Abstract
This loosely-argued manifesto contains some suggestions regarding what the philosophy of religion might become in the twenty-first century. It was written for a brainstorming workshop over a decade ago, and some of the recommendations and predictions it contains have already been partly actualized (that’s why it is now a bit “untimely”). The goal is to sketch three aspects of a salutary “liturgical turn” in philosophy of religion. (Note: “liturgy” here refers very broadly to communal religious service and experience generally, not anything specifically “high church.”) The first involves the attitudes that characterize what I call the “liturgical stance” towards various doctrines. The second focuses on the “vested” propositional objects of those attitudes. The third looks at how those doctrines are represented, evoked, and embodied in liturgical contexts. My untimely rallying-cry is that younger philosophers of religion might do well to set aside debates regarding knowledge and justified belief, just as their elders set aside debates regarding religious language. When we set aside knowledge in this way, we make room for discussions of faith that in turn shed light on neglected but philosophically-interesting aspects of lived religious practice.
*Note: This essay has its origins in a talk I gave a decade ago at a conference for “younger, up-and-coming philosophers of religion” at Boston University. The talk contained a lot of sketches and suggestions, and not many arguments, which is why I called it, somewhat ironically, a “manifesto.” In the intervening decade, some of the turns I was anticipating (towards practice, “vested” doctrines, and communal practice) have started to take place. I note some of these developments in the [bracketed and italicized] footnotes, but have left the body of the piece largely unchanged, since taking account of the progress over the intervening years would require an entirely different kind of contribution. So it remains a manifesto, albeit now an “untimely” one.
I am grateful to M. David Eckel and his colleagues at the Boston Institute for Philosophy and Religion for the invitation to think about this topic back then, and to Eckel, Allen Speight, Troy DuJardin, and Boston Studies in Religion, Philosophy, and Public Life for inviting me to revisit the essay for the present volume.
I dedicate it to Marilyn McCord Adams, whose (also untimely) death in 2017 deprived many of us of a beloved teacher, mentor, exemplar, and friend. Marilyn embodied the liturgical turn in philosophy of religion about as well as anyone could. Gratias tibi ago.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
I’ve told bits of this story before (Chignell 2013) but am reproducing it here in more detail since it seemed like the best way to introduce the present topic.
- 2.
In fact, I think non-theistic like Graham Oppy, Louise Antony, Jeffrey Stout, and Paul Draper or “alternative-theistic” writers like J.L. Schellenberg, Mark Johnston, Philip Clayton, and Catherine Keller have provided some of the more interesting recent contributions to the field, and that these contributions have been read and appreciated. My sense is that the people who have the hardest time in professional philosophy of religion are those who write confessionally but from ‘fringe’ movements like Mormonism, Pentecostalism, Adventism, Swedenborgianism, Falun Gong, and so on.
- 3.
In many non-western traditions, belief and doctrine obviously do not play the central role that they are thought to play in western monotheistic traditions. If that’s right, then the point I am making here may be even more relevant in e.g. the Shinto, Taoist, Confucian, Jain, and Buddhist contexts. On the other hand, there may also be traditions and global contexts where belief comes much more easily, and religion is more doxastically vibrant (for better and for worse). For a seminal discussion of the Indian tradition on this issue, see Griffiths (1990).
- 4.
See Chignell (2002).
- 5.
The first panelist actually included as part of his tweak of the business-as-usual model that we move on to discussing Bayesian justifications for specific Christian doctrines such as Incarnation and Resurrection. It will now be clear to many readers who that panelist was.
- 6.
This is Stephen Wykstra’s neologism for whatever quantity or quality it is that turns true belief into knowledge (he doesn’t like the term “warrant” for various reasons).
- 7.
[2020 update: In fact he did not leave it “up to you all” in the end, and in 2018 published a substantial monograph on the philosophy of liturgy. It will now be clear who that panelist was as well.]
- 8.
