooted in a divine volition, the fact that there is a world--some world or other consisting of a multiplicity of finite actual entities--is not contingent. What exists necessarily is not simply God, as in traditional Christian theism, and not simply the world understood as the totality of finite things, as in atheistic naturalism, but God-and-a-world, with both God and worldly actualities being embodiments of creativity. Although these three ultimates within the totality are distinct, they are, Cobb emphasizes, “not in fact separable from one another,” adding: “I would propose that without a cosmic reality there can be no acosmic one, and that without God there can be neither. Similarly, without both the cosmic and acosmic features of reality there can be no God” (TCW 121).^[26]

      Although those who have been conditioned, especially through the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo, to believe that there can be only one ultimate tend to hear any talk of multiple ultimates as polytheism, this characterization would not, Cobb points out, be appropriate for his Whiteheadian worldview, as the three ultimates do not exist on the same level. They differ as the one Supreme Being, the many finite beings, and Being Itself, which is embodied by both God and finite beings. Creativity, as Being Itself, is in no way a second god alongside the Supreme Being, because it is not a being and has no reality apart from its embodiments in the divine and finite actualities. It makes no sense to say, as some have, that Whitehead’s God is subordinate to creativity, because, as Cobb argues, “between reality as such and actual things there can be no ranking of superior and inferior. Such ranking makes sense only among actualities. Among actualities [God] is ultimate.”^[27] This statement also makes clear that Whitehead’s position does not make the world of finite being equal with God. Although Tillich said that a Supreme Being would be merely “one being alongside other beings,” this pejorative description would not fit the Whiteheadian idea of God. As the “worldsoul,” understood as “a unity of experience that contains all the multiplicity of events,” God is “the being that includes all beings” (TCW 122).  

      This pluralistic ontology allows us to understand the possibility that a wide variety of religious experiences could be authentic. Although these three ultimates are inseparable, individuals and religious traditions can concentrate on one or two features alone (TCW 121). Insofar as there is concentration solely on God, on the universe in distinction from God, or on creativity, there would be the pure case of theistic, cosmic, or acosmic religious experience.^[28] However, Cobb adds, “much religious language blurs the distinctions and relates to more than one of the three ultimates” (TCW 186). For example, the fact that “[t]he universe reverenced as ultimate is the embodiment of Being Itself or [nirguna] Brahman and is pervaded by God . . . is often attested unintentionally in the rhetoric of those who find meaning in appreciating their part in this whole” (TCW 185). Likewise, “Language about God often draws on what is strictly true only of Being Itself” (TCW 185). This mixing occurs especially in Western theism, Cobb points out, because “it has incorporated acosmic elements from its Neo-Platonic sources” with the result that “the religious experience of Western mystics seems to be at once of theistic and acosmic reality--one might say that it is of the theistic as embodying the acosmic reality, or of the acosmic as qualified by the theistic reality” (TCW 124). As a final example, the truth that “Being Itself does not exist at all except in God and the creatures” is reflected in a twofold fact. On the one hand, “Very little is said of Being Itself or [nirguna] Brahman that does not hint at characteristics that actually belong to God.”^[29] On the other hand, “Being Itself, being the being of all things, is also closely associated with the thought of the whole” (TCW 186).

      Cobb’s view that the totality of reality contains three ultimates, along with the recognition that a particular tradition could concentrate on one, two, or even all three of them, gives us a basis for understanding a wide variety of religious experiences as genuine responses to something that is really there to be experienced.^[30] “When we understand global religious experience and thought in this way,” Cobb emphasizes, “it is easier to view the contributions of diverse traditions as complementary” (TCW 186).

