14 The Gospel and the Religions
The line of thought which I have been developing in these chapters is one which a very considerable number of contemporary Christians reject altogether. It would be regarded as an expression of a type of exclusive claim for the gospel which was typical of the missionary movement of the past two hundred years. That movement, such critics would say, was obviously intimately related to the imperial expansion of the western European powers. The same triumphalist spirit permeated them both. The famous watchword "The Evangelization of the World in This Generation" was a typical example of this aggressive imperialism. It is inappropriate for today's world. For our grandparents, who were ignorant of the spiritual riches of the great world religions, the idea that these were all to be displaced by a triumphant Christianity was excusable. It is not excusable today. We now know, if we are not wilfully blind and deaf, that we live in a religiously plural world in which the other great world religions show at least as much spiritual vitality as does Christianity, a world moreover in which many Europeans and Americans, disillusioned by the manifest failures of the Christian West, are turning toward the East and the South for fresh ways of understanding and coping with our common human situations. The other world religions, stimulated by the attack of the West, are now themselves active in mission. To maintain, in this new situation, the old missionary attitude is not merely inexcusable but positively dangerous. In a world threatened with nuclear war, a world facing a global ecological crisis, a world more and more closely bound together in its cultural and economic life, the paramount need is for unity, and an aggressive claim on the part of one of the world's religions to have the truth for all can only be regarded as treason against the human race. Even if it is granted that this exclusive claim has been the claim of the Church through nineteen centuries, we must face the fact that it is not now tenable. Just as the Church in the first generation had to face the fact that God's grace was not confined to those who by circumcision were brought into the visible community of Israel but was freely available to uncircumcised gentiles, so now the Church must have the courage to recognize a new fact, recognize that God's grace is at work with undiscriminating generosity among all peoples and in all the great religious traditions, and therefore abandon the claim to be the sole possessor of the truth.
This view is now so widely shared that it has become in effect the contemporary orthodoxy. Pluralism is the reigning assumption, and if one declines to accept it, as I do, one must give reasons. In the following paragraphs I shall refer to three recent expositions of this view. No Other Name? by Paul Knitter; The Myth of Christian Uniqueness, edited by Paul Knitter and John Hick; and a series of essays and discussions occasioned by the celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the World Missionary Conference at Tambaram in 1938, published in the volume of the International Review of Mission for July 1988.
The basic assumptions from which Paul Knitter and his colleagues write is, on the one hand, the urgent need for human unity, and on the other side the conviction that one particular religious tradition cannot provide the focus for that unity. "Modern Historical Consciousness" (Kaufman in The Myth, pp. 5ff.) must necessarily disallow Christian claims to uniqueness. The distinguished Indian theologian Stanley Samartha speaks of our present situation as different from anything else in human history, in that we face the total annihilation of all life either by environmental pollution or by nuclear disaster, and goes on: "Since this is a threat to all humanity, to claim that one religious tradition has the only answer to such a global problem seems preposterous" (International Review of Mission, July 1988, p. 315). For Samartha and others, the affirmation of the continuing validity of the other great religions is a necessary part of the struggle of their people to emerge from the spiritual and cultural humiliation of colonialism. Dr. Diana Eck, Professor at Harvard and Moderator of the World Council of Churches' program on Dialogue, speaks of the astonishment of a Hindu at the idea that God had had only one incarnation, and continues, "This exclusive understanding of revelation which speaks of it as an event of the past and imprisons it in the first century, is also folly to many Christians" (ibid., p. 384).
It would be tedious to continue with such quotations. For those who have never moved outside the circle of Christian faith and worship, the "folly" of which Dr. Eck complains may not be obvious. But for those who have shared in the multifaith, multiculture, multirace world of today it seems preposterous to maintain that in all the infinite pluralities and relativities of human affairs there should be one absolute against which everything else is to be measured. For the historian there are no absolutes. It is sometimes wrongly said, for instance by Paul Knitter, that science also, since Einstein, has abandoned absolutes and made everything relative. This is, of course, not true. After Einstein there are still absolutes, such as the speed of light and the value of Planck's constant. But, it is urged, if we are to be part of the modern world we must recognize that there is no further place for claims for absolute truth in religion. We must accept pluralism as a reality which God evidently wills.
