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Who gets to say what a religion is, and why do “World Religions” classes so often fail in their approach to Christian Faith? Joe Heschmeyer, author of The Early Church Was the Catholic Church, explores the politics around the word “religion.”
Cy Kellett:
Why modern definitions of religion get Christianity wrong. Joe Heschmeyer is next.
Cy Kellett:
Hello and welcome to Focus, the Catholic Answer’s podcast for living, understanding and defending your Catholic faith. I’m Cy Kellett your host and one of the things we might have to defend our Catholic faith against is the average ordinary everyday university world religions course. It’s in those world religions courses that people are getting the wrong idea in many cases about Catholicism as a religion. We talked to Joe Heschmeyer about how to define religion and what to do about the loss of faith that sometimes comes with the idea of world religions. Here’s what Joe had to say.
Cy Kellett:
Joe Heschmeyer, author of The Early Church was the Catholic Church, thank you for being here with us.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Great to be here, Cy.
Cy Kellett:
It is often said that Christianity is one of the world religions.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Yeah. And that’s a complicated question and a complicated claim, even what we mean by world religions.
Cy Kellett:
You have a course for the Catholic Answer School of Apologetics on just this topic so we wanted to kind of get you in to ask you about the concept of religion, really.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Yeah. It turns out it’s surprisingly difficult question to say, what is a world religion? Or for that matter, just what is a religion? Is agnosticism a religion? Is atheism a religion? Is Buddhism a religion? What are the defining features of a religion? It is not something people agree on and you’ll see religions included on one list that are written off on other lists as just philosophies or as rejections of religion and the like.
Cy Kellett:
Okay. It’s funny because you would think actually this would be, we talk about religion so much but I guess to me, there are many words that we use constantly that don’t have an actual shared definition.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Oh yeah. We’re currently having a whole debate about…
Cy Kellett:
What is marriage?
Joe Heschmeyer:
Transgenderism without knowing what gender men and women are.
Cy Kellett:
Right, right. What’s the essential difficulty in defining a religion?
Joe Heschmeyer:
Very broadly speaking, this is an overgeneralization on both sides. There’s kind of a saying that Western religions think Christianity, Islam, Judaism, the Abrahamic religions but even things like Zoroastrianism, they’re worried about salvation while the Eastern religions, think Buddhism, Hinduism, Sikhism, Jainism, the like, they’re worried about enlightenment. That is an overgeneralization in both directions but they’re often asking different questions. There’s something true about that. Some of them are more explicitly psychological. Some of them are more explicitly focused on an exterior help and our focused more on what we would normally think of as theology. Questions of who is God? What’s he like? What’s his plan for us? Whereas some of the Eastern religions are just silent on that question. Theravada Buddhism is the most famous example of this. It has nothing to say on the question of God. Confucianism is famously like this as well. There’s actually a story about this, where someone went to Confucius, Jilu, asked about men’s duties to spirits and Confucius responds just by saying, “Before we’re able to do our duty by the living, how can we do it by the spirits of the dead?” He’s just saying…
Cy Kellett:
That’s not my question.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Let’s not even ask that question. It’s above my pay grade. And so that seems almost an intentionally, I’m not going to ask religious questions kind of thing. Confucianism still gets grouped as a religion sometimes.
Cy Kellett:
All right. I don’t know the history of the East as well as the West so I can’t ask this question in reverse but it seems to be you that when you make that classification, well that means that the things that we’re calling Eastern religions just in the West that would be stoicism, that would be hedonism. We would call those philosophies in the West.
Joe Heschmeyer:
That’s exactly.
