Foundations
⚠ Saves only the work stored in this browser on this device.
Before you spend an entire semester thinking theologically about ultimate reality, evil, ritual, and the rest, you should ask prior questions: what are we even doing, and is it legitimate? Those are foundational questions, not in the sense of introductory throat-clearing, but in the sense of the conceptual ground much of this course stands on. So this first module does something none of the others does. It turns the course's own “three-lens” method on the course itself, to examine whether a theological, non-confessional, approach, drawing on every tradition and none, is a coherent thing to attempt at all.
Start with the word that makes some people uneasy: theology. Here it does not mean the in-house doctrine of a church, and it does not require that you believe anything in particular. Theology, as we will use the term, is the disciplined pursuit of truth about ultimate reality and ultimate concern: the deepest questions about what is finally real, what matters most, and how a human life should be lived in light of the answers. Understood that way, theology is not the private property of the devout. Everyone already lives by some working answer to those questions, examined or not. Theology is the attempt to bring those working answers into the light, state them clearly, compare them carefully, and ask whether they are true. That is why a course like this can be for students of any faith or none. It does not ask you to adopt a tradition; it asks you to think, as carefully as you can, about the questions no human being truly escapes, no matter how advanced their denial and distraction capabilities.
The next phrase is the contested one: without walls. Most theology in history has been confessional, done from inside a particular tradition and accountable to its revelation and community. This course takes a different and much-debated path. It proposes that the pursuit of truth about the ultimate need not be confined within any single tradition's walls, that it can and should draw on all the traditions and on secular knowledge alike, comparing what they claim and testing it. That proposal has serious critics on two sides, and this module presents the argument. Below, three voices, a confessional theologian, a secular religious-studies scholar, and an advocate of Theology Without Walls, dispute whether non-confessional theology is even coherent. You will meet the three-lens method every week after this, though from Module 2 on the three voices become a secular humanist, a Christian, and a rotating third tradition. Here, fittingly, the method is turned on its own foundations.
One last piece of equipment before the argument begins. The analytical method you will use all semester is called PIE: Position, Implications, Evaluation. You state a clear position, you trace its implications, and you evaluate it by giving your warrant and facing the strongest objection to it. It is a simple structure yet a demanding discipline, because it never lets you stop at merely having an opinion. The Instructor's View lays out PIE in full. For now, notice that this entire course is training in one complex skill: thinking clearly and fairly about the very questions where clarity and fairness are hardest to achieve.
Four conceptual tools make the Theology Without Walls project workable, and each answers one of this module's foundational questions.
The first is a shift in the object of study, from religions to worldviews and lifeways. Though there are ancient antecedents in multiple traditions, the category “religion” as it is typically used today is a mostly nmmodern, largely Western construct, and it fits some traditions badly, treating as a separable compartment of life something that many cultures never separated out at all. So instead of asking what a group's religion is, we ask about its worldview, how it construes what is finally real and valuable, and its lifeway, how that construal is actually lived in practice, ritual, and community. As framing concepts, worldview and lifeway work across cultures better than religion does, and they keep belief and practice together rather than privileging doctrine over life.
The second tool is the demand for cross-culturally stable categories. To compare traditions at all, you need categories that hold their shape as they move from one tradition to another. A category that is really just one tradition's local term wearing a neutral disguise will distort every tradition you apply it to. This is why we reach for a thin category like ultimate reality rather than a thick one like God when the task is comparison, since God carries a freight of specifically theistic, largely Abrahamic or Indic meaning that misdescribes a tradition for which the ultimate is impersonal, non-dual, or plural. Thin categories are the shared axes along which genuine comparison becomes possible.
The third tool is the distinction between thick and thin terminological approaches themselves, which is well worth fixing in your mind. Thick terms are dense with tradition-specific meaning, such as covenant, Trinity, dukkha, dao; they are where a tradition's real texture lives, and you cannot understand a tradition without them. Thin terms are abstracted from that density for the sake of portability, such as ultimate reality, worldview, lifeway, human condition; they are what let you set traditions side by side. Neither is superior; each is for a different job. Thin-only work can be bloodless and miss what a tradition is actually like, while thick-only work is rich but might struggle to host fair comparison, because every tradition stays walled up inside its own vocabulary. The discipline this course teaches is to move deliberately between the two: thin to compare, thick to understand.
The fourth tool is multidisciplinarity, and it is a necessity rather than an mere bonus. Questions about the human being and the ultimate do not respect the walls between university departments. What we can responsibly say about the mind, about morality, about the history of a text or a rite, about how communities form and fracture, is constrained by philosophy, history, anthropology, and the cognitive and social sciences. A theology that ignores those constraints is not purer for it, only less accountable. Theology Without Walls is inherently multidisciplinary because its questions are not the property of a single university discipline.
Each lens below is presented as one of its own thoughtful adherents would present it, in that adherent’s own voice. Each follows the same PIE path: the Position it holds, the Implications that follow, and its own Evaluation of strengths and costs. Compare them in §4; argue with them in §6.
