The Templeton Prize is one of the most
prestigious in the world. It was established in 1972 by the late Sir
John Templeton, who said he wanted to identify “entrepreneurs of the
spirit”—individuals who have devoted themselves to deepening our
understanding of human purpose and ultimate reality.
As the
Templeton Prize website
puts it, “The prize celebrates no particular faith tradition or notion
of God, but rather the quest for progress in humanity’s efforts to
comprehend the many and diverse manifestations of the Divine.” The
prize’s monetary award is £1,100,000 sterling (a little over $1.5
million currently).
Recipients have come from a variety of religious
traditions (the Dalai Lama won it in 2012), but most have been
Christians, and some, evangelicals (Billy Graham, Bill Bright, and
Charles Colson, to name three). This year the award was given to Rabbi
Lord Jonathan Sacks, the former Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew
Congregations of the Commonwealth. According to Templeton, he “has spent
decades bringing spiritual insight to the public conversation through
mass media, popular lectures and more than two dozen books.”
In particular it noted, “Central to his message is
appreciation and respect of all faiths, with an emphasis that
recognizing the values of each is the only path to effectively combat
the global rise of violence and terrorism.” CT invited Miroslav Volf,
professor of theology at Yale Divinity School, to write about the
significance of this prize for Sacks, since Volf himself has argued
along similar lines in his recent,
Flourishing: Why We Need Religion in a Globalized World.Volf is likely best known among CT readers for his now classic book on forgiveness and reconciliation:
Exclusion and Embrace.
—The editors
I cannot think of a
worthier person to receive the prestigious Templeton Prize than this
year’s recipient, Lord Jonathan Sacks, the former Chief Rabbi of the
United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth. I am partial. I have
known Rabbi Sacks for many years; I have shopped with him for Indian
clothing in Amritsar; I have hosted him as a public lecturer for the
“Life Worth Living” class that I co-teach at Yale; he serves on the
Advisory Board for the Templeton-funded project at the Yale Center for
Faith and Culture on “Theology of Joy and the Good Life”; and he has
welcomed me as a dinner-guest at his home in London.
One need not be partial to recognize that Rabbi Sacks is
one of the most significant public intellectuals today speaking in a
distinctly religious voice. As his many books and public lectures
attest, his brilliant intellect, deep devotion to his own religious
tradition, and an exceptional ability to communicate ideas clearly
combine to make his influence exceptional among his peers. All three of
these qualities are amply demonstrated in his books, and especially in The Politics of Hope (1997), The Dignity of Difference (2002) and Not in God’s Name: Confronting Religious Violence (2015).
But he is not the only public intellectual with such qualities—and,
significant as these qualities are, they would not have sufficed to earn
him the Templeton Prize.
So why is Sacks such a worthy recipient of this honor,
and more to the point here, why can evangelicals celebrate this as well?
There are four main reasons, and they form an integrated whole in
public philosophy.
I am partial in naming them, of course. Over the years—especially in A Public Faith: How Followers of Christ Should Serve the Common Good (Brazos, 2011) and, most recently, in Flourishing: Why We Need Religion in a Globalized World
(Yale, 2016)—I have advocated very similar positions from a Christian
perspective, sometimes in explicit conversation with Rabbi Sacks.
Committed religious people can agree, and when they disagree, they can do so in a civil way.
Against the backdrop of a common disrespect for
difference either in secular critiques of religion or in shrill
contentiousness among religious people, it is significant that two
persons, both deeply rooted and strongly committed to their own
tradition, can share so much about the importance of religious
traditions in public life and the nature of their engagement for the
common good. This commonality is doubly significant since, given the
long history of Jewish/Christian relations, we would not have expected
anything of the sort only a few decades ago. Committed religious people
can agree, and when they disagree, they can do so in a civil way.
First, while recognizing extraordinary achievements of
modernity, Sacks is at the same time aware of its limitations and
insists that religion has an indispensible contribution to make. He
writes, “None of the four great institutions of the modern age—science,
technology, the market economy or the liberal democratic state—offers a
compelling answer to the three great questions every reflective human
being will ask at some stage in his life: Who am I? Why am I here? How
then shall I live?”
As citizens of modern democracies, educated in modern
universities and working in market economies, we are experts at using
sophisticated means to achieve desired ends, but we are amateurs when it
comes to knowing what ends we should desire. As a result, we
run hard but gain no ground in terms of fulfillment. Throughout the
course of our lives, meaninglessness lurks at every turn. As Sacks puts
it, the “21st century has left us with a maximum of choice and a minimum
of meaning.”
