Ideas for a Theology of the History of Religion

Ideas for a Theology of the History of Religion

by Ernst Benz

135One of the urgent tasks of contemporary theology is to formulate a new theological understanding of the history of religion. This involves new insight into the position of Christianity within the general religious development of mankind and a new conception of the relationship of the history of religion to salvation-history (Heilsgeschichte). The urgency of this task has been caused by the profound changes in the general situation of Christianity in the world, by the great transformations within the non-Christian religions, and by the universal changes in religious consciousness which have arisen in the twentieth century.

In this situation the traditional schemata of the theological evaluation of the history of religion are no longer adequate; indeed, they begin to endanger the claim of the Christian revelation to truth. These traditional schemata can be reduced to two basic types.

The first is represented by the doctrine of absolute discontinuity between Christianity and the non-Christian religions, between the God who reveals himself in the Old and New Testaments and the gods of the various religions. This schema has found its modern expression in dialectical theology. It maintains that the various 136religions are the efforts of man to justify himself before God; a way of self-justification which does not save man from his guilt and self-centeredness, nor from being lost. The history of religion from this point of view is the history of the religious dreams of mankind in which man dreams of saving himself but is unable to lift himself up from his sickbed. He is awakened out of his dreams only by the revelation of the true word of the true God. Christianity is the crisis of all religions. It is the revelation of the “wholly other” God, who utters His divine verdict upon the selfmade gods of man.

The second schema is represented by the Logos theology of the Apologists and is found today especially in Roman Catholic mission theology. Logos theology attempts to place the general history of man and religion in a more positive relationship to Christian salvation-history which has its backbone in the Old and New Covenants. It begins with the idea that there are seeds of the divine Logos in the heathen environment of the Old Testament; in Indian, Persian, Egyptian, and above all in Greek, “philosophy.” Sparks from the burning bush have fallen on the land of the heathen. The divine Logos, who spoke through the mouth of Moses and the prophets, called forth some perception of the light in the nonJudaic world before He became man in Jesus Christ and appeared in his completeness and fullness.

Both these schemata, confronted with the development of our modern consciousness of history and of religion, lead to absurd consequences. Both separate the history of mankind from salvation-history. Both conceive of salvation-history as an arbitrary improvisation which no longer makes possible any meaningful relation between the history of all humanity and salvation-history.

The first schema, the assertion that Christ is the crisis of all religions (in the words of a Buddhist philosopher, the “theology of flying saucers,”) can no longer be upheld in a world situation where Christianity is reproached by the non-Christian religions for its guilty entanglement in the colonial and economic expansion of the European and American West.

The second schema, the traditional Logos theology and its modern versions, proves itself to be a theological ell which is too short to measure our modern consciousness of history. It limits salvation-history before Christ to the events of the Old Testament and the happenings in the general history of man which accompany these 137events, thereby limiting salvation-history to the development of religious consciousness within this segment of history. Traditional Logos theology regards the development of the history of mankind and of religion as essentially closed with the birth of Jesus Christ and the appearance of the Christian Church. It ignores the history of religion after Christ, in as far as this history is not identical with the history of the Christian Church. Two important new tasks arise here for a Christian view of the history of religion.

The first task consists in bringing our contemporary picture of human development, including prehistoric times, into a meaningful relationship with the Christian understanding of salvation-history. The traditional Christian picture of the course of salvation-history is built upon the ancient Jewish chronology, which believes that world history took place in an extraordinarily brief period of time. According to the Jewish computation of time the date of the creation of the world is not so far distant in the past. In terms of the Christian calendar it took place in the year 3761 According to the calendar which was accepted in the Byzantine imperial church, Christ was born in the year 5509 after the creation of the world. Into such a picture of history as this the theologians of the ancient Church sketched a schema of salvation-history which had its backbone in the history of the Jewish nation, which saw its fulfillment in the incarnation of the Son of God in Jesus Christ and in the Christian Church, that reckoned with the speedy return of Christ and believed that the epochs before and after Christ held together through the schema of promise and fulfillment.

