CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 10
The Gospel among the Religions
I
AT THE outset of this discussion, in speaking of the question of authority, I affirmed my belief that the Christian mission rests upon a total and unconditional commitment to Jesus Christ as the one in whom all authority inheres. This initial affirmation has governed the whole discussion. It is now necessary to face the difficult questions that arise when this commitment is brought into contact with other unconditional commitments of the same kind. In the title of this chapter the word "religion" is intended to denote all those commitments that, in the intention of their adherents, have an overriding authority over all other commitments and provide the framework within which all experience is grasped and all ideas are judged. In this sense the word will include an ideology such as Marxism, which functions, both for the committed individual and for societies under Marxist control, as such an ultimate commitment.
I realize the word "religion" is a notoriously difficult one. It can be used to describe any system of belief and practice that implies some sort of transcendence of the experience of the senses, in which case it becomes too vague to be useful. It is sometimes used as if it referred to beliefs and practices concerning God and the immortal soul - in which case it is too narrow, for it excludes the original message of the Buddha. I am using it to refer to that which has final authority for a believer or a society, both in the sense that it determines one's scale of values and in the sense that it provides the models, the basic patterns through which the believer grasps and organizes his or her experience. When the word is used in this way it follows that it will include ideologies as well as what are usually called religions. It also becomes necessary to point out that what someone calls "their religion" may in fact be other than the ultimately authoritative factor in their thinking and acting. It is. for example, obvious that a person may be a Christian and yet limit the operation of his or her Christian commitment to a restricted field (for example, to private and domestic life) while the ultimate commitment is to some other way of understanding experience, to a traditional tribal "myth" or, in the case of contemporary Western man, to the modern scientific worldview. In this case the commitment to Christ will be conditioned by the person's commitment to the overriding "myth," and the latter will be his or her real religion.
I am concerned with the issues that arise from the meeting of different and discordant commitments that are for the participants their ultimate commitments. This means that I shall not be discussing the enterprise formerly known in English as "comparative religion." now religious studies, or in German as Religionsi►'issenschaft. This increasingly prestigious academic discipline was defined by one of its great pioneers as "a science of religion based on an impartial and truly scientific comparison of all, or at all events, of the most important religions of mankind.- I This enterprise, the history of which has been magisterially surveyed in Eric Sharpe's book just quoted, is outside of my discussion here because it does not envisage the possibility with which I am now concerned, namely, the possibility of the meeting of different ultimate commitments. For Max Muller and his successors it is clear that the ultimate commitment is to the scientific method as the clue to the apprehension of truth. In the passage just quoted. Muller calls upon the scientific community "to take possession of this new territory in the name of true science." This is the confident language of the pioneer missionary who has not yet found it necessary to consider the truth-claims of the tribal myths and religions of the natives. The possibility is not envisaged that the very foundations of "true science" might be called into question by one of the religions to be studied. There is no meeting, no encounter, no mutual challenge: there is only the triumphant advance of "true science" into unevangelized territory. The missionary has not yet become aware of the fact that his own vision of the truth is, from another point of view. only the dominant "myth" of the tribe that happens at the moment (the end of the nineteenth century) to have acquired unchallenged dominance over most of the world. His "scientific objectivity" conceals from him the whole set of models by which he organizes and grasps his experience. and it is to these that his ultimate commitment is given.
A more subtle and much more ancient way of approaching the variety of religions is embodied in the oft-told Indian tale of the king who invited a number of blind men to his court, put an elephant in their midst, and asked them to say what it was. Their varied answers were intended not only to amuse the courtiers but also to teach them that the diverse religions of the world are but the gropings of blind men after a truth much too great for any human mind to grasp. The story aptly expresses the basic philosophy of the Vedanta, namely, that ultimate reality is not a matter of knowledge (which implies the dualism of known and unknown) but of the realization of the identity of the eternal self and the self of the whole universe - the identity of atman and Brahman. The ultimate reality can therefore only he indicated by negatives: neti, neti ("not that, not that"). The whole point of the story is that the blind men represent the religions, but the king, who is not blind, represents the one who has attained to this realization and who therefore "sees." Once again, there is no encounter. There is no possibility that one of the religions might call in question the interpretation of the mystical experience on which the whole philosophy of the Vedanta rests. The story implies simply that the philosophy of the Vedanta is that which corresponds to reality and that all else is blindness.
It is understandable that anyone faced with the clashing diversity of religious commitments should seek some basis for unity among them, or at least some agreed common framework. The difficulty is that we are dealing here with ultimate commitments, and the basis that I accept can only be my commitment. There have been many attempts to find a basis that all could accept, but none of them escapes this necessity. Professor John Hick has proposed a "Copernican revolution" in theology, which would solve the problem of interreligious understanding by means of "a shift from the dogma that Christianity is at the centre to the realisation that it is God who is at the centre, and that all the religions of mankind, including our own, serve and revolve round him. Clearly there is a logical fallacy in comparing this proposal to the shift from a Ptolemaic to a Copernican view of the solar system. The sun, the planets, and the earth are all objects capable of investigation by the same methods of observation; they are equally objects of sense-perception. God and the religions are not objects in the same class. If the analogy of the Copernican revolution is to be applied to the relation of Christianity and the other religions without logical fallacy, then like must be compared with like. God is not accessible to observation in the same sense in which the world religions are, and we have no frame of reference within which we can compare God as he really is with God as conceived in the world religions. The two realities that are accessible and comparable are God as I conceive him and God as the world religions conceive him. What claims to be a model of the unity of religions turns out in fact to be the claim that one theologian's conception of God is the reality that is the central essence of all religions. This is the trap into which every program of the unity of the religions is bound to fall. There is no real encounter. Hick's conception of God simply is the truth and there is no possibility that one of the world's religions can challenge it.
I have said that it is very understandable that we should look for some point of view that would enable us to bring together these clashing commitments in a single framework. It is understandable, but we have to face the fact that it is impossible. The framework that I devise or discern is my ultimate commitment or else it cannot function in the way intended. As such a commitment, it must defend its claim to truth over against other claims to truth. I have no standpoint except that point where I stand. The claim that 1 have is simply the claim that mine is the standpoint from which it is possible to discern the truth that relativizes all truth. That claim is the expression of the ultimate commitment that is my real religion.