Cy Kellett:
We have them.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Certainly in the west, we have these two parallel tracks. You see this, especially in Greek society. Greek before the time of Christ, you’ve very clearly got theologians and people doing mythology telling these religious stories. It’s not totally clear how much they believe their stories but they’re telling religious stories that have a moral and are about the gods or whatever. And then you have people doing philosophy, even Aristotle, Socrates, Plato. All of those things. And so certainly if you were to take the Eastern religions, if you were to drop the Buddha or drop Confucius, drop Laozi or any of these people into the West, they would probably be more naturally comfortable in dialogue with someone like Socrates and Aristotle than they would with the people telling the religious stories.
Cy Kellett:
Right. And it seems to me that the Western religions let’s just take the Abrahamic religions are more if they went East, they might be more comfortable. No, I don’t know about this. I don’t want to make too many one to one because it’s not that simple a story in other words.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Yeah. It does get more complicated because there’s also folk religion on the ground. It takes something like Taoism.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah. That’s what I was saying.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Taoism has this whole philosophy for sure, that doesn’t make any explicit claims about God at all. It’s about the Tao, the way. And to the extent that it says anything chapter two seems to describe God as being derived from the Tao or the Gods coming from the Tao rather than the other way around. Now, the Tao, the way, the structure of the universe is even above God. But then you have folk Taoism where it’s very much combined with belief in spirits and demons and there are gods.
Cy Kellett:
And ancestors.
Joe Heschmeyer:
And Laozi, exactly. The three great ancestors. And so they offer worship. And so one of the questions, even among scholars of Taoism is how much are these just two different things? Because a lot of people are philosophically Taoist and also religiously Taoist. Are those two different belief systems that overlap? Or are they two expressions of the same system? Because it seems like you could extract one from the other. A lot of Westerners can dabble in the philosophical aspects of these Eastern religions without endorsing religious claims. There’s a phrase JewBu which refers to Jewish Buddhists and it’s people who are ethnically, culturally, maybe even in some ways religiously Jewish who also dabble in Buddhist practices without taking any kind of Jewish religious theological view, metaphysics, that sort of thing. They’re trying to have one foot in each world. There’s enough people kind of playing that game that there’s a term for it.
Cy Kellett:
How much of that is connected to the idea that Buddhism, like many other things you mentioned is interested in enlightenment? Which is really a practical concern. Whereas salvation is not so much a practical concern as one that involves a proper relationship with whoever’s going to be saving you. If you’re looking for salvation, you’re going to need a savior. But the search for enlightenment is practical in the sense that it’s rooted in practices. Buddhist practice is Buddhism.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Yeah. There’s a real sense of that. One of the ways you can kind of tell different school rules of Buddhism is how they act, what they do more than just what they believe. When you really get into the differences between Theravada and Mahayana and Tibetan Buddhism is even its own kind of things. Zen Buddhism is a subset in Mahayana but they’re doing very different thing., whether you’re doing chants and reciting the same thing or whether you’re dealing with like a Zen Koan or whether you have a big monastic tradition. These are all these radically different expressions that they’re looking for enlightenment in these very different ways. There’s kind of an umbrella category where they’re trying to follow these things laid out by Buddha but they’re doing them in different ways. But you see, like you said, the differences in practice more than in a difference in something like theology. There’s an interesting analog in the West though.
Cy Kellett:
I just want to make the connection there.
Joe Heschmeyer:
please.
Cy Kellett:
That I was trying to make that if Buddhism is primarily about practice, then a Jew can practice Buddhism in a certain sense without giving up being a Jew.
Joe Heschmeyer:
It’s kind of the yoga question. Yoga is this in Hinduism, Tai Chi is this Taoism where you have this whole set of exercises and these physical practices that clear the mind and they’re supposed to help enlightenment. And then it becomes a question of how much am I buying onto specifically religious claims when I do these things? And how much can I just extract them? Because when you do good exercises, it does kind of clear the mind.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah. Right. And that could be very helpful for anyone to know.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Yeah. I think the question, I’m not going to give an answer to, can someone be a faithful Jew and practice these Buddhist practices? Because that would involve me giving an opinion on these really intimate aspects of what it means to be a Jew, what it means to be a Buddhist and kind of what the significance are of these practices. And those are all questions that you’re going to find massive disagreement on.
