APA Newsletters
Fall 1999
Volume 99, Number 1

Book Reviews

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Lynn Stephens and Gregory Pence, Seven Dilemmas in World Religions
New York: Paragon House, 1994. x + 156 pp. $16.95 hardcover.

Reviewed by Berel Dov Lerner
Western Galilee College, Israel

The traditional division of academic labor assigns different purposes and methods to comparative religion than it does to the philosophy of religion. While courses in comparative religion offer charitable descriptions of various religious traditions, courses in philosophy of religion teach the critical analysis of generic Western monotheism, the High Church of the God of the Philosophers. Stephens and Pence have tried to combine the two categories by writing a book which introduces the reader to the world's great religions via critical discussions of conceptual issues peculiar to particular traditions.

Each chapter of this book briskly attempts to teach enough about a specific religious tradition to allow the reader to appreciate one of its central "dilemmas." Some "dilemmas" involve issues which are genuinely internal to a particular tradition: the divinity of Jesus in Christianity, God's majesty and human impotence in Islam, the doctrine of reincarnation and the unreality of the individual in Buddhism, and religion as the guardian of public morality in Confucius and his critics. Other "dilemmas" arise from the meeting of different traditions: Judaism's stand on ethnicity and assimilation is presented as a response to Hellenism, the chapter on Jesus' role as moral teacher discusses the validity of the Enlightenment interpretation of Christianity, and the Hindu notion of Brahmin is considered as an alternative to the Jewish/Christian/Moslem notion of God as a person. The reader should gain from this book a basic acquaintance with the origins and founders of the major faiths, as well as a conceptual grounding in several fundamental issues of religious concern.

Seven Dilemmas is a clearly written and well-structured book. Undergraduates with no background in religious studies or philosophy should be able to get through it painlessly and without assistance. Perhaps more importantly, the authors display an awareness that the questions which they treat are intrinsically interesting for college students who may be making up their own minds about religion. They graciously invite the reader to "try on" new ways of thinking. On the other hand, it may be difficult to find a place for the book in a course on comparative religions. It is too slight to serve as a principal text: allowing each dilemma to be the topic of a single class room discussion, seven dilemmas just aren't enough to finish a semester. So this book would have to serve as a source of "additional readings" (with the attendant danger of its repeating material explained in greater detail elsewhere). Teachers might also benefit by modeling their own presentations of the "dilemmas" on Stephens and Pence's lucid expositions.

Religious scholars may feel a bit uneasy with Seven Dilemmas. Stephens and Pence are philosophers who specialize in medical ethics. Although they have a strong sense for the important differences between the various faiths, their book does not reveal them as much more than competent readers of reference works and other secondary materials in the area of comparative religion. A few too many footnotes direct the curious reader to encyclopedia articles. They offer precious little in the way of guidance for those who might want to delve more deeply into the study of religions. Furthermore, the book's natural preoccupation with conceptual issues may mislead students to think that all religions share Christianity's intense concern with theological doctrine (rather than with proper meditative, ritual and ethical practice).

Caveat emptor! Although Stephens and Pence generally get their facts straight, it worries me that precisely the chapter dealing with material which I know best (Judaism) also strikes me as being by far the weakest part of the book. The Judaism chapter is replete with minor, but jarring, errors such as a reference to King (sic) Nehemiah and an incorrect definition of bastardy in Jewish law. More importantly, Stephens and Pence would have remained truer to the general tenor of their book if they had chosen an issue more directly relevant to the internal dynamics of Jewish spirituality, such as the relative value of Torah study vs. religious practice. Instead, they deal with the strategies adopted by Jews facing Hellenistic hegemony in the Second Temple period, which were as much a matter of realpolitik as of faith. The deeper aspects of the eternal struggle between Athens and Jerusalem are left largely untouched. I have, however, not discovered similar problems in the other chapters.