Wainwright

honor of William Wainwright, this article takes up his interest in interreligious dialogue. It pursues two goals simultaneously: One is to provide a better model for understanding philosophy of religion. Terrence Tilley claims that there is the standard model which is mistaken in that it takes arguing for religious beliefs to be equivalent to justifying commitment to a religion. He promotes a practical model , which has its ancestry in the writings of Michel de Montaigne and Blaise Pascal. This model begins with the lived practices of religion and justifies its intellectual content as explanation for the rightness of this way of life. Wainwright’s work fits into the practical model, but Tilley provides a description and a stronger basis for it. The second goal is to provide much more adequate epistemological resources than those used by the standard model, with contributions from Catholic modernist theologian George Tyrrell, recent philosopher of science Imre Lakatos, and Alasdair MacIntyre, who became interested in evaluating traditions, in science, in moral reasoning, and finally what he came to call large-scale traditions. The problem he needed to overcome is the fact that such traditions carry their own, often different, concepts of reasoning. The possibility of fruitful rational conversation between religions is illustrated here by an account of dialogue between Christianity and Shi’ia Islam, as exemplified in David Burrell’s ability to use conversation with Islamic thought to clarify for Christians their own doctrines of the Trinity, the mediation of Christ, and original sin.  

In some contexts, philosophical debate can be rancorous even when the volume is kept low. In other contexts, certain stripes of “evangelical apologetics” can be equally adversarial and inimical in tone. In the name of preserving a professional, if not an irenic spirit, some unspoken ground rules have been adopted for interreligious dialogue. First is the demand to avoid all appearance of circular reasoning, which is to say avoid making any rhetorical moves that depend upon metaphysical presuppositions about the reality of God. Second, it is understood that (supposedly) unimportant theologically-laden details are to be left off until the (supposedly) prior task of establishing God’s reality is achieved. Such ground rules put philosophical theologians at a distinct disadvantage in interreligious dialogue as they sideline the very voices that have the highest stake in the conversation. William Wainwright offers the concept of “passional reason” as a way to counter the ground rules. Wainwright has shown that charges of circularity and subjectivism fail in the cases of such thinkers as Jonathan Edwards, John Henry Newman, and William James. Read in one way, Wainwright’s work may be taken as a strategic defense that prevents antagonists from excluding religious voices from philosophical conversation. I argue that there is an even more fruitful way to read Wainwright. Simply put, Wainwright’s recapture and rehabilitation of “passional reason” for philosophy of religion simultaneously opens the door for more constructive approaches to interreligious dialogue than an agonistic-styled philosophical debate can allow.