Cy Kellett:
But there’s at least the possibility.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Yes, absolutely.
Cy Kellett:
That there are not two competing theologies here and without a theology do you have a religion? Or do you have something else? And so it just seems to me that the complications just multiply the more we try to say what a religion is. We haven’t even talked about God. Is a religion related to God? Or is a religion not related to God? Because if it’s related to God, then clearly Buddhism for the most part is not a religion.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Yeah. It might be adjacent to religion. It might have some religions implications. But it’s not itself a religion. In fact, a lot of Eastern religions are going to have that problem.
Cy Kellett:
But if religion is not related to God necessarily but is related to the human impulse to worship, then you might say, communism is a religion. Look, let’s cut through it all and just say, what does Joe Heschmeyer say? We can multiply the problems or I can just ask you how do you define a religion?
Joe Heschmeyer:
I’m going to step back from answering that just for a second, just to say, here’s what some brighter minds than I have come up with and then kind of explain where I’ve come to kind of with that. Just to kind of show my work. Aquinas quotes Cicero. Now Aquinas is clearly writing from a Western perspective on religion, so is Cicero and their definition is that religion consists in offering service and ceremonial rights to a superior nature that men call divine. There’s two aspects are worth noting, first it’s explicitly connected with the question of God but then second, it’s not just what do I happen to believe about God? It’s an actual lived thing. It’s not enough to just sit at home and say, “Oh, there’s probably a God.” That real religion has to act. You’re offering sacrifice. You’re offering service. You’re doing something in response and in relation to God. That’s Aquinas’, I think that’s really good.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Our own Jimmy Akin, he gives a similar definition. He says, “Religion is a system of belief about the divine and or the afterlife.” He’s trying to include some aspects of Eastern religious questions because they’ll be looking at aspects of divinity or aspects of the afterlife. And he’s got that and or there.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Émile Durkheim, the sociologist, he gives a definition that even kind of splits the difference. His is very broad though. He says, “A religion is a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things. That is to say, things set apart and surrounded by prohibitions, beliefs and practices that unite its adherence in a single moral community called the church.”
Cy Kellett:
wow.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Now you can see again, he’s certainly writing from a Western perspective but he’s including beliefs and practices. He’s very much not in the camp that the question, do I believe in God or not? Religion is something much, much bigger than that?
Cy Kellett:
No, that sounds like a sociologist defining religion.
Joe Heschmeyer:
It does sound like that.
Cy Kellett:
Which is what Durkheim is but it sounds very sociological and it does seem like a religious person would have a different definition of religion than an nonreligious person.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Oh yeah, absolutely. Durkheim’s going to say, “It’s a whole formed of parts, a more or less complex system of myths, dogmas, rights and ceremonies.” And again, that’s certainly kind of an outside observer kind of looking in saying, “What do I find in common between all of these things that we’re calling religions?” Those are all kind of attempts to do it. I actually like the way Vatican II and Rabbi Abraham Heschel approached the question, which is not defining.
Cy Kellett:
Did they work together on this?
Joe Heschmeyer:
no.
Cy Kellett:
Vatican II and Rabbi Heschel?
Joe Heschmeyer:
We’re going to give more conspiracy theories.
Cy Kellett:
It sounded like, the way you said it, it sounded like the two of them sat down together, Vatican II and Rabbi Heschel.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Rabbi Heschel just says, “Religion is an answer to man’s ultimate questions.” I think that’s a great definition.
Cy Kellett:
That is really brilliant. That’s insightful. Religion is an answer to man’s ultimate questions.
