Introduction

This book began life as a chapter in a projected monograph on critical realism and religious education. The contemporary practice of religious education in the UK tends to occlude questions of realistic truth: Do the generic truth claims of religion in general, or of the truth claims of specific religious traditions in particular, enjoy any epistemic purchase on the ultimate ontological order-of-things? Or do any of the alternative secular accounts of ultimate reality provide us with a more comprehensive, powerful and truthful explanatory model? The reasons for the occlusion of such questions are not difficult to identify: the Enlightenment’s rejection of the epistemic warrant of religious truth claims reduced religious belief to a private affair predicated on an irrational or post-rational leap of faith that precluded informed debate in the public sphere. This, coupled with the Enlightenment’s cultivation of the twin liberal values of freedom of belief and tolerance of the beliefs of others, made a realistically oriented religious education vulnerable to the charge of indoctrination. In some quarters the subject was seen as an agent of Christian confessionalism, striving to impose a set of ideological beliefs upon pupils in a closed and distinctly uncritical manner. The 1970s saw a fundamental paradigm shift in the theory and practice of religious education in state-funded schools in the UK. An open multi-faith approach was adopted, which sought to attend to a range of different religious and secular belief systems without bias or prejudice. In this new situation the charge of indoctrination was avoided by presenting pupils with neutral descriptions of the truth claims of various religious traditions in a manner that tended to avoid discussion of their veracity. As a result, contemporary religious education often leaves pupils free to express their own beliefs and opinions, provided that in doing so they acknowledge and tolerate the beliefs and opinions of others. The frequent absence of any sustained attempt to employ judgemental rationality to critically assess the various ontologically incommensurable truth claims presented in the religious education classroom means that in many instances religious education functions as an instrument for the transmission of liberal ideology, in which an uncritical freedom of expression equates with a thoroughgoing epistemic relativism: ‘You are free to believe whatever you like, regardless of its epistemic warrant and ontological veracity, provided that in doing so you respect and acknowledge the freedom of others to do likewise.’ The problem

with this ideological representation of religions is threefold: first, it ignores critical ontological questions of truth and truthful living; second, it imposes a premature and unwarranted epistemic closure by treating all beliefs as equally valid; and third, it perpetuates a widespread religious, spiritual and theological illiteracy among religious believers, secular sceptics, and interested/disinterested agnostics alike. Since the mid-1990s I have worked closely with colleagues in the Centre for Theology, Religions and Education, located in the Department of Education and Professional Studies at King’s College London, to develop a model of ‘critical religious education’ that employs critical realism in an under-labouring role. It draws on critical realism’s triumvirate of ontological realism, epistemic relativism and judgemental rationality in a manner designed to: (1) place questions of truth and truthful living at the heart of contemporary religious education (ontological realism); (2) recognize the contested nature of religious and secular accounts of the ultimate-order-of-things (epistemic relativism); and (3) promote appropriate levels of religious, spiritual and theological literacy (judgemental rationality). The projected book, which will be published in Routledge’s New Studies in Critical Realism and Spirituality series as The Spiritual Turn in Critical Realism: Critical Religious Education and Spiritual Literacy, set out to provide a fuller account of the relationship between critical religious education and critical realism than had hitherto been possible in my previous publications. The so-called ‘spiritual turn’ in critical realism, which we will consider in detail in the first part of the current book, made it clear that the internal logic of critical realism opens up, and indeed demands, rational engagement with religious and secular questions about ultimate truth and the ultimate order-of-things. The hermeneutical circle between parts and the whole requires that the interpreter makes sense of the parts of a text in the light of the text as a whole, and of the whole of the text in the light of its individual parts, in an ongoing interpretative dialectic. By extension, in seeking to make sense of reality the critical realist strives to understand the parts in terms of the whole, and the whole in terms of its constituent parts. This necessitates attempts to explain the ultimate nature of the totality of reality, regardless of whether the proffered explanations are religious/theological or secular/naturalistic. In acknowledging the intellectual imperative to attempt to make sense of the totality of experiences, objects/events and causal mechanisms, the spiritual turn in critical realism resonates strongly with the largely independent tradition of theological critical realism generated and nurtured by Christian theologians since the late 1950s. In the chapter in the projected monograph from which this current book emerged, I set out to use Christianity as a case study of the way in which critical realism might underlabour for a form of critical religious education committed to the pursuit of truth and truthful living through the cultivation of religious, spiritual and theological literacy. However, as I began to draft the chapter it quickly became clear that what had, on the surface, promised to be a relatively simple exercise was in actual fact replete with problems – the major one being the relative paucity of intellectual

engagement between critical realism and Christian theology. With the notable exception of the work of my colleague Alister McGrath, Christian theologians, despite having developed their own version of critical realism as a tool for theological investigation, have largely failed to engage with the work of Bhaskar and his colleagues. Where conversations have taken place, they have largely been in the specialist sphere of the interface between Christian theology and the natural sciences. Prior to the publication of this book, there has been little substantial engagement between critical realism and theological critical realism with regard to: (1) the distinctive ontological claims of Christianity; (2) their epistemic warrant and intellectual legitimacy; and (3) scrutiny of the primary source of the ontological claims of Christianity, namely the historical figure of Jesus of Nazareth. This failure on the part of theological critical realism is replicated in discussions of Christianity within the critical realist community. This is most clearly visible in the work of Sean Creaven, whose critique of Christianity singularly fails to engage in any viable intellectual depth with the particularities of Christian ontology and epistemology (Creaven 2010; Wright 2011). This problem is compounded by Bhaskar’s own reading of Christianity, which suggests that institutional religion tends to occlude spiritual well-being, that spiritual insight is grounded in pre-linguistic experience of transcendence rather than discursive doctrinal formulations, and that consequently Christian doctrines do not offer viable explanations of ultimate reality. This book is offered as a prolegomena to a much-needed debate, guided by the under-labouring services of critical realism, between Christianity and various other religious and secular worldviews. It is written in the conviction that for such a debate to be effective, a more substantial understanding of the ontological claims and epistemic commitments of Christianity than that currently available within critical realist circles needs to be tabled for discussion. If critical realism is correct in suggesting that we make sense of the world by developing explanatory models that we are justified in embracing until such time as they are trumped by more powerful and comprehensive models, then any evaluation of the Christian retroductive explanation of the ultimate order-of-things must necessarily be cognisant of its ontological substance and epistemic ground. One of the ongoing consequences of the Enlightenment’s occlusion of the discipline of theology as a valid academic endeavour is a tendency of critics of Christianity to assume that theological questions do not require the same level of careful academic scrutiny demanded and required in other fields of knowledge. Thus, for example, the anti-Christian polemic of Richard Dawkins is notable for its almost complete lack of engagement with academic Christian theology – a criticism which can also be laid at the feet of Sean Creaven (Dawkins 2006; McGrath and Collicutt 2007). The modern occlusion of theology is rooted in empiricist and idealist assumptions about the epistemic warrant of religious belief systems that critical realism has shown to be woefully inadequate. This being the case, any informed debate needs to engage with Christian ontology and epistemology with the same intellectual rigour and thoroughness granted any other field of intellectual endeavour.