Mission and Interfaith Relationships



Pope John Paul II with world religious leaders at Assissi accessed at catholicherald.co.uk

This final post explores the issue of mission and inter-faith relationships.  The subject matter is controversial and raises major theological and societal questions. Here is a small sample of some of these questions.



 World religions such as Islam and Christianity claim to be uniquely true.  How would one begin to measure these competing truth claims? 

Pluralist theologian John Hick based part of his rejection of traditional Christianity on the claim that biblical scholarship proves the historical Jesus never claimed to be God or the unique path to salvation.  Is such a far-reaching claim justified? 

If the traditional Christian claim to uniqueness is true, does the Bible have anything to say about those who have never heard the Christian gospel? 

In a multi-cultural world how is mutual understanding and greater trust to be built among adherents of the world faiths? 

These questions will be addressed in one form or another over the course of this post.  A good starting point for our exploration of this theme is the three classical approaches to the question of salvation and the world religions.  These positions are often designated as exclusivism, inclusivism and pluralism. 

Pluralism

According to Lesslie Newbigin the predominant theological perspective is that of pluralism. This is the notion that no religion has a unique hold on the truth and that each religion provides its own access to the divine without any need for conversion to any other.  The two contemporary thinkers most strongly identified with that position are the late Presbyterian theologian John Hick and the Roman Catholic lay thinker, Paul Knitter.  No Other Name? by Knitter and The Myth of Christian Uniqueness, edited by Hick and Knitter, are two of the most significant statements of the pluralist case.
 



John Hick accessed at noetic.org

Paul Knitter accessed at bates.edu

  

One would have to acknowledge that pluralism is, at least partially, a reaction to a western cultural imperialism which saw the West, and the religion of the West, as superior to all other expressions of culture or faith.  This elitist attitude is increasingly being perceived as steeped in ignorance.  Had westerners been aware of the vitality of the other world faiths,  it is argued,  they would not have held such an elitist outlook.  Indeed, some pluralist theologians would suggest that only the abandonment of any kind of exclusive claim for Christianity can make for good relationships between the different peoples of the world.

A famous Buddhist parable perfectly captures the heart of the pluralist argument.  This parable was later re-told in the style of a humourous poem by Saxe, The Six Men of Hindostan.

It was six men of Hindostan,

To learning much inclined,

Who went to see the Elephant,

(Though all of them were blind);

That each by observation

Might satisfy his mind.

The first approached the Elephant,

And happening to fall

Against his broad and sturdy side,

At once began to bawl:

‘Bless me, it seems the Elephant,

Is very like a wall.’

The second feeling of his tusk,

Cried, ‘Ho! What have we here

So very round and smooth and sharp?

This wonder of an Elephant

Is very like a spear.’

The third approached the animal,

And happening to take

The squirming trunk within his hands,

Then boldly up and spake:

‘I see,’ quoth he, ‘the Elephant

Is very like a snake.

……………….

And so these men of Hindostan

Disputed loud and long,

Each in his own opinion

Exceeding stiff and strong,

Though each was partly in the right

And all were in the wrong.

Pluralists argue that in relation to the other religions Christianity has often acted like one of the blind men in the parable. A Christian claiming that Christ is the way to salvation and that other religions are not as adequate is like a blind man claiming that only his perception of the elephant is correct and that all the others are false. For pluralists,  there needs to be, in Hick’s famous phrase, a sort of Copernican revolution in which Christ is removed from the centre of the religious solar system to join the rest of the religions in their orbit, and for the centre to be replaced by God himself, with Christ as just one of the many means to bring people to a knowledge of the divine reality: a reality which the Hindus call Brahmin; the Buddhists, Nirvana;  the Muslims, Allah with Mohammed as his final authoritative messenger;  the Jews, Yahweh; and the Christians God, who for them, is revealed in Christ.