The Religious-Studies Scholar
The Confessional Theologian
Theology Without Walls (the course's own stance)
Here is where the three stances converge and diverge on what theology is and whether it can be done without walls.
| What is theology? | Where is it done from? | Is the truth-question in play? | The characteristic danger | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Religious-Studies Scholar | The neutral study of worldviews | From methodological distance | Bracketed and set aside | Never asks what is actually true |
| Confessional Theologian | Faith seeking understanding | Inside a tradition's walls | Yes, answered by revelation | Cannot self-correct across walls |
| Theology Without Walls | Disciplined inquiry into the ultimate | From anywhere, drawing on all | Yes, and kept genuinely open | May claim a view from nowhere |
Notice where Theology Without Walls actually stands. It shares the confessional conviction that the truth-question matters, which sets it against neutral religious studies, and it shares the secular conviction that no tradition owns the answer, which sets it against confessional theology. It is a middle position that tries to keep the best of both, and it pays for that ambition with a distinctive risk that neither of the others runs: the temptation to speak as though from above the traditions it means to understand and compare. Whether that risk can be managed, or whether it sinks the whole project, is exactly what the case below is designed to probe.
This week's running case is the ancient parable of the blind men and the elephant, which appears, tellingly, across many traditions, in Buddhist (the Tittha Sutta, Udāna 6.4), Jain, Hindu, and Sufi sources. That very spread makes it a fitting case for a course about cross-traditional inquiry. Read it first for its obvious lesson, then for the harder problem hiding inside it, because that problem is the deepest objection to any course adopting a Theology Without Walls approach.
The parable is simple. Several people who cannot see are asked to say what an elephant is, each touching a different part. The one at the leg says the elephant is like a pillar; the one at the trunk, like a thick snake; the one at the ear, like a fan; the one at the tail, like a rope; the one at the side, like a wall. Each reports truly what they touched, and each is wrong about the whole, and they fall to quarreling, certain the others are mistaken. The surface lesson is easy and appealing, and it looks a great deal like this course: each tradition grasps a real part of an ultimate reality too vast for any one of them to hold in its entirety, so their quarrels come from mistaking a part for the whole.
Now the harder problem, is this: Who, in the parable, knows that it is an elephant? The story is told by a narrator, in the oldest versions a king, who can see the whole animal and can therefore judge that the leg-holder and the trunk-holder each have hold of only a part. Take that narrator away and the parable cannot be told, because no one inside it is positioned to say that the pillar and the rope belong to one elephant. So the parable that seems to teach humility also seats its teller on a throne: the single vantage from which every partial view can be seen as partial. Stated as a sharp objection, the point is this: the only way to know that every tradition grasps merely a part of the truth would be to see the whole truth yourself. That is precisely what the confessional theologian and the secular scholar both press against a course like this one. When Theology Without Walls says the traditions grasp parts of one ultimate reality, is it not claiming, without warrant, to occupy the narrator's chair?
Keep in mind: it may be possible for advocates of Theology Without Walls to answer that comparing partial descriptions is not the same as claiming a complete one, that you can notice two traditions are describing something related without pretending to see it whole. It may also be that the objection holds, and that the clear-eyed conclusion should be support for a more modest comparison that claims far less that an intention to seek the truth about ultimate matters. Either way, the burden is real, and an intellectually serious version of this course, or any course employing the Theology Without Walls conceptuality, has to be open about it.
Case questions for class — each one needs the reading and at least two of the lenses:
- State the parable's surface lesson, the pluralist reading, precisely, as an argument. Then state the confessional theologian's objection to it and the secular scholar's objection to it, using this week's three lenses. Where does each objection land, and which is harder to answer?
- Who occupies the narrator's position in the parable, and does Theology Without Walls have to claim that position to do its work? Try to state a version of the course's project that compares thick traditions without claiming to see the whole elephant, then test whether your version still does anything worth doing.
- The elephant works as a thin, cross-culturally stable category (one reality, variously grasped) while pillar, rope, and fan are thick, tradition-specific descriptions. Use the case to explain, in your own words, why comparison needs thin categories and understanding needs thick ones, and what is lost if you keep only one.
- Using PIE, take a position on the parable's implicit claim that the traditions are partial graspings of one reality. State it, give your warrant, face the strongest objection from a lens that rejects the one-elephant premise, and say where you come down.
Answer these in your own words. They save on this device, and you should bring them to class.
You already hold operative answers to ultimate questions, about what is real, what matters most, and how to live, whether or not you have ever called them theology. Name one of them. Is it a thick answer inherited from a particular tradition, a thin one abstracted for portability, or a mix, and how would you defend it to someone who holds a different one?
Describe a community you belong to as a worldview paired with a lifeway: what does it take to be finally real and important, and how is that lived out in practice? Where do the worldview and the lifeway fit together, and where has one drifted from the other?
Where do you see your society using a thick term, a tradition-bound word like salvation, sin, or even God, as though it were a thin, universal one? What confusion results when a category that is specific to one tradition gets treated as neutral common ground?
Optional exercise. Draft a one-paragraph PIE on the course's central wager. Your draft saves on this device.
State a clear position on this course's central wager: that theology can be done well without confessional walls.
