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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 October 2008
There are good reasons for being suspicious of the very concept of ‘a religion’, let alone a ‘world religion’. It may be useful for a hospital administrator to know a patient's ‘religion’ – as Protestant or Church of England or Catholic or Buddhist – but such labels clearly do little more than identify the most suitable chaplain, and connote groupings in the vast and confusing region of ‘religious thought and practice’ that are of very different ranks. By any rational, genealogical taxonomy ‘Protestant’, ‘Anglican’, ‘Catholic’ connote species, genera or families within Christianity, which is in turn a taxon within the multivariant tradition traced back to Abraham. ‘Buddhism’ includes as many variants as would ‘Abrahamism’. Most Abrahamists, traditionally, have been theists, but it is difficult not to suspect that Marxist socialism is an atypical (and probably non-viable) variant which has inherited a linear view of time, a contest between the chosen agents of justice and the doomed powers-that-be, and the prospect of a future in which ‘there shall be no more sea’.
1 Modern biologists distinguish species (and higher taxa) not by any essential attributes but by common descent. The dodo, once extinct, will never reappear, even if birds indistinguishible from dodos someday evolve. And dogs are still dogs even though they are by now very unlike their wild ancestors. See Sober, E. ‘Evolution, population thinking and essentialism’, Philosophy of Science XLVII (1980), 350–83.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
2 Smith, W. Cantwell, Towards a World Theology (London: 1981), pp. 8ff.Google Scholar
3 Kant, I., Perpetual PeaceGoogle Scholar; Reiss, H., ed., Kant's Political Writings (Cambridge: 1970), p. 114.Google Scholar
4 Lewis, C. S., Of Other World, ed. Hooper, W. (London, Bles, 1986), pp. 59f.Google Scholar
5 Hocking, W. E., Living Religions and a World Faith (London, 1940), p. 264.Google Scholar
6 Hocking, op. cit. p. 19.
7 Toynbee, A., A Study of History vol. VII (Oxford: 1954), pp. 420–525.Google Scholar
8 Cooper, B., ‘A Imperio usque ad Imperium’, George Grant in Process, ed. Schmidt, L. (Toronto: 1978), pp. 22–39, 35.Google Scholar George Grant's thought is grievously neglected outside Canada.
9 Daniel 5.4.
10 Revelation 13.
11 Frye, N., Spiritis Mundi (Bloomington: 1976), p. 198.Google Scholar
12 See Slaterm, R. L., World Religion and World Community (New York: 1963), p. 241.Google Scholar
13 See my Civil Peace and Sacred Order (Oxford: 1989).Google Scholar
14 Hocking, op. cit. p. 234.
15 See my ‘City of the Wise’, Apeiron, XX (1987), 63–80.Google Scholar