Writers such as those I have quoted often say that this is a radically new situation which the Church has not faced before, and therefore calls for radically new formulations of the Christian faith. This is clearly not the case. The world into which the first Christians carried the gospel was a religiously plural world and-as the letters of Paul show-in that world of many lords and many gods, Christians had to work out what it means that in fact Jesus alone is Lord. The first three centuries of church history were a time of intense life-and-death struggle against the seductive power of syncretism. But if the issue of religious pluralism is not entirely new, it certainly meets our generation in a new way. We must meet it in the terms of our own time.
One fact that is certainly new is the acute sense that we are part of one global society more and more dependent on each other. The first photographs beamed back to earth from the moon gave us a vivid sense that our planet is not an inexhaustible area in which there will always be fresh frontiers to cross and free space to occupy, but a small and fragile spacecraft in which we are condemned to live together or else perish together. This sense of the paramount need for human unity is one of the genuinely new facts of our time-at least insofar as it now embraces the whole globe. In face of this need, the claim of one group to have the truth for all is seen as potentially disastrous. Thus Professor Christopher Duraisingh, Secretary of the Council for World Mission, writes: "It is not through our a priori doctrinal formulations on God or Christ, but rather through our collective human search for meaning and sacredness, that the'universe of faiths' could be adequately understood." He goes on, therefore, to say that our approach must not be christocentric or even theocentric but rather on the basis of soteriology, of a common search for salvation (ibid., p. 399).
On this two comments are in order:
1. Surely we all seek "salvation" in the sense of total welfare and happiness. The trouble is that we define it differently and seek it at the expense of others. Human beings have different ideas about what "salvation," total welfare, might be, and thus the human search for salvation is a highly competititive affair.
2. All serious seeking involves reliance on some clue. Christians are also seekers, and they believe that the decisive clue, the true and living way, has been given in Jesus. A common search cannot surely mean a search which abandons any specific clue and simply agrees to search.
The Christian points to Jesus as the master-clue in the common search of humanity for salvation and invites others to follow. It is true that this invitation, when it is given by Christians who are in positions of power and privilege, may be radically corrupted into a kind of spiritual imperialism which is oppressive rather than liberating. Missions have been guilty of this distortion and we have to acknowledge it. But it is also worth noting that most of the vigorous evangelism in our contemporary world is being done by the churches of the Third World which have no such power or privilege.
In similar vein Dr. Samartha calls on Christians to "contribute to the pool of human values such as justice and compassion, truth and righteousness in the quest of different people for spiritual and moral values to undergird viable political structures to hold together different religions, cultures, languages and ethnic groups" (ibid., p. 323). He indicates that we must work for secular political structures which will give space for the different religions to make their contributions. It is indeed the duty of Christians in multifaith societies to cooperate with people of other faiths in seeking a just ordering of society, but this is in no sense a substitute for the missionary preaching of the Church. In using the language of values, Dr. Samartha reveals his captivity to the postEnlightenment worldview which separates facts from values and supposes that what are called values can be permanently sustained apart from some agreement about what are the facts. For centuries Orthodox Hindus believed that the miserable condition of the outcastes or un touchable communities was the result of the sins of their previous birth and that it was therefore part of the cosmic order not to be interfered with. By common consent the preaching of missionaries among these communities was one of the major factors, if not the decisive factor, in bringing about the change of view which has led to legislation (oftenalas-ineffective) to give them justice. There is a struggle within Hinduism to relate the demand for justice and compassion to the traditional belief. The "values" of justice and compassion cannot be permanently sustained apart from some belief about the facts which correspond to these values. Christians cannot simply "contribute" these values as if they were contributions to a potluck supper. Questions of ultimate truth are involved.
