Religion Within the Limits of History Alone : Pragmatic Historicism and the Future of Theology

Among the greatest challenges facing religious thinkers today is that created by historicism, the notion that human beings and their myriad understandings of reality are utterly historical, conditioned by contingent circumstances and tied to particular contexts. In this book, Demian Wheeler confronts the historicist challenge by delineating and defending a particular trajectory of historicist thought known as pragmatic historicism. Rooted in the German Enlightenment and fully developed within the early Chicago school of theology, pragmatic historicism is a predominantly American tradition that was philosophically nurtured by classical pragmatism and its intellectual siblings, naturalism and radical empiricism. Religion within the Limits of History Alone not only undertakes a detailed genealogy of this pragmatic historicist lineage but also sets forth a constructive program for contemporary theology by charting a path for its future development. Wheeler shows that pragmatic historicism is an underdeveloped resource for contemporary theology since it offers a model for normative religious thought that is theologically compelling yet wholly nonsupernaturalistic, deeply pluralistic, unflinchingly liberal, and radically historicist. Contents Acknowledgments Introduction Chapter 1 What Is Historicism? A Multileveled Definition History All the Way Down: Historicism as an Ontology and Cosmology Homo Historicus: Historicism as an Anthropology Rediscovering the Sociohistorical Method: Historicism as a Methodology Chapter 2 Historical Particularity and the Problem of Insularity: Pragmatic Historicism as a Bigger Historicism Contextual Particularism: Historicism’s First Principle The Short Distance from the Particular to the Insular: Historicism and the Many Faces of Isolationism Religious and Theological Historicism in a Postliberal Key: Ghettoized, Confessional, and Mono-Humanistic Historicity without Insularity: Prospects for a Bigger Historicism The Diversity, Porousness, and Multitraditionedness of Cultural and Religious Histories: Toward a Dynamic Historicism The Breadth, Depth, and Interconnectedness of Human and Natural Histories: Toward a Holistic Historicism Chapter 3 Particularist Mutualism: Toward a Pragmatic Historicist Theology of Religions The Historicism of Ernst Troeltsch: The Religionsgeschichtliche Schule and the De-absolutizing of Christianity Pragmatic Historicism and the Regnant Theologies of Religions: Toward a Particularist Mutualism Beyond Exclusivism and Inclusivism: Pragmatic Historicism as a Type of Religious Pluralism Pluralism without Perennialism: Pragmatic Historicism as Particularist Mutualism What the Religions Have in Common: Historicity and Nature as the Ground of Mutuality A Lingering Question: Is Pluralism a Western Imposition and Covert Exclusivism? Chapter 4 After Incommensurability: Pragmatic Historicism as an Impetus for Meaningful Interreligious Engagement Shared Limits, Emergent Truths: The Goad and Goal of Interreligious Dialogue Comparative Theology in a Pragmatic Historicist Perspective: How a Particularist Mutualism Facilitates Deep Learning across Religious Borders Hybrid Histories, Porous Particularities: From Multitraditionedness to Multiple Religious Belonging Naturalism, Empiricism, Pragmatism: Pragmatic Historicist Pillars for the Ethical Bridge The First Pillar: (Religious) Naturalism The Second Pillar: (Radical) Empiricism The Third Pillar: (Criteriological) Pragmatism Chapter 5 Beyond Amnesia and Nostalgia: Pragmatic Historicism and the Authority of the Past Give the Historical Method an Inch and It Will Take a Mile: The Historicizing, Humanizing, and Desupernaturalizing of Religious Traditions Givenness, Agency, and the Flux of Historical Process: Why Religions Lack Essences From Antisupernaturalism and Antiessentialism to Antiauthoritarianism: Rethinking the Normativity of the Past The Authority of Jesus: A Case Study on the Benefits of an Antiauthoritarian Theology Chapter 6 Truth Reconsidered: Building Blocks of a Paleopragmatic Historicism Perspectivism, Constructivism, Nonfoundationalism, Fallibilism, Instrumentalism: Historicist Checks on the True and the Real The First Check: Perspectivism The Second Check: Constructivism The Third Check: Nonfoundationalism The Fourth Check: Fallibilism The Fifth Check: Instrumentalism In Defense of Getting Things Right: Toward a Paleopragmatic Historicism Historicist Epistemology as Constructivist and Realist: Balancing the Social Construction of Reality Beyond Whatever Works: Reevaluating the Correspondence Theory of Truth Taking the Highroad around Modernism: An Excursus on Historicism and Metaphysics Chapter 7 Theological Truth Reconsidered: Four Traits of a Paleopragmatic Historicist Theology The First Trait: Religious Fallibilism The Second Trait: Theological Liberalism The Third Trait: Constructive Realism The Fourth Trait: Probative Pragmatism Chapter 8 Sacred Conventions, Sacred Nature: Toward a Pragmatic Historicist Theology of the Divine Naturalizing Religion, Humanizing Theology, Conventionalizing Divinity: Pragmatic Historicism and the Menace of Atheism Is “Historicist Theology” an Oxymoron? The Conflicted Historicisms of George Burman Foster and William Dean Beyond Humanism: Atheistic Ironies and the Possibility of a Religious Naturalism From Convention to Mystery: The Irony of Atheism Constructive Historicism and the Receptive Side of Religion: Arguments for a Theological Realism Radical Empiricism and Religious Naturalism as Sources of a Historicist Metaphysics of Ultimacy; or, Why Pragmatic Historicists Pragmatic Historicism and the Varieties of Religious Naturalism: Evaluating the Alternatives Truncated, Anthropocentric Naturalism: George Burman Foster, Shailer Mathews, Sallie McFague Transitional, Cosmic Naturalism: Shirley Jackson Case and Gerald Birney Smith Apophatic, Pluralistic Naturalism: Gordon Kaufman, William Dean, Bernard Loomer, Wesley Wildman, and Donald Crosby Qualifying, Engaging, and Transforming the Mystery and Ambiguity of History: The Irony of Theism and the Necessity of the Humanistic and the Cataphatic Conclusion Notes Bibliography Index