Lazy pluralism, or lazy rationalism?

My friend Matt Bieber has posted a strongly worded (and clearly, strongly felt) critique of Harvard Divinity School on his blog. The meat of it: HDS is guilty of "lazy pluralism," which--out of desire to respect diversity, or postmodern complacency--leaves uninterrogated the potentially harmful ethical and metaphysical beliefs of its students and ministers-to-be. 

Unsurprisingly, the piece has occasioned much debate on Facebook, including a quick initial rebuttal from me. Matt's response to my  first comments, which goes line by line, can be found here. More to say than I can, in a single blog post written on a working day, but here's a  next reply, on the theme Matt keeps returning to: "Truth."

Matt, you make much of the unwillingness of HDS students to talk about truth, or at least, to do so rigorously. As I've suggested, I disagree. I think education at HDS inevitably involves many kinds of "truth-seeking" inquiries, which are pursued quite rigorously. They're simply not aimed at, nor interested in, the kind of Truth you're looking for. 

Can you say that it's hard to find classes at HDS oriented towards giving more accurate historical accounts of a given religious tradition--that is, historical truth (a contested term, to be sure)? Or sociological, or anthropological? Even psychological? How about the concern many classes have for more informed interpretation of texts--whether Scriptural, or theological? Historical, social scientific, and interpretive truth claims are made and fought over in abundance. As they should be in the academic study of religion. If that was not your experience, then I can only conclude you had a highly irregular experience of HDS.

The kind of universalizing propositional truth claims about metaphysics or ethics you seem to be looking for were, while not emphasized, also not too hard to find at HDS. In Christian theology, they fall under the category of "fundamental" or "philosophical" theology, which in its contemporary form often certainly does call the existence and nature of God into question (among other things). Their home in the broader humanities is Philosophy of Religion. There are courses in both at HDS. Frank Fiorenza and David Lamberth presently teach them, among others. 

The academic discipline of social or religious ethics, likewise, has, in some of its guises, gone in for making ethical claims of the kind you're looking for. Admittedly, it's not HDS's strong suit right now. At present, you'd probably have to go to Fr. Hehir at the Kennedy School to find someone who can play that game. 

As I've admitted, those kinds of philosophical truth--or "Truth"--inquiries aren't emphasized at HDS, nor is it expected everyone submit to them. One might ask why. As Jack Jenkins has pointed out, one reason may be because most people aren't interested. The people at HDS to receive professional ministry degrees may have already settled those questions for themselves to their satisfaction, or they may yet hold them open, but have not considered your way of pursuing them particularly relevant to their experience of their religion. And the people at HDS to prepare for a career in the academic study of religion will likely be more interested in the historical, sociological, interpretive forms of inquiry. That commitment they share with most people in the humanities and social sciences, excepting the philosophy department. If it's a fault, it's not a peculiar fault of "religious" scholarship. It's a fault of the entire modern academy.

Another reason, however, that "Truth" inquiries aren't pursued by most at HDS may be because they've proven notoriously intractable. Philosophers with incontestable virtues of rational rigor disagree profoundly on what "truth" is, and "reason" itself, for that matter. They disagree on the method of even pursuing or answering the question. Still more, accordingly, do they disagree on the particular truth content of metaphysics or ethics. (Hence there are "realists" and "anti-realists," pragmatists and "rationalists," consequentialists and deontologists). And even their degrees of difference have only grown over the last hundred years. For few professional philosophers is anything like the hubris of early analytic (or transcendental) philosophy still possible. Philosophy is too contested to be an arbiter, a priori, of what constitutes metaphysical truth or ethical validity. 

How then could anything else be? Philosophy has assumed the role, both due to its own pretensions and others' agnosticism, of focusing all of its energy on your kind of questions. And it can't answer them as a discipline (though many within it believe themselves, of course, to have answered them). How could one expect the other disciplines, fragmented as they are and with many other objectives besides that do not depend much upon those big questions, to answer them? Against that background, their disinterest is defensible.