There is a longing for unity among all human beings, for unity offers the promise of peace. The problem is that we want unity on our terms, and it is our rival programs for unity which tear us apart. As Augustine said, all wars are fought for the sake of peace. The history of the world could be told as the story of successive efforts to bring unity to the world, and of course the name we give to these efforts is "imperialism." The Christian gospel has sometimes been made the tool of an imperialism, and of that we have to repent. But at its heart it is the denial of all imperialisms, for at its center there is the cross where all imperialisms are humbled and we are invited to find the center of human unity in the One who was made nothing so that all might be one. The very heart of the biblical vision for the unity of humankind is that its center is not an imperial power but the slain Lamb.
The truth, of course, is that every program for human unity has implicit in it some vision of the organizing principle which is to make this unity possible. As Andre Dumas has pointed out, if this is not clearly recognized and stated, as it is in the Christian vision of the cross of Jesus as the place where all peoples may find reconciliation, then we shall find that the interests and intentions of the proposer are the hidden center. If there is no explicit statement of the center of unity, then the assumptions and interests of the proposer become the effective center. This becomes very clear in The Myth of Christian Uniqueness. Professor Gordon Kaufman of Harvard begins with the need for human unity, assumes without argument that the Christian gospel cannot furnish the center for such unity, and goes on to say that "modern historical consciousness" requires us to abandon the claim to Christ's uniqueness, and to recognize that the biblical view of things, like all other human views, is culturally conditioned (The Myth, pp. 5ff.). This same "modern historical consciousness" will enable us to enter into the mental worlds of the other religions without supposing that we can impose our Christian norms on them. But to a person living in another culture it is not obvious that the modern historical consciousness of twentieth-century Western intellectuals provides us with a vantage point which can displace the one provided by the Christian story, or that it can furnish a basis for human unity. It is true that modern historical studies enable us to see that people in other times and places were looking at the world through culturally conditioned lenses and that their claim to "see things as they really are" is relativized by our studies in the history of cultures. But to suppose that modern historical consciousness gives us a privileged standpoint where we really do see things as they are, is of course unsupported dogma. Modern historical consciousness is also the product of a particular culture and can claim no epistemological privilege. Kaufman's theology of religions is thus similar to that of the Christian in that it finally rests on an ultimate faith-commitment which does not and cannot seek validation from some more ultimate ground. In this case the ultimate faith-commitment is to the validity of the "modern historical consciousness."
The same is true for the often made claim that all religions are variants of one central human experience, namely that which has been explored most fully by the great mystics. It is indeed true that mystical experience has played a very important role in all the world's great religions, including Christianity. But in no religious tradition is it the only reality. There is much else in all religious traditions, much about the conduct of human life, about justice, freedom, obedience, and mutual charity. To select the mystical element in religion as the core reality is a decision which can be questioned in the name of other elements in the religious life. And the claim that the mystical experience is that which provides the primary clue to what is real, and therefore the one road to salvation for all humanity, is-once again-to choose a particular faithcommitment among others which are possible. It does not enable one to evade the question: Why this, rather than that?
Wilfred Cantwell Smith in the same volume restates his familiar view that all the religions have as their core some experience of the Transcendent; that whether we speak of images made of wood and stone or images made in the mind, or even of such an image as the man Jesus, all are equally the means used by the Transcendent to make himself, herself, or itself present to us humans. To claim uniqueness for one particular form or vehicle of this contact with the Transcendent is preposter ous and even blasphemous. Much rather accept the truth so beautifully stated in the Bhagavadgita and in the theology of Ramanuja, that God is so gracious that he (or she or it) accepts everyone who worships whatever be the form through which that worship is offered (The Myth, p. 65).
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 worshipper 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" (The Myth, p. 55). 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 (Col. 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.