If one attempted to sum up the pluralist’s rejection of any unique place for Christ one could probably do no better than the summary offered by Newbigin.  Newbigin, while profoundly disagreeing with pluralism,  outlines concisely its mindset:

Given our multifaith, multirace, multiculture world of today it seems preposterous to maintain that in all the infinite pluralities and relativities of human affairs there should be one absolute against which everything else is to be measured.

Thus we have the pluralist argument in summary.  Any advocacy of Christian claims to uniqueness is an expression of cultural imperialism. It is destructive of good relationships between different faith communities and depends on a certain reading of biblical texts which is no longer tenable. Moreover,  it narrows the work of God to a tiny pin prick in history and ultimately fails to recognize that God is bigger than all our formulations.

Exclusivism



Exclusivist theologian Don Carson accessed at deathbybillions.tumblr.com

The polar opposite stance to pluralism is exclusivism.  Bosch in Transforming Mission reminds his readers that the historic position of Roman Catholicism was an ecclesial exclusivism whereby salvation was confined to members of the Roman Catholic church. The Council of Florence assigned to hell everyone not attached to the Catholic church. The old saying, ‘No salvation outside the Church’ became a watchword for the Roman Church over many centuries.  Few Roman Catholics still hold to that extreme exclusivist position though, in an ironical quirk of history, Fr Laurence Feeney of Boston was excommunicated in 1949 for holding that there could be no salvation outside the church. Present Catholic thinking, influenced by Vatican II, would no longer promote the ecclesial exclusivism of the past.

Many conservative Protestants have continued to hold to a fairly classic exclusivist position.  Salvation is deemed to be impossible without conscious faith in Christ. He is the only Saviour,  and although certain things can be grasped about the nature of God from general revelation, knowledge of salvation comes only through Christ and the preaching of the gospel.  Therefore if Christ is not preached, individuals will lose their only possibility of attaining salvation.

Two things should be noted in closing about this exclusivist stance.  Firstly, it is the historic Christian position held by the vast majority of the faithful.  While appearing narrow and restrictive by today’s standards, it has had considerable purchase over church history. Secondly, there are some pivotal biblical texts which may indicate that Jesus and the apostles saw things precisely in this kind of light. Not least Peter’s speech in Acts where he tells the crowds that ‘there is no other name given under heaven by which individuals may be saved’, and the oft quoted words of Jesus from John 14:9 in which he says, ‘I am the way, the truth and the life. No-one comes to the Father except through me.’

Inclusivism

Catholic inclusivist theologian Karl Rahner accessed at maristmessenger.co.nz

The third classic stance vis-à-vis salvation and the world faiths is that of inclusivism and this is essentially a reaffirmation of the traditional Christian position that Christ is the only Saviour and that salvation is entirely through Christ. Where this differs from the exclusivist view outlined above is the contention that Christ’s salvation can touch the lives of those who have no conscious knowledge of him. Inclusivists would cite the example of Abraham and some of the Old Testament saints who were unquestionably saved but never had a conscious encounter with Christ. Thus the cross saves them even if geographically and chronologically they lived outside the timescale in which the gospel was preached.

Inclusivism as an outlook is quite an extensive spectrum with ‘hard’ inclusivists advocating a position not far from exclusivism and ‘soft’ inclusivists coming relatively close to a pluralist outlook.  Some major Catholic theologians would identify more with soft inclusivism, particularly Karl Rahner with his notion of Anonymous Christianity. Rahner suggested that grace can be secretly at work in individuals and that as they respond to grace they are unconsciously responding to Christ.  Thus Muslims, Hindus and even atheists can be anonymous Christians.  More conservative inclusivists would suggest that Christ died for the sins of the whole world and that anyone who calls out to God with genuine openness (no matter where or no matter when) can be reached by God’s grace on the basis of Jesus’ death on the cross.

