Christian Approaches to Other Religions
Christian Approaches to Other Religions
We now turn to consider Christian approaches to understanding the relationship between Christianity and other religious traditions. In what way can such traditions be understood, within the context of the Christian belief in the universal saving will of God, made known through Jesus Christ? It must be stressed that Christian theology is concerned with evaluating other religious traditions from the perspective of Christianity itself. Such reflection is not addressed to, or intended to gain approval from, members of other religious traditions or their secular observers.
Three broad approaches can be identified:
We shall consider these three viewpoints individually. However, there are difficulties with this traditional threefold division of approaches into exclusivism, inclusivism, and pluralism. Readers must appreciate that these categories, though convenient for educational purposes, often prove inadequate to categorize the wide range of approaches now found within Christian theology. They are best seen as convenient ways of organizing approaches to other religions, rather than as distinct, coherent schools of thought.
For example, several theological approaches are very difficult to position using this threefold framework, largely because it fails to distinguish between the questions of truth and of salvation in other religions. A number of writers hold an “inclusivist” view regarding truth outside the Christian church yet at the same time hold an “exclusivist” view with regard to salvation. For example, Karl Barth straddles categories awkwardly, suggesting that they require revision if they are to be useful tools of description. Thinkers who may be assigned to a given category may nonetheless adopt quite different approaches to their topic. Furthermore, there is a sense in which each of the three positions – exclusivism, inclusivism, and pluralism – are “exclusivist” in their own right. Each assumes the other to be wrong and thus ends up making exclusivist claims of its own.
These concerns are well known, and alternatives certainly exist. For example, the Finnish scholar Veli-Matti Kärkkäinen has proposed the threefold scheme of “ecclesiocentrism,” “Christocentrism,” and “theocentrism.” However, none of the alternatives proposed has gained widespread support. For this reason, we shall retain the traditional scheme, despite its clear limitations.
Exclusivism
The viewpoint that is widely known as “exclusivism” can also be described as “particularism,” on account of its affirmation of the particular and distinctive features of the Christian faith. Perhaps the most influential statement of this position may be found in the writings of Hendrik Kraemer (1888–1965), especially his Christian Message in a Non-Christian World (1938). Kraemer emphasized that “God has revealed the Way and the Truth and the Life in Jesus Christ, and wills this to be known throughout the world.” This revelation is sui generis; it is in a category of its own and cannot be set alongside the ideas of revelation found in other religious traditions.
At this point, a certain breadth of opinion can be discerned within this approach. Kraemer himself seems to suggest that there is real knowledge of God outside Christ when he speaks of God shining through “in a broken, troubled way, in reason, in nature and in history.” The question is whether such knowledge is only available through Christ or whether Christ provides the only framework by which such knowledge may be discerned and interpreted elsewhere.
Some exclusivists (or, as some prefer to be styled, particularists), such as Karl Barth, adopt the position that there is no knowledge of God to be had apart from Christ; others (such as Kraemer) allow that God's self-revelation occurs in many ways and places but insist that this revelation can only be interpreted correctly, and known for what it really is, in the light of the definitive revelation of God in Christ. (There are important parallels here with the debate over natural and revealed knowledge of God.)
What, then, of those who have not heard the gospel of Christ? What happens to them? Are not particularists denying salvation to those who have not heard of Christ or who, having heard the Christian proclamation, choose to reject it? This criticism is frequently leveled against particularism by its critics. Thus, John Hick, arguing from a pluralist perspective, suggests that the doctrine that salvation is only possible through Christ is inconsistent with belief in the universal saving will of God. That this is not, in fact, the case is readily demonstrated by considering the view of Karl Barth, easily the most sophisticated of the twentieth-century defenders of this position.
Barth declares that salvation is only possible through Christ. He nevertheless insists on the ultimate eschatological victory of grace over unbelief – that is, at the end of history (a point we considered earlier, in connection with his doctrine of election, pp. 348–9). Eventually, God's grace will triumph completely, and all will come to faith in Christ. This is the only way to salvation, but it is a way that, through the grace of God, is effective for all. For Barth, the particularity of God's revelation through Christ is not contradicted by the universality of salvation.
