beyond wishful thinking 49What religion is, or has been
In addressing the major spiritual orientations to have emerged over the
last two and half millenniums and in presenting a view of what can and
should succeed them, I use the contested concept of religion.
We in the West today are accustomed to defi ne religion having in
mind chiefl y the Near Eastern religions of salvation: Judaism, Christi-
anity, and Islam. Such a view organizes the concept of religion around
the idea of a transcendent and interventionist God and the truth re-
vealed by him to humanity. It disregards the objections that have led
some students of two of these religions— Judaism and Islam— to reject
the term religion altogether.
It also excludes two of the three major orientations that have repre-
sented, for about two thousand years, the chief spiritual alternatives
available to humanity. It fails to include the overcoming of the world
insofar as this approach to existence rejects, as the example of Bud-
dhism shows, the notion of a personal deity. It does not apply to the
humanization of the world to the extent that, as the example of Confu-
cianism suggests, this response to our circumstance puts a this- worldly
spiritualization and moralization of social relations in the place of a
partnership between human will and divine grace.
I call all three approaches to existence that I explore here, as well as
the spiritual and intellectual movements that have represented and de-
veloped them, the world religions, the religions of transcendence, or
the higher religions. I treat the Semitic mono the isms or salvation reli-
gions as the original and most infl uential form of one of these ap-
proaches: the struggle with the world. Th is usage requires elucidation
and defense of the disputed concept of religion.
In contemporary religious studies, the idea of religion lies under a
cloud of suspicion. In a move characteristic of the situation of social
and historical thought today, this idea is criticized as a historical con-
struction, and a relatively recent one at that. Th e construction is oft en
said to be modeled on Protestant Christianity and to suff er the infl u-
ence of Protestant beliefs about the actual or desirable relation of Chris-
tian faith to the rest of social life. Such beliefs fi rst won infl uence in
early modern Eu rope. Th e word religion gained broad currency, as a