This belief (or, rather, this declining of the possibility of belief) is taken to its logical conclusion in the frank polytheism with which the Myth volume concludes. In his final essay Tom Driver writes:
God has different "natures". In pluralist perspective, it is not simply that God has one nature variously and inadequately expressed by different religious traditions. It is that there are real and genuine differences within the Godhead itself, owing to the manifold involvement that God has undertaken with the great variety of human communities. (Myth, p. 212)
Readers of the preceding chapters of the present book will of course recognize this as a typical (though extreme) illustration of the cultural collapse which has abandoned the struggle to find truth in the welter of human experiences. But, as I have tried to show in the earlier chapters, this collapse is a feature of only one side of our culture. In the world of science the effort to grasp the coherent rationality of things has not been abandoned. There is an unresting passion to find those patterns of thought which will enable us to grasp the coherence of things. Thus the physicists, faced with the problem of reconciling relativity with quantum theory, do not fall back on the supposition that reality has different natures, acts in different ways, is fundamentally incoherent. They continue with unwearied energy to seek a unified theory which will hold the whole of physics together. The religious pluralism represented in The Myth is evidence of cultural collapse. And, very obviously, if even God is not one but many; if ultimate reality is such that he, she, or it behaves in mutually incoherent ways, what possible hope is there for human unity? The corollary of this intellectual collapse is the abandonment of hope for human unity.
In another essay in the same volume, Langdon Gilkey shows himself much more aware than the other essayists of the problems which this kind of total relativism raises. In this total relativism, he writes, we have no ground for speaking of salvation at all. Pluralism has its shadow side-the demonic movements which operate under the names of religion or quasi-religions such as nationalism. We must resist these, but in order to do so we must have somewhere to stand. And that means we must be committed to some belief not merely about what we personally desire (our "values") but about what is really the case. Against Hitler, only the absolute commitment of the signatories to the Barmen Confession could mount a real resistance. There has to be an absolute commitment if we are to act effectively against demonic powers. So, writes Gilkey, "paradoxically, plurality, precisely by its own ambiguity, implies both relativity and absoluteness, a juxtaposition or synthesis of the relative and the absolute that is frustrating intellectually and yet necessary practically" (The Myth, pp. 43-44). How does Gilkey resolve this dilemma? By relying on what he calls the venerable American tradition of pragmatism. He falls back on John Dewey and William James. We have to act or else conform. For this purpose we need an absolute, but we must recognize that our standpoint is only relative, otherwise our absolute will become another source of domination and repression.
On this point it seems to me that two comments are in order even after one has gone through the difficult process of understanding how an absolute can be relative. The first comment is this: an absolute is surely, by definition, something which cannot be acquired because we need it for the fulfillment of some purpose which we have embraced on other grounds. If it really is absolute truth, then it is not at our disposal. What Gilkey's program points to is something all too familiar, namely the employment of absolutist language to support claims which are in fact only the desires, or-if you like-values of some people. We are back again with Nietzsche: the only reality is the will. We want a certain kind of society, and in order to get it we need to be able to appeal to an absolute. The absolute in this scene is no absolute at all but merely a mask for a certain kind of desire. It is not surprising that this kind of liberalism was powerless in the face of Hitler and is powerless in the face of people like Ayatollah Khomeini.
The second comment is this: Gilkey suggests that a claim to absolute truth must be oppressive. It is certainly true that any community which claims to possess absolute truth must inevitably, if it gains power, become oppressive. But the Christian claim is not such, although in the course of history it has been wrongly understood as such. The claim of the Christian community is that in Jesus the absolute truth has been made present amid the relativities of human cultures, and that the form which this truth took was not that of dominance and imperial power but that of one who was without power, or-rather-whose power was manifest in weakness and suffering. The Church in its journey through history and in its embodiment in many different cultures seeks to express its allegiance to this truth in forms of theological statement and practical living. These forms are always temporary and always flawed by human sin and error. But insofar as they are constantly held under the critical control of the original witness as embodied in Scripture they are always capable of reformation. The Church thus does not claim to possess absolute truth: it claims to know where to point for guidance (both in thought and in action) for the common search for truth.