      Heim, who subtitled his book “Truth and Difference in Religion,” says that the overarching task of a more adequate approach to religious diversity is “to find a fruitful way of combining recognition of truth or validity and difference across the religions.” His twofold contrast is with (identist) pluralists, who “are committed to limiting their attribution of truth to what is convergent,” and inclusivists, who “are almost equally inclined to stress the truth of what is similar . . . and to deny validity to what is different.” What is needed, he says, is a perspective that “can recognize the effective truth of what is truly other” (S 124). Cobb, as we have seen, has been developing a version of pluralism that can do just that. Heim’s subtitle, in fact, could have been employed by Cobb. “I continue to push [my proposal] forward against great resistance,” says Cobb, “because I believe it helps those who accept it to acknowledge the deep differences among religious traditions without denying that each has its truth” (TCW 186).

4. Cobb’s Pluralism Contrasted with Ogden’s Semi-Pluralism

The distinctiveness of Cobb’s pluralism can be made clearer by contrasting it with the position of Schubert Ogden, who has also been heavily influenced by Whitehead, especially as mediated through the philosophy of Charles Hartshorne. Although Ogden has widely been considered a process theologian because of his employment of Hartshorne’s doctrine of God and his metaphysical position more generally, equally formative for Ogden’s position is a demythologized, which for Ogden means dehistoricized, version of Rudolf Bultmann’s kerygmatic theology.^[31] Given the fact that Ogden’s resulting position leads him to endorse the negative half of pluralism--the rejection of any a priori denial that there could be any other equally authentic religions--but not the positive half--the affirmation that there are in fact some such religions--Ogden can be called a semi-pluralist. Ogden affirms, in his language, “the possibility of pluralism” but not “the actuality of pluralism.”^[32] Although he holds that the “completely universal reality of God’s love” is savingly “at work in all religions,” which not only grounds the possibility of pluralism but also provides an a priori reason to expect it to be actual (IT 103),^[33] he has been unable to say that it is actual. The purpose of this section is to clarify why Cobb and Ogden differ on this issue.

Ultimate Reality

We can begin this comparison by looking at Ogden’s notion that we have a “basic faith (or confidence) in the meaning of life,” which is “the faith that there is . . . an authentic self-understanding--that the ultimate reality of one’s own existence together with others in the whole is such that some way of understanding oneself is uniquely appropriate, or authorized” (IT 7). Every human being in every historical tradition, Ogden argues, is confronted with the challenge to live in terms of this authentic self-understanding. Cobb has argued, by contrast, that the various axial religions promote various structures of existence, each one of which can be actualized in either authentic or inauthentic modes. Ogden could reply that, even granting that supposition, Cobb’s acceptance of the realist view that “reality is as it is” (DOD 120) means that he must accept Ogden’s view that “ultimate reality in itself has one structure rather than another” (IT 18). Cobb, accordingly, must agree that there is some way of being human that is more appropriate to the nature of reality than the rest. Although Cobb would in fact agree, he would add that he sees no reason to suppose that any of the modes of existence recommended by any of the world’s religions or philosophies in their past or present forms coincides with this uniquely authorized mode of existence. Part of the reason for Cobb’s view here is his pluralistic metaphysics, with its affirmation that reality is indefinitely complex, with part of this complexity being that there is more than one ultimate relevant to human existence. So, although “ultimate reality in itself” must indeed have “one structure rather than another,” the full apprehension of this structure by human beings is still a work in progress, to which we can expect interreligious dialogue to contribute.

      By contrast, Ogden speaks--with Hartshorne--in terms of only one ultimate, which he identifies with God, as illustrated by his reference to “the strictly ultimate reality called ‘God’” and his assertion that “the structure of [ultimate] reality in itself, in its strictly ultimate aspect, must be as individual as it is universal” (IT 47). Ogden sometimes refers to the ultimate reality as the love of God, as in his statement that the Christian witness is that the “love of God . . . is the strictly ultimate reality with which every human being has to do” (IT 100). He holds, accordingly, that “the kind of trust in God’s love and loyalty to its cause that are Christian faith are, in fact, authorized by ultimate reality” (IT 47). At least partly because he affirms only one ultimate, Ogden’s position is not merely that this mode of human existence is authorized by ultimate reality, but that only this mode is authorized. There is, in other words, only one salvation: “If persons are saved, it can only be because or insofar as they so entrust themselves to God’s love as thereby to be freed to live in loyalty to it” (IT 101).^[34] Given Ogden’s view of ultimate reality and salvation, therefore, the only kind of pluralism he would be able to endorse would be an identist pluralism.^[35] 