Trace what follows, for how such inquiry would proceed, what it may and may not claim, and what it asks of someone rooted in a particular tradition.
Give your warrant, state the strongest objection, confessional or secular, respond to it, and say plainly whether the wager holds.
This section is where your instructor's own position lives, set clearly apart from the three stances above. Argue with me; this is a considered wager, backed by significant evidence, but it is not proved beyond reasonable doubt.
You have just watched this course deliberately turn its method on itself. Before you spend a semester using the three-lens method and PIE, you deserve to know why the course is built as it is, and to hear the case against it stated as strongly as I can state it. So let me tell you where I stand.
I built this course on Theology Without Walls because I think each alternative gives up something we cannot afford to lose. The confessional theologian is right that the truth-question is real, that it matters enormously whether our deepest account of reality is true, and that thick traditions are where most of the world's hard-won wisdom about the ultimate actually lives. But confining the inquiry inside one tradition's walls means you can never seriously ask whether another tradition saw something yours missed, and I am not willing to give that up. The religious-studies scholar is right that description must be careful and that we should never pass off our preferences as findings. But bracketing the truth-question forever, refusing on principle to ask which account of the ultimate is truer, treats the most important question human beings face as the one question scholarship may not touch, and I am not willing to give that up either. Theology Without Walls is my attempt (and the attempt of many others) to keep both, the seriousness about truth and the openness across traditions, and to pay the price that keeping both requires.
And there is a price, which the elephant names exactly. The real danger of this course is that it claims the narrator's chair, the view from nowhere from which all traditions look partial, which I think is a fictitious location. I do not think we are forced to claim it, though, and here is the discipline by which I try to avoid it. You can use thin, cross-culturally stable categories to compare and thick, tradition-specific description to understand, and you can keep moving between them, so that you never mistake your thin comparative scaffolding for a finished map of the ultimate itself. Hold every conclusion modestly and revisably. Voice each tradition in its own strongest terms before you evaluate it, which is what the native-lens exercise trains you to do. And treat multidisciplinarity as a requirement rather than a decorative flourish, because questions about the human condition and the ultimate do not respect our university departmental silos, and the sciences of mind, culture, and history constrain what a responsible theology may say.
That is the wager, and I want you to test it all semester, starting now. If by the end you conclude that the confessional theologian or the secular scholar had the better of the argument, that is a legitimate outcome of this course, and you will have reached it by exactly the disciplined thinking the course exists to build.
Here is the practical method you will use every week, stated once, in full (refer to “The PIE Method” tool for more details). The analytical spine is PIE, three moves that turn an opinion into an argument. Position: state your claim in one clear sentence, calibrated to exactly the strength you can defend and no stronger. Implications: trace what actually follows if the claim is true, for belief, for practice, for other questions, since a claim is grasped partly by what it commits you to. Evaluation: give your warrant, then, crucially, state the strongest objection from someone who disagrees, respond to it, and reach a judgment you can stand behind while staying open to revision. The hardest and most important move is the second half of evaluation. If you cannot state your opponent's best case in terms they would accept, you do not yet understand your own position. Around PIE sit two further disciplines. The first is the native-lens practice: before you assess a tradition's view, articulate it sympathetically, in the first person, as its own best advocate would, which is why each module voices its lenses natively before comparing them. The second is the thin-thick discipline: reach for thin, cross-culturally stable categories—ultimate reality, worldview, lifeway, human condition—when you need to compare traditions, and for thick, tradition-specific terms—Trinity, dukkha, dao, covenant—when you need to understand a tradition in its own rich terms; never let one crowd out the other, because thin-only comparison risks being bloodless and thick-only description risks not being able to compare at all. Master these three—PIE, the native lens, and the movement between thin and thick—and you have the entire toolkit this course runs on.
A short applied case to work up before class, separate from the running case in §5. Bring your prepared response to the seminar.
The pre-class case for this module will be published here. Check back before the session.
Clear this to illuminate the deeper readings
This is open-guide. The point is to make sure the shared floor is solid before class, and to open the recessed “deeper reading” blocks above. It is not graded here; your graded version lives on Blackboard. You may retake it as many times as you like.
Read these before class. Required readings are all free online; word counts are approximate. Optional readings extend the week but are not required.
Required
- “The Blind Men and the Elephant,” Udāna 6.4 (Tittha Sutta), trans. Thanissaro Bhikkhu ~800 open ↗
- Anselm of Canterbury, Proslogion, Preface + chs. 1–4 (Deane trans.) ~2,600 open ↗
- Overview: is “religion” a cross-culturally stable category? — “Definition of religion,” Wikipedia ~3,500 open ↗
- Jerry L. Martin, “Introduction,” Theology Without Walls (Routledge, 2019, Open Access) — front section ~2,500 open ↗
- Rūmī, “The Elephant in the Dark,” Masnavi Bk III (Whinfield trans.) ~400 open ↗
Cross-links. Module 2 — sources and methods, how we know in this course · Module 3 — ultimate reality, the thin category at work · Module 6 — comparing thick cures with a thin rule · Module 12 — inhabiting rather than resolving a tension