But is it possible to believe that the absolute has become part of history, history which is all a matter of relativities? Many of the writers I am discussing see it as axiomatic that there can be no absolutes in history. How absurd, says Cantwell Smith, to believe that it is only in Jesus that God was personally present. He is present everywhere, in the music of Bach as in the eucharist. How preposterous, says Dr. Eck, that there should be only one incarnation and only one gospel. In fact it is wrong to speak of God's revelation as if it were an event in past history. "The locus of revelation," says Dr. Eck, quoting Cantwell Smith, "is always the present, always the person. The channel of revelation in the Christian case, Christ, is a figure in history, but history moves forward and is the process by which He comes to us" (International Review of Mission, p. 385). Since revelation is always in the present and always to the person, I cannot speak of an absolute revelation since it is obvious that I at this moment have not grasped the whole of what God wills to reveal.
I think four comments are in order:
1. In the first place, the statement that there are no absolutes in history is obviously a pure assertion for which no proof is offered or can be offered. It is simply one of the axioms of our contemporary Western culture. It is pure unsupported dogma. There is nothing in the nature of things and nothing in the necessities of human thought which requires us to deny the possibility that history might have a center just as the solar system has a center. In fact, of course, the denial of the Christian belief that the center of all history is the incarnation of the Logos in Jesus is always the other side of another belief about the real meaning and end of history. The very heart of the Christian message, as it is set forth for instance in the Fourth Gospel, is that the particular life-story which it tells is the decisive manifestation within history of the one who is the source and goal of all history. One may dismiss this belief as preposterous, as the writers of these essays do, but that merely demonstrates their captivity within the plausibility structures of our contemporary Western society.
2. The second comment is with reference to the statement that revelation is always in the present and always to the person. Behind this seemingly innocent statement there is the very ancient seduction of a purely individualistic spirituality, the understanding of the human person as a being existing apart from the history of which every human life is a part. Granted that there are profound and deeply personal spiritual experiences of many kinds which have many elements in common even though occurring in many different cultural and religious contexts, it is a distortion of the human reality to suppose that these can be taken in isolation from the continuing shared life of the human race as the clue to the ultimate meaning of life. Human life is both personal and corporate. No human life can be rightly understood apart from the whole story of which each life-story is a part. The trinitarian faith brings together these two aspects of human existence, assuring us that the one who is the source and sustainer and goal of all reality, and the one who is made known in the deepest experiences of the human spirit, is one with the man, this particular man, who went his humble way from Bethlehem to Calvary. There is thus no dichotomy between the inward experiences of the heart and the outward history of which each of us is a part. God's self-revelation in Jesus is not simply an event which recedes farther and farther into the past; through the work of the Spirit we are led into an ever fuller understanding of it as the Spirit takes of the things of Jesus and shows them to us through the experiences of our place and time. And, by the same token, our spiritual experience is not an affair of our own individual subjectivity; it is sustained, nourished, and tested by continual reference to the original witnesses of the revelation and by reference to the continuing experience of those who share with us the allegiance to Jesus.
Dr. Samartha strongly attacks the traditional understanding of the Christian mission on the grounds that "conversion, instead of being a vertical movement towards God, a genuine renewal of life, has become a horizontal movement of groups of people from one community to another" (International Review of Mission, p. 321). Here again we meet the same fundamentally false view of what it is to be a human person. Samartha sees the human person as an isolated monad "vertically" related to God through an inward spiritual experience which is unrelated to the "horizontal" relations of human beings with each other. A true relation to God cannot be independent of our relation with other people, and allegiance to Christ must necessarily be expressed in relationship with those who share that allegiance.