True Religion

This point can be brought out more clearly by turning to the concept in the title of Ogden’s book, “true religion.” It belongs to very nature of religion, Ogden says, to claim authority with regard to the understanding of human existence,^[36] so that “every religion at least implicitly claims to be the true religion” (IT 4, 12). This statement implies that a Christian by definition believes Christianity to be the true religion. How, then, can the question in the title of Ogden’s book make sense? If Christianity is taken to be the true religion, how could there be any other true religions?

      To understand Ogden’s question, we need to see precisely what he means by “true religion.” He understands this concept, he tells us, by analogy with the concept of a “true church” in classical Protestant ecclesiology (IT x). According to that concept, a church is “substantially true provided that its doctrine and practice agree with those of the apostles, whose church alone may be said to be formally true.” By analogy, Ogden says, a religion

may be said to be formally true provided that its representation of the meaning of human existence is that with which all others must agree in order themselves to be true religions. On the other hand, it may be said to be substantially true provided that it exhibits just such agreement with whatever religion is correctly said to be the formally true religion. (IT 12-13)

In claiming to be the true religion, then, any specific religion is claiming to be formally true, which leaves open the possibility that other religions may be, from its perspective, (merely) substantially true.“[I]t belongs to a religion to claim to be the true religion, and hence the formal norm by which all other true religion, if any, has to be determined” (IT 13).^[37]  

      From the Christian’s perspective, therefore, the question whether there is more than one true religion is the question whether there are any other religions that “give expression to substantially the same religious truth” (IT 103). This condition means, more precisely, that these other religions “must express substantially the same self-understanding, the same way of understanding ourselves in relation to others and the whole. And this means . . . that they must also have substantially the same necessary implications, both metaphysical and ethical” (IT 60). Ogden sees, however, that Christianity and Buddhism (at least the type of Buddhism with which he has been in dialogue) have radically different metaphysical and ethical implications (IT 60-66). Given this view of what it would take to affirm the actuality of religious pluralism, Cobb, who has emphasized the great differences in the religious worldviews and the “salvations” they produce, would find the affirmation at least as difficult as does Ogden.

      One of the differences between the two theologians is that Cobb’s understanding of the God-world relation provides no basis for him to accept Ogden’s notion of “true religion.” As Ogden points out, his idea that a religion can be “the formally true religion” is understood by analogy with the traditional Protestant concept of the apostolic church as the standard by which all other churches are to be measured. Cobb would emphasize, however, that his traditional concept presupposed traditional theism, according to which God could provide complete and infallible revelation recorded in inerrant scripture. Traditional Protestants could reasonably assume, accordingly, that the witness of the apostolic church contained not only truth but the whole truth and nothing but the truth. It was fully self-consistent, therefore, for them to take it as the norm for measuring the truth of all subsequent churches. However, given Cobb’s Whiteheadian rejection of traditional theism’s doctrine of omnipotence, which entailed that God could unilaterally determine human thought, speech, and writing, the necessary presupposition for the traditional idea of complete and infallible revelation is removed. This presuppositional change is, in fact, reflected in Ogden’s own criteria for theology, according to which appeal to the apostolic witness can answer only the question whether a theology is Christian, not also, as it did for traditional theology, whether it is true; that question must now be settled in terms of common experience and reason (IT 36-37). Ogden’s acceptance of a notion of true religion based on analogy with the traditional doctrine of the formally true church is rooted in the part of Ogden’s theology that Cobb does not share. From Cobb’s more strictly Whiteheadian theology, there is no basis for the assumption that Christianity’s understanding of reality expresses the whole truth about the essential structure of reality.^[38]  