If this argument is valid, it follows that the Christian will meet his or her friend and neighbor of another faith as one who is committed to Jesus Christ as their ultimate authority, who openly acknowledges this commitment, and seeks to understand and to enter into dialogue with a partner of another commitment on that basis.
In his Younghusband Lecture, "Christian Theology and InterReligious Dialogue," John Hick has commented on this approach to dialogue. He writes that theological dialogue between the religions takes place within a spectrum that ranges between two opposite conceptions of its nature.
At one extreme there is purely confessional dialogue in which each partner witnesses to his own faith, convinced that his has absolute truth whilst his partner's has only relative truth. At the other extreme is truth-seeking dialogue in which each is conscious that Transcendent Being is infinitely greater than his own limited vision of it, and in which they accordingly seek to share their vision in the hope that each may be helped towards a fuller awareness of the Divine Reality before which they both stand.-
The Christian who enters into dialogue on the basis of his or her own "confession" must recognize that others will do the same. But each participant will see the other religions from the point of view of his or her own. Each one has the impression of standing at the centre of a world of meaning and with all other faiths dispersed around its periphery,"4 and of course from a global point of view there is a plurality of such "circles of faith." In spite of some refinements of this confessional stance (which we shall discuss later), Hick is concerned that this stance is unfruitful, as it can only end either "in conversion or in a hardening of differences."5 Therefore "Christianity must move emphatically from the confessional to the truth-seeking stance in dia- logue."6 In the second part of his paper Hick discusses the impact of the rise of modern science on Christianity, and its probable impact upon the other religions in the coming decades. He traces the rise of modern science to the awakening of the European mind from its "dogmatic slumbers" under the influence of the rediscovered idea of the GrecoRoman civilization. It has forced Christianity to make major transformations, and it will have a similar impact upon the other world religions. And in fact the uniqueness of Christianity consists in the fact that it has "given birth to the modern mentality."7 Christianity must now join with the other "great streams of faith within which human life is lived"s to find answers to the problems with which modern science and technology confront us all.
Hick asks the Christian to "move emphatically from the confessional to the truth-seeking stance in dialogue." The latter stance is indicated in the affirmation that "Transcendent Being is infinitely greater than (one's) own limited view of it." The former stance might be indicated by such an affirmation as "Jesus Christ is Lord of all." Each of these is an affirmation of faith. Neither is an assertion of omniscience. The Christian will also say, "Jesus Christ is infinitely greater than my limited view of him." In these respects the two affirmations are analogous. Both are - or can be - made by people who are seriously seeking the truth. The difference lies in the way truth is to be sought, the clues that are to be followed, the models by which it is to be grasped, and the weight that is to be given to different kinds of evidence. The "confessional" stance implies that truth is to be found in a life of obedient discipleship to Jesus Christ as he is to be known through a life lived in the community of disciples, in faithfulness to the tradition about him, and in openness to all the truth that may be discovered in the history of the human race. The basic commitment is to a historic persona and to historic deeds. It rests upon a life lived, upon deeds done, upon events in history.
The other stance takes as its point of reference Transcendent Being. (The capital letters are presumably to be taken seriously.) This is of course not a recorded event in history. It is an idea difficult for one not trained in philosophy to grasp. "Transcendent" is an adjective that literally refers to the position of something above or beyond something else. "Being" is a verbal noun from the verb "to be," which normally only has meaning in association with a subject. The idea of "being" that is devoid of any subject, that is, devoid of any reference to something that is, seems for most people to be very difficult to grasp. A person untrained in philosophy may be forgiven for asking whether "Being" that is not being anything is not a figment of the imagination. The phrase "Transcendent Being" is one that can be used meaningfully in Hick's lecture because he is addressing people who are familiar with the long history of philosophical idealism. His statement is in fact an affirmation of his faith that it is in this tradition that truth is to be sought and found. It is entirely right and proper for him to affirm this faith and to defend it against other views of how truth is to be sought. But two points must surely be made.
First, it is not obvious that the very abstract mental concept, which only a very small number of philosophers trained in certain disciplines are capable of grasping, is a more reliable starting point for the adventure of truth seeking than is the fact of Jesus Christ. Every attempt to form a coherent understanding of the whole human situation starts out from an initial act of faith. There is no possibility of knowing anything except on the basis of something that is, at least provisionally, taken for granted. In this respect the Christian believer and the idealist philosopher share the same human predicament. My point is that I know of no basis, no axiom, no necessity of thought that requires me to believe that a historic person and a series of historic events provide a less reliable starting point for the adventure of knowing than does the highly sophisticated mental construct of a philosopher.
Second, and more serious, Hick uses the words "confessional" and "truth-seeking" to define the two stances. The implication is that those who take the confessional stance are not seekers after truth. This is surely a very serious matter. One cannot enter into real dialogue if one begins by denying the intellectual integrity of one's partner. Under the guise of openness and teachability, Hick is in fact asserting that his own presuppositions are the way to arrive at truth and are acceptable as such, whereas those of the Christian are not. It is in line with this that Hick regularly uses the word "dogma" to describe the basic presuppositions of Christians, while his own basic presuppositions are simply a transcript of reality as it is. Among many examples I will cite only the key phrase already quoted from God and the Universe of Faiths: "A shift from the dogma that Christianity is at the centre to the realisation that it is God who is at the centre.- 'I The Christian who takes part in dialogue cannot accept as a basis for dialogue the view that the commitment to Jesus Christ precludes him or her from seeking the truth and that he or she can qualify as a seeker after truth only by adopting the commitment of the idealist. On the basis that Hick proposes, there is in fact no encounter between the faiths. It is eliminated at the outset by the dogma that only one set of presuppositions can provide the conditions of truth seeking.
The further argument of the lecture makes this still more clear. The shift in European thought that displaced the Christian worldview with patterns of thought derived from Greek philosophy is described by Hick as Europe's "awakening from its dogmatic slumbers." The "scientific outlook" that has dispelled these slumbers is thus seen as the basis upon which all the religions, including Christianity, are judged. In this section of the paper Hick unwittingly illustrates precisely the pattern that he has earlier described in condemning the "confessional stance." As one co►n- ►nitted to the "modern scientific worldview," he also is "standing at the centre of a world of meanings, with all other faiths dispersed around its periphery," and he thus exemplifies his own observation that the inhabitants of each of the "circles of faith ... all live under the same impression of their own unique centrality." to There is no suggestion that the "modern scientific worldview" is open to radical challenge from the standpoint of another faith. There is no recognition of the fact that this view is only one of the many ways in which men and women can grasp their experience of the world. There is therefore no dialogue, no encounter. There is only the monologue of the one who is awake addressed to those who are presumed to be asleep, or who have not yet wholly roused themselves from their "dogmatic slumbers."