Assessing the three major paradigms



Josef Ratzinger. Accessed at unionindialogue.org

How does one judge between these ideas?  I wish to draw on some of my own research to offer you one grid for thinking through the issues. The scholar whose ideas I will utilize is Joseph Ratzinger,  Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI.  Ratzinger taught history of religions and from that background was able to challenge one of the pre-eminent assumptions of the age.  An assumption which you will undoubtedly encounter in your ministry and that determines many people’s outlook on inter-faith questions. This is the view that all the world religions are fundamentally the same under the surface. 

Ratzinger suggests, to the contrary,  that there have been two very different approaches to religion that have always stood out from one another and had no natural meeting point. The first he defines as a sort of impersonal pantheism where the divine is itself beyond personality and the goal of religion is to lose any sense of individual identity and to blend or dissolve into the one (forms of New Age mysticism and some of the ancient religions of the East fall into that category).

The other type of religion is theism were God is encountered as a Person and where the human being’s individual identity remains forever intact.  Ratzinger expresses the contrast between the two approaches in these terms: 

Ultimately it is a question of whether the divine ‘God’ stands over against us, so that religion, being human, is in the last resort a relationship – love – that becomes union (‘God is in all’: 1 Cor 15:28) but that does not do away with the opposition of the I and Thou; or, whether the divine lies beyond personality, and the final aim of man is to become one with, and dissolve in, the All-One.

It is abundantly clear from Ratzinger’s summary that pantheism and theism are quite dissimilar and envisage very different outcomes for the human person.  A third more recent pathway which has opened up for human beings is Enlightenment rationalism of the kind that you have been hearing about in this module.  What is frustrating from Ratzinger’s point of view is that Christianity alone is pilloried for an attitude that in fact characterizes all three paths.  One Ratzinger scholar summarized his position in the following terms:

Christianity has gained a bad press for its historic intransigence: its accordance of absolute primacy to the divine call made audible in Jesus Christ. But, complains Ratzinger, this unsavoury reputation should really afflict representatives of the two other life-ways as well. Mystical universalists and epistemological rationalists are equally exclusive in defending their ultimate criteria. (The Thought of Joseph Ratzinger, Aidan Nichols)

Christianity is reprimanded because it attaches ultimacy to its world view. The reality is that secularists and non-theistic religionists are just as exclusive and just as narrow in terms of what they allow to be true. Indeed, even the parable of the blind men of Hindustan functions on the basis that somebody is able to see the reality and that their worldview can see beyond the blinkered perspective of the world’s different religions.

The philosophical foundations of pluralism

Ratzinger traces pluralism’s roots back to the famous Kantian distinction between the noumenal and the phenomenal.  Kant believed that no-one had access to the noumenal. The noumenal is objective reality. The essential truth of existence.  All that is visible to human beings is the phenomenal world and what we read into or construct from that.  Therefore, in Kantian terms, the world religions are all human constructs which bear no relationship to that which is ultimately real. All are limited and none offer true knowledge of the ineffable divine reality.

It is this kind of Kantian thinking, argues Ratzinger,  that has brought belief systems which view themselves as normative into question and caused them to be deemed problematic to cultural harmony.

Moreover,  the theological impulse towards pluralism is given greater credence by what Ratzinger terms ‘the strange closeness between Europe’s post-metaphysical philosophy and Asia’s negative theology.’ Although different in source and in the way they leave their mark on culture,  they are nevertheless said to,   

…mutually confirm one another in their metaphysical and religious relativism. The a-religious and pragmatic relativism of Europe and America can get a kind of religious consecration from India which seems to give its renunciation of dogma the dignity of a greater respect before the mystery of God and man.       (Joseph Ratzinger,  Truth and Tolerance,  p. 122)

The seeming merging of these two world views elicits from Ratzinger a pessimistic description of the current fortunes of traditional Christianity.