      It is precisely this notion of true religion, furthermore, that separates Ogden’s position so radically from Cobb’s. Some of Ogden’s formulations could, to be sure, be endorsed by Cobb. Ogden says, for example, that “it is the very nature of a religion to make or imply the claim to formal religious truth” (IT 13). If this statement were taken to mean only that a religion claims to represent a universally valid truth and thereby to be a norm for measuring all other religions, Cobb would enthusiastically endorse it. This interpretation, besides avoiding relativism, would allow for another religion to be seen as expressing a different but complementary universally valid truth, so that this religion would be normative with respect to that part of the full truth that it has seen. There would be two “true religions” that are not substantially the same.^[39] Ogden, however, rules out this way of interpreting his statement. In saying that a religion makes “a claim to formal religious truth,” he means that it claims “to be the true religion, and hence the formal norm by which all other true religion, if any, has to be determined” (IT 13; latter two emphases added). He rules out, accordingly, the kind of complementarity that Cobb advocates. From Ogden’s perspective, a Christian can consider other religions to be true only “insofar as they give expression to substantially the same religious truth” (IT 103). It is mainly because of this difference that Cobb is a radical pluralist whereas Ogden, assuming that pluralism would have to be identist pluralism, is a semi-pluralist,^[40] endorsing only the possibility that there could be other true religions.

Philosophy as a Norm

Ogden does add a qualification that could open the way to an acceptance of Cobb’s position and thereby full-fledged pluralism. Although he often writes as if we must take our own religion as the norm for judging the truth-value of other religions, Ogden’s position is really that we must have some norm, which might well be a philosophy. This allowance is reflected in his observation that we can make a reasoned judgment about the truth of the religions “only by employing, openly or tacitly, some one of them, or some philosophy, as the norm required to make it” (IT 73). Cobb’s pluralism, at least arguably, employs Whiteheadian philosophy as such a norm. From Cobb’s perspective, this employment is not in conflict with taking Jesus Christ as normative, because he sees Whitehead’s philosophy as “a Christian natural theology.”^[41] This philosophy, nevertheless, provides a basis for recognizing truths that have not been present in historic Christian thought, at least explicitly, because this philosophy has also been informed by insights from other traditions. Whitehead himself famously observed that his philosophy approximates “some strains of Indian, or Chinese thought” (PR 7).

      With regard to the question of how we can recognize truths other than those embodied in our own particular tradition, Whitehead’s tuning-fork analogy suggests an answer: Saying that an expressive sign “elicits the intuition which interprets it,” Whitehead adds: “It cannot elicit what is not there. A note on a tuning fork can elicit a response from a piano. But the piano has already in it the string tuned to the same note. In the same way the expressive sign elicits the existent intuition which would not otherwise emerge into individual distinctiveness” (RM 133; emphasis added). In other words, insofar as a doctrine of another religion is an explication of a universal intuition that had not arisen to consciousness in my experience because it had not been thematized by my own religious tradition, I can, upon being exposed to it, recognize its truth.^[42] This seems to be Ogden’s position with regard to people in nontheistic traditions being exposed to the idea of God as creator and redeemer. From Cobb’s viewpoint, there may be other doctrines, such as the doctrine of sunyata, the same formal status. The Christian could, accordingly, see nontheistic Buddhism as representing a universally valid salvific truth, even though it is not the truth historically represented by Christianity. Ogden, however, has not developed this possible implication of Whitehead’s philosophy. For example, one of his statements, that “the truth in any philosophy not only has to confirm that in any religion, but also has to be confirmed by it” (IT 72), seems to foreclose the possibility that a philosophy, while containing much truth, might not contain a truth expressed by a particular religion, or that a religion, while expressing a universally valid salvific truth, might not contain every universally valid truth expressed by a particular philosophy.  