Second, Sacks is persuaded that the most compelling
answers to questions of human identity and purpose come especially from
the great religious traditions. Why is it, asks Sacks, that great
nations, economic systems, and entire cultures come and go in the course
of history, but the great religious traditions perdure through
millennia? It is because they give compelling answers—contestable and
contested answers, of course, but compelling to millions—to questions
like, “Why we are here?” and “What kind of world should we seek to
create?”
I myself have put the matter this way in Flourishing:
“Whatever else world religions might be, they are, at their heart,
accounts of life worth living, of life being lived well, life going
well, and life feeling good under the primacy of transcendence. Accounts
of the good life are the most important gift world religions can give
to the world.” The accounts of the good life in world religions often
don’t agree with one another, but they are crucial options to be taken
into consideration in the human search for the truth of our existence.
Sacks believes that “when religion turns men into murderers, God weeps.”
Third, religions are not inherently violent. Put
slightly differently, it is not the case that hidden in every religious
person is an extremist “waiting to happen.” True, he contends that “the
greatest threat to freedom in the postmodern world is radical,
politicized religion,” the face of what he calls “altruistic evil,”
which is to say “evil committed in a sacred cause, in the name of high
ideals.” But Sacks believes that “when religion turns men into
murderers, God weeps.”
And religion does so most frequently when it turns
political—not when it is merely politically engaged, but when there is
no separation of religion and state, when religion functions as the
transcendental justification of the state. In contrast, the great
monotheist traditions, starting with Abraham, insist that “every human
being, regardless of color, culture, class, or creed, was in the image
and likeness of God” and therefore possesses equal dignity to any other
human being and should be free in the choice of religion (or
a-religion).
Fourth, religious people should have a public voice.
This last point follows from the previous three, if one assumes that
each person’s having a voice in public affairs—that some kind of
democracy—is desirable. “I believe,” Sacks writes, “that religion, or
more precisely, religions, should have a voice in the public
conversation within the societies in the West, as to how to live, how to
construct a social order, how to enhance human dignity, honor human
life, and indeed protect a whole from environmental hazard.” Sacks is
making two important and related points here.
First, he is rejecting both secular exclusion of
religion from the public sphere and religious imposition of a single
religion onto the entire public space; he is against any form of
totalitarianism or authoritarianism, whether secular or religious.
Second, he is advocating for something like liberal
political pluralism; we need political arrangements such that people
divided along important and enduring lines of difference would be able
to participate as equals in the search for the common good. That’s where
the two moral convictions about human equality and freedom of religion
come in. These two moral convictions, which significant streams of
thought in other world religions share with major branches of
contemporary Judaism and Christianity, are the key building blocks of
pluralistic political order appropriate for a contemporary globalized
world.
We live in an interconnected and highly interdependent
world made of nation states that are, due to intense migration of
people, highly diverse and often deeply divided along cultural and
religious lines. In the West, we are presently witnessing a wave of
resistance to “the stranger,” especially when that stranger gives
allegiance to the Muslim faith.
“I think Islam hates us … There’s an unbelievable hatred
of us,” said the immensely popular frontrunner for the Republican
nomination in the presidential race, Donald Trump. That is certainly not
true of “Islam,” but it is true of many Muslims. But what Trump is not
saying, and what is evident from how he is acting, is that there is also
a corresponding hatred of Islam and of Muslims in the West. Religious
tensions are rife elsewhere as well, especially in Asia. Consider the
following facts, which speak in cold numbers about the warm blood and
tears of many:
- 46 percent of the world population lives in countries with high or very high levels of social hostility involving religion.
- Almost 75 percent of the world’s roughly 7 billion
people live in countries with high levels of government restriction of
freedom of religion.
- In nearly 33 percent of countries, individuals were
assaulted or displaced from their homes in retaliation for specific
religious activities considered offensive or threatening to the majority
religion, including preaching and other forms of religious expression.
- In 30 percent of countries, religion-related terrorist groups were active in recruitment or fundraising.
Today, more than at any other time since World War II,
we need people who do not only condemn extremism, but offer a vision,
rooted in their own tradition, of a world in which people with deep
disagreements inhabit a common space and work for the common good. If
this is a call to people of all faiths, it is certainly a call to
evangelicals, who like many others, seek to be peacemakers in a troubled
world. Rabbi Sacks is such a person in the Jewish tradition, and he has
articulated such a vision in a most compelling way. That’s why he
deserves the Templeton Prize.
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