There is a sad irony about the fact that these things can be written just at the time when the foundations of the modern scientific worldview seem to be crumbling, when the culture of the Western white man that dominated the world fifty years ago is visibly sinking into nihilism. It is surely becoming clear now that Greek rationalism can no more provide the ultimate basis for society in the twentieth century than it did in the third and fourth and that if the precious values of modern Western culture are to be saved from destruction it will be on the basis of resources drawn from another source. That source will be an ultimate faith-commitment that is honest enough to recognize that it is one among the possible commitments. At the risk of wearisome reiteration I must repeat the simple truth that no standpoint is available to anyone except the point where they stand; that there is no platform from which one can claim to have an "objective" view that supersedes all the "subjective" faith-commitments of the world's faiths, that everyone must take their stand on the floor of the arena, on the same level with every other, and there engage in the real encounter of ultimate commitment with those who have also staked their lives on their vision of the truth.
I conclude this part of the argument, then, with the affirmation that the Christians go to meet their neighbor of another religion on the basis of their commitment to Jesus Christ. There is no dichotomy between -confession" and "truth-seeking." A confession of faith is the starting point of their truth seeking. A person meets his or her partner with the expectation and hope of hearing more of truth, but inevitably will seek to grasp the new truth by means of those ways of thinking and judging and valuing that he or she has already learned and tested. The presuppositions that shape the Christian's thinking will be those drawn from the gospel. This must be quite explicit. They cannot agree that the position of final authority can be taken by anything other than the gospel -- either by a philosophical system, or by mystical experience, or by the requirements of national and global unity. Confessing Christ - incarnate, crucified, and risen - as the true light and the true life, one cannot accept any other alleged authority as taking priority over this. One cannot regard the revelation given in Jesus as one of a type or as requiring interpretation by means of categories based on other ways of understanding the totality of experience. Jesus is for the believer the source from whom his or her understanding of the totality of experience is drawn and therefore the criterion by which other ways of understanding are judged.
In this respect the Christian will be in the same position as the other partners in dialogue. The Hindu, the Muslim, the Buddhist, the Marxist - each has a distinctive interpretation of other religions. including Christianity, and the faith of each provides the basis of his or her own understanding of the totality of experience and, therefore, the criterion by which other ways of understanding, including that of the Christian. are judged. The integrity and fruitfulness of the interfaith dialogue depends in the first place upon the extent to which the different participants take seriously the full reality of their own faiths as sources for the understanding of the totality of experience.
II
If this is the basis upon which the Christian participates in the dialogue, what understanding of other faiths does this imply'? Many different answers have been given to this question. Many volumes would be needed to state and examine them. The following is only a sample of answers for the purpose of orientation.
1. Other religions and ideologies are wholly false and the Christian has nothing to learn from them. On this three things may be said.
(a) The sensitive Christian mind, enlightened by Christ, cannot fail to recognize and to rejoice in the abundant spiritual fruits to be seen in the lives of men and women of other faiths. Here we must simply appeal to the witness of Christians in all ages who have lived in friendship with those of other faiths.
(b) In almost all cases where the Bible has been translated into the languages of the non-Christian peoples of the world. the New Testament word Theos has been rendered by the name given by the non-Christian peoples to the one whom they worship as the Supreme Being. It is under this name, therefore, that the Christians who now use these languages worship the God and Father of Jesus Christ. The very few exceptions, where translators have sought to evade the issue by simply transliterating the Greek or Hebrew word, only serve to prove the point; for the converts have simply explained the foreign word in the text of their Bibles by using the indigenous name for God. (I owe this piece of information to a conversation with Dr. Eugene Nida.) The name of the God revealed in Jesus Christ can only be known by using those names for God that have been developed within the non-Christian systems of belief and worship. It is therefore impossible to claim that there is it total discontinuity between the two.
(c) John tells us that Jesus is the light that lightens every man. This text does not say anything about other religions, but makes it impossible for the Christian to say that those outside the church are totally devoid of the truth.
2. The non-Christian religions are the work of devils and their similarities to Christianity are the results of demonic cunning. This view is stated by Justin in his Apology and is linked by him with the assertion that the Logos speaking through Socrates and others sought to lead men to the light and away from the work of demons -- the Logos who was made man in Jesus Christ. A sharp distinction is here drawn between pagan religions (the work of demons) and pagan philosophy (in which the Logos was shedding his light). Two points should be made regarding this view.
(a) It would be wise to recognize an element of truth here: the sphere of religions is the battlefield par excellence of the demonic. New converts often surprise missionaries by the horror and fear with which they reject the forms of their old religion - forms that to the secularized Westerner are interesting pieces of folklore and that to the third-generation successors of the first converts may come to be prized as part of national culture. Religion, including the Christian religion, can be the sphere in which evil exhibits a power against which human reason and conscience are powerless. For religion is the sphere in which one surrenders oneself to something greater than oneself.
(b) Even the strange idea that the similarities to Christianity in the non-Christian religions are evidence of demonic cunning points to an important truth. It is precisely at points of highest ethical and spiritual achievement that the religions find themselves threatened by, and therefore ranged against, the gospel. It was the guardians of God's revelation who cntcified the Son of God. It is the noblest among the Hindus who most emphatically reject the gospel. It is those who say, "We see," who seek to blot out the light (John 9:41).
3. Other religions are a preparation for Christ: the gospel fulfills them.'1 This way of understanding the matter was strong in Protestant missionary circles in the early years of this century and is fully expressed in the volume of the Edinburgh Conference of 1910, The Mis- sionan' Message. The non-Christian religions can be seen as preparation for the gospel. either as the "revelation of deep wants of the human spirit," which the gospel satisfies, or as partial insights that are corrected and completed by the gospel. 12 Obviously such a view can be discussed only on the basis of an intimate and detailed knowledge of the world's religions. There is indeed a vast missionary literature, mainly written in the first half of this century, that studies the religions from this point of view. Briefly, one has to say that this view had to be abandoned because, in R. Otto's phrase. the different religions turn on different axes. The questions Hinduism asks and answers are not the questions with which the gospel is primarily concerned. One does not truly understand any of the religions by seeing it as a preparation for Christianity. Rather, each religion must be understood on its own terms and along the line of its own central axis.