Religion in a Pluralistic Situation

Another feature of Ogden’s position that separates his position from Cobb’s is his contention that a religion necessarily claims to be the formal norm of all true religion whatsoever. Consistently with this contention, Ogden says that “to be a Christian and to take Christianity to be the formally true religion are one and the same thing” (IT 100). Cobb would withhold assent from this view in terms of Ogden’s own third test for a theological position, namely, that besides being appropriate to Jesus Christ and credible in light of common human experience and reason it also be “fitting to its situation” (IT 35). Part of the present situation is precisely its religious plurality combined with the fact that many Christian theologians, partly because of new forms of theism (of which the process theism shared by Cobb and Ogden is one instance), believe that pluralism is theologically appropriate. Ogden himself, in fact, says that more and more Christian theologians “are religious pluralists precisely as Christians and theologians” and that “this is why the challenge they pose to Christian witness and theology is new, and importantly new at that” (IT 4).

      One of the implications of this importantly new situation, Cobb would suggest, is that it can lead adherents of the various religions to make a somewhat more modest claim. Granted that religions traditionally have claimed to be the formally true religion, could not believers in this new situation be content to see their own religion as a formally true religion? Could they not come to see, furthermore, that this new understanding of Christianity’s place among the religions of the world is more appropriate to their founding events than the claim to be the formally true religion? It is this slight but crucial change that Cobb’s complementary pluralism makes. With regard to Christian faith in particular, Cobb would fully endorse Ogden’s statement, slightly modified, that “to be a Christian and to take Christianity to be [a] formally true religion are one and the same thing.” One could argue, in fact, that this is a reformulation of the meaning of Christian faith that many Christians in our time have, largely implicitly, already made, so that Cobb’s complementary pluralism is simply providing a way to explicate this new self-understanding. This is not a move, however, that Ogden has made.^[43]

      Ogden’s rejection of pluralism is based, at least in part, on his realization that pluralism, at least in many of its best-known versions, is either incoherent or implicitly, if not explicitly, relativistic. In the present section, I have alluded to the way in which Cobb’s position allows him to affirm pluralism without relativism.^[44] In the next section, I address this issue directly.

5. Pluralism without Relativism

The idea of religious pluralism has from the outset raised the specter of relativism. Troeltsch, as we have seen, has been called both the pioneer of religious pluralism and the first great Christian relativist. Having defined “debilitating relativism” as the view that all religions are equally true, therefore equally false, Alan Race says: “The pertinent question mark which hovers over all theories of pluralism is how far they succeed in overcoming the sense of ‘debilitating relativism’ which is their apparent danger” (CRP 78, 90). Langdon Gilkey, in his contribution to The Myth of Christian Uniqueness, opines that a theoretical solution is probably impossible. Seeing “no consistent theological way to relativize and yet to assert our own symbols,” he says that plurality as “rough parity,” which means giving up our absolute starting point, seems to lead to an “unavoidable relativism.” Believing, nevertheless, that we must oppose demonic forms of religion in terms of absolute values, he says that the only resolution of the dilemma is practical.^[45] 

      Hick tries to avoid a debilitating relativism by regarding ethical norms as rooted in our human nature and as thereby independent of religious belief, so that these norms can serve as criteria for evaluating the religions in terms of their fruits (IR 97-98, 325-26). Hick’s view of ultimate reality, however, undermines this position. He says, on the one hand, that morality is derivative from God, or the Real, in the sense that it is based in our human nature as ethical, which is “an aspect of our existence ‘in the image of God,’” so that living ethically is living “in earthly alignment with the Real” (IR 204, 312). On the other hand, as we have seen, Hick denies that any of our predicates, including goodness, can apply to the Real in itself (IR 338), which implies that the idea of “alignment with the Real” is vacuous. Christian values at their best can be said to be in alignment with the Real no more than Nazi values at their worst. Given the fact that Hick’s theory has been taken as the paradigmatic example of pluralism, it is not surprising that Race and Gilkey wonder whether any theoretical avoidance of debilitating relativism is possible.