3. This leads to a third comment. When Cantwell Smith writes: "God is not revealed fully in Jesus Christ to me, nor indeed to anyone else that I have met" (International Review of Mission, p. 423), he is no doubt correct in the sense that neither he nor anyone else has fully grasped the revelation. But from this statement one can move in two different directions. One would be to say, I find in Jesus the most compelling clue to God's being and purpose, therefore I shall try to grasp the revelation in Jesus more fully." But that is not the move that Smith advocates. Rather, it is to claim that God reveals himself everywhere to every human being however varied may be the forms in which they express that revelation. But certainly Smith does not in practice accept all these forms as equally valid. Hitler was certain that he had a divine mission. On what grounds do we reject his claim? Dr. Eck, in her criticism of Kraemer, says that he was wrong to presume to answer the question, Does God reveal himself to Muslims? since it is only the Muslims themselves who can answer that question, and it was presumptuous of Kraemer to presume to answer it for them (International Review of Mission, pp. 380-81). But certainly none of these writers would be ready to accept every claim to divine revelation. Some, such as that of Hitler, will certainly be rejected. On what ground? No explicit answer is given to that question, but from the writers concerned it is clear that the criterion is the general consensus of liberal-minded Western Christians. And when these same Christians ask, "What grounds have you for taking Jesus as your criterion of revelation? Why this one and not any of the others offered by people of other faiths?" one must put the counterquestion: What grounds are there for thinking that this contemporary opinion is the valid measuring rod for assessing claims to divine revelation?
4. Fourth, if the answer is given that the criteria are to be found in such permanently enduring values as justice, compassion, love, and mercy, one must ask, Why should these abstract nouns have a more ultimate status than a concrete life lived out on the actual plane of history? The gospel is not the assertion that in Jesus certain qualities such as love and justice were present in an exemplary manner. If this were so, we could of course dispense with the example once we had learned the lesson which the example teaches. The gospel is not just the illustration (even the best illustration) of an idea. It is the story of actions by which the human situation is irreversibly changed. The concreteness, the specificity, the "happenedness" of this can in no way be replaced by a series of abstract nouns. The difficulty of words like justice and love is that their content has to be given them in particular situations where action has to be taken. Both "justice" and "love" can be used and are frequently used as masks for special interests. One has always to ask, "Whose justice? What kind of love?" Where there is no Judge, each of us is judge in our own cause. On the other hand, when we point to Jesus, and to the story which has its center in the cross, we are invoking a criterion by which all our claims to justice are humbled and relativized. To affirm the unique decisiveness of God's action in Jesus Christ is not arrogance; it is the enduring bulwark against the arrogance of every culture to be itself the criterion by which others are judged. The charge of arrogance which is leveled against those who speak of Jesus as unique Lord and Savior must be thrown back at those who assume that "modern historical consciousness" has disposed of that faith.
Some of those who advocate the abandonment of a claim to Christian uniqueness seek to show that the Bible itself authorizes this move. Appeal is made to the early chapters of Genesis and especially to the Noachic covenant with its unconditional promise of blessing on Noah and all his descendants. The blessing is manifest in the procreation of the seventy nations as it is recounted in the following chapter. The gentiles are thus introduced at the beginning of our Bible as existing because of the blessing of God and as under his unbreakable promise of blessing. That is true and profoundly important. All the nations live by the blessing of God. The New Testament reaffirms that faith. But one cannot stop the reading of the Bible at the tenth chapter of Genesis. That chapter is followed at once by the story of the tower of Babel, the first great imperial project for human unity, which ends, as do all imperialisms, in confusion and alienation. And so there follows the beginning of the story of election, the choosing of one among the seventy na tions to be the bearer of the blessing for all. It is a very misguided exegesis which sets these two elements in the biblical story against each other. God's love for all his creation, his purpose of blessing for all human beings is fundamental from beginning to end. But-for the reasons that I have already suggested-that purpose is fulfilled by way of election, of the choosing of one for the blessing of all. Both dimensions of the divine purpose, the universal and the particular, show themselves in different ways throughout the Bible. To set one against the other is to misunderstand both.