4. A distinct but related view of the matter, the one dominant at the Jerusalem Conference of 1928, seeks "values" in the religions and claims that while many values are indeed to be found in them, it is only in Christianity that all values are found in their proper balance and relationship. The final statement of the council lists such spiritual values - "the sense of the Majesty of God" in Islam. "the deep sympathy for the world's sorrow" in Buddhism, the "desire for contact with ultimate reality" in Hinduism, "the belief in a moral order of the universe" in Confucianism, and "disinterested pursuit of truth and of human welfare" in secular civilization - as "part of the one Truth." 13 And yet. as the same statement goes on to say, Christ is not merely the continuation of human traditions: coming to him involves the surrender of the most precious traditions. The "values" of the religions do not together add up to him who alone is the truth.
5. A different picture of the relation between Christianity and the other religions is given in the papal encyclical Ecclesia,n Suamu (1964).1=1 Here the world religions are seen as concentric circles, having the Roman Catholic church at the center and other Christians, Jews, Muslims, other theists, other religionists, and atheists at progressively greater distances. In respect of this proposal one must repeat that the religions cannot be rightly understood by looking at them in terms of their distance from Christianity. They must be understood, so to speak, from within, on their own terms. And one must add that this model particularly fails to do justice to the paradoxical fact central to the whole issue that it is precisely those who are in one sense closest to the truth who are in another sense the bitterest opponents of the gospel. Shall we say that the priest and the Levite, guardians of God's true revelation, are nearer to the center than the semipagan Samaritan?
6. Recent Roman Catholic writing affirms that the non-Christian religions are the means through which God's saving will reaches those who have not yet been reached by the gospel. Karl Rahner argues as follows: God purposes the salvation of all men. Therefore he communicates himself by grace to all men, "and these influences can be presumed to be accepted in spite of the sinful state of men." Since a saving religion must necessarily be social, it follows that the non-Christian religions have a positive salvific significance. In this respect they are parallel to the Judaism of the Old Testament, which, though it was a mixture of truth and error, was until the coming of Christ "the lawful religion willed by God for them." The adherent of a non-Christian religion is thus regarded as an anonymous Christian. But a Christian who is explicitly so "has a much greater chance of salvation than someone who is merely an anonymous Christian." 15
This scheme is vulnerable at many points. The devout adherent of another religion will rightly say that to call him or her an anonymous Christian is to fail to take the other faith seriously. The argument from the universal saving purpose of God to the salvific efficiency of nonChristian religions assumes, without proving, that it is religion among all the activities of the human spirit that is the sphere of God's saving action. The unique relation to Jesus Christ of the Old Testament is not adequately recognized.
Its most serious weakness, however, is one shared in some degree by the other views we have examined: it assumes that our position as Christians entitles us to know and declare what is God's final judgment upon other people. On the question of the ultimate salvation of those who have never heard the gospel, most contemporary Protestant writers are content to say that it is a matter to be left to the wise mercy of God. Some contemporary Roman Catholics (Hans Kung, for example) rebuke that attitude as a failure to do one's theological duty. Kung even uses the word "supercilious" to characterize this unwillingness to announce in advance the outcome of Judgment Day.16 I must confess, on the other hand, that I find it astonishing that a theologian should think he has the authority to inform us in advance who is going to be "saved" on the last day. It is not accidental that these ecclesiastical announcements are always moralistic in tone: it is the "men of good will," the "sincere" followers of other religions, the "observers of the law" who are informed in advance that their seats in heaven are securely booked. This is the exact opposite of the teaching of the New Testament. Here emphasis is always on surprise. It is the sinners who will he welcomed and those who are confident that their place was secure who will find themselves outside. God will shock the righteous by his limitless generosity and by his tremendous severity. The ragged beggars from the lanes and ditches will be in the festal hall, and the man who thought his own clothes were good enough will find himself thrown out (Matt. 22:1-14). The honest, hard-working lad will be out in the dark while the young scoundrel is having a party in his father's house (Luke 15). The branch that was part of the vine will be cut off and burned (John 15). There will be astonishment both among the saved and among the lost (Matt. 25:31-46). And so we are warned to judge nothing before the time (I Cor. 4:1-5). To refuse to answer the question that our Lord himself refused to answer (Luke 13:23-30) is not "supercilious"; it is simply honest.
This is not a small matter. It determines the way in which we approach the man of another faith. It is almost impossible for me to enter into simple, honest, open, and friendly communication with another person as long as I have at the back of my mind the feeling that I am one of the saved and he is one of the lost. Such a gulf is too vast to be bridged by any ordinary human communication. But the problem is not really solved if I decide from my side of the abyss that he also is saved. In either case the assumption is that I have access to the secret of his ultimate destiny. If I were a Hindu, I do not think that even a decision by an ecumenical Christian council that good Hindus can be saved would enable me to join in ordinary human conversation with a Christian about our ultimate beliefs. All such pronouncements go beyond our authority and destroy the possibility of a real meeting. The truth is that my meeting with a person of another religion is on a much humbler basis. I do not claim to know in advance his or her ultimate destiny. I meet the person simply as a witness, as one who has been laid hold of by Another and placed in a position where I can only point to Jesus as the one who can make sense of the whole human situation that my partner and I share as fellow human beings. This is the basis of our meeting.
III
How, from this starting point, do I begin to understand the religion of my partner'?
1. Believing that in Jesus God himself is present in the fullness of his being, I am committed to believing that every part of the created world and every human being are already related to Jesus. John expressed this by saying that Jesus is the Word through whom all things came to be, that he is the life of all that is, and that he is the light that gives light to every man. To say this is to affirm that the presence and work of Jesus are not confined within the area where he is acknowledged. John also says, in the same breath, that the light shines in the darkness and that the darkness has not mastered it. His whole Gospel is the elucidation of that statement in terms of actual history. This is not a sort of Christ-monism: there is light and there is darkness. But light shines in the darkness to the uttermost: there is no point at which light stops and darkness begins, unless the light has been put under a bushel. When the light shines freely one cannot draw a line and say, "Here light stops and darkness begins.' But one can and must say. "There is where the light shines: go toward it and your path will be clear, turn your back on it and you will go into deeper darkness." One can and must do what John the Baptist did, and can and must "bear witness to the light.