Joe Heschmeyer:
And Vatican II and Nostra aetate say, “Men expect from various religions, answers to the unsolved rids of the human condition.” And then it gives a bunch of examples of the kinds of questions people ask that are religious questions. What’s the aim of life? What’s the moral good? What’s sin? But I think they’re just giving a lot more words to give Rabbi Heschel’s kind of definition. That religion is about the unsolved riddles of the human condition or man’s ultimate questions and I that’s where I end up. That if you are exploring the big, the first thing so to speak, you’re exploring religious questions.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah. It is a very modern description though because modern people are always concerned with me, me, me. That’s what we are. It’s this turn to the interior. And so he’s essentially defining religion interiorly, not exteriorly.
Joe Heschmeyer:
That’s a fair point. Whereas Cicero and Aquinas are going to say.
Cy Kellett:
They’re going to define it as something exterior to you.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Yeah. Yeah, yeah. It’s the rights we offer to God. And that’s a really good definition for Western religions. The Abrahamic ones, Greek ones. But it does seem to fall short of capturing the fact that there’s something like religion going on in Asia.
Cy Kellett:
Oh right, certainly. And including the making of sacrifice because you talked about service and sacrifice. Or unless I’m misremembering Cicero’s definition.
Joe Heschmeyer:
No, no, you’re right. That Cicero slash Aquinas’s definition is that it is an offering, service and ceremonial rights to a superior nature that men call divine.
Cy Kellett:
Okay. We would see that all over the East.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Yeah, we do.
Cy Kellett:
There’s plenty of that.
Joe Heschmeyer:
It’s just fascinatingly, loosely connected with the things we normally think of as religion. It’s much more just the animism or the folk religions. And then you have these more philosophical things that intersect with those. But you could kind of dispense with them. A lot of the gods people were worshiping in China, they were worshiping before Confucius and independently of Confucianism. They’re worshiping independent of Taoism and so on. Those kinds of things may influence the nature of the worship but don’t seem to capture it. They don’t seem to be the same thing as it.
Cy Kellett:
Right. The one that you are most captivated by, I have to say, I am most captivated by, but I think that really shows how modern we are is Rabbi Heschel’s very interior description, the thing that.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Yeah. Well, because I think it gets to the religion in some ways is bigger than what’s the service I owe to God? I know that sounds very strange to say but also who am I in light of who God is? Seems to be a very religious question. Think about the beginning of Fides et Ratio when John Paul II says, “Faith and reason are the two wings of the human spirit rising to God so that in contemplating God, we also come to a realization of who we are.” That that second aspect, which again, maybe is more modern in some ways, the awareness that man is searching for man, that is so closely connected with man’s search for God. And what you might call God search for man, which is the story of salvation history. That just having them be vaguer in some way that these are the ultimate questions kind of thing, gives it enough breath without getting to a Durkheimian, overly broad or overly exterior.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Because I think you’re right, that Durkheim is, this is the featherless biped problem. I don’t know if you’re familiar with this. I think it was Socrates and Diogenes. Socrates had suggested that man was a featherless biped, walks on two legs and he doesn’t have feathers. And so Diogenes plucks a chicken and says, “I present you a man.” And so Durkheim’s definition has kind of that problem that when you’re just thinking what a religion.
Cy Kellett:
I always hated Diogenes, that guy.
Joe Heschmeyer:
He would not be fun at parties. That was the least offensive thing he did, other than the chicken. But no, the problem with Durkheim’s definition is it looks at what a religion does or the story that does, that sort of thing.
Cy Kellett:
Its functional description.
Joe Heschmeyer:
But from an interior perspective, it’s going to say, “Okay, but who is it? What is it?” In the same way that I could say, “Here’s what Cy does, he’s the host, he does this, he does that.” But it doesn’t really capture who you are. It just captures what you do.
Cy Kellett:
But if I’m a death’s head wearing a Nazi stormtrooper, Nazism meets Heschel’s definition. You’d have to say Nazism is a religion. If I’m standing enraptured by Lenin giving a speech, communism meets Heschel’s definition.