Thus, for example, appeal is made to the words of Amos 9: "'Are you not like the Ethiopians to me, 0 people of Israel?"' says the Lord. "'Did I not bring up Israel from the land of Egypt, and the Philistines from Caphtor and the Syrians from Kir? Behold, the eyes of the Lord are upon the sinful kingdom, and I will destroy it from the surface of the earth."' Do these words negate the teaching of the rest of the Old Testament about the special election of Israel? Not at all; they confirm it. They are in line with the earlier words of Amos, which immediately follow the terrible catalogue of crimes in which Israel is as bad as or worse than all the gentiles: "You only have I known of all the families of earth; therefore I will punish you for all your iniquities" (Amos 3:2). God's guiding and providing hand is over all his works and over all the nations. His purpose is blessing for them all. For that purpose he has chosen Israel. Israel has rejected the call and behaved just like any of the nations which do not know God. Therefore his wrath descends on Israel. To take this text as ground for denying the biblical doctrine of the special calling of Israel is to reverse its whole intention. So also in the wonderfully ironic story of Jonah, where God's unlimited kindness to the wicked city of Nineveh and all its inhabitants, even the cattle, is contrasted with the surly, spiteful, and disobedient messenger of the Lord, Jonah alias Israel. The contrast is as sharp as it could be. The pagan sailors on the ship and the pagan rulers and people of the wicked city are both so tenderhearted that they repent and turn to the Lord at the first invitation, while Jonah is stubborn and unbelieving. And yet it is Jonah and no other who is chosen, called, and sent to bring God's message. God deals with Nineveh through this unlikely missionary. Jonah must go.
In the New Testament the text most often appealed to is the story of the conversion of Cornelius, which was also the conversion of Peter and of the Church. According to Wesley Ariarajah, the story shows that "there is no need to channel God to people; God has direct access" (The Bible and People of Other Faiths, p. 17). Now it is certainly true that this story shows how God's mission is not simply an enterprise of the Church. It is a work of the Spirit who goes ahead of the Church, touches the Roman soldier and his household, prepares them for the message, and teaches the Church a new lesson about the scope of God's grace. But it is a complete misreading of the story to conclude from it that the going of the missionary is unnecessary. On the contrary, if Peter had not gone to Cornelius's house there would have been no conversion and no story. God prepared the heart of Cornelius, before Peter came. But God also sent Peter, and Peter had to go and tell the story of Jesus. It was the telling of the story that provided the occasion for the radically new experience which made Cornelius a Christian, and which radically changed the Church's own understanding of its gospel. To use this story to suggest that the missionary journey is unnecessary or even improper is to distort it beyond recognition. It is indeed true, gloriously true, that God goes ahead of his Church. But it is also true that he calls the Church to follow. The Holy Spirit is not domesticated within the Church, but it is through the Church, the company of those (often unworthy like Jonah) who confess Jesus as Lord, that the Spirit brings others to that confession.
I venture to offer two concluding comments on the pluralist position as it is set out in The Myth of Christian Uniqueness. One is from the perspective of the sociology of knowledge. The culture in which this type of thinking has developed is one in which the most typical feature is the supermarket. In a society which has exalted the autonomous individual as the supreme reality, we are accustomed to the rich variety offered on the supermarket shelves and to the freedom we have to choose our favorite brands. It is very natural that this mentality should pervade our view of religion. One may stick to one's favorite brand and acclaim its merits in songs of praise; but to insist that everyone else should choose the same brand is unacceptable.
