Three types of religion

When we start to consider 'world-views' we can be met immediately with the falsehood that "all religions are the same"

 

Clouser in "The Myth of Religious Neutrality" goes a way to identifying how this is an inadequate analysis, even at the most superficial level, but Westphal is even more helpful. 

Westphal presents an interesting taxonomy of religions in his book "God, Guilt  and Death" that shows that they very much are not, on their own terms, the same as each other.

Mr AI summarizes it below

"AI Overview

              

In his book God, Guilt, and Death, philosopher Merold Westphal categorizes religious sensibilities into three main classes to explain human responses to finitude: exilic, mimetic, and covenantal religion. These are structural classes of religious thought rather than rigid historical traditions.

1. Exilic Religion

Core View: Takes life in the material world to be an exile from the soul's true home.

Salvation: The process of returning to that spiritual home.

Key Focus: The divide between the transcendent/spiritual and the physical world, often viewing the latter as fallen or a place of alienation.

2. Mimetic Religion

Core View: Views life as normatively controlled by a right, harmonious relationship with nature.

Salvation: Achieved by rehearsing or participating in the origins and depths of nature, often guided by myth and ritual.

Key Focus: Cosmic order, cyclical time, and living in accordance with the rhythms of the natural universe.

3. Covenantal Religion

Core View: Adds a historical dimension to the cosmological focus of mimetic religion.

Salvation: Finds ultimate meaning in historical interactions between the divine and humanity, giving specific historical context to human guilt, death, and redemption.

Key Focus: Time as linear, historical responsibility, and moral obligations to a personal, active deity.

While Westphal uses these three categories to describe the phenomenology of religion, he also famously explored the Phenomenology of religion broadly, and examined how modern critiques of religion can function as a tool for Religious Belief.

If you are exploring Westphal's work, I [Mr AI] can:

Detail how these categories apply to specific traditions (e.g., how Christianity blends these elements).

Summarize his concepts of faith and reason.

Provide an overview of his views on the hermeneutics of suspicion (Marx, Nietzsche, Freud).

Let me know which of these you'd like to focus on! "

[end of AI]

 

Some people are faced with contention about the 'rightness' of seeking to persuade others to change religion.

Two thoughts on this:

Firstly it raises an interesting question of moral epistemology and the possible source of 'rights' along with the basis for any ethical or moral judgement, because those who would reprimand for proselytizing are themselves seeking to impose their 'religious' belief on us!

Secondly, we typically have initial evangelistic conversations that 1. seek to understand the other's belief system, and 2. seek  to explain ours. No push to 'convert at all"

Greg Koukl has two excellent books on this: "Tactics" and "Street Smarts".

 

On covenantal religions.

 

The three main ones are often said to be Judaism, Christianity and Islam. There are others of course but very small. Perhaps Zoroastrianism, for example.

Islam is interesting in this category as its conception of Allah ("the god") has mimetic characteristics.

 

Allah seems to be contained in the cosmos, has physical characteristics and seems to be physically localized. His "word" seems also to be both "Isa" (the Islamic misnamed distortion of Yeshua) and the 'eternal Quran', which itself is eternally physical on tablets in 'heaven'. This latter is strange given its occasionalist references, historical errors, physical mistakes and inclusion of late Christian pseudepigrapha .

 

How this plays out

In the idea of man and the idea of of mans relation to the world are different across the three types.

Mimetic religions have man as an integral part of the world and not substantially differentiated from it.

It is finally monastic.

Materialism/physicalism reflect this in that man is an assembly of basic particles and everything about man is founded in his material substance. Man has no more status, finally, than a rock!

Exilic religions depict man as separated from the basic IS: an impersonal undifferentiatedness. There is no innate significance to man or, it seems, the basic "IS". Man's 'object' (the worth of which fails to be established by the nature of the basic being espoused) is to be unified or undifferentiated with the basic "IS". Upon this the individual dissolves into the IS.

Against these conceptions covenental religions set man in contrast to both the material cosmos and the separate self-existent Creator: Yahweh in both Judaism and Christianity. Fundamental to man is relationships, which are real and substantial.

Man is distinguished from both other types in a combination of his substance and his dependence. While similar materially to the cosmos is differentiated by virtue of spiritual self-consciousness that is only resolved in relationship with Yahweh through his Spirit sent by the incarnate Messiah. The Genesis creation account in chapters 1-3 illuminates this.