The Christian confession of Jesus as Lord does not involve any attempt to deny the reality of the work of God in the lives and thoughts and prayers of men and women outside the Christian church. On the contrary, it ought to involve an eager expectation of, a looking for, and a rejoicing in the evidence of that work. There is something deeply wrong when Christians imagine that loyalty to Jesus requires them to belittle the manifest presence of the light in the lives of men and women who do not acknowledge him, to seek out points of weakness, to ferret out hidden sins and deceptions as a means of commending the gospel. If we love the light and walk in the light we will also rejoice in the light wherever we find it - even the smallest gleams of it in the surrounding darkness.
Here I am thinking, let it be clearly understood, not only of the evidences of light in the religious life of non-Christians, the steadfastness and costliness of the devotion that so often puts Christians to shame; I am thinking also of the no less manifest evidences of the shining of the lights in the lives of atheists, humanists, Marxists, and others who have explicitly rejected the message and the fellowship of the church. "The light" is not to be identified with the religious life of humankind, religion is in fact too often the sphere of darkness, Christian religion not excluded. The parable of the Good Samaritan is a sharp and constantly needed reminder to the godly of all faiths that the boundary between religion and its absence is by no means to he construed as the boundary between light and darkness.
Christians then, in their dealing with men and women who do not acknowledge Jesus as Lord, will meet them and share with them in a common life, not as strangers but as those who live by the same lifegiving Word, and in whom the same life-giving light shines. They will recognize and rejoice in the evidences they find of a response to the same God from whom alone life and light come. They will join with their non-Christian neighbors in all that serves life against death and light against darkness. They will expect to learn as well as to teach, to receive as well as to give, in this common human enterprise of living and building up a common life. They will not be eager to have their particular contributions to the common human task separately labeled as "Christian." They will be happy only if what they do can serve the reign and righteousness of the Father of Jesus who loves all, gives life to all, and purposes the blessing of all.
2. But having said this, having joyfully and gratefully acknowledged all the goodness to be found in every part of the whole human family. it is necessary to go on to say that there is a dark side to this bright picture. The most dark and terrible thing about human nature is our capacity to take the good gifts of God and make there into an instrument to cut ourselves off from God, to establish our independence from God. All the impulses toward good, all the experiences of God's grace, and all the patterns of conduct and of piety that grow from these can be and have constantly been made the basis for a claim on our own behalf, a claim that we have, so to speak, a standing in our own right. And so, in the name of all that is best in the moral and spiritual experience of the race, we cut ourselves off from the life that God intends for us - a life of pure and childlike confidence in the superabundant kindness of God. This is the tragic story that was enacted in the ministry of Jesus when - in the name of all that was best and highest in the law and piety of the time - the incarnate Lord was rejected and condemned to death. This is the story that Paul repeats in many different ways, and above all in three chapters (9-11 ) of the letter to the Romans. It is the story that has been constantly repeated in the history of the church when Christians believe they have, in virtue of their faith and baptism, a claim upon God that others do not have and when they refuse to accept the plain meaning of the teaching of the apostle that there is no distinction between Christian and pagan because the same Lord is Lord of all and bestows his riches upon all who call upon him (Rom. 10:12).
The cross of Jesus is on the one hand the exposure of this terrible fact and on the other hand God's way of meeting it. For, as Paul teaches in many places, while at the cross our human righteousness and piety found themselves ranged in murderous enmity against the God whom they proposed to honor, in that same deed we were offered another kind of righteousness - the righteousness that is God's gift, the relationship of total reconciliation with God present in his own person in the here and now who is condemned and crucified by our righteousness. This unique historic deed, which we confess as the true turning point of universal history, stands throughout history as witness against all the claims of religion - including the Christian religion - to be the means of salvation. Contrary to much of the teaching we have reviewed, we have to insist that religion is not the means of salvation. The message of Jesus, of the unique incarnate Lord crucified by the powers of law, morals, and piety and raised to the throne of cosmic authority, confronts the claim of every religion with a radical negation. We cannot escape this. Jesus comes to the representatives of the highest in human spirituality, as he came to Saul of Tarsus, as one who threatens the most sacred ground on which they stand. He appears as the saboteur, the subverter of the law. It is only after his unconditional claim has been accepted that one in Christ, like Paul the apostle, can look back and see that Christ has not destroyed the law but fulfilled it.
The experience of Paul is mirrored in that of many converts from the Hindu and Muslim faiths with whom I have discussed this matter. At the point of crisis Jesus appeared to them as one who threatened all that was most sacred to them. In the light of their experience of life in Christ they now look back and see that he has safeguarded and fulfilled it. To put the matter in another way: the revelation of God's saving love and power in Jesus entitles and requires me to believe that God purposes the salvation of all men, but it does not entitle me to believe that this purpose is to be accomplished in any way that ignores or bypasses the historic event by which it was in fact revealed and effected.
3. The accomplishment of this saving purpose is to be by way of and through a real history - a history whose center is defined by the events that took place "under Pontius Pilate." The end envisaged is the reconciliation of all things in heaven and earth in Christ (Col. 1:20). the "summing up of all things in Christ" (Eph. 1:10), the liberation of the entire creation from its bondage (Rom. 8:19-21). The object to which God's purpose of grace is directed is the whole creation and the whole human family, not human souls conceived as billions of separate monads, each detached from its place in the whole fabric of the human and natural world. To think in this way and then to engage in speculations about which of these monads will finally reach the goal and which will not is to distort the biblical picture out of all recognition. The salvation which is promised in Christ and of which his bodily resurrection is the firstfruit is not to be conceived simply as the fulfillment of the personal spiritual history of each individual human being. To speak in this way is to depart both from Scripture and from a true understanding of what it is to he a person. We are fully persons only with and through others, and in Christ we know that our personal history is so rooted in Christ that there can be no final salvation for each of us until he has "seen of the travail of his soul" and is satisfied (Isa. 53:11). The New Testament itself suggests at many points the need for the patience this requires (Heb. 11:39-40; Rev. 6:9-11). The logic that leads the writer of the Letter to the Hebrews to say of the saints of former days that "apart from us they should not be made perfect" surely did not cease to operate with the first century. We must equally say that we, and all who are called to the service of God's universal promise of blessing, cannot be made perfect, cannot be saved apart from all who have not yet had the opportunity to respond to the promise. This is the theological context, surely, in which we should try to understand the place in God's purpose of all those millions who have lived and died out of reach of the story that we believe to be the clue to universal history.