The fact that here, in the context of the encounter between the cultures, relativism seems appropriate as the true philosophy of humanity gives it (as we have already suggested) such an appreciable impact, both in East and West, that it hardly seems possible to offer further resistance. Anyone who opposes it is not only setting himself against democracy and tolerance, that is, the fundamental rules of human discourse; he is obstinately insisting on the preeminence of his own Western culture and thus refusing to share in that coexistence of cultures which is obviously the order of the day. Anyone who wants to stick with the Bible and the Church starts by finding himself thrust into a cultural no-man’s land…’

Such a depressing picture leads not to despondency but functions as a stimulus for Ratzinger’s own theological assault on relativism.  Where that system of thought is said to be at its weakest is when addressing the question, ‘What purpose is being served by a relativist theory of religion?’ Ratzinger finds the Hick definition of pluralist faith (‘a movement from ‘self-centredness’ to ‘reality-centredness’) to be largely empty and meaningless. When stripped of its religious veneer it is seen to be no more than a re-statement of the categorical imperative and one does not need a religious framework to live by that standard.  Moreover,  adds Ratzinger,  the religion spawned by relativism is one that, by definition, can have little effect on its hearers’ lives since nothing it says will have any binding impact.  It is altogether, then, a vision of religious life which robs religion of those very components which have made it decisive to peoples’ lives.

Given this range of increasingly popular relativistic perspectives,  which stretch from the rational pluralism of the likes of Hick to New Age mysticism,  what has made traditional faith by contrast seem so lacking in credibility?  Ratzinger’s short answer in Truth and Tolerance[1] is that a combination of liberal Christology,  Kantian rationalism and historical critical methodology have undermined the traditional structure of faith and made it more difficult to believe. However,  for Ratzinger,  the reason Christianity still gains adherents is that it accords with the deepest aspirations and desires of the human spirit. For this reason he sees grounds for optimism.

The longing for the infinite is alive and unquenchable within man. None of the attempted answers will do; only the God who himself became finite in order to tear open our finitude and lead us out into the wide spaces of his infinity, only he corresponds to the question of our being. That is why, even today, Christian faith will come to man again. It is our task to serve this faith with humble courage, with all the strength of our heart and of our mind.  (p. 137)

Some closing thoughts on pluralism

If one is not a Kantian or a student of the history of religions, and therefore open to the view that all religions can be legitimately harmonized, the following two considerations need taken into account.  First, very fundamental beliefs about the nature of God, the means of salvation, and the nature of that salvation contradict each other when we explore the various beliefs of the world faiths. One strand of Buddhism, for example, is explicitly atheistic.  Can one therefore say that the same God is the source of both atheistic and theistic belief and that both have been revealed by him?  Moreover, the two central historic dogmas of the Christian faith (atonement and incarnation) are explicitly denied by Islam which claims that God has no son and that Christ never died. Where is the fundamental unity of the revelation when what is literally ‘crucial’ for one tradition of faith is anathema to another?  Professor Alister McGrath sums up well the implications of the Christian pluralist position.

Alister McGrath accessed at esacademic.com

Pluralism is fatally vulnerable to the charge that it reaches an accommodation between Christianity and other religious traditions by willfully discarding every distinctive Christian doctrine traditionally regarded as identity-giving and identity-preserving (to say nothing of the reductionist liberties taken with the other religious traditions). The ‘Christianity’ which is declared to be homogenous with all other ‘higher religions’ would not be recognizable as such to most of its adherent. It would be a theologically, Christologically and soteriologically reduced version of the real thing. (Alister McGrath, Bridge Building) 

  

 

Exclusivism versus inclusivism

Given that much of this post has questioned the validity of the pluralist position, what might be said about the issue of exclusivism versus inclusivism and which is closer to the truth? Both are within the parameters of what might be called a broad orthodoxy. Neither can be absolutely proven from Holy Writ and both maintain ultimately that Jesus is the only Saviour and that none are saved outside of his vicarious atonement. The issue seems to be whether conscious faith in Christ is a prerequisite for salvation. The Bible, in my view, neither says enough to absolutely negate such a viewpoint nor enough to sanction it without question. There are suggestive hints such as the salvation of the Old Testament saints, the salvation of the thief on the cross, and the image of God as a missionary God which intimate that there may be a wider mercy.  What do you think about this?