More recent expositions of the particularist position are associated with Stephen C. Neill (1900–84) and Lesslie Newbigin (1909–98), both British writers who spent a substantial part of their working lives as Christian bishops in India. Neill saw no tension between the affirmation of the unique status of Christianity and having respect for, and interest in, other religions. Yet he was clear that Christianity, by its very nature, calls the truth of other belief systems into question:
Christian faith claims for itself that it is the only form of faith for men; by its own claim to truth it casts the shadow of falsehood, or at least of imperfect truth, on every other system. This Christian claim is naturally offensive to the adherents of every other religious system. It is almost as offensive to modern man, brought up in the atmosphere of relativism, in which tolerance is regarded almost as the highest of the virtues. But we must not suppose that this claim to universal validity is something that can quietly be removed from the Gospel without changing it into something entirely different from what it is.
Neill concedes that, to non-Christians, this must sound like “crazy megalomania, and religious imperialism of the very worst kind.” Yet he believes that, while this aspect of the Christian faith is open to sensitive statement and application, it cannot be denied or diluted.
Lesslie Newbigin similarly affirms the uniqueness of the Christian faith, and the missionary obligation that arises from its distinctive view of reality. One of Newbigin's most important contributions to the exclusivist position lies in his defense of the particularity of the Christian faith. Newbigin strongly resists any attempt to suggest that Christianity is just one perspective on God, or one way of seeing a greater reality. The pluralist alternative to traditional ways of thinking, he argues, is flawed. Newbigin illustrates this by pointing out some of the difficulties associated with the pluralist approach of Wilfred Cantwell Smith (1916–2000), who asserts that all religions share a common core experience:
It is clear that in Smith's view “The Transcendent” is a purely formal category. He, she, or it may be conceived in any way that the worshiper may choose. There can therefore be no such thing as false or misdirected worship, since the reality to which it is directed is unknowable. Smith quotes as “one of the theologically most discerning remarks that I know” the words of the Yogavasistha: “Thou art formless. Thy only form is our knowledge of Thee.” Any claim for uniqueness made for one concept of the Transcendent, for instance the Christian claim that the Transcendent is present in fullness in Jesus (Colossians 1: 19), is to be regarded as wholly unacceptable. There are no criteria by which different concepts of the Transcendent may be tested. We are shut up to a total subjectivity: the Transcendent is unknowable.
Newbigin therefore reaffirms what he regards as the classic Christian position: that Jesus Christ is the unique and distinctive ground and center of a unique and distinctive faith.
Inclusivism
The inclusivist approach holds that Christianity makes space for other religions. Rather than seeing them as degradations or denials of the truth, they are to be seen as important milestones along the road to the Christian faith. These ideas can be seen developing in British India during the second half of the nineteenth century, as increasing numbers of British theologians became familiar with Hinduism at first hand. The “fulfillment hypothesis,” especially associated with J. N. Farquhar (1861–1929), saw other faiths as pointing toward their fulfillment in Christianity.
The groundwork for the “fulfillment” model of the relationship of Christianity to other faiths was laid by the English theologian F. D. Maurice (1805–72), whose Religions of the World and their Relations to Christianity (1846) marked the beginning of the end of the missionary “defamation” of other religious traditions. Similar ideas were developed by B. F. Westcott (1825–1901), who spoke of “the progressive action of the Word” in the world's religions and of a “Divine plan in the education of the world.” These ideas began to be reflected in the Indian context. In a course of lectures given at Madras in 1876, the missionary writer and thinker T. E. Slater (1840–1912) set out the guiding principle of the “fulfillment” model as follows:
Not to present Christianity as an antagonistic Religion among other Religions of the world, not as a voice sounding the knell of doom to non-Christian nations, but, in the firm persuasion that all are by nature Christians, to hold it up as that in which Hindus would find realized and satisfied the noblest and earliest ideas of their sages, and the truest sentiments and yearnings of their hearts.
