We live in a period religious insights are more and more influential. The rise of communautarism makes it necessary to engage for more moderate or progressive views of religions. To this extend it is necessary to defend more open ways, in a contest that is happening for ages.
In my opinion, progressism in the world of religion is first linked to the notion of interpretation. Interpretation is a the heart of the texts. Marx said that “philosophers interpreted the world”, it can be applied to the religions as well. To this extend, as science emancipated from theology in the XVIIth century, religion had the possibility to focus on interpretation. It is necessary to notice that Jesus talked by paraboles, which is open to the notion of interpretation. Is it a way to say that human understanding is limited to interpretation, and that the real truth is beyond its understanding? A demeanor favoring interpretation and refusing to talk about a “truth” led to the historico-critical approach. Those visions are necessary to build a vision that is going back to the principles. Luther advocated this method, a symbol of this demeanor was Melenchton, who was teaching Anciant Greek while supporting Luther.
This approach favoring interpretation, in my opinion, if favoring a progressive vision of theology. It is advocating thinking in the long run, which is necessary to lead to a very good understanding of the texts. It is also detrimental to notice that Judaism, for instance, is promoting this approach : for instance the Talmudist Aboulafia was one of the founders of hermeneutics, and the tulmudic schools are advocating dialog.
Promoting progressism is also a matter of intellectual fights. Those ones always existed. For instance the Talmudist Hillel prevailed over his great rival Chammaï advocating a more open vision of the texts. In Islam Al Ghazali confronted Avicenne concerning the place of philosophy in religion, considering that is was necessary to restrict the role of other disciplines to understand the religious texts. To the same extend Franciscan and Benedictan orders were partly put in place to go back to the original Christian values against the Vatican considered as corrupted, Jesuits were created by Ignace de Loyola to confront the Reformers… More recently there were intellectual confrontations between Hans Kung and Joseph Ratzinger were representative of these oppositions.
In my opinion it may be useful to consider Christian movements as the theology of liberation, the movement of the newspaper Spirit of Mounier, or the social Christian movements. Those approaches look to combine a Christian engagement compatible with social engagement and values. Christian approaches can give useful insight to favor the environment for instance, even if the Genesis gave symbolically the power to men to dominate the nature and the animals (it gave to Descartes the ability to build his theory of “man master and owner of nature”, and also the notion of “animal machine”). Working on religious texts to fight for environmental causes can have a positive impact in many countries and regions of the world where religion is very important.
It looks necessary to defend progressive values in our century. As we saw intellectual controversies already existed over the ages. Today the rise of communautarism everywhere necessitate to deepen theological concepts to engage better to fight for these causes. As the theologian Mohamed Bajrafil said, “it will be a long run fight”. It looks necessary to inspire from Sanct Paul, which was called the “athlete of God” to engage energetically in this process.
The observer 