Thanks to Keith DeRose for discussion of these degrees of sincerity. [2020 update: For DeRose’s own efforts to explain and defend the “suspicion that hardly anyone, if anyone at all, knows whether God exists,” see his (2018).]
- 9.
Again, the doctrine of Ascension is particularly curious in the context of contemporary cosmology – if there were drones or satellite cameras around at the time, what would they have picked up: a flesh and blood body just zooms up into the sky and then… keeps going into outer space? Is vaporized in the stratosphere somewhere? Transmutes into another invisible realm at some point? Even if they can believe in the Resurrection, I’m really not sure what Christians are supposed to believe on this score.
- 10.
It is consistent with most of what I say here that belief is not the disposition to have a certain feeling, but rather some other kind of disposition to take a proposition to be true. So the Humean flavor of the discussion is incidental, although I myself am inclined towards a Humean view of belief.
- 11.
[2020 update: Alas that phenomenology has changed quite dramatically.]
- 12.
Is that right? Or do we only feel something towards particular instantiations of the symphony?
- 13.
I do not take this to entail that belief itself is primitive or irreducible. It’s consistent with what I say here about the feeling involved in occurrent belief that belief itself be analyzable (i.e. it may involve something other or more than just this doxastic feeling).
- 14.
There may be a few unusual counterexamples to the general principle. See Ginet 2001. More recently, people like Brian Weatherson (2008), Kieran Setiya (2008), and Pamela Hieronymi (2008) have raised different sorts of objections to direct doxastic involuntarism. [2020 update: The number of papers on this topic has exploded over the past decade.]
- 15.
[2020 update: For an overview, see Chignell (2018).]
- 16.
See Pereboom (2002) for an argument according to which we could still be accountable for it.
- 17.
Compare James (1956, 11): “Our passional nature not only lawfully may, but must, decide an option between propositions, whenever it is a genuine option that cannot by its nature be decided on intellectual grounds.”
- 18.
My favorite passage in The Will to Believe: “When I look at the religious question as it really puts itself to concrete men, and when I think of all the possibilities which both practically and theoretically it involves, then this command that we shall put a stopper on our heart, instincts, and courage, and wait – acting of course meanwhile more or less as if religion were not true – till doomsday, or till such time as our intellect and sense working together may have raked in evidence enough, − this command, I say, seems to me the queerest idol ever manufactured in the philosophic cave” (James 1956, 30).
- 19.
- 20.
James writes in the Principles of Psychology that “those to whom ‘God’ and ‘Duty’ are now mere names can make them much more than that, if they make a little sacrifice to them every day. But all this
is so well known in moral and religious education that I need say no more.” This suggests, in a Pascalian spirit, that he views the “belief” involved in religious faith as something that can be voluntarily produced through inculcation and practice (rather than seeking evidence). See James (1890, 948–949).
- 21.
I don’t meant to suggest that there is no way to support talk of obligations on direct acts of belief-formation while trying to absorb the involuntarist datum that such acts are not under the direct control of the will. I will set aside discussion of these more complicated positions here. See Feldman (2002) and Adler (2006).
- 22.
For contemporary accounts of the distinction between (involuntary) “belief” and (voluntary) “acceptance,” see Cohen (1992), Bratman (1992), Ullman-Margalit and Margalit (1992), and Pettit (1998). Not all concepts of acceptance are the same, however. Robert Stalnaker develops a concept of “acceptance” that is much broader than this: it seems quite close to the genus of “positive propositional attitudes,” of which “acceptance” is of course just a species. See ch. 5 of Stalnaker (1984). For discussions of acceptance in a religious context, see Alston (1996) and Audi (2008). [2020 update: There’s been an explosion of work on this issue, too, including a series of key articles by Howard-Snyder (e.g. 2013). See also Malcolm and Scott (2017), Page (2017), and Audi (2019). For an intriguing view that leaves open whether to assimilate acceptance and outright belief (but not credences), see Bolinger (2020]
- 23.
This is compatible with thinking that acceptance may or must meet some limited epistemic conditions.
- 24.