And that leads to a second point, which is more fundamental. The Myth volume celebrated a decisive move beyond exclusivism, and beyond the inclusivism which acknowledges the saving work of Christ beyond Christianity, to a pluralism which denies any uniqueness to Jesus Christ. This move, the "crossing of the Rubicon," is the further development of what was described by John Hick as a Copernican revolution-the move from a christocentric view of reality to a theocentric one (Hick, God and the Universe of Faiths). The further move is described as "soteriocentric"-it has its center in the common quest for salvation. Even the word "God" excludes some concepts of the Transcendent Reality and is therefore exclusivist. But what is "salvation"? It is, according to Hick, "the transformation of human experience from self-centredness to God-or Reality-centredness" (Myth, p. 23). The Christian tradition affirms that this salvation has been made possible because God, the creator and sustainer of all that is, has acted in the historical person of the man Jesus to meet us, take our burden of sin and death, invite us to trust and love him, and so to come to a life centered in God and not in the self. The authors of the Myth deny this. "Reality" is not to be identified with any specific name or form or image or story. Reality "has no form except our knowledge of it." Reality is unknowable, and each of us has to form his or her own image of it. There is no objective reality which can confront the self and offer another center-as the concrete person of Jesus does. There is only the self and its need for salvation, a need which must be satisfied with whatever form of the unknown Transcendent the self may cherish. The movement, in other words, is exactly the reverse of the Copernican one. It is a move away from a center outside the self, to the self as the only center. It is a further development of the move which converted Christian theology from a concern with the reality of God's saving acts, to a concern with "religious experience," the move which converts theology into anthropology, the move about which perhaps the final word was spoken by Feuerbach who saw that the "God" so conceived was simply the blown-up image of the self thrown up against the sky. It is the final triumph of the self over reality. A "soteriocentric" view makes "reality" the servant of the self and its desires. It excludes the possibility that "reality" as personal might address the self with a call which requires an answer. It is the authentic product of a consumer society.
It is not easy to resist the contemporary tide of thinking and feeling which seems to sweep us irresistibly in the direction of an acceptance of religious pluralism, and away from any confident affirmation of the absolute sovereignty of Jesus Christ. It is not easy to challenge the reigning plausibility structure. It is much easier to conform. The overwhelming dominance of relativism in contemporary culture makes any firm confession of belief suspect. To the affirmation which Christians make about Jesus, the reply is, "Yes, but others make similar affirmations about the symbols of their faith; why Jesus and not someone or something else?" Thus a reluctance to believe in something leads to a state of mind in which the Zeitgeist becomes the only ruling force. The true statement that none of us can grasp the whole truth is made an ex cuse for disqualifying any claim to have a valid clue for at least the beginnings of understanding. There is an appearance of humility in the protestation that the truth is much greater than any one of us can grasp, but if this is used to invalidate all claims to discern the truth it is in fact an arrogant claim to a kind of knowledge which is superior to the knowledge which is available to fallible human beings. We have to ask, "How do you know that the truth about God is greater than what is revealed to us in Jesus?" When Samartha and others ask us, "What grounds can you show for regarding the Bible as uniquely authoritative when other religions also have their sacred books?" we have to ask in turn, "What is the vantage ground from which you claim to be able to relativize all the absolute claims which these different scriptures make? What higher truth do you have which enables you to reconcile the diametrically opposite statements of the Bible and the Qur'an about Jesus? Or are you in effect advising that it is better not to believe in anything?" When the answer is, "We want the unity of humankind so that we may be saved from disaster," the answer must be, "We also want that unity, and therefore seek the truth by which alone humankind can become one." That truth is not a doctrine or a worldview or even a religious experience; it is certainly not to be found by repeating abstract nouns like justice and love; it is the man Jesus Christ in whom God was reconciling the world. The truth is personal, concrete, historical.
To make that confession does not mean, as critics seem to assume, that we believe that God's saving mercy is limited to Christians and that the rest of the world is lost. In the next chapter, taking for granted the faith that Christ is indeed unique Lord and Savior, we must ask what this means for our understanding of and relations with the other great world faiths.