Joe Heschmeyer:
And that certainly seems to be the perspective the church takes actually. In Mit Brennender Sorge, Pius XI accuses the Nazis of being pagans, of making race their God and making the state a God. That it really is.
Cy Kellett:
Which is very much like Roman paganism.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Yeah. And well, and there’s a fascinating conversation online between Ross Douthat from New York Times and Bill Maher and they’re debating religion.
Cy Kellett:
I’m just going to go with Ross is right.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Yes. Absolutely.
Cy Kellett:
I don’t know what they talked about but I’m going with Ross is right.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Well, you’re not wrong about this. And Douthat points out that totalitarians, it’s easy for Maher to make all this, oh, religion is so dangerous and violent. And Douthat said, “Look at the history of the 20th century. You don’t find religious people involved in these mass genocides in the same way you find these atheists.” Because what happens is these totalitarian ideologies, communism, fascism, Nazism, the like, they are competing with religion. And so someone who puts God before the state can’t comfortably be a communist, a fascist, a Nazi and so on because they’re making these rival claims to man’s highest allegiance. And so none of these religious political systems were happy with Christianity. None of them were happy with devout religion of any kind because it’s a rival claim to what they’re trying to do.
Joe Heschmeyer:
They want man’s total allegiance. They want, I’m going to tell you to do something and you’re going to do it without asking any questions. And a religion’s going to say, “No, no, no. I have another set of obligations for how I ought to live because I’ve got another source of answers to these big questions.” That I think is actually a really insightful kind of take. That understood that way, it’s not an exaggeration or a figure of speech to say, “These are operating as religions.” They are trying to give you your identity. They’re trying to answer the big question of life for you. And they’re trying to kind of shape who you are and what you do only instead of offering worship to the divine and the sense of God, the divine becomes the state.
Cy Kellett:
Okay. In today’s world, we still have ideologies, I would say ideologies, but I sometimes feel that’s too dismissive of the other person to say that. But I can’t think of a better word. But like say scientism, the kind of the ideology of the new atheists. This makes itself a competitor to Christianity because it makes absolute claims. We have scientists, really bright scientists saying very, very dumb things like, “Philosophy is dead.” Which as far as I can tell is a self contradictory statement.
Joe Heschmeyer:
It’s a philosophical claim against philosophy. It’d be like writing a whole thing about how the written word was dead.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah, exactly.
Joe Heschmeyer:
And it doesn’t really work.
Cy Kellett:
Okay. This would seem to me, then scientism would seem to be a religion or a quasi religion then but it seems to me that in the modern era, we are afflicted because we are consumerist society in a way that communists and Nazis were not, that we’re afflicted with things that attempt to replace religion, not by exciting the religious impulse but by dulling it, do you see what I’m saying?
Joe Heschmeyer:
Oh yeah. We don’t need to answer these big questions.
Cy Kellett:
Because we have Netflix. And am I worshiping the television? Or is it a simulacrum of worship that cuts me off from that part of myself that should in fact be worshiping?
Joe Heschmeyer:
Yeah. That is a very good question. Neil Postman’s, 1985 maybe book, Amusing Ourselves to Death, looks at this kind of trend. And I don’t think anyone would say it’s gotten better since 85. I don’t think we’re less tech addicted than we were in the mid 80s.
Cy Kellett:
Right. For sure not.
Joe Heschmeyer:
And I think it’s Peter Kreeft gives the example that it’s like looking at the billboards as you drive off the cliff. That it is a diversion, it is a distraction. And so people sit home on their devices, writing about how the country is falling apart and going up in flames and this is the end of the empire and all this. And it’s like there’s something performatively just incoherent about this, that you’re just comfortably sitting back and saying, “Everything is burning. Just fiddle.” But that it is that question that, how much is this just a diversion? How much is this just a distraction to not ask those bigger questions? That’s aided, so you’ve got that aspect but then you have this other thing, Rawls is the most famous kind of adherent of this that we should just leave those big questions alone, basically. Ah, just don’t ask them. And very much in favor of this kind of comfortable modernity.