4. Because this salvation is a real consummation of universal history and not simply the separate consummation of individual personal lives conceived as abstracted from the public life of which they are a part, it follows that an essential part of the history of salvation is the history of the bringing into obedience to Christ of the rich multiplicity of ethical, cultural, and spiritual treasures that God has lavished upon humankind. The way in which this is to be understood is shown in the well-known verses from the Fourth Gospel:
I have yet many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth; for he will not speak on his own authority, but whatever he hears he will speak. and he will declare to you the things that are to come. He will glorify me, for he will take what is mine and declare it to you. All that the Father has is mine; therefore I said that he will take what is mine and declare it to you. (John 16:12-15)
We can spell out what is said here in a threefold form.
(a) What can be given to and grasped by this group of first-century Jews is limited by the time and place and circumstances of their lives. It is true knowledge of the only true God and in that sense it is the full revelation of God (John 17:3, 6). But it is not yet the fullness of all that is to be manifested.
(b) It will be the work of the Holy Spirit to lead this little community, limited as it now is within the narrow confines of a single time and place and culture, into "the truth as a whole" and specifically into an understanding of "the things that are to come" - the world history that is still to be enacted.
(c) This does not mean. however, that they will be led beyond or away from Jesus. Jesus is the Word made flesh, the Word by which all that is came to be and is sustained in being. Consequently all the gifts that the Father has lavished on humankind belong in fact to Jesus, and it will be the work of the Spirit to restore them to their true owner. All these gifts will be truly received and understood when the Holy Spirit takes them and declares their true meaning and use to the church.
We have here the outline of the way in which we are to understand the witness of the church in relation to all the gifts that God has bestowed upon humankind. I do not suggest that the church go into the world as the body with nothing to receive and everything to give. Quite the contrary: the church has yet much to learn. This passage suggests a Trinitarian model that will guide our thinking as we proceed. The Father is the giver of all things. They all belong rightly to the Son. It will be the work of the Spirit to guide the church through the course of history into the truth as a whole by taking all God's manifold gifts given to all humankind and declaring their true meaning to the church as that which belongs to the Son. The end to which it all looks is "a plan for the fulness of time, to unite all things to him, things in heaven and things on earth" (Eph. 1:10). The apostle, looking at the marvelous events by which the Gentiles, who were outside of the covenant, have been brought into it and made members of the household of God, can see in them the signs of the accomplishment of this purpose. As we, from a longer experience of the church's mission to all the nations, look back upon the story of the church and trace its encounter first with the rich culture of the Hellenic world and then with one after another of the cultures of humankind, we can see, with many distractions and perversions and misunderstandings, the beginnings of the fulfillment of this promise.
5. The church, therefore, as it is in via, does not face the world as the exclusive possessor of salvation, nor as the fullness of what others have in part, the answer to the questions they ask, or the open revelation of what they are anonymously. The church faces the world, rather, as arrabon of that salvation - as sign, firstfruit, token, witness of that salvation which God purposes for the whole. It can do so only because it lives by the Word and sacraments of the gospel by which it is again and again brought to judgment at the foot of the cross. And the bearer of that judgment may well be and often is a man or woman of another faith (cf. Luke 11:31-32). The church is in the world as the place where Jesus, in whom all the fullness of the godhead dwells, is present, but it is not itself that fullness. It is the place where the filling is taking place (Eph. 1:23). It must therefore live always in dialogue with the world. hearing its witness to Christ but always in such a way that it is open to receive the riches of God that belong properly to Christ but have to be brought to him. This dialogue, this life of continuous exchange with the world, means that the church itself is changing. It must change if "all that the Father has" is to be given to it as Christ's own possession (John 16:14-15). It does change. Very obviously the church of the Hellenic world in the fourth century was different from the church that met in the upper room in Jerusalem. It will continue to change as it meets ever new cultures and lives in faithful dialogue with them.
6. One may sum up - or at least indicate the direction of - this part of the argument by means of a picture. We have looked at and rejected a series of models that could be expressed in pictures. We will suggest (following Walter Freytag) a simple sketch that may serve to indicate the true basis for dialogue between Christians and those of other faiths.L7 It will be something like this:
The staircases represent the many ways by which humans learn to rise toward the fulfillment of God's purpose. They include all the ethical and religious achievements that so richly adorn the cultures of humankind. But in the middle of them is placed a symbol that represents something of a different kind - a historic deed in which God exposed himself in a total vulnerability to all our purposes and in that meeting exposed us as the beloved of God who are, even in our highest religion, the enemies of God. The picture expresses the central paradox of the human situation, that God comes to meet us at the bottom of our stairways, not at the top; that our real ascent towards God's will for us takes us further away from the place where he actually meets us. "I came to call not the righteous, but sinners." Our meeting, therefore, with those of other faiths takes place at the bottom of the stairway, not at the top. "Christianity" as it develops in history takes on the form of one of those stairways. Christians also have to come down to the bottom of their stairway to meet the adherents of another faith. There has to be a kenosis, a "self-emptying." Christians do not meet their partners in dialogue as those who possess the truth and the holiness of God but as those who bear witness to a truth and holiness that are God's judgment on them and who are ready to hear the judgment spoken through the lips and life of their partner of another faith.
IV
On the basis that has been laid down, one can speak briefly of the purpose with which the Christian enters into dialogue with people of other faiths. This purpose can only be obedient witness to Jesus Christ. Any other purpose, any goal that subordinates the honor of Jesus Christ to some purpose derived from another source, is impossible for Christians. To accept such another purpose would involve a denial of the total lordship of Jesus Christ. A Christian cannot try to evade the accusation that, for him or her, dialogue is part of obedient witness to Jesus Christ.
But this does not mean that the purpose of dialogue is to persuade the non-Christian partner to accept the Christianity of the Christian partner. Its purpose is not that Christianity should acquire one more recruit. On the contrary, obedient witness to Christ means that whenever we come with another person (Christian or not) into the presence of the cross, we are prepared to receive judgment and correction, to find that our Christianity hides within its appearance of obedience the reality of disobedience. Each meeting with a non-Christian partner in dialogue therefore puts my own Christianity at risk.