      The question of how to formulate pluralism without relativism has been uppermost in the minds of Whiteheadian pluralists. In her contribution to The Myth of Christian Uniqueness, Marjorie Suchocki asks in her introduction whether pluralists can avoid “religious relativism, which would follow were there no acceptable norms of discernment to be applied to religious positions.”^[46] In his introduction to Christ in a Pluralistic Age, Cobb says that the danger of the deeper pluralism he is advocating is “an unqualified relativism” (CPA 19). In Beyond Dialogue, he says that “thoroughgoing relativism fall[s] outside the boundaries of Christian theology” (BD 15). In his critique of The Myth of Christian Uniqueness, he says that none of the great religious traditions can find acceptable “a sheer conceptual relativism,” according to which a tradition’s message “is truth for its believers but irrelevant to others” (TCW 67, 68). In an essay titled “Responses to Relativism,”  Cobb even uses the same expression as Alan Race, speaking of the need to avoid a “debilitating relativism” (TCW 102). It is noteworthy that Race, after pointing to the danger that pluralism can lead to debilitating relativism, says: “The virtue of Cobb’s contribution is that he combines fidelity to Christ with unqualified openness to other faiths” (CPR 98).

      The distinction between God and creativity is at root of the way in which Cobb’s version of pluralism differs from Hick’s at this point. We saw earlier that, against the kind of allegedly neutral meta-theory of religion employed by Hick, Cobb protests in “the name of Christian faith” because of “the implicit relativization and even negation of basic Christian commitments” (TCW 79). Cobb elsewhere spells how out the move made by Hick results in this relativization and even negation. “[T]hose who assume that all traditions must be focusing on the same aspects of reality” are led to believe that what Zen Buddhists call Emptying “must be the same as God,” which can in turn lead the Christian thinker to “employ the negative theology^[47] on the Christian heritage so radically as to dissolve God into Emptying. In that process everything distinctive of the biblical heritage is lost” (DOD 6).^[48] 

      One might reply, to be sure, that this criticism would not apply to Hick, because he does not “dissolve God into Emptying” but instead regards both the biblical God and Buddhist emptiness as two phenomenal appearances of the transcendent Real. This reply, however, would not remove Cobb’s charge that the God of the biblical tradition, who has a concern for justice and other particular forms of existence, is dissolved into formlessness. In his early writings on religious pluralism, Hick saw his own distinction--between ultimate transcendent reality as it is in itself and this reality as it is conceived by us--as parallel to “the Hindu distinction between nirguna Brahman, Brahman without attributes, beyond the scope of human language, and saguna Brahman, Brahman with attributes, known within human religious experience as Ishvara, the personal creator and governor of the universe.”^[49] Adding his own affirmation that “[t]he infinite God must pass out into sheer mystery . . .  and is in this limitless transcendence nirguna,”^[50] Hick was clearly saying that Advaita Vedanta was right and Christianity and the other theistic traditions wrong about what the Divine Reality is in itself. Hick later tried to overcome this favoritism by insisting that the various views of ultimate reality as impersonal, such as nirguna Brahman and Sunyata (Emptiness), are mere impersonae of the Real, corresponding no more to the Real in itself than do the divine personae (IR 245, 279, 294-95). The fact remains, however, that what Hick says about the Real is remarkably similar to what he says of nirguna Brahman and Sunyata. Hick himself, furthermore, undermines his own attempt at evenhandedness by saying that if Sunyata is understood “as referring to the ultimate reality beyond the scope of all concepts, knowable only in its manifestations, then it is indeed equivalent to what in our pluralistic hypothesis we are calling the Real” (IR 292; cf. CTR 60-61). Not flinching from the implication--which, as Cobb says, is that everything distinctive of the biblical concept of deity is lost--Hick has his interrogator ask: If the biblical God, which has the attributes of being “good, loving, purposeful,” is an authentic appearance of the Real, must not these attributes “have their analogical counterparts in the Real itself?” Hick, while saying that he sees the point of the question, answers in the negative (CTR 61). This is the main reason why Hick’s view of ultimate reality undermines his own concern that religious beliefs be reformulated to give more unambiguous support for morality.