These ideas gained increasing popularity in the 1890s, resonating with a shift in both cultural and theological mood. In an editorial of 1908, the Madras Christian College Magazine, citing some words of Jesus of Nazareth from the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5: 17), set out the leading principle of what was increasingly becoming the new missionary orthodoxy: “‘I came not to destroy but fulfil' is not a word to be limited in its application to Judaism. All that there is of truth and inspiration in other religions must find its fulfillment in Jesus Christ.”
The outbreak of the First World War brought such theological speculations to an end. Although such ideas were explored sporadically over the next decades, they never received the systematic exposition they required. The “fulfillment” approach to other religions was revived after the Second World War, particularly within Catholic theology. Jean Daniélou (1905–74) argued that Christianity was to be seen as the fulfillment of human longings for salvation and acceptance. Daniélou, a noted patristic scholar, developed arguments found in writers such as Justin Martyr (c.100–c.165), arguing that pagan religions are to be seen as “divine pedagogy.” The church “does not despise pagan teaching, but sets it free, fulfills it, and crowns it.” This has an important ecclesiological implication: that there are people who will be saved through Christ who are not members of the visible church:
The domain of Christ and of the Church extends beyond the limits of the explicit revelation of Christ and of the visible expansion of the Church. In every age and in every land there have been men who believed in Christ without knowing Him and who have belonged invisibly to the visible Church.
An influential variant of this approach was developed by the leading Jesuit writer Karl Rahner, who rapidly became known as the leading advocate of this “inclusive” approach. Rahner developed the approach far beyond its earlier modest statements.
In the fifth volume of his Theological Investigations, Rahner develops four theses, setting out the view not merely that individual non-Christians may be saved but also that the non-Christian religious traditions in general may have access to the saving grace of God in Christ. Karl Rahner's theology of religions is based on the core axioms of God's universal salvific will and the necessity of a specifically Christian faith:
We may explore the first three of these theses in a little more detail.
It will be clear that Rahner strongly affirms the principle that salvation may only be had through Christ, as he is interpreted by the Christian tradition. “Christianity understands itself as the absolute religion, intended for all people, which cannot recognize any other religion beside itself as of equal right.” Yet Rahner supplements this with an emphasis upon the universal saving will of God: God wishes that all shall be saved, even though not all know Christ. “Somehow all people must be able to be members of the church.”
For this reason, Rahner argues that saving grace must be available outside the bounds of the church – and hence in other religious traditions. He vigorously opposes those who adopt too-neat solutions, insisting that either a religious tradition comes from God or it is an inauthentic and purely human invention. Where Kraemer argued that non-Christian religious traditions were little more than self-justifying human constructions, Rahner argues that such traditions may well include elements of truth.
Rahner justifies this suggestion by considering the relationship between the Old and New Testaments. Although the Old Testament, strictly speaking, represents the outlook of a non-Christian religion (Judaism), Christians are able to read it and discern within it elements which continue to be valid. The Old Testament is evaluated in the light of the New, and, as a result, certain practices (such as dietary laws) are discarded as unacceptable while others (such as the moral law) are retained. The same approach can and should, Rahner argues, be adopted in the case of other religions.
The saving grace of God is thus available through non-Christian religious traditions, despite their shortcomings. Many of their adherents, Rahner argues, have thus accepted that grace, without being fully aware of what it is. It is for this reason that Rahner introduces the term “anonymous Christians” to refer to those who have experienced divine grace without necessarily knowing it.
This term has been heavily criticized. For example, John Hick has suggested that it is paternalist, offering “honorary status granted unilaterally to people who have not expressed any desire for it.” Nevertheless, Rahner's intention is to allow for the real effects of divine grace in the lives of those who belong to non-Christian traditions. Full access to truth about God (as it is understood within the Christian tradition) is not a necessary precondition for access to the saving grace of God.
Rahner does not allow that Christianity and other religious traditions may be treated as equal, or that they are particular instances of a common encounter with God. For Rahner, Christianity and Christ have an exclusive status, denied to other religious traditions. The question is: can other religious traditions give access to the same saving grace as that offered by Christianity? Rahner's approach allows him to suggest that the beliefs of non-Christian religious traditions are not necessarily true while allowing that they may, nevertheless, mediate the grace of God by the lifestyles which they evoke – such as a selfless love of one's neighbor. Rahner thus maintains that other religions are “lawful” while insisting that this lawfulness is temporary and provisional, valid only until an historical and existential encounter with Christianity.
