Reality or “Reality”? A critique of Fr. David Tracy’s view of religious pluralism

Editor’s note: The prominent Catholic theologian Fr. David Tracy (1939-2025), who was known for his writings on pluralism, religious diversity, and interreligious dialogue, died on April 29th, at the age of 86. In this essay, aspects of his thought are considered and critiqued.

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The great philosophical theologian, Fr. David Tracy (1939-2025), in the 1987 book Plurality and Ambiguity: Hermeneutics, Religion, Hope (University of Chicago Press) considers the matter of religious diversity. Tracy distinguishes the fact of religious plurality from a possible response to that fact, namely, as Tracy calls it, “pluralism—more accurately, a pluralistic attitude.” He adds, “It is an attitude I fundamentally trust.”

Is Tracy a religious relativist? Are all religions in some sense equally true? According to the 2000 document, Dominus Iesus, “relativistic theories . . . seek to justify religious pluralism, not only de facto but also de iure (or in principle).” (§4)

In response, on the one hand, Tracy takes religious pluralism seriously by arguing that the “plurality among the religions is not reducible to claims that they all bespeak the same enlightenment or practice the same way of liberation.” He argues that it is implausible to think that ultimately all religions are finally one. In other words, “there is no single essence, no one content of enlightenment or revelation, no one way of emancipation or liberation, to be found in all that plurality.”

In this connection, Tracy differentiates in what has now become typical between what he calls “Ultimate Reality itself,” reality as it is in itself, and the different ways of talking about that reality: “God, Emptiness, Suchness, the One, Nature, the Many,” even “grace-ful,” as Tracy refers to that reality. Is there one God or more? I surmise that the Trinity and the Incarnation is just a different way of talking about “Ultimate Reality.”

The Real and relativism

The central problem with this familiar approach to “Ultimate Reality” derives from insisting that this “Ultimate” transcends all concepts, personal or nonpersonal conceptions. If so, then it cannot explain religious diversity; it cannot be causally responsible for the religious experiences of the different religions, and, most significantly, since there is no will of God, says then Cardinal Ratzinger, “neither, then, is there any ultimate distinction between good and evil.”

Ratzinger discusses, in this connection, the philosophical views of the late British theologian John Hick (1922–2012) whose starting point in reflecting on religious diversity is the Kantian distinction between phenomenon and noumenon, that is, the world as it appears to us and the Real in itself. In short, says Hick, “our awareness of the Transcendent is . . . necessarily mediated to us through our own conceptual apparatus.” As Ratzinger describes this distinction: “We can never know ultimate reality in itself but only ever its appearance in the way we perceive things, seeing it through various ‘lenses’.”

Furthermore, Hick seeks to hold a monotheism that still recognizes religious diversity such that ultimate reality, what he calls the Real in itself, is present in world religions. He distinguishes religious pluralism, as he thinks of it, from relativism. In other words, for Hick, this ultimate reality, which is the ontological basis for religion, is “present to all forms of existence as the ground of their ever-changing being.”

But this means, as Hick himself affirms, that “the Real in itself ‘cannot be said to be one or many, person or thing, substance or process, good or evil, purposive or non-purposive’.” In fact, Hick addresses the question as to “why we should ‘use the term “Real” in the singular’” since “‘the Real’. . . cannot literally be numbered.”

Anglican philosophical theologian Roger Trigg’s critique of Hick’s view dovetails with that of Ratzinger’s. It is also a critique of David Tracy’s view of religious pluralism:

Nothing could illustrate better the collapse of Hick’s realism and monotheism into vacuity. The pluralism that aims at a total inaccessible reality will collapse into something surprisingly like relativism. A monotheism that cannot even proclaim the oneness of God immediately contradicts itself. The admission that we cannot even be sure that the universe contains purpose or is ultimately good, let alone that the root of all things is personal, undermines the foundations of monotheism.

The ne

On the other hand, Tracy does not argue that a pluralistic attitude means “anything goes.” We need to demonstrate a “responsible pluralistic attitude,” and there are criteria of assessment for a judgment of relative adequacy other than the openness to new religious possibilities. He states, “There must be criteria to assess the coherence or incoherence of any possibility with what we otherwise know or, more likely, believe to be the case.” This implies that some religious interpretations are better or worse. This demand for criteria of assessment distinguishes Tracy from being a pure religious relativist. He states that “any good pluralist should always be able to discuss the differences between good, bad, and downright awful interpretations.” In sum, “all we can hope for is some relatively adequate interpretation,” which is a reasonable interpretation.

This requires interreligious dialogue that is meaning- and truth-oriented. In that dialogue, we find analogies between the religions, for example, between Christianity, Judaism, and Islam regarding a theology of creation. This dialogue involves the “plurality of interpretations of religion” as well as “resulting conflict of interpretations.” Again, the “great pluralists of religion are those who so affirm plurality that they fundamentally trust it, yet do not shirk their responsibility to develop criteria of assessment for each judgment of relative adequacy.” At the root of the varying interpretations is a “fundamental trust in, and loyalty to, the Ultimate Reality disclosed . . . in one’s own religious tradition.”