The problem of whether and to what extent the general history of mankind in the epoch before the election of the Jewish people (as the real bearers of salvation-history) can be understood as salvation-history arose already for Jewish thought and then more so for Christian thought. This question was answered with the idea of the first covenant, before the election of Abraham, between God and Noah, the father of all human generations who survived the flood. Jewish theology based the universality of salvation-history upon this idea, and the Christian Church held onto it for a positive relation between salvation-history and the general history of mankind. The Apologists thought of the revelation in Jesus Christ as the fulfillment of the universal development of humanity.

This beginning, however, remained static and did not keep pace with the general consciousness of history. The cleavage between 138the traditional mythological picture of history in the Bible and the modern consciousness of history appeared for the first time with the discovery of America. It seemed absolutely impossible to fit the fact of the existence of such huge continents into the traditional picture of history in Christian doctrine. Christian theologians attempted to explain the origin of the newly discovered peoples in two ways. Some wanted to keep the traditional schema of history by explaining the population of America as the progeny of the ten lost tribes of Israel. Others, to whom this theory seemed too adventurous, considered it necessary to develop the idea of the existence of preadamites, an explanation which came under severe ecclesiastical condemnation.

The cleavage between the traditional picture of salvation-history and the modern consciousness of history has deepened to the degree that the knowledge of prehistory (prehistoric times) and early history has increased. The task of connecting the modern view of human history with the Christian conception of salvation-history becomes even more urgent when we realize that the retention of the traditional historical-theological conceptions goes against the very content of the Christian Gospel. A God who has left man to the power of demons, to the service of idols, magic, and sorcery, and who improvised a salvation-history which could be appropriated by a very small and arbitrary selection of mankind only after thousands of human generations died in sin and went to hell, has more similarity to the God of Marcion or to the Devil than to the God of the New Testament.

Christian theology today cannot escape the task of bringing the knowledge of the tremendous phases of the development of human religious consciousness in prehistory and early history into a meaningful relationship with the theological concept of salvation-history. The modern understanding of prehistory and history demands from theology a modern theodicy. The claim to universality of Christianity will be fulfilled only when it is shown that the universal history of religion and the development of the religious consciousness of man in all of history stand in a meaningful relationship to Christian salvation-history. The Christian understanding of man and his history as salvation-history cannot exclude the prehistory and early history of man. Either the saying is true that God “did not leave himself without witness” (Acts 14:17) even in the thousands of generations of archaic humanity, or we must 139relinquish the belief in a salvation-history and the claim of the Christian message of salvation to universality.

A second task for Christian theology results from the fact that the history of religion continues post Christum. Christian theology has not done justice to this fact; indeed, it has ignored it. Even where Christian theology attempted to establish a positive relationship to the non-Christian religions in the manner of the Logos theology of the Apologists, it started from the assumption that the history of religion had already found its fulfillment, its suspension and historical conclusion. In this view there cannot be a history of religion after Christ, after the fulfillment of time.

Nevertheless new world religions have appeared post Christum. Some of them can still—with some difficulty—be explained by the traditional theological picture of history. The first world religion which opposed the Christian Church with new holy books, with a new institution and a claim to universality was Manichaeism in the third and fourth centuries. But the apologists of the Christian Church opposed it as a Christian heresy rather than a new religion.

Even Islam was not understood as a new religion. It challenged the Christian claim to be the fulfillment of all the prophecies of salvation. It accepted the previous stages of revelation of God in Moses, in the Prophets, and in Jesus, but believed them to be surmounted and consummated by the final revelation in the prophet Mohammed. Christian theology fitted Islam into its picture of history by an eschatological explanation. It saw in Islam the fulfillment of the final prophecies of the coming of the false prophet (Rev. 19:20). And after Islam began to spread over the areas of the earliest Christian missions by means of holy war, its advance was interpreted as the fulfillment of those plagues and afflictions which had been prophesied for the final sifting of the Church by John in the Apocalypse.