For Kant’s picture, see Chignell (2007) and Chignell (2009). German is tricky, because the word “Glaube” can often pick out our concept of belief or our concept of faith, depending on context. Interestingly, Kant too uses the language of “acceptance” sometimes, defining “Annehmung” in the Dohna-Wundlacken lectures as “a contingent approval that has sufficient ground in regard to a certain purpose” (Kant 1902-, 24:735). [2020 update: For another articulation of this combination of evidentialism about belief and a practical account of the justification of faith, see Wood 2020.]
- 25.
- 26.
See the “Introduction” and other contributions to Firestone and Palmquist (eds.), (2006).
- 27.
For this terminology, see the Real Progress essay (1902-, 20:305ff).
- 28.
- 29.
[2020 update: See McKaughan (2013), Kvanvig (2014); Johnston (2019), Pace and McKaughan, (forthcoming).]
- 30.
I don’t assume here that “acceptance” and “faith” are the same thing in the contemporary context (though I think they are in the Kantian context). In effect the debate about the doxastic, non-doxastic, and other attitudes and dispositions involved in the liturgical stance is a debate about what faith might be, and how it relates to various principles of rational engagement and attitude-formation. [2020 update: For a summary of recent developments, see Buchak (forthcoming)].
- 31.
- 32.
I do not mean to suggest that these tools are the sole possession of analytic philosophers, obviously.
- 33.
[2020 update: Here see Wolterstorff 2015.]
- 34.
- 35.
I am not suggesting that systematic theologians do not make principled appeals to collective religious sources, nor am I suggesting that they make unprincipled appeals to such sources. The point is rather one of emphasis: in the liturgical philosophy of religion, a premium would be placed on making explicit precisely how it is that the deliverances of “collective religious sources” can increase or decrease our justification for taking certain attitudes towards a doctrine.
- 36.
Marilyn McCord Adams (1999) utilizes these three different kinds of tools in an effort to response to what she calls the “concrete logical problem” of horrendous evil. More specifically, she invokes some of the vested doctrines (ontological and axiological) of the Christian tradition to generate scenarios that show how it is logically possible for horrendous evils to be defeated within the individual life and perspective of a victim or perpetrator. She also demonstrates (in Adams 2008) how practices of prayer might lead us to focus in hope on those possibilities.
- 37.
- 38.
[2020 update: As noted earlier, Wolterstorff has now published a book on the matter (2018), following other studies by Bruce Benson (2013) and (Wolterstorff’s student) Terence Cuneo (2016). James K.A. Smith has published a trilogy of popular books on “Cultural Liturgies” (2009–2017); Michael Scott has reinvigorated the discussion of religious language (partly in liturgical contexts) in a series of articles (including 2017); Claire Carlisle has developed a sophisticated theory of religious habit as part of liturgical practice (see her 2013); and Mark Wynn works in the phenomenology of religious practice in, for example, certain architectural spaces (see his 2011 and 2013).]
- 39.
“Versinnlichung” (“sensible rendering”) is Kant’s term in the Critique of Judgment for what beautiful art and nature can do with respect to the transcendental ideas of uncognizable supersensibles (see Kant 1902--, 5:356.) In Religion within the Bounds of Reason Alone he notes that “we always need a certain analogy with natural being in order to make supersensible characteristics comprehensible to us” (1902 -, 6:65n). And in a striking comment in a lecture on anthropology, Kant says of the arts what he might just as well say of religious ceremony: “The entire utility of the beautiful arts is that they set … propositions of reason in their full glory and powerfully support them” (1902-, 25:33).
- 40.
In addition to the fellow contributors to this volume (including its editors), I would like thank the participants in a conference on “Philosophy of Religion: Eastern and Western Contexts” hosted by the Centre for Sino-Christian Studies in Hong Kong, and audiences at Princeton Theological Seminary, Calvin College, and the 2015 conference in honor of Marilyn McCord Adams at Georgetown University. For discussion of this more recent “untimely” version, I’m grateful to Keith DeRose, Brendan Kolb, Leigh Vicens, Lauren Winner, Nicholas Wolterstorff, and members of the Princeton Project in Philosophy and Religion reading group.