But this reality seems inaccessible, as I argued above.

Missing in this dialogue is, then, the question of competing truth claims between the religions; they are explicitly at odds with each other. The fundamental concepts of truth, rationality, and objectivity, as well as reality and reference, are necessary to account for the justification of religious beliefs. The Catholic philosophical tradition affirms a cognitive and ontological realism. The former means that reality is knowable, while the latter means, in the words of Roger Trigg, “true theories are true in virtue of the nature of objective reality. Truth has its source in reality.”

The notion of truth here is a realist one. Realism about truth holds that a proposition is true if and only if what the proposition asserts is in fact the case about objective reality. Otherwise, it is false. The philosopher-Pope John Paul II is also a philosophical realist regarding a philosophy of knowledge that is a scripturally directed epistemology, one that can be of service to the Gospel, orthodoxy, and theology. It must affirm the “human capacity to know the truth”—that is, “to come to a knowledge which can reach objective truth by means of the correspondence between thing and intellect (adaequatio rei et intellectus).” (Fides et Ratio, §82)

Reality or “Reality”?

Against this background, we should understand the point raised by the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue.

To say that the other religious traditions include elements of grace does not imply that everything in them is the result of grace. For sin has been at work in the world, and so religious traditions, notwithstanding their positive values, reflect the limitations of the human spirit, sometimes inclined to choose evil. An open and positive approach to other religious traditions cannot overlook the contradictions which may exist between them and Christian revelation. It must, where necessary, recognize that there is incompatibility between some fundamental elements of the Christian religion and some aspects of such traditions.

Given Tracy’s emphasis on criteria of assessment, does he hold that our best interpretation of “Ultimate Reality” tells us the truth about that reality? Definitely not, given his distinction between “Ultimate Reality” and ways of construing that reality. We certainly must consider the claims to meaning and truth of the different religions. Consider the committed Christian who justifies the beliefs he holds to be true in light of the authoritative sources of the faith, or what Tracy calls the “religious classic” of that tradition. This justification involves the retrieval of the meaning and truth of those sources, critique of my present self-understanding in order to address properly the questions raised against orthodox Christianity—say, against conjugal marriage and for “same-sex marriage”—and resistance to any interpretation as the final one. And interpretation is never free from “finitude, contingency, and faults.”

In this view, do the assertions of the Nicene Creed disclose the meaning and truth of reality? Is Tracy a religious realist? No, he holds that divine truth is elusive and inexpressible (see Dominus Iesus §4). This position puts objective reality and hence the truth about that reality at risk because Tracy limits what is real to what is real for human beings; in other words, treating reality, as Trigg states, to be “totally irrelevant to questions of truth.” Tracy explains:

Reality is what we name our best interpretation. Reality is constituted, not created or simply found, through the interpretations that have earned the right to be called relatively adequate or true. . . . Reality is neither out there nor in here. Reality is constituted by the interaction between a text, whether book or world, and a questioning interpreter. The interaction called questioning can produce warranted assertions through relevant evidence.

Tracy adds, “‘Reality’ is the one word that should always appear within quotation marks.” Why would he put the term in such quotes? Because he seeks to distance himself from what the term ordinarily means. Thus, warranted assertions do not give actual access to reality, and so we cannot know the truth about reality, say, the definitive and complete character of the revelation of Jesus Christ. Tracy fails to distinguish the conditions under which we know that something is true from the conditions that make it true. My knowing that something is true is not what makes it true; objective reality does that.

John Paul II disagrees with Tracy’s anti-realism. He writes:

The interpretation of this word [that is, the Word of God] cannot merely keep referring us to one interpretation after another, without ever leading us to a statement which is simply true.” (Fides et Ratio §84)

As then-Cardinal Ratzinger comments on this passage from Fides et Ratio and the hermeneutical position that Tracy seems to endorse: “Man is not trapped in a hall of mirrors of interpretations; he can and must look for the way out to the reality that stands behind the words and manifests itself to him in and through the words.” In sum, pace Tracy, we can know the truth about reality.

The content of the concepts informing the propositions that God is Triune, and that the Second Person of the Trinity is God Incarnate, is meaning invariant, is fixed and hence determinate, having a dogmatic conceptual hard core, and that meaning does not change precisely because it is true to reality, to an objective state of affairs. This position is consistent with Vatican I and II, the 1973 CDF document Mysterium Ecclesiae, the International Theological Commission 1989 document The Interpretation of Dogma, and John Paul II’s 1998 Fides et Ratio.

Without that contact with reality, dogmatic relativism is unavoidable.