Cy Kellett:
Be practical.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Yeah. Yeah. Have a Sprite, go buy some McDonald’s don’t ask any big questions.
Cy Kellett:
And don’t violate anybody else’s rights.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Yeah, exactly. Don’t ask where those rights come from.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah. Don’t bother asking where the rights come. You know. You can intimate what they are.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Yeah, exactly.
Cy Kellett:
Okay. All of this is important to me as a Christian and I want to pause and if this goes in a direction that you would not want to go in this conversation, you can direct me otherwise. But it seems to me that we have this idea of world religions now. And that that idea is often actually employed in the service of denying Christ and his church. Do you feel that?
Joe Heschmeyer:
Yeah. I think there’s a couple things there. One is, Christianity is a faith and these others are not. That from a Christian understanding.
Cy Kellett:
Judaism is a faith.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Well, yeah. But I guess in the sense that it is divinely revealed and it takes grace to accept it. Then those aspects of Judaism meet the definition of faith. But Buddhism in the like do not.
Cy Kellett:
It’s not a faith, no.
Joe Heschmeyer:
You don’t need theological grace to accept Buddhism. Faith is a gift from God. And so I hate it when people refer to these things as other faiths because they’re not. They are other religions.
Cy Kellett:
Okay, that’s interesting.
Joe Heschmeyer:
And so in that sense, depending on, they are rival answers to the question, so sure, they’re other religions in that sense. The problem with something like world religion, and look, I taught a world religions course or comparative religions, is that again, as Peter Kreeft said, “Comparative religion tends to make you comparatively religious.” Because it can easily become kind of an implicit refutation of the idea that one religion is actually right. And because of the way it’s being treated, the questions are not, well, which one is right? The question are, what makes them similar? What makes them different? And it much more resembles the Durkheimian look. Well, what are these? It’d be like, if I said, “I’m going to have like a class that just says what’s Catholic Answers Live doing? What are these other Protestant or atheist or fill in the blank shows doing? And we just analyze the aspects of the show.” Without ever asking, is one of them right?
Cy Kellett:
They all talk about big questions. Exactly. But actually even giving the implication. I feel like at a public university today that you could go to the religious studies department and fully funded by government money in a country that is supposed to have a clear distinction between church and state, be taught essentially that the church is not God’s sacred possession. The church is just another one of these ways of doing this thing that people do called religion.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Yeah. And this is, I know I’ve said this multiple times but always bears repeating, that there is a natural virtual religion. And so world religions, there’s something I even want to say good about that in that human beings are reaching out for God. There’s some recognition that I need to be asking these big questions and I need to do something in response to it. As Cicero and Aquinas would point out. That it’s not enough just to ask the question, then you got to do something. That’s already head and shoulders above of the person who, whether they call themselves Christian or not, doesn’t seriously concern themselves with life’s bigger questions. That part, we can say all that is very good. What makes Christianity and like you said, Judaism, unique is that it’s God revealing himself to man. That is not the Tower of Babel, us reaching up to God. It’s Pentecost, him coming down to us. It’s the incarnation. Him revealing.
Joe Heschmeyer:
It’s God’s entrance into history, not here’s our best guess. And the problem with comparative religions, the problem with world religions is it’s very, very, very difficult to avoid saying, “Well, here’s Buddha’s best guess, here’s Confucius’ best guess, here’s Muhammad’s best guess here’s Jesus’ best guess. Or here’s St Paul’s best guess or here’s the Pope’s best guess.” And no, that’s not right. You can’t put those on the same playing field. It doesn’t work like that. That one of them actually is revealing what he sees because he is both fully God and fully man, he enjoys the beatific vision. He is the second person in the Trinity. When he says this, he’s not just guessing, he’s not even relaying a dream or a vision that he had. He’s just telling you reality. That’s a very different thing.
