Western Pluralism and the Question of Other Religions
Western Pluralism and the Question of Other Religions
The Christian proclamation has always taken place in a pluralist world, in competition with rival religious and intellectual convictions. The emergence of the gospel within the matrix of Judaism, the expansion of the gospel in a Hellenistic milieu, the early Christian expansion in pagan Rome, the establishment of the Mar Thoma church in southeast India – all of these are examples of situations in which Christian apologists and theologians, not to mention ordinary Christian believers, have been aware that there are alternatives to Christianity on offer and have had to make appropriate responses to this situation.
It is quite possible that most North American and western European Christians of the late nineteenth or early twentieth centuries, unfamiliar with the religious diversity of the world, had little idea of the importance of these issues. For such people, “different religions” would probably have been understood to refer simply to the age-old tension between Protestantism and Catholicism. Virtually nothing was known of the great religions of the east. That would change when the German orientalist Max Müller (1823–1900) published his great series The Sacred Books of the East, the first volume of which appeared in 1875.
Yet things changed radically in the west during the second half of the twentieth century. The western seaboard of the United States and Canada and many cities in Australia experienced an influx of peoples of eastern faiths, especially those originating from a Chinese context. Immigration from the Indian subcontinent has changed the situation irreversibly within Britain, with Hinduism and Islam becoming the foci of identity for ethnic minorities, just as the social shape of France has been significantly changed by the new presence of Islam through emigration from its former North African colonies. As a result, western theologians (who still seem to dominate global discussion of such issues) have become increasingly aware of issues which are routine facts of everyday life for Christians in many parts of the world. The result is that providing a theological account of the relation of Christianity to other religions has become of major significance in the modern world.
Two fundamentally different styles of approach to the study of religions may be adopted, each of which can be readily discerned in modern western academia.
The Detached Approach
The detached approach seeks to give an account of the religions, Christianity included, from the standpoint of philosophy or the social sciences, or from a loosely “religious” perspective (as in many modern American “faculties of religion”). An excellent example of this approach may be found in Anthony Giddens's (born 1938) highly influential textbook Sociology (1989), which approached religious matters from a sociological standpoint. His approach is instructive; for example, he gives four illustrations of what religion is not, in order to indicate the extent to which western cultural bias can creep into thinking about religions. According to Giddens, who writes from a sociological perspective, religion is not:
Giddens's comments in relation to the too-easy identification of religion with monotheism are of considerable interest:
Religion should not be identified with monotheism (belief in one God). Nietzsche's thesis of the “death of God” was strongly ethnocentric, relating only to western religious ideas. Most religions involve many deities. [...] In certain religions, there are no gods at all.
Giddens's concern as a sociologist is simply to document the phenomenon of religion, without imposing a restrictive interpretive framework upon it.
The Committed Approach
The committed approach seeks to give an account of the origins and functions of religions from an explicitly Christian perspective. It is this approach that particularly concerns us in this volume, which deals with a specifically Christian theology rather than theories about religion in general.
However, the importance of the question of religions in modern culture is such that it is entirely proper to open this discussion by considering some “detached” approaches to the world religions before moving on to consider more explicitly Christian approaches.