DOCTRINE AND RELIGIOUS TRADITIONS 59someone suggests that all religions have the same content if they all agree
on some such claim as a few years of life on earth under present conditions
is not all there is or materialistic values are inadequate as a basis for
living. It plainly is worth noting that at least our four religious traditions –
and many others as well – share these themes. Claiming, as I shall, that it is
false that all religions are the same need not blind one to seeing that they
agree on some things. But none of the things that they agree on are what
the traditions themselves take to be the most important. I will argue that in
fact the things they disagree about are the most important.
Two sorts of doctrine: metaphysical (cosmos and persons)
and moral
If one looks at the accounts we have given of four religious traditions, it
is clear that they include claims about at least two sorts of matter: what
there is, or metaphysics, and what there ought to be, or ethics. I will
briefly draw out some of the metaphysical, and some of the moral, claims
that are constitutive of these religious traditions.
Some kinds of metaphysics
Arguably the, and certainly a, central sort of religious experience within
the classical monotheisms, Christianity included, is what Rudolph Otto,
in The Idea of the Holy, called ‘numinous’ experience (though there are
problems with his second-order characterizations of it).^14 In such an
experience, the subject of the experience at least seems to be aware of an
awesome Being which is unapproachable save on its own terms, majestic,
overpowering, independent, living, possessed of great energy, unique,
compelling, both attractive and dangerous. Typical responses come in
terms of awe, a sense of creaturehood and dependence, submission,
worship, and guilt for one’s sins. Plainly these experiences have a subject/
consciousness/object structure; they at least seem to be encounters with
something that exists quite distinct from and independent of the
experiencing subject.
The relevance of this to our current topic is this: within the Christian
tradition, experience and doctrine both emphasize the role of a Creator and
Providence on whom all else depends. Between God and any human person
there is a one-way dependence relationship; it is blasphemous to deny the
Creator–creature distinction. For Advaita Vedanta, what seems to be creature
really is not strictly the Creator, but at any rate underived Being.