Furthermore, as Jack Jenkins has pointed out, "difficult conversations" about theology happen all the time at HDS. I got called out repeatedly there, when my own positions were judged too narrow, too inconsistent, insufficiently historically informed, or too contingently a product of privilege, whiteness, or patriarchy. Behind each of those call outs stand a whole web of presupposed validity claims--whether historical, sociological, ethical, metaphysical, or whatever. It was admittedly a rare conversation that sought to name and unpack those presuppositions "all the way down." That, as someone trained in philosophy, was sometimes frustrating to me too. But as someone trained in philosophy, I also know how hard such foundational conversations are to have, and how long they take to pursue with genuine care and rigor--and without self-blindness. 

"Self-blindness" raises another important point. The last 100 years of our study of human beings across disciplines (including philosophy) has given us ample reason to recognize how frequently claims to reason and truth are anything but. It's therefore often more illuminating to understand them not on their own terms, but via the external means of historical, social, or natural science that give an account of why people come to believe what they do. And, to add another layer, given "science's" prestige and history of abuse, any purportedly "scientific" explanation itself now also merits a reflexive suspicion. The New Atheist figures that seem to intrigue you, with their confident proclamations of their own rationality and their spokesmanship for a monolithic "Science" that doesn't exist (and never did, save in ideology), betray a distressing degree of ignorance on this front. Their particular vantage points are loaded with debunked presuppositions to which they are totally self-blind (epistemological, historical, and political, among others). That, rather than merely their offensive unfriendliness to religion, may be why no one at HDS takes them seriously. It seems in this regard you did not learn at HDS what you might have most needed to.

I think much of HDS's own scholarship tilts strongly in the skeptical direction that has marked most humanities and some social science for the last thirty years --hence the popularity of a figure like Foucault.  In that regard, HDS looks very little like the school for Unitarian ministers founded in the early 19th Century, to which you hearken back much too easily. I would also argue, opposite yourself, that in many of the non-ministry courses, there's actually not a bias towards religious credulity at all: there's a methodological bias towards explaining religion in terms other than its own (what they are varies by discipline). Hence its not necessary to debate whether a given religion is metaphysically or ethically "true." And where those debates happen, they already happen within the web of particular, circumscribed presuppositions of a discipline or sub-discipline, not via the transcendent claims of Grand Old Rationalism. To see, articulate, and critique those presuppositions is fine--admirable and necessary, even--but it requires much more careful work than you've done here.

What's surprising to me in your critiques is the way in which you too easily conflate (as HDS sometimes does in its own messaging) the two rather distinct functions HDS serves: preparing ministers, and preparing religious scholars. Hence also, your apparent conflation of two very different possible motivations for HDS's ostensible lazy pluralism: kid-gloved respect (a la Seasons of Light) on the one hand, and scholarly skepticism towards the viability of Truth on the other (a la your professor who chortled at "Veritas"). In my experience, these aims, programs, and cultures of HDS actually sit uneasily with each other. This is one of many reasons why HDS is not the monolith you depict it to be. Though it may not have been the kind you wanted to engage in, there is much contention at HDS, of many kinds--scholarly, political, religious, and downright personal--and sometimes it breaks out quite sharply. 

Perhaps that's why certain members of HDS, particularly in the Ministry program, have tried so hard to create a culture of mutual respect and charity that feels a little "kid-gloved." It's clear it leaves many of us unsatisfied at least some of the time, and some teachers handle it with more deftness than others. But I consider it better and more humane than most alternatives I could think of. And by no means need it define the extent of one's experience at HDS, if one only makes the effort to go deeper. 

Ultimately, I read what you've written about HDS as more lament than critique. Beneath the surface, what's really going on is simple: HDS did not minister to you, personally, in the way you hoped it would. "The big questions" you urgently wanted it to answer are your own existential ones, and those it left unanswered. Hence *you* are asking why HDS exists (whereas, to many of us, why it exists is both relatively apparent and susceptible of many answers other than yours). As someone who's craved, in an earlier chapter of my own life, the kind of satisfying rational answers you seek, I know many of the feelings and frustrations you have. But I have also come to believe the quest you seem to be on is not a fruitful one. How you deal with that fact, as you absorb it, is part of what it will mean for you to accept the human condition. It's a long, and difficult, walk. But in the meantime, try to be more charitable, and more careful, than you are in this piece--as I know you're capable of being. Don't blame it on "religion," and don't blame it on "HDS."