Cy Kellett:
And your response to him is your response to God. Your response to him is your response to reality in a way that your response to the Buddha, as magnificent as he is, is not a response to God and fundamental reality.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Yeah. Imagine if you did a comparative class where you looked at all of the different test answers and one of them is just the teacher’s answer key but you just treated it as one more admission, one more test and say, “Well, you got C for number seven but most of the class got B.” Well, most of the class is wrong then. Because this is answer key.
Cy Kellett:
Because this is the answer.
Joe Heschmeyer:
And that’s what can easily be lost. It’s very difficult. And I experience this in teaching even at a Catholic school. It’s very difficult to present these things in a way that is at one and the same time, fair to the other religions and say, “Here’s what they do.” And just trying to understand them before we evaluate them. Because I think that’s important.
Cy Kellett:
That is.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Without falling into any kind of relativism, without falling into any kind of even implicit, someone could walk away thinking, I think all of them are the same. And so, it’s something I think people taking the classes or certainly teaching the classes have to be mindful of. That yes, there are other religions and in one sense, Christianity absolutely is a religion. James will tell you, “Pure religion.” Taking care of widows and orphans. We own the fact that we’re a religion. But we are more than that. We’re a faith because, and the whole reason I stress that is faith is given by God. And the nature of revelation is that it’s God’s self unveiling. Which makes it different and kind from other people’s best guesses about the nature of reality, even though many of those best guesses are brilliant. Even though we can actually learn a lot from many of those best guesses because there are people who were very legitimately insightful and who often really captured something about the human condition.
Cy Kellett:
Confucius is certainly among those. A great, wonderful, insightful person.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Laozi is again, there’s some question if he actually existed. But certainly the Tao Te Ching it’s brilliant and there are these aspects where you’re just sort of like, oh, that’s such a beautiful way of capturing this part of my life. Maybe I’d never really noticed, maybe I fill my cup to overflowing and it’s not actually making me happy. Those kinds of things. There it’s something we can actually learn from that a lot in the West without saying it’s divinely revealed or without saying it’s everything right. You can take a much more, take the roses, remove the thorns kind of approach but you have to treat it different kind from what Christianity is.
Cy Kellett:
What you’re saying about religion reminds me a great deal of Walker Percy’s critique of Arnold Toynbee’s world history. Where he says, “Toynbee essentially gets all of world history right, it’s in a compact form, except the Jews, because he tries to explain the Jews as another instance of things that happen.” And Percy says, “That’s a fundamental misunderstanding of human history. If you get the Jews wrong, you get all of history wrong because what happened to the Jews didn’t happen to anybody else. Isn’t like what happened to anyone else and so.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Where are the Philistines today?
Cy Kellett:
Yeah. That’s right. As Percy said, “Why don’t I see any Hittites on the streets of New York City?” And then certainly then the coming of the Messiah, the coming of the Jewish Messiah. The salvation comes from the Jews, that this is categorically different from every other historical event is the key to understanding history. And we deny it and act as if we’re neutral when we deny it.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Chesterton made a very similar critique of Toynbee in Everlasting Man. And he gives a brilliant comparison. He says, “Man is an animal but he’s a very unusual animal. Christ is a man but he is a very unusual man.”
Cy Kellett:
Isn’t that beautiful? That’s well done. Because if you stop noticing the difference between man and every other animal, you are outside of reality. you
Joe Heschmeyer:
Giraffes aren’t asking this question, you are, something is different.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah. And if you stop noticing the difference between Christ and every other one of us, then you are making a fundamental error.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Exactly.
Cy Kellett:
About what’s real.
Joe Heschmeyer:
That there really is something in common, there really is something different and we need to respect and recognize both of those things.
Cy Kellett:
Wonderfully said. Did I take you in a direction you didn’t want to go?