      Rather than subordinating the personal God to the formless ultimate, as do Advaita Vedanta, many forms of Buddhism, and Hick, Whitehead regarded the personal God and formless creativity as equally primordial, with each presupposing the other.^[51] Whiteheadian pluralists can agree with the descriptions, provided by nontheistic Hindus and Buddhists, of ultimate reality as formless^[52]  while still affirming the existence of a Divine Actuality with many characteristics in common with the biblical God, including those that support the concern for a just social order. Cobb, on this basis, says not only that he evaluates the various religious traditions in terms of the norm of “[c]ontributing to the indivisible salvation of the whole world” but also that this norm comes from his “hope for what Jesus called the basileia theou, the world in which God’s purposes are realized” (TCW 182). On the basis of this idea of God, likewise, Marjorie Suchocki uses justice--“the normative justice that creates well-being in the world community”--as the norm for evaluating the various religions.^[53] 

      However, although Whiteheadian Christian pluralists, thanks to the distinction between God and creativity, are able to avoid relativism, it may seem as if they can do so only by undermining their pluralism by imperialistically imposing a norm from their own religious tradition. I will look first at the treatment of this issue by Suchocki. Explicitly addressing this issue, she asks whether religious pluralists, who by definition reject “absolutizing one religion as the norm for all others,” can avoid the relativistic view that “each religion is governed by norms and perceptions uniquely conditioned by the cultural and historical situation of the religion.” Having suggested that justice can provide a norm that expresses a “transcendence of our particularity,”^[54] she recognizes that the norm of justice that she and other liberationists would employ would not command universal assent.^[55] This norm might, therefore, seem imperialistic by virtue of taking “the notion of physical well-being developed in a culture-specific context and appl[ying] it evaluatively to all cultures and religions.”^[56] Suchocki suggests that this charge could be answered by showing that there is sufficient unanimity in the various religions’ ideas of “the ultimately perfect mode of existence” expressed in their eschatological visions to provide a criterion of justice that is “nonimperialistic” because it would be “an internal norm within each religion.”^[57] She admits, however, that this solution does not completely overcome the charge but only “mitigates” it, because “the norm is hardly culture-free.”^[58] 

      Suchocki’s own self-critique here can be fleshed out with a point made by Cobb in response to Knitter. While not denying that there are common elements in all the major traditions, Cobb does maintain that “if there are such common elements, they do not constitute what all the traditions regard as most important” (DOD 181). This point is relevant to the degree of unanimity that can be found in the images of ideal existence found in the various traditions. Describing her approach, Suchocki says that, valuing well-being, she “look[s] for its traces within that which is given ultimate value in each religion.”^[59] The relevance of Cobb’s point is that, even if traces of the valuation of well-being, including physical well-being, that is found in a central strand of the Judeo-Christian tradition--the strand regarded as normative by liberation theologians--can be found in all the other traditions, this fact would not mean that this valuation has the same importance in all those traditions. It would, therefore, be imperialistic for Suchocki to propose “justice that creates well-being” as “the fundamental criterion of value and the focus of dialogue and action among religions” (emphases added).^[60] However, this problem could be overcome, without lapsing into relativism, by changing the definite articles in this statement to indefinite ones. In Cobb’s version of Whiteheadian complementary pluralism, which has thus far been worked out much more fully than Suchocki’s, this modification is central.

      The crucial point is that we can hold fast to the universal validity of our own norms without insisting that these norms are the only ones with universal validity. Having said that for him to enter into genuine dialogue with people of other traditions means that he must provisionally bracket his claim that what he as a Christian sees as most important is truly the most important thing (DOD 11), Cobb clarifies his point by saying that what is bracketed is

neither the content of what I find supremely important, for example, that we transmit a habitable planet to our children’s children, nor the conviction that this is important for all, but only the opinion that it is more important for all than what others regard as supremely important. Perhaps becoming empty is just as important! (DOD 11)

As Cobb puts it elsewhere, to enter into dialogue “we do not need to relativize our beliefs.” Rather: “We can affirm our insights as universally valid!^[61] What we cannot do, without lapsing back into unjustified arrogance, is to deny that the insights of other traditions are also universally valid” (TCW 137). With regard to Suchocki’s question, the implication is that it is not imperialistic for Christians to propose liberative justice as a norm to evaluate the various religious traditions if we recognize the equal right of other traditions to propose different norms based on their own sense of what is most important.^[62] 

