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Dr. Winfried Corduan is emeritus Professor of Philosophy and Religion at Taylor University, and has been a blogger since before it was cool. I have learned from several of his books as I’ve developed my own class on world religions. His scholarship is thorough, multi-disciplinary, insightful, and informed by his own travel and conversations. He’s well known among students of apologetics for his informed engagement with members of other religions.
In this interview we discuss how he came to be interested in the world religions; raised as a Christian, as a young adult, he wasn’t interested in them at all! But things changed…
Did Dr. Corduan’s journey into religious studies scholarship cause him to doubt his own Christian faith?
And what is his answer to suggestions that all religions are basically the same? He argues that we must look below the shiny, exciting surfaces of the religions, to find differences of deep structure.
In the course of this interview, he makes interesting comments on Islam, Buddhism, and Hinduism. He also discusses the famous theory of religious pluralism propounded by John Hick, accusing it of “religious imperialism.”
Finally, Dr. Corduan gives some advice to Christians who want to learn about other religions.
You can also listen to this episode on Stitcher or iTunes (please subscribe, rate, and review us in either or both – directions here). It is also available onYouTube (scroll down – you can subscribe here). If you would like to upload audio feedback for possible inclusion in a future episode of this podcast, put the audio file here.
Bonus: Dr. Corduan performs his original song “United Vegetarian Meatmarket,” as he explains: “Choose your religion to suit your preferences! This is a satirical song about people looking for an easy custom-made religion.”
Links for this episode:
- Win Corduan’s blog
- Win Corduan’s website
- Karma to Grace
- Christ and Krishna
- Jesus: The Avatar I Never Knew
- Beyond Karma: Sin in Hinduism
- Dr. Corduan’s books
- Dr. Corduan’s YouTube channel
- 2011 interview with Apologetics 315
- An example of Buddhist art regarding Hell realms (warning: gruesome images).
- Keith Yandell and Harold Netland, Buddhism: A Christian Exploration and Appraisal
- Recent (1960s on) “Humanistic Buddhism.”
- the Hsi Lai Buddhist temple in Hacienda Heights, California
- upaya (“skillfull means”) explained
- my screencast on skillful means in the parable of the burning house in the Lotus Sutra
- Dr. John Hick’s much-discussed theory of religious pluralism
- Mircea Eliade
- Joseph Campbell
- This week’s thinking music is “Neo Zen” by Ketsa.
Podcast 95 – Dr. Corduan may be a good candidate for a conversation on the Trinity. Here’s a brief excerpt from his book Handmaiden to Theology, dealing with philosophy and its proper use in theology: Models of the incarnation
Our first problem arises from the fact that in Jesus Christ we have one person who is both man and God. Such a statement seems at first to be self-contradictory. After all, we have gone to great lengths to emphasize the difference between God and man. God is a unique, self-existent, noncorporeal spirit; man is a limited, contingent, form-and-body unity. How can one person be both? Before presenting our solution, we will review several other models that have been proposed.
Let us return to our conceptualization of man as a unit of form (soul) and matter (body). Applying this concept to Christ, some of the earliest Christian thinkers substituted the Spirit or the Logos for the human soul. Whereas other men consist of a human soul indwelling a human body, Jesus is a divine “soul” indwelling a human body.† Thus both the divine and human aspects are taken care of, and a certain unity has been preserved.
But this model suffers in both its theology and its anthropology on Platonic and Aristotelian presuppositions alike. If we were to buy into the Platonic anthropology of an autonomous soul inhabiting a dispensable body, the only significant component in the christological model would be the divine soul. The body would not be important for by itself it cannot constitute humanity. Since under this scheme the human soul would be missing, Christ would not be truly human at all.In an Aristotelian anthropology the form determines the body. Hence, if we substitute a divine form for the human one, we are left with one of three unacceptable options:
1. The body is truly human; the form truly divine. Then the body is somehow human without the form of humanity, a metaphysical impossibility.
2. The form is truly divine, determining the body. Then the body cannot be human. It must be a divine body (Apollinarianism). This is a lesser form of the heresy of Docetism-that Jesus was human in appearance only.
3. The body is truly human, determined by its form. Then the form cannot be divine, a notion contrary to our presupposition.
In short, any Christology which tries to substitute the divine spirit for the human soul is inadequate. In order to preserve both divinity and humanity, we must maintain that both a human soul and the divine spirit were present in Christ. But this is only the beginning of the christological problem, not a solution. For how this is to be accomplished with philosophical integrity presents a most difficult …
As a progressive evangelical (emphasis here on “evangelical”) I don’t have too much sympathy for John Hick’s views, but I found myself wanting to defend him a bit (or at least the broad pluralist project of which he’s an exemplar) after listening to the short shrift he got in the conversation.
At the core of Hick’s view (as I see it) is a recognition that good religions (those he’d consider to be properly in touch with the Real) provide forms of life that move people from being self-centered to being other-centered. If one finds admirable exemplars of each religious tradition who exhibit what a Christian would call the fruit of the Spirit, and each seems to do so in significant part due to their participation in the practices of their religious belief community, one might be understandably inclined to see that religious tradition as providing a vehicle for relating properly to that which Christians call God.
Presumably the main objection to this ethical and pragmatic approach to religion is the diversity of doctrine between different traditions. But think about the diversity of doctrine within the Judeo-Christian tradition, e.g. the extreme distance between an ancient Israelite monolater of Yahweh and an analytically trained contemporary (Trinitarian) Christian classical theist. The doctrinal distance between these two individuals on virtually all the major theological questions is vast, and yet I’m sure your guest would want to say they are both in salvific contact with Yahweh. (This suggests to me that a dose of fallibilism and doctrinal antirealism is not inimical to serious theological reflection.)
When we combine the evidence of ethical transformation in different religious traditions and the enormous diversity of doctrine within a single tradition like the Judeo-Christian stream, it seems to me that the Hickean project deserves more credit than Corduan was willing to grant it.
With ethical pluralism you don’t need even to limit it to religion, some of the most ethically righteous People in history have been atheists, or religious People motivated by something other than their religion.
I don’t think being self-centered to being other-centered is good enough, first of all there are plenty of forms of Bhuddism that are essencially self-centered, where beith other-centered is nothing more than a means toward self-enlightenment, also there are horrendous philosophies that move People from being self-centered to other-centered, like Nazism.
I think doctrine and theology has a lot more impact than People think, for example abolition slavery really only grew within Christianity, you don’t find that in other religions. The Whole concept of the individual as a morally free and valuable person comes from the Abrahamic tradition.
There are individuals that are bad, and good in every tradition, but the actual theological framework makes a difference in how these individuals function.
I’m sure there were plenty of really good pagans pre-Christianity, but you need the theological framework of Christianity to get the enlightenment (for example).
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