February 2008 – Why is Lloyd Geering still important?

It is 2008, and the world is well into a century which looks like being dominated by climate change, by China, and by the challenges of religious pluralism in a religious age. New Zealand is slowly turning its attention to all three. It is ill equipped to understand the third, because it has been ill-equipped to understand religion.

Overall, our small country has shallow intellectual soil – we rely heavily on a few voices canonised by the media to interpret the wider world for us. This is especially true for the wider world of ideas. Generally, we have been shaped by an unreflective pragmatism which has its strengths, but also makes us vulnerable; we can too easily accept the assumptions and confident assertions of others about the state of intellectual play in the rest of the world. Nowhere have we proved more vulnerable to this than in the field of religion.

In the last three decades of the 20th Century, Professor Lloyd Geering came to dominate what religious discourse there was among our chattering classes, and his was also the voice most often chosen by the media to pronounce authoritatively on religious matters to mainstream New Zealand. He did this clearly, articulately, concisely, and honestly. The state recognised his significant role by conferring upon him membership of this country’s “Top Twenty” – the Order of New Zealand. And many of Geering’s perceptions and judgements about religion have fused to become the lens through which the largest growing religious group (those who ticked the “no religion” box in the census box) have tended to view such things. At the height of his public exposure he often became the only academic authority to which it was convenient to appeal, especially by those who wished to believe or disbelieve as he did, but who chose not to do the hard yards of critical reading and thinking. The problem is: that lens was, and remains, defective.

Today, Lloyd Geering is less visible, and less known to a younger generation. Yet, there are many New Zealanders who continue to echo his perceptions and judgments, whether aware of their provenance or not. Such people often continue to have considerable influence in the media, in academia, and in government circles (including education). That influence is inevitably secularist, working from within Geering’s overarching modernist paradigm, rooted in the European Enlightenment. Yet, that paradigm is trebly inadequate.

First, the western intellectual world (at least) has become postmodern and suspicious of overarching narratives.

Second, religion of one tradition or another has become ever more important globally.

And third, the modernist paradigm is only “overarching” where Christian (and other) intellectual critiques of it are ignored, as indeed they have been largely ignored by Geering.

Where the modernist paradigm still rules – as it does in much of this country – it must be challenged. Geering, of course, is not an original thinker, as he himself emphasises. Rather, he is a brilliant populariser who has done a number of us a great service in making accessible the work of a not a few classic scholars in the field of religion. Any critique of Lloyd Geering’s work is thus a critique of many of the Enlightenment challenges to Christianity over the last several centuries upon which he has drawn. This latter critique can be done, and is being done, from within western academia. There, there is a growing conviction that the Enlightenment’s conceptions have failed the tests of intellectual analysis and societal experience, though there is no agreement about what should take their place. It can, however, be salutary (and “enlightening”!) when a non-European, fully conversant with the intellectual conversations within the western world comments, at some cultural distance, on what is going on.

When Raymond Pelly and I were putting together a set of essays critiquing the work of Lloyd Geering1 we asked Professor Kwan Kai Man of Hong Kong Baptist University to contribute a paper on Geering’s thesis that God is no more than a human construct and a projection of human desires. This Kwan did, but he came up with more than that. Kwan wrote a wide-ranging and penetrating critique of Geering’s central intellectual story. Sadly, we could not include Kwan’s work in its entirety in our book we had to be content with several sections of it. Yet, we thought it very important that Kwan’s whole paper should see the light of day. Hence, this issue of Stimulus.

One striking thing about Kwan’s work on Geering is how it reveals the extent to which Geering has failed to acknowledge, let alone engage with, the full range of academic discussion about religion in general (and Christianity in particular) which has been going on for decades, both outside New Zealand and within the growing academy of very well qualified and able New Zealand theologians, biblical scholars, sociologist of religion, etc, who have been, on the whole, much less inclined to court media attention. Kwan’s quotations, footnotes, and bibliography provide a different lens, a very different lens, on that wider world of scholarship. He is conversant with that world in a way which Geering is not, and sometimes expresses his bemusement that Geering has not referred to it or engaged with it.

In addition to this intimate knowledge of western philosophy of religion, Kwan as a Chinese Christian brings a salutary cultural distance into play. Unlike many of us in this country, he knows that the Church lives in many cultures and is thriving in some, and that today its centre of gravity is no longer in the West. He is in bondage neither to our false perceptions of a declining Church, nor to our failing, Enlightenment-soaked culture. There is a cool Chinese head at work here, and we New Zealanders would do well to listen when he speaks.

Kwan’s main targets are Geering’s neo-Feuerbachianism and theological constructivism, as well as Geering’s theological anti-realism of the sort popularised by Don Cupitt (whom Geering greatly admires). Kwan instead takes a “critical realist” approach. Kwan furnishes us with a comprehensive diversity of inputs which stretch from Alvin Plantinga, through Janet Soskice, to N.T. Wright. With respect to the sociology of religion, Kwan draws upon a range of recent and contemporary scholars, particularly Peter Berger and the later Harvey Cox.

This issue of Stimulus may well be of interest to those who have adopted the positions espoused by Geering but are still open to the possibility that these positions are not unchallengeable. However, although the issue presents a specific engagement with the thought of Lloyd Geering, the value of the issue is significantly wider than that – inasmuch as Geering’s views are representative of the modernism that is at odds with orthodox Christian faith, the issue will be a valuable resource to those who seek to think these matters through in their wider context. The issue should be of interest to those New Zealanders of good will who seek to understand better the continuing phenomenon of religious belief and practice, and are willing to probe beneath the sound-bites of the media. It will be of interest to those who are exploring rational grounds for the faith which they already hold or are being drawn towards. And it is necessary reading for those Christians who have themselves ignored the intellectual challenges of the Enlightenment, and thus opened the way for shallow belief and burgeoning unbelief. Such as they need to be made to think – Geering, and now Kwan, make their readers do just that. 

Peter Stuart