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What if religious texts were some of our most significant sources of philosophical insight?
Philosopher Meghan Sullivan believes that traditions like Christianity, Judaism, and Islam are filled with moral questions that invite discussion and reflection. She challenges the idea that philosophy must be strictly secular, pointing out how religious stories and parables often resemble the open-ended questioning found in ancient dialogues like Plato’s Republic.
These connections support the idea that religious texts are not meant to shut down debate, but encourage it. For Sullivan, exploring faith through philosophical conversation helps us think more clearly about how to live and what it means to be human.
MEGHAN SULLIVAN: Many contemporary philosophers shy away from using religious texts as philosophical sources of evidence or inspiration. They think that because these traditions believe that the texts are inspired by God, they’re not capable of interpretation and debate. And that’s just a mistake.
The whole tradition of Jewish and Christian ethics is a tradition of debate. You have Jesus or Muhammad or Moses engaged in asking a philosophical question to followers that followers are meant to wrestle with and think about. These kinds of texts are asking philosophical questions that many people find profoundly interesting. In fact, one of the best ways to engage with that idea and to live out that teaching is to engage with the debate.
There really shouldn’t be this sharp division between so-called secular philosophical texts and so-called religious philosophical texts. All of these texts ask philosophical questions, and philosophy doesn’t know those boundaries. There are plenty of instances in the Bible that are in exactly the same genre as the Socratic dialogues, which are the bedrock of how we have taught philosophy for 2,400 years.
“The Republic” opens with Socrates on the road, taking a walk. He runs into his cousins, and his cousins start asking him questions about what it really means to be a just person. That sets off the whole rest of the book, which gets into so many really deep and important philosophical questions about how we should design society and how we should educate young people. These really profound questions come from that simple question.
We see the same dynamic with Jesus and his disciples, especially in the parables. There are people who are curious about how they should be living their lives. They want Jesus to share a story. They want to ask a follow-up question. That curiosity, that kind of conversation—this is how we cultivate our inner lives. This is how we work on our souls.
This kind of debate, this kind of thinking, it’s not meant to turn you off to the ideas in the tradition, but quite the contrary. It’s meant to make you really, really interested in understanding what these moral traditions ask of you. Philosophy cuts across secular and religious genres. It’s an invitation for us to be a part of a discussion where that discussion itself is something that, frankly, we’re meant to enjoy.
It’s meant to help us answer really deep questions that are hard to wrestle with if we don’t have philosophical interlocutors. And in the process of having the debate and discussion, we’re promised that we’re going to uncover some really important philosophical truths that we can use to live our lives.
