good reason to conclude that it will, on that account, be what is sometimes described as a
real definition, which is to say a definition that captures the essential nature of some
entity.
I therefore doubt that the problem of defining religion has been either solved or
dissolved. There is no consensus among students of religion about whether the concept of
religion can be analyzed or defined in terms of conceptually necessary and sufficient
conditions. There is more to be said on the topic of defining religion or, more generally,
understanding the concept of religion. Hence, this topic should remain on the agenda of
comparative philosophy of religion.
Another Novel Opportunity: Constructive Comparisons
Christian Wolff paints a sympathetic picture of classical Chinese ethics in his 1721
Discourse on the Practical Philosophy of the Chinese (1992). According to Mark
Larrimore, “China's being perceived as outside of (Western) history made it a resource
specifically for the antivoluntarist ethics and moral anthropology which, in Wolff's time,
were struggling against the voluntarism of a Christian ethics premised on original sin”
(2000, 213). But Wolff did not appeal to Chinese ethics to support the view that ethics is
independent of religion; his own ethical theory is religious but antivoluntarist. According
to a theory that is religious but antivoluntarist, ethics is independent of God's will but
depends on something else about God, for example, the goodness of the divine nature,
whereas for voluntarism, ethics depends specifically on God's will or the divine
commands that express it. However, the Discourse set off a controversy with the pietist
theologians at the University of Halle. It resulted in the royal banishment of Wolff from
Halle in 1723, an exile that lasted until his return in 1740 under the newly crowned
Frederick II.
According to Griffiths, for whom constructive work is another of the items on the agenda
of comparative philosophy of religion, “The main interests of those doing comparative
philosophy of religion constructively are in making a contribution of a normative kind to
some question that belongs to or arises out of one or more particular religions” (1997,
619). Judged in the light of this characterization, Wolff's engagement with Chinese ethics
is constructive because it speaks
end p.411
to the issue, which arises out of Christianity, of whether an antivoluntarist religious ethics
can be developed and defended. We, of course, have opportunities to make constructive
comparisons that were not available to Wolff. In at least two respects, they are novel. We
bring to the task scholarly resources, for instance, editions and interpretations of texts,
that Wolff did not have. And, not an insignificant point, those of us fortunate enough to
be housed in the Western academy are unlikely to suffer from the wrath of religious
zealots in the way that Wolff did. Constructive comparisons, however, constitute a
relatively unexplored territory within philosophy of religion. What they are capable of
yielding by way of fruits must be gathered from examples. I shall discuss two cases I