Dimensions of the Sacred: An Anatomy of the World's Beliefs

Christian Century, June 18, 1997 by Lloyd Steffen

By Ninian Smart. University of California Press, 331 pp., $29.95.

Ninian Smart has undertaken the daunting and risky task of producing "a general study of religion and worldviews" in an effort to explicate what it means to be religious. The result is a synthetic analysis of religious and secular worldviews that illumines those worldviews by considering the complex ways they are embedded in practice.

Smart employs a scientific and phenomenological method of "informed sympathy" that probes seven dimensions of religious worldviews: doctrine or philosophy; ritual; myth or the parahistorical; the experiential and emotional; the ethical and legal; the social; and the material. Refusing to accept either a relativism that would render his project incoherent or a naive essentialism that would mistakenly assert that underneath their particularities all religions are alike, Smart argues that these seven foci identify the general "patterns" of religion and religious expression. When examined within a particular tradition, the foci are clearly interrelated. When examined between traditions, the foci help us explore differences of expression. For example, both Christianity and Theravada Buddhism can be said to be doctrinal. They do not share a belief in God, however; religion need not be theistic, Smart reminds his readers. But both traditions give rise to ritual practices, social organizations and ethical views that are related to their structures of belief. The Christian attends through worship to a numinous theism whereby the self relates to the Other outside the self, while the Theravada Buddhist attends through a contemplative mode of expression to the non-other within the self. In Smart's descriptive analysis, identifying similarities serves to highlight differences.

Scholars of religion may not find much new in the details of this volume, and Smart himself admits that his approach is "old-fashioned" in its use of traditional categories and symbols of religion. But this book nonetheless will command the scholar's respect and the general reader's admiration. Scholars will find Smart's approach sensitive to cross-cultural differences. Yet he boldly claims that by attending to certain features common to religious expression, we can identify religion and faiths as distinctive phenomena in human experience.

The book is accessible, well written and, at times, very personal. It connects religion to all kinds of other phenomena, including sports, nationalism, globalism, electronic communications and New Age spirituality. Smart eloquently pleads for adding more cross-cultural learning in higher education, not only because failure to do so increases the destructive forces of nationalism and racism, but because globalization is affecting all dimensions of human life, with serious implications for future developments in Christian theology. This book wonderfully exemplifies the kind of crosscultural educational effort Smart has in mind.

Reviewed by Lloyd Steffen, university chaplain and associate professor of religion studies at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.