References
Adams MM (1999) Horrendous evils and the goodness of god. Cornell University Press, Ithaca
Adams MM (2006) Christ and horrors. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge
Adams MM (2008) Opening to god: childlike prayers for adults. Westminster John Knox Press, Louisville
Adler J (2006) Belief’s own ethics. Bradford Books, Cambridge
Alston WP (1996) Belief, acceptance, and religious faith. In: Howard-Snyder D, Jordan J (eds) Freedom and rationality. Rowman & Littlfield, Lanham, pp 3–27
Audi R (2008) Belief, faith, and acceptance. Int J Philos Relig 63(1–3):87–102
Audi R (2019) Faith, belief, and will: toward a volitional stance theory of faith. Sophia 58:409–422
Bell C (1992) Ritual theory, ritual practice. Oxford University Press, New York
Bell C (1997) Ritual: perspectives and dimensions. Oxford University Press, New York
Benson BE (2013) Liturgy as a way of life. Baker Academic, Ada
Bolinger RJ (2020) The rational impermissibility of accepting (some) racial generalizations. Synthese 197:2415–2431
Bratman M (1992) Practical reasoning and acceptance in a context. Mind 101:1–15
Buchak L (forthcoming) Reason and faith. In: Abraham W, Aquino F (eds) The Oxford handbook of the epistemology of theology. Oxford University Press, New York
Carlisle C (2013) Theologies of habit: from hexis to plasticity. Body Soc 19(2–3):30–57
Chignell A (2002) Epistemology for saints: Plantinga’s magnum opus. Books & Culture March/April. Carol Stream, IL: CTI Publishers. https://www.booksandculture.com/articles/2002/marapr/10.20.html
Chignell A (2007) Belief in Kant. Philos Rev 116(3):323–360
Chignell A (2009) ‘As Kant has shown…’: analytic theology and the critical philosophy. In: Rea M, Crisp O (eds) Analytic theology. Oxford University Press, New York, pp 116–135
Chignell A (2013) Prolegomena to any future non-doxastic religion. Relig Stud 49(2):195–207
Chignell A (2014) Rational hope, possibility, and divine action. In: Michalson G (ed) Cambridge critical guide to Kant’s ‘Religion within the bounds of mere reason’. Cambridge University Press, New York, pp 98–117
Chignell A (2018) The ethics of belief. In: Zalta E (ed) Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy (Spring 2018 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL: https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2018/entries/ethics-belief/
Chignell A, Pereboom D (2020) Natural theology and natural religion. In: Zalta E (ed) Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy (Summer 2020 edition). URL: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/natural-theology/
Clifford WK (1999) The ethics of belief. In: Madigan TJ (ed) The ethics of belief and other essays. Prometheus Books, Amherst
Cohen LJ (1992) An essay on belief and acceptance. Clarendon Press, Oxford
Collins S (1990) What are Buddhists doing when they deny the self? In: Reynolds F, Tracy D (eds) Religion and practical reason. SUNY Press, Albany, ch. 2
Cuneo T (2016) Ritualized faith. Oxford University Press, New York
DeRose K (2018) Delusions of knowledge concerning God’s existence. In: Benton M, Hawthorne J, Rabinowitz D (eds) Knowledge, belief, and god: new insights in religious epistemology. Oxford University Press, New York, pp 288–301
Feldman R (2002) The ethics of ebelief. In: Feldman R, Conee E (eds) Evidentialism. Oxford University Press, New York
Firestone C, Palmquist S (2006) Kant and the new philosophy of religion. Indiana University Press, Bloomington
Ginet C (2001) Deciding to believe. In: Steup M (ed) Knowledge, truth and duty. Oxford University Press, New York, pp 63–77
Griffiths P (1990) Denaturalizing discourse: Abhidharmikas, propositionalists, and the comparative philosophy of religion. In: Reynolds F, Tracy D (eds) Myth and philosophy. SUNY Press, Albany. ch. 3
Hieronymi P (2008) Responsibility for believing. Synthese 161:357–373
