We live in a time in which the boundary fences between the various disciplines are being dismantled—at least as far as the social sciences and humanities are concerned. Take, for example, the work of Michel Foucault. Is it philosophy, history, sociology or political science? Again, where would one place the deconstructionism of Jacques Derrida? Under the guise of literary theory it has profoundly changed the enterprise of literary criticism, and some think it is finally bringing to an end the hegemony of historical criticism in the theory and practice of biblical interpretation. With a nod towards Thomas Kuhn we could say that across the social sciences and humanities there is a search for new paradigms.

Students of that questionable discipline, called variously science of religion, history of religions, religiology, religious studies, comparative religion, or simply religion, are well used to a cloud of uncertainty obscuring the legitimacy, function and defining method of their academic project. About the only point of agreement is that the science of religion is not theology—and even that distinction is understood in different ways. Other questions abound. Is there a single science of religion, with a defining method, distinguishing it from such related sciences as anthropology and sociology? Or, is it a collective name for a group of sciences and disciplines with no single methodology? Is there a strictly empirical science of religion or is the study of religion essentially a hermeneutic discipline, demanding a methodology appropriate to one of the Geisteswissenschaften? One could continue along these lines, multiplying questions. Enough has been said to indicate what all its practitioners know, the uncertain status of the academic study of religion. By the ‘academic study’ of religion I mean that study when disengaged from the controlling authority and presuppositions of any particular religious tradition or organization.

I am making a systematic theological point about the relationship between moral conscience and the experience of God. While the same theme may be taken up as a moral theological question, my intention is to explicate in part the meaning of ‘God’ as implied by the Christian witness of faith, and so I am approaching the theme as a systematic theologian and not from the perspective of moral theology. That is, I intend to ask primarily about the significance of moral conscience for understanding our experience of God, and not vice versa.

Clearly the phrase ‘the experience of God’ is systematically ambiguous, and I will argue that the term ‘moral conscience’ or ‘dictates of conscience’ is also systematically ambiguous, and that recognition of this ambiguity helps us resolve a cluster of philosophical and theological problems that accompany any assertion that moral conscience is a mode of the experience of God. (‘The experience of God’ is also grammatically an ambiguous phrase, of course. Here I will be using it as an objective genitive unless otherwise indicated.)

My central hypothesis is that the experience of moral conscience is a primary mode of the experience of God, if not the most important mode. This hypothesis is hardly without controversy: at least since the beginning of the nineteenth century, when D.F. Schleiermacher argued against any simple identification of moral conscience and religious experience, it has been recognized to be complex and problematic. Schleiermacher wrote in 1799 that religion ‘must be something different from a mixture of opinions about God and the world, and of precepts for one life or for two. Piety cannot be an instinct craving for a mess of metaphysical and ethical crumbs’ (Schleiermacher, 31).

In the February issue of New Blackfriars, Rowan Williams explored the unity of theological discourse. He asked what criteria might be used in setting limits to pluralism—how we can go about deciding what should be allowed to count as a statement of Christian truth. He concluded that we must go beyond the domain of formal theological language and look to the way in which a theology becomes enfleshed: ‘the unity of Christian truth is perceivable to the extent that we can perceive a unity in Christian holiness’.

I believe that, in an important though rather complex way, Williams is right, and in this article I would like to explore that complexity and to offer some observations on the understanding of Church which implies and is implied by that insight.

One obvious criticism which could be made of Williams’ position is that it shifts the problem of unity rather than solving it. If ‘the unity of Christian truth’ is to be discerned through ‘a unity of Christian holiness’, this latter unity must be in some way recognizable. And that raises a question.

On this view it is not particularly helpful to say, for example, that what unites Mother Theresa and Simeon Stylites is their shared Christian faith. Rather, it is the other way round. What holds the articulated faith of the fifth and twentieth centuries together is the fact that spending forty years on the top of a column and tending the sick in Calcutta somehow display ‘continuities of Christian patterns of holiness’. I would want to say that in the end it must be so. But how can we know?