      In giving this answer, however, it may seem that Cobb has avoided imperialism only by accepting a more subtle form of relativism--one that, rather than saying that nothing is of universal truth and validity, has a plurality of universally valid norms based on different universally valid truths. The relativism would result if a Christian came to “recognize that there is a wisdom from which faith shuts one out” (DOD 4). Explaining how pluralism of this sort would stimulate the “corrosive acids of relativism,” Cobb says:

One recognizes that one’s faith, a faith that had previously seemed comprehensive and adequate, has left something out. . . . One realizes that one’s faith does not have the completeness one had thought, that there are other faiths embodying other strengths.^[63] One concludes that Christian faith is one faith among others. (DOD 4).^[64]

Such a view would be corrosive, Cobb holds, because it would work against the whole-hearted commitment for which Christian faith calls: “If other movements seek other ends than the Christian end, and yet have equal validity with Christianity, then how can one give whole-hearted commitment to the Christian goal?” (TCW 45) The problem is intensified by the recognition that although these other movements are seeking other ends, they can contribute to what the Christian sees as the Christian goal, namely, “the indivisible salvation of the whole world,”^[65] “in ways that Christianity as now constituted does not and cannot.” It is primarily this recognition, Cobb says, that constitutes him “as a pluralist” (TCW 44-45).

      Cobb’s solution draws on the twofold idea that Christianity is a living movement, which “should be constantly changing and growing,” and that the Christian’s devotion should be not to any particular form of Christianity but to “the living Christ” who “calls us in each moment to be transformed by the new possibilities given by God for that moment” (TCW 45). Whereas this perspective “does relativize every form taken by Christianity in time,” it “does not relativize the process of creative transformation by which it lives and which it knows as Christ” (TCW 47).^[66] The Christian can recognize that other religions have truths and values and make contributions that Christianity, in its present form, does not incorporate, accordingly, without relativizing Christian faith itself and thereby undermining one’s whole-hearted commitment to it:

The fullness of Christianity lies in the ever-receding future. One can be a whole-hearted participant in the present movement as long as one believes that the particular limitations to which one is now sensitive can be overcome. (TCW 45)

The way for the Christian theologian to be pluralistic without being relativistic, in other words, is to encourage the continual creative transformation of Christian theology in the direction of its becoming a “global theology,” in which the truths and values of the other religious traditions have been incorporated (TCW 52, 58-60). Pointing out that the task of transforming Christianity “in relation to each of the great ways of humankind is a vast one,” Cobb says: “We have barely begun to deal with the fundamental changes that must be effected within our Christian faith” (TCW 84).

      True to his pluralism, Cobb hopes that this work of globalization will occur in the other religious traditions as well, at least those that claim universal validity,^[67] adding that if it does it will result in “a movement toward greater resemblance” (TCW 59). Contrary to the hitherto dominant proposals for global theology, however, Cobb advocates “confessional global theologies” (TCW 58):

Global theology in a pluralistic age need not cut its ties to the particularities of [the] religious traditions. Instead it can work within each religion to make the theology of that tradition more global. In the name of what is most sacred, even what is most particular, in each tradition, adherents can be called to more global religious thinking and practice.

      My suggestion is that there is no global strategy for developing global theology in a pluralistic age. The strategy is pluralistic. It will be quite different for Muslims, for Hindus, for Sikhs, for Jains, for Buddhists, for Jews, and for Christians. (TCW 59)

If such a process occurs, there could be pluralism without relativism in all the universalist traditions.

Cobb’s Christian pluralism, which he has been developing since his 1967 book, The Structure of Christian Existence, provides one version of Whiteheadian religious pluralism, the version that has thus far been developed most fully and most in dialogue with pluralists of other persuasions. As such it provides a version that other Whitehead-inspired philosophers and theologians, from other religious traditions as well as from Christianity, can learn from and build upon, modify, or provide an alternative to.