The classic biblical example of this is the meeting of Peter with the Gentile Cornelius at Caesarea. We often speak of this as the conversion of Cornelius, but it was equally the conversion of Peter. In that encounter the Holy Spirit shattered Peter's own deeply cherished image of himself as an obedient member of the household of God. ("No, Lord: for I have never eaten anything that is common or unclean.") It is true that Cornelius was converted, but it is also true that "Christianity" was changed. One decisive step was taken on the long road from the incarnation of the Word of God as a Jew of first-century Palestine to the summing up of all things in him.
The purpose of dialogue for the Christian is obedient witness to Jesus Christ, who is not the property of the church but the Lord of the church and of all people and who is glorified as the living Holy Spirit takes all that the Father has given to humankind - all people of every creed and culture - and declares it to the church as that which belongs to Christ as Lord. In this encounter the church is changed, the world is changed. and Christ is glorified.
V
What is to be said, on the basis of the preceding discussion, of the manner of interfaith dialogue" We have already suggested that it is the doctrine of the Trinity that provides us with the true grammar of dialogue, and we shall proceed accordingly.
I . We participate in dialogue with those of other faiths, believing that we and they share a common nature as those who have been created by the one God who is the Father of all, that we live by his kindness, that we all are responsible to him, and that he purposes the same blessing for us all. We meet as children of one Father, regardless of whether or not our partners have accepted their sonship. This has at least three implications.
(a) We are eager to receive from our partners what God has given them, to hear what God has shown them. In Karl Barth's words, we must have ears to hear the voice of the Good Shepherd in the world at large.
Eagerness to listen, to learn, to receive even what is new and strange will be the mark of one who knows the word of Jesus: All that the Father has is mine." In our meeting with those of other faiths we are learning to share in our common patrimony as human beings made by the one God in his own image.
(b) We meet in a shared context of things, of nonpersonal entities. The importance of this becomes clear if one recalls the distortion that arises when dialogue is conceived as the encounter of pure naked spirits. For those who regard the mystical experience of undifferentiated unity with pure Being as the core of religion, it will be natural to conceive dialogue as being directed toward a meeting of persons at a level "deeper" than that which can be conceptualized. But, while fully acknowledging that there may be in such a personal meeting more than either of the partners can put into words, I must insist that truly personal relationships develop in the context of impersonal realities. We do not become more fully persons by trying to abstract ourselves from the world of things. The Christian in dialogue with people of other faiths rejoices to share with those partners the one common world that is the gift to all from the one God.
(c) Moreover, in the dialogue we meet at a particular place in time in the ongoing history of the world, a history that we believe to be under the providence and rule of God. We meet not as academics studying dead traditions of the past, but as men and women of faith struggling to meet the demands and opportunities of this moment in the life of our city, our nation, our world. To recognize this will prevent us from simply shooting at each other from old fortresses. We shall meet in the open country where all of us, of whatever faith, are being called upon to bring our faith to the test of decision and action in new and often unprecedented situations. It is in this open encounter in the field of contemporary decision that true dialogue takes place. This dialogue may, and often should, lead into common action on many matters of public life.
2. We participate in the dialogue as members in the body of Christ - that body which is sent into the world by the Father to continue the mission of Jesus. This has three consequences for the manner of the dialogue:
(a) It means that we are vulnerable. We are exposed to temptation. We have no defenses of our own. We do not possess the truth in an unassailable form. A real meeting with a partner of another faith must mean being so open to him or her that the other's way of looking at the world becomes a real possibility for us. One has not really heard the message of one of the real religions that have moved millions of people for centuries if one has not been really moved by it, if one has not felt in one's soul the power of it. Jesus was exposed to all the power of human religious and ideological passion, to the point where he could cry, "My God, my God. why did you forsake me?" and yet remain wholly bound to his Father and commit his spirit into his Father's hands. When in true dialogue the true disciple will be exposed without defense in his dialogue.
(b) One may put this point in the form of the model sketched on page 181. The Christian has to come down to the bottom of the stairway to meet his or her partner. Much so-called "Christianity" may have to he left behind in this meeting. Much of the intellectual construction, the piety, the practice in which his or her discipleship of Christ has been expressed may have to be called in question. The meeting place is at the cross. at the place where the Christian bears witness to Jesus as the Judge and Savior of both of them. In commenting on this approach to dialogue Hick writes:
This is, I think, a very fruitful approach. But where it will lead must depend to an important extent upon investigations concerning the historical Jesus, to whom it appeals, and of the ways in which the Christian interpretation of him has been formed over the centuries. The all-important question concerns the extent to which the man Jesus is to be understood in terms of the developed theology of the Church. 18
He goes on to suggest that if this approach is followed, many of the doctrines that have traditionally been regarded as central to Christianity - the doctrines of the Trinity and of the incarnation, for example - may have to be abandoned.
The issue that is raised here has been discussed in any previous chapter. I have tried to sketch the three-cornered pattern of relationships within which the church has to formulate, in its passage from generation to generation and from culture to culture, its answer to the question of who Jesus is. It has to be formulated in openness to the whole testimony of the universal church, in dialogue with the cultures of mankind, and in faithfulness to the tradition as primarily embodied in Scripture. The dialogue with people of other religions will certainly lead to reconsideration and reformulation of Christian doctrines formulated in other circumstances. The possible limits of such reformulation cannot be laid down theoretically in advance. But my whole discussion presupposes the confessional stance; the participants are those for whom Jesus Christ is determinative. Hick explicitly repudiates this stance and adopts that of the modern scientific worldview, which replaced the "dogmatic slumbers" of Christendom two hundred years ago. From this stance (which is, of course, also a `'confessional" stance) the answer to the question "Who is Jesus?" will certainly be very different from any of the traditional Christian formulations. Hick's own writings are ample evidence of this.
The Christian partner in the dialogue of the religions will certainly put his or her "Christianity" at risk. The Christian must be ready to face the possibility of radical reconsideration of long-accepted formulations. But he or she does so within the ultimate commitment to Jesus Christ as finally determinative of his or her way of understanding and responding to all experience.
(c) It follows from this that the Christian will share in the dialogue of the religions as one who is deeply rooted in the life of the church - its worship, teaching, sacraments, and shared discipleship. It is as a member in the body of Christ that the Christian accepts the vulnerability that is a precondition of real encounter. He or she does not go in his or her own strength. The world of the religions is the world of the demonic. It is only by being deeply rooted in Christ that one can enter with complete self-emptying and with complete exposure into this world in order to bear faithful witness to Christ.