A somewhat different approach is associated with the Second Vatican Council (1962–5). In its decree on other faiths (1965), the Council followed Rahner in affirming that rays of divine truth were indeed to be found in other religions. However, where Rahner allowed other faiths to have soteriological potential, the Council maintained the distinctiveness of the Christian faith at this point:
The Catholic Church rejects nothing of what is true and holy in these religions. She has a high regard for the manner of life and conduct, the precepts and doctrines which, although differing in many ways from her own teaching, nevertheless often reflect a ray of that truth which enlightens all men. Yet she proclaims and is in duty bound to proclaim without fail, Christ who is the way, the truth and the life (John 14: 6). In him, in whom God reconciled all things to himself (2 Corinthians 5: 18–19), men find the fullness of their religious life.
The distinction between Rahner and the Second Vatican Council can be summarized as follows.: Rahner is both revelationally and soteriologically inclusive; the Council tends to be revelationally inclusive yet soteriologically particularist.
The issue of religious pluralism is now being widely discussed within western evangelicalism. The general consensus within evangelicalism at present is strongly exclusivist. However, a minority opinion should be noted. The Canadian writer Clark H. Pinnock (1937–2010) draws on a Logos Christology similar to that of the apologists of the second century in building his argument for universal access to salvation, adopting an inclusivist position similar, in respects, to that of Karl Rahner.
The following considerations clearly influence his thinking:
If God really loves the whole world and desires everyone to be saved, it follows logically that everyone must have access to salvation. There would have to be an opportunity for all people to participate in the salvation of God. If Christ died for all, while yet sinners, the opportunity must be given for all to register a decision about what was done for them. They cannot lack the opportunity merely because someone failed to bring the Gospel of Christ to them. God's universal salvific will implies the equally universal accessibility of salvation for all people.
In recent years, growing discontent with the shortcomings of the pluralist approach has led to the emergence of a variant inclusivist approach, sometimes referred to as “parallelism.” Irritated at pluralist attempts to shoehorn all the religions into the same basic pattern (to be considered presently), writers such as Joseph DiNoia (born 1943) and Mark Heim have insisted that the distinctive features of each religion must be respected. In his The Diversity of Religions (1992), DiNoia pleads for religious diversity to be taken seriously and offers a critique of what he regards as the shortcomings of reductionist approaches. In his Salvations: Truth and Difference in Religion (1995), Heim critiques three major pluralistic thinkers: John Hick, Wilfred Cantwell Smith, and Paul Knitter (born 1939). He argues that all three create paradigms that arise from and are informed by the world of western liberal thought. The outcome is inevitable: they end up forcing religions into a preconceived mold.
For Heim, it is essential to respect religions for what they are. Instead of arguing that all religions ultimately lead to Christian truth (the inclusivist position) or to some ultimate reality which transcends all religious traditions (the pluralist position), Heim insists that we must take each religion's understanding of its beliefs and goals seriously. Christian beliefs and practices will lead to Christian goals – to the New Jerusalem. Muslims will attain a Muslim paradise on the basis of their beliefs and practices. Buddhist beliefs and practices will lead to Buddhist goals. And so on. Instead of forcing all religions to end up at the same place, Heim insists that we respect their own visions of what they are seeking to achieve.
Heim's position is itself a form of religious particularism. Writing from a Christian perspective, Heim insists that everyone must recognize both the actuality and the possible value of other religious particularisms, without trying to subsume them all into some grand, religiously neutral theory. Heim argues that pluralism is actually crypto-inclusivist, in that it claims to believe in many goals but actually believes in only one – namely, “reality-centeredness” in the case of John Hick, liberation from social oppression for Paul Knitter, and universal faith and rationality for Wilfred Cantwell Smith.
