Sea of Faith in Australia
North Brisbane Group
NOVEMBER 2011 NOTES
Openly exploring issues of religion and faith.
Meeting of 24 October ‘Richard Holloway and Hans Kung’s Sixth Paradigm’
Scott began by outlining the ‘paradigmatic’ approach to summarising the history of science and religion by Thomas Kuhn and Hans Kung respectively. Similar approaches in other domains were raised by members. We then considered the first five paradigms in the history of religion as summarised by Holloway over the past two millennia:
1.First Century early apocalyptic
2.First to Sixth Centuries theology
3.Eleventh to Fifteenth Centuries medieval Roman Catholic
4.Sixteenth Century Protestant Reformation
5.Seventeenth to Nineteenth Centuries liberal Christianity
Members generally found these useful ‘pegs’ and made suggestions as to how these five stages are still evident in religious belief and practice in the world today. Some of the points made were:
1.Mainstream Christian denominations still teach that there will be a ‘second coming’ though most biblical scholars now say that Jesus was not himself an apocalyptic prophet.
2.The focuses of the early ‘theological era’ were issues like the relationship between Jesus and God and the doctrine of the Trinity which owe much to the Greek philosophic context; these are still mainstream issues for many.
3.The medieval Catholic era on the other hand was heavily influenced by Roman obsession with legalism power and control; institutional Christianity is still structured to retain power.
4.The leaders of the Protestant Reformation sought to avoid what they saw as the errors of Catholicism but went on to repeat many of them.
5.Like the earlier paradigms the liberal era reflects the spirit of the Age; religious change has followed social and political change though the time-lag may be great.
The hallmarks of the sixth emerging paradigm were seen as: its basis in the Scientific and Political Revolutions and the Enlightenment; religion as a human construct; claims by religions to sole legitimacy and inerrancy are untenable. While mainstream academic religious studies is a driving force in this paradigm it was acknowledged that it was strong only within some Christian Jewish and Buddhist contexts. These are mainly in communities with high levels of education and a liberal democratic political system. In Christianity even the Fifth liberal paradigm is virtually unknown in Orthodox denominations and has made little headway in many Catholic and Pentecostal contexts.
We finally considered what the future might hold for the Sixth paradigm. On this issue optimists were outnumbered by pessimists. While loose ‘movements’ like progressive Christianity and liberal Judaism would continue to thrive in more secular contexts in the near future it was felt that fundamentalist religions would always be a force.