3. We participate in the dialogue believing and expecting that the Holy Spirit can and will use this dialogue to do his own sovereign work, to glorify Jesus by converting to him both the partners in the dialogue.
(a) The Christian partner must recognize that the result of the dialogue may be a profound change in himself or herself. We have referred to the story of the meeting of Peter and Cornelius, which is the story of radical conversion both of the apostle and of the pagan Roman soldier. Klaus Klostermeier writes as follows of his experience of dialogue with Hindus: "Never did I feel more inadequate, shattered and helpless before God.... All of a sudden the need for a metanoia in depth became irrepressibly urgent." "9 The Holy Spirit who convicts the world of sin, of righteousness, and of judgment may use the nonChristian partner in dialogue to convict the church. Dialogue means exposure to the shattering and upbuilding power of God the Spirit.
(b) The Christian will also believe and expect that the Holy Spirit can use the dialogue as the occasion for the conversion of his partner to faith in Jesus. To exclude this belief and expectation is to reduce dialogue as the occasion for the conversion of his partner to faith in Jesus. To exclude this belief and expectation is to reduce dialogue to something much less than its proper importance. What we have said about the "conversion of Peter" in the encounter at Caesarea must not he used to overshadow the conversion of Cornelius, without which there would have been no conversion of Peter. A distinguished Hindu writer on religious and philosophical questions, Dr. R. Sundarara Rajan of Madras, has recently commented on the current developments in the field of Hindu-Christian dialogue. He points out that the emphasis upon a self-critical attitude, the demand that each party should try to see things from within the mind of the other, and the disavowal of any attempt by either side to question the faith of the others can easily mean that dialogue is simply an exercise in the mutual confirmation of different beliefs with all the really critical questions excluded. "If it is impossible to lose one's faith as a result of an encounter with another faith, then I feel that the dialogue has been made safe from all possible risks."20 A dialogue tttat is safe from all possible risks is no true dialogue. The Christian will go into dialogue believing that the sovereign power of the Spirit can use the occasion for the radical conversion of the partner as well as of the Christian.
(c) When we speak of the Holy Spirit we are speaking of the one who glorifies Christ by taking all the gifts of God and showing them to the church as the treasury of Christ (John 16:14-15). The work of the Spirit is the confession of Christ (1 John 4:2-3; 1 Cor. 12:3). The Spirit is not in the possession of the church but is Lord over the church, guiding the church from its limited, partial, and distorted understanding and embodiment of the truth into the fullness of the truth in Jesus, who is the one in whom all things consist (Col. 1: 17). Not every spirit is the Holy Spirit. Not every form of vitality is his work. There is need for the gift of discernment. Peter at Caesarea, and later the congregation in Jerusalem, had need of this discernment to recognize that this strange and (at first) shocking reversal of deeply held religious beliefs was the work of the Holy Spirit and not of the Antichrist (Acts 11:1-18).
There is no substitute for the gift of discernment, no set of rules or institutional provisions by which we can be relieved of the responsibility for discernment. Dialogue cannot be "made safe for all possible risks." The Christian who enters into dialogue with people of other faiths and ideologies is accepting the risk. But to put mY Christianity at risk is precisely the way by which I can confess Jesus Christ as Lord - Lord over all worlds and Lord over my faith. It is only as the church accepts the risk that the promise is fulfilled that the Holy Spirit will take all the treasures of Christ, scattered by the Father's bounty over all the people and cultures of mankind, and declare them to the church as the possession of Jesus.
VI
One of the most common metaphors used in the New Testament to describe the relation of the church to the gospel is that of stewardship. The church, and especially those called to any kind of leadership in the church, are servants entrusted with that which is not their property but is the property of their Lord. That which is entrusted is something of infinite worth as compared with the low estate of the servants in whose hands it is placed. They are but mud pots; but that which is entrusted to them is the supreme treasure (II Cor. 4:7). The treasure is nothing less than "the mysteries of God" (I Cor. 4:1), "the mystery of the gospel" (Eph. 6:19), "the mystery which was kept secret for long ages but is now disclosed and ... made known to all nations . . . to bring about the obedience of faith" (Rom. 16:25-26). It is "the mystery of his will . . . to unite all things in him" (Eph. 1:9-10). It is the open secret of God's purpose, through Christ, to bring all things to their true end in the glory of the triune God. It is open in that it is announced in the gospel that is preached to all the nations; it is a secret in that it is manifest only to the eyes of faith. It is entrusted to those whom God has given the gift of faith by which the weakness and foolishness of the cross is known as the power and wisdom of God. It is entrusted to them not for themselves but for all the nations. It is Christ in them, the hope of glory.
A steward can fall into several kinds of temptation. All of them are illustrated in the history of the church and in the parables of Jesus. He can forget that he is only the steward and imagine that he is the proprietor. When this happens the church supposes itself to be the saved while the nations ("the heathen") are the lost. Or he can be lazy, drowsy, and slack, and so allow the treasure to be stolen. When this happens the church falls into a worldly slumber and the world is left without the sound of the gospel. Or the steward may forget the purpose for which the treasure was entrusted to him and keep it wrapped up or buried in the ground. It is to such an unprofitable servant that the master in Jesus' parable says, "You wicked and slothful servant.... You ought to have invested in money with the bankers, and at my coming I should have received what was my own with interest" (Matt. 25:14-30). To invest the money with a view to a high rate of interest is to risk the capital. The church has often been afraid to do this, thinking that the faith once delivered to the saints is to be preserved inviolate and without the change of a comma. Verbal orthodoxy then becomes the supreme virtue, and syncretism becomes the most feared enemy. When this is the mood real dialogue becomes impossible. And so does real mission. If such a church is strong there can be a proselytism, but there is not that kind of mission which seriously expects the Holy Spirit to take what belongs to Christ and show it to the church, thus leading the church into new truth. The mystery of the gospel is not entrusted to the church to be buried in the ground. It is entrusted to the church to be risked in the change and interchange of the spiritual commerce of humanity. It belongs not to the church but to the one who is both head of the church and head of the cosmos. It is within his power and grace to bring to its full completion that long-hidden purpose, the secret of which has been entrusted to the church in order that it may become the open manifestation of the truth to all the nations.