The parallelist way of thinking allows for the possibility that different religions may be deeply and genuinely different, offering their adherents competing goals which, however good each may be, are profoundly incompatible. That is why the title of Heim's book is so significant: Salvations – in the plural. Against the pluralist insistence that all religions ultimately lead to the same salvation, Heim argues that we must acknowledge and respect each religion's own distinctive understanding of what salvation actually is. “Christians can consistently recognize that some traditions encompass religious ends which are real states of human transformation, distinct from that Christians seek.” Christian theology should therefore consistently recognize that there are (or can be) many different religious goals, and hence many different salvations.
This position raises a number of questions. Its fundamental approach could be described as a “plurality of absolutes.” All religions are to be recognized as being completely right in their own terms. But how can this be? Can all be right? Heim's argument, in effect, is that these claims are justified, epistemically speaking, even if they may be mistaken. This conclusion reflects a postmodern reaction against the modernist insistence on a single standard of justification for beliefs. The religions develop their own standards of determining what justifies a belief, and their beliefs are justified by their own standards. It is an argument that is not without its problems. However, it certainly moves us away from the modernist assumptions that underlie pluralism. It remains to be seen how this new approach will be evaluated in the coming years.
Clark Pinnock and other inclusivists clearly believe that the difficulties encountered with the “particularist” or “exclusivist” model for understanding the relation of Christianity to other religions can be dealt with using the “inclusivist” approach. Others disagree: while recognizing the force of the difficulties of the “particularist” paradigm, they believe that these are more effectively addressed through a “pluralist” approach, to which we now turn.
Pluralism
The basic feature of the “pluralist” approach to the relationship of Christianity to other faiths is that each religion is understood to represent a distinctive, yet equally valid, grasp of some ultimate spiritual reality, which some religions term “God” and others define in rather more nontheistic or atheistic terms. For these reasons, pluralist writers tend to refer to the spiritual reality which they believe to lie behind all religions in terms such as “ultimate reality” or “the Real,” thus avoiding the explicit use of the term “God.”
Figure 17.2 John Hick (1922–2012).
The most significant exponent of a pluralist approach to religious traditions is John Hick. In writings such as God and the Universe of Faiths (1973) and The Second Christianity (1983), Hick argued for a need to move away from a Christ-centered to a God-centered approach. Describing this change as a “Copernican revolution,” Hick declared that it was necessary to move away from “the dogma that Christianity is at the centre to the realization that it is God who is at the centre, and that all religions [...] including our own, serve and revolve around him.” As Hick puts this point:
Now it seems to many of us today that we need a Copernican revolution in our understanding of the religions. The traditional dogma has been that Christianity is the centre of the universe of faiths, with all the other religions seen as revolving at various removes around the revelation in Christ and being graded according to their nearness to or distance from it. But during the last hundred years or so we have been making new observations and have realized that there is deep devotion to God, true sainthood, and deep spiritual life within these other religions; and so we have created our epicycles of theory, such as the notions of anonymous Christianity and of implicit faith. But would it not be more realistic now to make the shift from Christianity at the centre to God at the centre, and to see both our own and the other great world religions as revolving around the same divine reality?
Developing this approach, Hick suggests that the aspect of God's nature of central importance to the question of other faiths is his universal saving will. If God wishes everyone to be saved, it is inconceivable that the divine self-revelation should be effected in such a way that only a small portion of humanity could be saved. In fact, as we have seen, this is not a necessary feature of either particularist or inclusivist approaches. However, Hick draws the conclusion that it is necessary to recognize that all religions lead to the same God. Christians have no special access to God, who is universally available through all religious traditions.
Hick uses an essentially Kantian philosophical framework to argue that a distinction must be made between the ultimate spiritual reality which underlies the various religious systems of the world and the perceptions of this reality which exist within these systems. Kant (1724–1804) had insisted that the “thing in itself” could not be known directly; humanity was obliged to limit its reflections to the world of phenomena, which at best offered an indirect knowledge of that reality. “The Real” was thus inaccessible; the religions offered human responses to that “Real” which reflected the historical and social context in which the religions of the world evolved:
This distinction enables us to acknowledge both the one unlimited transcendent divine Reality and also a plurality of varying human concepts, images, and experiences of and response to that Reality. These different human awarenesses of and responses to the Real are formed by and reciprocally inform the religious traditions of the earth. In them are reflected the different ways of thinking, feeling and experiencing which have developed within the worldwide human family.