For nearly a millennium Islam remained the only non-Christian religion with which Christianity had to deal. It engaged Islam in a fight of life or death, and the opposition to Islam became the model for contact and polemic with other non-Christian religions. The Asiatic religions in India, China, and Japan were discovered only at the beginning of the seventeenth century. Even today one attempts to explain these religions eschatologically. The obvious analogy between Buddhistic and Roman Catholic forms of worship 140and institutions caused the first Jesuit missionaries in China and Japan to interpret Buddhism as a countermeasure of the devil, who used the forms of expression of the Catholic Church to seduce the peoples of Asia by an anti-Christian church of the devil and to keep them away from the true Church of Christ.

The recognition of an independent development of the history of religion beside and outside of Christianity came only gradually. In its expansion Christianity came into contact with all the living non-Christian religions and encountered their opposition. Christian theology must deal with the fact that the history of religions still continues to develop in great variety. The great world religions have not been any more willing than Christianity to remain static in the same forms with which they began. They have gone through an astonishingly diverse internal development in which many varied forms and degrees of religious experience and theological exposition have found expression. These in turn have led to the most varied types of religious forms of social expression. They have also, to a large degree, determined the general political, social, and cultural development of the Asiatic peoples. All of the great Asiatic religions, in the same manner as Christianity, have brought forth new sects and new schools of thought in the course of their historical development and their adaptation to the various national structures. These sects and schools represent new forms of religious consciousness and religious ethics.

All the great religions have influenced one another to a great extent wherever they have come into contact. After Islam had taken up a considerable inheritance from Christianity in its gospel, its piety, and its devotional forms, it entered the domain of Hinduism in the subcontinent of India and created new religious forms of expression. New forms have originated also in Hinduism. They appeared partly as reform movements, but also partly took on the character of a new independent religion, like Jainism. New religions, like Sikhism, have arisen in India out of a combination of Hinduism and Islam. _

Buddhism, which first appeared in the fifth century before Christ as a reform movement within Hinduism and which later was driven from India through the reaction of Brahmanism and the coming of Islam, has gone through a multiplicity of variations and even up to the present has called into life new forms of religious experience and social structures.

141Christianity itself has in no small way contributed to this further development of the non-Christian religions. The missionary attack by Christianity has led to an intensification of activity on the part of the great non-Christian religions in Asia, and these religions have copied some of the methods for their renewal from the Christian mission. Buddhism and Hinduism have partly adopted the practice of the Sunday preaching service and have developed methods of religious education which are copied from Christianity. Likewise the modern Hindu and Buddhist lay and youth organizations, and above all their various social institutions, have copied from the corresponding organizations and institutions of Christianity.

The fact that the history of religion goes on becomes especially obvious and appears as an urgent theological problem where new religions are formed within the best organized working areas of the Christian mission. This is the case above all in A series of new revelatory religions (religions based on revelation) have appeared there since the middle of the last century. These have attracted millions of followers, while the Christian mission in spite of all its efforts scarcely has acquired its first half million of believers of all confessions. These new religions are noteworthy because they appeal to new revelations—some of them in the form of a new incarnation of God in the person of their founder—and because they put into effect a series of specific Christian claims in their social ethics. Besides such new religions based on revelation a series of syncretistic religions have appeared, which, like the Caodai Religion in Vietnam, consciously take up Christian doctrine and ethics and the “integration” of all previous historical religious forms.

The facts that the history of religion continues after Christ and that the Christian Church and the Christian mission are drawn into this current of universal development of the history of religion should no longer be ignored theologically. A theological conception of salvation-history cannot bypass the fact that the history of religion continues post Christum. This fact must be brought into a meaningful relationship to Christ’s claim to be the fulfillment of time. It is important to examine the question of whether and to what extent the very dynamic and mobile history of religion post 142Christum stands in a direct or dialectical relationship to the history of Christianity and of the Christian Church and to the history of the Christian mission and its expansion.