Joe Heschmeyer:
No, I’m happy to go that direction because Christianity is a religion but it’s a very unusual religion. And it’s very unusual because it’s getting information from God. And one of the things, I’d just say, the brilliant thing about many world religions is that they have these kind of aha moments about the nature of reality. The brilliant thing about Christianity is they have these aha moments we could never come to on our own. No one on their own steam is getting the mystery of the Trinity. It never happened. Never would happen. But then when you actually hear it, you’re like, ah, that actually that answers some things, that explains some things. God, as a triune relationship of love, it makes some sense.
Joe Heschmeyer:
It has an explanatory power and yet it’s not the kind of thing we would ever reason to. And I would point to the fact that no other religion has anything comparable. There’s no other religion that has anything near that. Christ fully God and fully man. These things that a lot of people from the outside or even some Christians say, “Oh that’s too neat by half.” No, no. These are the parts that just don’t appear to be human authored. These are the parts that aren’t just the kind of things a keen observer of human nature would pick up on. But rather is revealing something very deep about the nature of reality that wasn’t accessible to us by our own strength.
Cy Kellett:
In your teaching of the course on world religions, in the school of apologetics and just in your approach, if I were to kind of crystallize what I hear from you, it’s that it’s very worthwhile to study world religions, do so from a position of faith, not from a position of neutrality.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Exactly. In the course, I try to do a couple things. One, I want people to be a little more informed, partly just so that people are more comfortable with it. Partly because I think they’re also really interesting. Occasionally have real insights that we should probably chew on. Probably, oh this great thinker, whether you call them a philosopher, religious leader, whatever they are, they may have something to offer us that we in humility can receive. But then also what are some good questions to ask? How can I maybe engage if I meet someone at a party and they say they’re a Buddhist, what are the questions I should ask? And what are some ways I should maybe press them to maybe open the door a little more to Christ. Those are the two kind of aspects of what I’m trying to do in the course of what can we learn from them? And what can we maybe offer them? Or what are good questions to lead the conversation in a good direction?
Cy Kellett:
Joe, thank you very much.
Joe Heschmeyer:
My pleasure.
Cy Kellett:
I appreciate it. That’s a hard problem, that religion problem.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Yeah. It turns out.
Cy Kellett:
All right. Well, thanks. I really appreciate it, Joe.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Absolutely.
Cy Kellett:
Actually, quite a bit of work that is done in the academic environment since the 19th century, some even before, is very critical, even a challenge to the Christian faith. Sometimes intentionally, not always intentionally, sometimes unintentionally, but we got to be critical of the critics because we can easily miss a very, very important truth, which is the Jewish people are not just another people among the peoples of the world. And Jesus is not just another guy among the people of the world. Something special happened to the Jewish people. God revealed himself to them. They are not an instance of this or that phenomenon. They are special because they were called out by God himself. And of course, Jesus is special because he’s God come among us. The proper response to all of that is religion. We do need to have a religious response to all of that but also faith. And that faith response gives us the eyes through which to see more clearly the good and sometimes the not so good in other world religions.
Cy Kellett:
Hey, if you really like what Joe Heschmeyer does, you can get his course at the School of Apologetics. That’s at schoolofapologetics.com, schoolofapologetics.com. The course is called World Religions: A Snapshot, and they almost always have a deal on it. Check it out at schoolofapologetics.com. If you want to communicate with us, hey, you can always send us an email, focus@catholic.com is our email address. If you’re listening on one of the podcast services, Spotify, Stitcher, Apple Podcast, whatever, if you wouldn’t mind, give us that five star review and maybe a couple nice words, that’ll help to grow the podcast. And if you subscribe, then you’ll be updated when new episodes are available. If you’re watching on YouTube, thanks for watching on YouTube. We’re trying to grow there. Maybe let other people know about it. Hit that little bell so you’re notified when new episodes are available. I’m Cy Kellett your host. Thanks for being with us. We’ll see you next time, God willing right here on Catholic Answers Focus.