This suggestion is not without its problems. For example, it is fairly clear that the religious traditions of the world are radically different in their beliefs and practices. Hick deals with this point by suggesting that such differences must be interpreted in terms of “both/and” rather than “either/or.” They should be understood as complementary, rather than contradictory, insights into the one divine reality. This reality lies at the heart of all the religions; yet “their differing experiences of that reality, interacting over the centuries with the different thought-forms of different cultures, have led to increasing differentiation and contrasting elaboration.” Hick states this point as follows in his Second Christianity:
Thus the concept of deity is concretized as a range of divine personae – Yahweh, the Heavenly Father, Allah, Krishna, Shiva, etc. Each of these personae has arisen within human experience through the impact of the divine Reality upon some particular stream of human life. Thus Yahweh is the face of God turned towards and perceived by the Jewish people or, in more philosophical language, the concrete form in which the Jews have experienced the infinite divine Reality. As such, Yahweh exists essentially in relation to the Hebrews, the relationship being defined by the idea of covenant. He cannot be extracted from his role in Hebrew historic experience. He is part of the history of the Jews, and they are a part of his history. And as such Yahweh is a quite different divine persona from Krishna, who is God's face turned towards and perceived by hundreds of millions of people within the Vaishnavite tradition of India.
It will be clear that this idea is very similar to that propounded by Deist writers of the “universal rational religion of nature” which became corrupted through time.
These difficulties relate to observed features of religious traditions. In other words, the beliefs of non-Christian religions make it difficult to accept that they are all speaking of the same God. But a more fundamental theological worry remains: is Hick actually talking about the Christian God at all? A central Christian conviction – that God is revealed definitively in Jesus Christ – has to be set to one side to allow Hick to proceed. Hick argues that he is merely adopting a “theocentric,” rather than a “Christocentric,” approach. Yet the Christian insistence that God is known normatively through Christ implies that authentically Christian knowledge of God is derived through Christ. For a number of critics, Hick's desertion of Christ as a reference point means abandoning any claim to speak from a Christian perspective.
The real problem here is that pluralists such as Hick are caught up in a tension that they cannot resolve: there is an implicit need to provide arguments for the superiority of their own pluralist views about human nature and human destiny over and against traditional religious views, on the one hand, yet this is coupled with an explicit commitment to principles that exclude the legitimacy of precisely these arguments, on the other.
Pluralists want to critique and challenge Christian tendencies to be (as they see it) imperialist and condescending in their judgments about non-Christian religions. Yet, in doing this, pluralists are themselves engaging in precisely the activity they wish to criticize – namely, critiquing Christians for holding Christian views. Yet why should Christians be blamed for holding Christian ideas? Or Muslims for holding Islamic ideas? No system of thought can sustain such a tension.
More significantly, questions have been raised over the intellectual basis of this model. Drawing on the insights of philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre (born 1929), Gavin D'Costa has pointed out that there is no such thing as a “detached” or “objective” view of religion. All such reflections arise from within traditions, despite the Enlightenment's belief that objectivity can be attained in this matter. D'Costa thus argues that Hick's approach to religious pluralism actually “represents a tradition-specific approach that bears all the same features as exclusivism – except that it is western liberal modernity's exclusivism.” The intellectual foundations of Hick's pluralism are incorrigibly modern.
For this reason, there has been growing interest in recent years in an alternative which might be able to avoid the intellectual shortcomings of the pluralist position. The new approach known as “parallelism,” discussed earlier in this chapter (pp. 421–2), in effect offers a postmodern approach to this issue, avoiding the weaknesses of the resolute modernism of Hick's pluralist approach.
The debate over the Christian understanding of the relationship of Christianity to other religious traditions will continue for some considerable time, fueled by the rise of multiculturalism in western society. The three options outlined above are likely to continue to be represented in Christian writing on the matter for some time to come.
Our attention now turns to the final aspect of Christian theology, traditionally known as “the last things” or, more technically, as “eschatology.”