The answer to the two questions that have been asked concerning a new view of the history of religion cannot be found in the development of a new schema from the traditional presuppositions of Western theology in place of the old dogmatic schema—be it the schema of “absolute discontinuity” or the schema of Logos theology. Two new ways offer themselves to us.

First it is well to reflect the fact that the view of an exclusive claim to absoluteness (Absolutheit) which is generally accepted as the self-evident presupposition of Christian dogma is not the only self-evident and determinative attitude to be found in the New Testament. The New Testament knows, rather, a series of indications of a completely different conception of the relationship of the Christian Church to the non-Christian religions.

Acts 14 portrays how the miraculous healing of a cripple by the Apostle Paul causes the people of Lystra to see in the Apostles Barnabas and Paul the epiphany of the gods Zeus and Hermes, and how the people, led by the priest of the temple of Zeus, prepare to honor the Apostles cultically by a great sacrifice of flesh and flowers. Paul wards off this honor shown to divinity with the words:

Men, why are you doing this? We are also men, of like nature with you, and bring you good news, that you should turn from these vain things to a living God, who made the heaven and the earth and the sea and all that is in them. In past generations he allowed all the nations to walk in their own ways, yet he did not leave himself without witness, for he did good and gave you from heaven rains and fruitful seasons, satisfying your hearts with food and gladness.

Pére Jean Daniélou, the only modern Roman Catholic theologian who has dealt with the problem of the theology of the history of religion with any acuteness, has made this passage the basis for his doctrine of the révélation cosmique, the cosmic revelation. Paul emphasizes here the continuity of the self-witness of the living God throughout the whole series of human generations, and Paul expressly includes his own generation. This continuous self-witness of the living God is an expression of His love. It is completely off the track here to speak of an absolute discontinuity between Christianity and the history of religion before Christianity. In this passage 143all humanity appears under the sign of the continuity of the self-witness of the one God who is Lord of creation and of salvation-history.

Jesus expresses himself very clearly in regard to the claim of absoluteness by orthodox Christians. At the end of a series of sayings on the theme “by their fruits you shall know them,” Jesus says in Matthew 7:21-23:

Not every one who says to me, “Lord, Lord,” shall enter the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the will of my Father who is in heaven. On that day many will say to me, “Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and cast out demons in your name, and do many mighty works in your name?” And then will I declare unto them, “I never knew you; depart from me, you evildoers.”

Such a saying is quite surprising, for usually the possession of such gifts of the spirit as prophecy and exorcism appears as a sign of election to the kingdom of God. But this saying of “Lord, the insistence upon an orthodox Christology, upon the prestige of correct belief—appears here apparently as a negative attitude of the spirit. It cannot even be compensated for by the exercise of such superb charismata as prophecy and exorcism.

The only commentary to this obvious deprecation of charismata is the hymn to Agape in the First Letter to the Corinthians. Here also the usually highly praised charismata are disapproved of as they are measured against the norm of Agape. With increasing intensity the charismatic feats—from talking in tongues to the offering of oneself—are presented. Then if they are not motivated by Agape, they are radically rejected. The lack of Agape, the lack of love for our fellow men, is the real characteristic of this self-conscious saying of “Lord, Lord.” This lack is the reason why simply saying “Lord, Lord” does not lead into the kingdom of God and why all gifts of the spirit are useless if they are related simply to saying, “Lord, Lord.” The lack of Agape makes allegiance to Christ simply a formal, dogmatic claim to absoluteness, which ‘claims for itself the whole truth and all salvation. It creates an attitude of lovelessness toward those who do not accept this claim—a lovelessness that comprehends in itself the whole range of negative components that are the opposite of love: presumptuousness, contempt, disdainfulness and arrogant condescension.

