Coleridge
I was trying to remember who wrote
not ... by his pure morals, or excellent example merely -- but in a mysterious manner
by way of taking his religion seriously, and it turns out that it was S. T. Coleridge. (Coleridge was writing about how he believed Jesus had saved him.)
I thought of this quotation because I was thinking about how people like to be polite to one another. When one person has a strongly-held belief, especially about the efficacy of (let's say) a method of salvation, or perhaps a political or ethical doctrine, a second person, wanting to be polite, will often say, well, your religious leader was a great teacher, or your doctrine is a source of much inspiration. And in the hard-core old-school no-holds-barred old-fashioned whole-hearted style of believing things, that kind of politeness doesn't get you very far.
It's definitely more conducive to friendly co-existence. For example, when I was growing up, we tended to hear in Hebrew school that Jesus of Nazareth (not, of course, Christos) was a great teacher. In fact, this is a pretty conventional position among non-Christians living around Christian culture. (Take a look through J. D. Salinger's Franny and Zooey, and so on!)
I remember that C. S. Lewis spent a long time attacking the argument that Jesus was a great moral teacher. In fact, that was the whole point of the "Trilemma" argument, to undermine the respectability of the middle position or moderate position, in favor of a more extreme view. So Lewis was contending with a lot of liberals who were repelled by things like the symbolum Nicenum and had come to feel comfortable with the "great teacher" position. And he attacked that position mercilessly.
But that view, what Coleridge calls Jesus's "excellent example", was already fairly old in Coleridge's day. Deistic and skeptical writers had been attacking the supernatural elements of Christian stories for a hundred years. Very few of them suggested that Jesus was a bad guy. Instead, they typically said that what Jesus had to say was true and useful to humanity, and could be separated from the supernatural and theological dogmas which had grown up around them. (It was very important to C. S. Lewis to maintain that Jesus himself was responsible for making certain supernatural claims for himself, because then anybody who denied those claims would presumably be calling Jesus a "Liar" or a "Lunatic", which is to say, approximately, a bad guy, or an untrustworthy guy. So Lewis particularly tries to avoid any separation of Jesus's "moral" message from his (largely Johannine, not synoptic) theological claims.)
These days, I'm hearing similar vague praise of Islam from non-Muslims, that Islam contains useful moral lessons and that Mohammed was a great teacher. In some sense, this is a way to avoid giving offense, but it's still far off from Muslims' practice of considering Mohammed a prophet of God.
One thing I notice is that only a tiny percentage of people who call doctrines they don't believe inspirational will spend any significant amount of time studying them for inspiration. Hebrew school students who are told that Jesus was a great moral teacher (with "pure morals" and an "excellent example merely") aren't usually encouraged to go out and read gospels. How many people who've praised any tradition foreign to them have actually made themselves familiar with it in detail?
Is there a better way for people who think that something is effective "in a mysterious manner" (as Coleridge thought of Jesus, and as many other people are wont to think of other things) to talk to people who don't think so, or who haven't shared that experience?