Hospitality and dialogue

How are Christians to engage with adherents of the world’s faiths?  This may not be a major issue in many parochial settings presently but it is a question to ponder. One guideline given for the English situation is that the church be rooted in communities where folks of other faiths live and that Christians should purposefully choose to stay there and build relationships with those who think and believe differently.  As one writer put it, when discussing responses to people of other faiths, 

A Christian will seek to understand the feelings of the community, to involve himself in its joys and sorrows and to get to know its leaders, and he will be deeply concerned that all its members should be able to live their lives in freedom and dignity, following the cultural pattern which they have inherited.

Even more than seeking to be a presence in a multi-faith setting, there is the challenge to serve. Many churches in multi-faith areas in England are already doing much to minister to the whole community and what they do could be a template for Ireland as well.  The establishment of community centres, advice centres, play groups, clubs for unemployed young people, language classes teaching adults English,  programmes for immigrants – all of these things can be part of the church’s ministry.  Paralleling the need to serve is the challenge of dialogue.  One of the imperatives of inter-faith relationships will be this ability to share with other people our deepest convictions while at the same time seeking to genuinely understand what the other religious view point is saying?

Here are five guidelines offered by the Evangelical Alliance UK for forging relationships in an inter-faith context.

Banish all confessional pride and all feelings of cultural and historical superiority.

Be fully open to all that is good and true in another faith. Acknowledge that you may learn something of divine truth from a person of another faith, truth, which though contained in the Christian faith, has not fully dawned on you so far.

Let your approach to someone of another faith be human, personal, relevant and humble.

Achieve the above goal by remembering that we are not dealing with religious systems as abstractions; we are dealing with human beings who share many of the same hopes and aspirations, the same longings and fears which we have.

Seek to learn from the other what makes his faith so precious to him.

Does dialogue preclude proclamation? The short answer is that it does not but that it does call for a high degree of sensitivity and humility. However, anything less than a willingness to proclaim our faith in Christ undermines the essence of dialogue which is sharing about that which means most to us.

If we have grasped (or been grasped by) something that is true, the experience is not something which we should keep to ourselves. For the first Christians it was not something they could keep to themselves. To treat the story of Jesus as if it was merely private and personal would have robbed it of its public, universal importance, and reduced the Christian church to a cult of like-minded cranks … The first Christians … wanted the Good News taken to every person.

(Relations with People of Other Faiths, British Council of Churches, 1981, p.12)

Inter-faith worship

A final question to briefly explore is that of inter-faith worship. I would direct you, in the first instance, to a little booklet produced by the Bishops of the Church of Ireland on the question of inter-faith relationships. (Guidelines for Interfaith Events & Dialogue) Essentially the bishops recognize that there are a variety of views on this issue and suggest that differences be discussed openly and respectfully. 

The Evangelical Alliance takes a more definitive position on the matter and suggests that inter-faith worship as it is presently  practiced is not theologically justified.

I close the post by outlining some of the fundamental arguments for and against inter-faith worship.

Pro

1.    Interfaith worship displays humility and a lack of arrogance on the part of Christians.

2.    Such events improve interfaith relationships in general.

3.    Everyone is gathered under God.

4.    God is known by many names and such worship acknowledges this.

Con

1.    It is shot through with contradictions, because of the radically different conceptions of God and fundamental beliefs among the different faiths.

2.    It is bound to give the impression, whether true or false, that the Christian participant accepts the other faiths as equally valid with his own.

3.    It conflicts with the task of evangelism which Christ laid upon the church.

4.    It cannot fail to cause great perplexity in the minds of Christians converted from other religions and any who are  weak in faith.

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[1] The thesis explores Ratzinger’s answer in more detail in other sections of chapter two.