Howard-Snyder D (2013) Propositional faith: what it is and what it is not. Am Philos Q 50(4):357–372
James W (1890) Principles of psychology. Harvard University Press, Cambridge
James W (1956) The will to believe and other essays. Dover, New York
Johnston M (2011) Saving god: religion after idolatry. Princeton University Press, Princeton
Johnston M (2019) Is Hope for another life rational? In: Draper P (ed) Current controversies in philosophy of religion. Routledge, New York, pp 47–68
Kant I (1902-present) Gesammelte Schriften. Walter de Gruyter, Berlin
Kolb B, Chignell A (2020) Modern philosophy: 1600–1800. In: Goetz C, Taliaferro C (eds) Encyclopedia of the philosophy of religion. Wiley-Blackwell, New York
Kvanvig J (2014) The idea of faith as trust: lessons in non-cognitivist approaches to faith. In: Bergmann M, Brower JE (eds) Reason and faith: themes from Richard Swinburne. Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp 4–25
Luhrmann T (2012) When god talks back: understanding the American evangelical relationship with god. Knopf Publishing, New York
Mackie JL (1983) The miracle of theism. Oxford University Press, Oxford
Malcolm F, Scott M (2017) Faith, belief and fictionalism. Pac Philos Q 98:257–274
McKaughan D (2013) Authentic faith and acknowledged risk: dissolving the problem of faith and reason. Relig Stud 409:101–124
Moltmann J (1964) Theologie der Hoffnung. Kaiser Verlag, Munich
Muyskens J (1979) The sufficiency of hope. Temple University Press, Philadelphia
Pace M, McKaughan D (draft) Christian faith as trust and loyalty
Page M (2017) The posture of faith. Oxf Stud Philos Relig 8. https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198806967.001.0001
Pereboom D (2002) Living without free will. Cambridge University Press, New York
Pettit P (1998) Practical belief and philosophical theory. Australas J Philos 76(1):15–33
Pickstock C (1998) After writing: on the liturgical consummation of philosophy. Wiley-Blackwell, Oxford
Scott M (2017) Religious assertion. Oxf Stud Philos Relig 8. https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198806967.003.0012
Setiya K (2008) Believing at will. Midwest Stud Philos 32(1):36–52
Smith JKA (2009–2017) Cultural liturgies trilogy: desiring the kingdom, imagining the kingdom, awaiting the king. Baker Academic, Ada
Stalnaker R (1984) Inquiry. Bradford Book, Cambridge
Stocker M (1982) Responsibility especially for beliefs. Mind 91(363):398–417
Ullman-Margalit E, Margalit A (1992) Holding true and holding as true. Synthese 92:167–187
Weatherson B (2008) Deontology and Descartes’ demon. J Philos 105:540–569
Wolterstorff N (2015) Would you stomp on a picture of your mother? Would you kiss an icon? Faith Philos 32(1):3–24
Wolterstorff N (2018) Acting liturgically: philosophical reflections on religious practice. Oxford University Press, Oxford
Wood A (2002) Unsettling obligations. CSLI Press, Stanford
Wood A (2020) Kant and religion. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge
Wynn M (2011) Taking the appearances seriously: architectural experience and the phenomenological case for religious belief. Relig Stud 47:331–344
Wynn M (2013) Renewing the senses: a study of the philosophy and theology of the spiritual life. Oxford University Press, Oxford
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2021 Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Chignell, A. (2021). Liturgical Philosophy of Religion: An Untimely Manifesto about Sincerity, Acceptance, and Hope. In: Eckel, M.D., Speight, C.A., DuJardin, T. (eds) The Future of the Philosophy of Religion. Boston Studies in Philosophy, Religion and Public Life, vol 8. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44606-2_6
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44606-2_6
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-44605-5
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-44606-2
eBook Packages: Religion and PhilosophyPhilosophy and Religion (R0)