Jesus promises that even those who have never heard of him, heathen and non-Christians, who to their own surprise turn out 144to be Christians because they have fulfilled the command of love, will be received into the kingdom of God and will sit at table there with him. This promise forms the complement to the exclusion of those who simply cry, “Lord, Lord.” The most powerful of these sayings is found in Matthew 25:31, where Jesus describes the coming of the Son of Man at the last judgment and reveals the criterion with which men will then be judged. According to this promise of Jesus many heathen who did not know Christ at all will be chosen by the Son of Man to be subjects of the kingdom. The criterion which determines the consignment of men to the kingdom of God or to outer darkness is not a definite doctrine about Christ, not a recognition of the Christian claim to absoluteness, nor is it even a knowledge of the historical figure of Jesus, but it is the fulfillment of the commandment of love toward the least of our human brethren. In the final judgment it becomes clear that a formal claim to absoluteness does not exist; the prestige of Christians is not taken into consideration. Many non-Christians in the generations of mankind before and after Christ conducted themselves as children of the kingdom of God without knowing Christ. There are children of the kingdom not only within the congregation of those who confess Jesus Christ, but also within all of humanity and in all times until the end of time.

Similarly one can see in the prophecy of the coming of the kingdom of God in Luke 13:29 ff. that many will be rejected who consider themselves to be the rightful followers of Jesus and who claim the fellowship of the table (personal fellowship) with him. They insist that they have personally received their doctrine from Jesus. Instead of them, however, others are received into the kingdom and deemed worthy to sit at the table with the Son of Man: “And men will come from east and west, and from north and south, and sit at table in the kingdom of God.” Not even the sacramental fellowship of the supper guarantees that nominal Christians belong to the kingdom of God. On the other hand many heathen who never came into contact with Jesus Christ are permitted to enter into the kingdom. In this passage also that which counts in the decisive moment, namely in the final judgment, is not the theological prestige of the Christian claim to absoluteness, but the fulfillment of the commandment of love toward the least of our brethren. This fulfillment of the commandment of love is found also outside of the Christian congregation. Salvation-history 145is realized not only in the area of organized congregations and confessional groups, but in the whole range of the history of religion. Salvation-history is human history.

This point of view is especially significant in the contemporary Situation because the strongest argument against the exclusive Christian claim to absoluteness is precisely the history of the Christian Church and the history of its mission. The bright side of the history of Christianity is accompanied by a shadow of error and misdeed which often obscures the light. The “night of history,” of which Franz von Baader speaks, was often identical with the night of Christianity. Today more than ever the followers of the non-Christian religions point to this dark side of church history as an important argument against the exclusive claim to absoluteness of Christianity. A work like Professor Thomas Ohm’s Asiens Kritik am Christentum shows that this criticism can no longer be overlooked, but must be taken by Christianity as an occasion for a sincere self-examination. Professor Friedrich Heiler has summed up the result of such a critical self-examination of the Christian claim to absoluteness in the light of church history with the words: “Every exclusive view which sees in Christianity the only saving revelation of God has thereby finally collapsed.”

A second way of a new approach seems to me to consist in directing the question of a Christian understanding of the non-Christian religions to those Christian personalities who have themselves grown up in a living experience and knowledge of a non-Christian religion and then have become Christian out of personal conviction. The exclusive judgments of non-Christian religions have up to now been made chiefly according to a fixed theological schema by theologians who did not know the non-Christian religions from within. But what do the great Christian converts say who have come out of a personal experience of Hinduism or Buddhism? This question has hardly been asked, let alone investigated. The great religious personalities of the Asiatic religions have characteristically expressed their recognition of the relation of religions to one another in figures and parables and not in abstract concepts. A pious follower of Mahayana Buddhism compares the relation of various religions to the pure light of the moon which is reflected by all the waters of the earth: by the muddy puddle of rain water, by the crystal-clear mountain lake, 146and by the boundless sea. Sarojini Naidu, a spiritual leader of Hinduism, compares the different religions “‘to the different colors in a beautiful piece of opal.” The great Mongolian Mangu (Mongka) Khan, grandson of Genghis Khan, compares the various religions as different ways of God to the different fingers on the same hand. In the Buddhistic Pali-Canon is found the famous parable of the blind men and the elephant. The parable of the three rings, which Lessing used in his Nathan der Weise, also has an Oriental origin. All of these parables of non-Christian origin aim at a harmonization and comparison of all religions within the context of a universal and inclusive idea of religion. It is characteristic that no such figurative visions of the relationship of Christianity to the non-Christian religions have originated in Western Christianity. I have found only one attempt to place a Christian parable over against the Buddhistic parables, and this came from an Asian Christian, the late Toyohiko Kagawa. He made use of an old Japanese proverb in which Zen Buddhism expressed its conception of the equality of all religions with these words: “Every way leads to the goal; every religion is good. Do not many paths lead to Mount Fuji?” This saying is very vivid for the Japanese, who know the various pilgrim paths which lead to the summit of the holy Mount Fuji, with their stations along the way, which are climbed annually by thousands of pilgrims. Kagawa was reared a Buddhist and was a believing Buddhist before he turned to Christianity. He takes this proverb which suggests: “Although many ways lead to the summit, we see the same moon from the summit; therefore why should Jesus Christ be our only leader?” and answers it in the following way:

Buddhism, Omoto, Tenri and Islam, all of these religions are good. All contain truth and guidance. But some stop at the sixth resting place on the mountainside, some at the fourth and some become tired and rest even before they have passed the first station. Many rest at the second and some reach only the third. Buddhism may bring us to the ninth resting place, but because it stops there I do not choose Buddhism. I choose Christianity because I want to climb to the top.

This parable is surprising because it shows that Kagawa counts not only the great classical religions like Buddhism and Islam among the “good religions,” but also some of the so-called “new religions” of Japan, like Tenri and Omoto which stem from new divine revelation and were founded only in the middle of the nine147teenth century. Kagawa demonstrates that he wishes to apply this parable to the total religious development of mankind ante Christum and post Christum. The decisive point of importance in the parable is that it gives up the traditional formulation of the Christian claim to absoluteness in its exclusive form, yet avoids a complete relativism of religions. All religions are “good” in so far as they strive for the transcendent reality of God and have one final goal in view, but the individual religions attain or arrive at difierent stations on the way to that goal. They have higher or lower experiences and perceptions of the transcendent reality. Christianity alone leads to the summit of the experience of God and mediates the final fullness of the knowledge of God. Actually it is amazing that Kagawa assigns such a high rank to Buddhism, which he says out of his own experience leads man to the next to the last station under the summit, the ninth station. Everyone who has climbed Mount Fuji knows that the stretch between the eighth and ninth stations is the steepest and most difficult part of the climb. At station nine one has the worst part of the climb behind him. But it is only Christ who leads to the summit, to the experience and the view of the full self-disclosure of divine love. There are different degrees and levels in the encounter between the various religions and the transcendent One. These steps are disclosed in the history of religion. But in Christ the heart of God is disclosed.

The last instance known to me of an approach to a Christian theology of the history of religion which attempts to overcome the traditional claim to absoluteness and to push on to an inclusive understanding of the history of religion from the standpoint of salvation-history stems from Rudolf Otto. Thanks to his remarkable intuitive ability at identification he was personally very close to Eastern thinking and its figurative manner of expression. He writes in his Vischnu-Ndrayana, Texte zur indischen Gottesmystik: ao

I am convinced that Christianity is decisively superior to other special forms of religion, not on the side of its many disputable historical accretions, but rather in terms of its specific ideal content; its highly individualized type of unique spirit. Its relationship of superiority to other religions is not that of truth to falsehood, but rather as Plato to Aristotle; not as master to slave, but as the first-born to his brothers.⁴

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