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Benevolent Confusion: Why religious pluralism doesn't add up
By Philip Tallon

According to the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life’s 2008 poll, seven out of ten U.S. Christians believe that there are many different paths to God. Even the majority of evangelicals, normally the theological picture of conservatism, leaned toward the view that “many religions can lead to eternal life.” This is surprising. Many newspapers have accordingly run stories on what would seem to be a shocking statistic. The news has also sent ripples of worry through the Christian community. The view that competing religious claims can be valid or that different religious systems can lead to salvation, also known as religious pluralism, seems to be on the rise in American Christianity.

This makes American Christians sound much more liberal than anyone would have expected. 

More puzzling, though, is the data on evangelicals and mainline Protestants: these Christians held tightly to some traditionally conservative Christian views and yet at the same time leaned toward religious pluralism.

On Scripture, for instance, all but 12 percent of evangelicals believe the Bible to be the word of God, with over half of that number stating that it is literally true, word for word. Yet, at least 45 percent of the Christians who stated that they believed the Bible to be the true word of God, also think that there are many ways to God, despite Jesus’ proclamation to be “the way.” 

Amongst mainline Christians a similar number of people praised Scripture yet also approved of religious pluralism. Sixty percent stated that the Bible was the word of God, yet 83 percent believed that multiple religions could get it (roughly) right. Only among Mormons (57 percent) and Jehovah’s Witnesses (80 percent) did a majority number say that their own religion was the one true faith leading to eternal life.

This makes most American Christians sound confused, or worse. 

But Christians, as the poll shows, don’t have the monopoly on confusion. For instance, among atheists interviewed in the Pew Forum poll, 21 percent said that they believe in God. This seems like an even more obvious self-contradiction than affirming the Bible as the word of God while seeing other religions as paths to God.  Like a few friends I have who call themselves vegetarians but still eat chicken, some Americans may simply like the sound of “atheist,” without really knowing what it means. In a similar way, it seems likely that many Christians want to affirm some theological positions, but at the same time don’t fully take into account what these positions entail.

If anything, what the poll really shows is that Christians want to be nice.

Looking over all the results, it is obvious that American Christians liked responding to questions with positive-sounding answers (such as affirming that the Bible is the word of God), but did not like negative-sounding statements (such saying that there was “only one true way to interpret the teachings of my religion,” or that there is only one way to God).

On the face of it, it does seem like a much nicer thing to say that many religions can lead to eternal life. It is clear that the Christians interviewed wanted to leave the door cracked for people of other faiths to attain eternal life, and so 70 percent gravitated toward the more apparently loving of the two options. And we are commanded to be loving, right? 

So why, then, shouldn’t Christians move toward religious pluralism?

Of course, there is the problem of consistency with Scripture. Any worthwhile view of Scripture takes seriously the words of Jesus as a guide for our Christian convictions. Jesus’ proclamations contradict the idea that there are many ways to God. “I am the way, the truth, and the life” Jesus says in John 14:6, “no one comes to the Father but by me.” Likewise, Peter says in Acts 4:12, “Salvation is found in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given to men by which we must be saved.”

Additionally, there is a deeper problem with religious pluralism, in that it asks us to believe that competing religious views can be valid and equally effective. This differs in quality from Christian universalism (the view that all people will be saved through Christ), as well as Christian inclusivism (the view that some people who die without Christ’s salvation could still attain it after death). Both of these views assume the necessity of Christ for salvation.

Religious pluralism, on the other hand, assumes that all religions can possess equal validity. Driving much of the momentum toward religious pluralism is a desire to extend compassion to other religious views. Pluralists have often pointed out that a loving God would be equally present to all people, even if their views differ from each other. But this immediately raises the question of how Christianity and Buddhism, for instance, can both have valid views of eternal life, when their conceptions of eternal life are so different? It is impossible to affirm both that we can experience a personal, eternal relationship with God in the afterlife and experience the nothingness of Nirvana at the same time.

George Bernard Shaw once noted that if we each have an apple and exchange apples, we each still have one apple, but if we exchange ideas we each wind up with two ideas. But this is not a net benefit if the ideas cancel each other out. Believing two contradictory ideas results in no ideas.

This is the core problem with religious pluralism: it offers, in a phrase borrowed from Richard John Neuhaus, a “view from nowhere.” Christians may embrace religious pluralism in order to affirm other faiths, but in the process they untether themselves from Christian revelation. In cutting against the words of Jesus, which tell us about the exclusivity of Christian truth, religious pluralism also cuts against the revelation of God’s unyielding compassion. The Bible tells us that God is love, but the Son of God tells us he is the only way to the Father. We cannot maintain our trust in God’s goodness without a trust in God’s revelation in Christ. We see God’s love from “somewhere,” and that “somewhere” begins with the red letters of the Bible.

So how do we interact meaningfully with other faiths?

It must be said that a belief in absolute truth does not require absolute condemnation of other religious views. There is still room for inter-religious dialogue. C. S. Lewis said it well in Mere Christianity: “If you are a Christian you do not have to believe that all other religions are simply wrong…you are free to think that all these religions, even the queerest ones, contain at least some hint of truth. When I was an atheist I had to try to persuade myself that most of the human race have always been wrong about the question that mattered to them most; when I became a Christian I was able to take a more liberal view. But, of course, being a Christian does mean that where Christianity differs from other religions, Christianity is right and they are wrong. As in arithmetic—there is only one right answer to a sum, and all the other answers are wrong: but some of the wrong answers are much nearer being right than others.”

What Lewis suggests is that a robust Christian theology should be able to recognize truth wherever it sees it, and affirm it. But Lewis also acknowledges that we should be able to recognize falsehood when it arises, and condemn it.

In this way, the Christian can pay a compliment to other religions that the religious pluralist cannot. By taking the apparently arrogant position of “first place,” a Christian can evaluate which other views deserve honorable mention. By taking a “view from nowhere” the religious pluralist makes the unfortunate mistake of trying to make the game more fun by not keeping score—thereby undoing the purpose of the game in the first place.

The best response to this rising pluralism, it seems to me, is a renewed Christian vision of Christ as presented in Scripture. If Jesus is reduced to merely the “way” to God, it can be easy to lose sight of why there cannot be other ways. If the Bible is merely “the word of God,” without any sense of the content of those words, we can lose sight of why there cannot be other words to other people. In place of this, the crisp vision of Christ presented in Scripture is a helpful remedy. It is not the idea of Christ that opens up salvation, but the actual Christ, a first-century Jew who really ate, drank, slept, wept, suffered, and rose from the dead.

A concrete vision of Christ makes ridiculous the vague affirmation of all religions as a way to God, because a concrete Christian vision sees that Christ is God. For the Christian, there is no blissful afterlife apart from the Triune God. Only renewed “optics” of salvation can help us to see that religious pluralism, however benevolent, is an unhelpful confusion.

 

Philip Tallon is the director of The Christian Studies Center at the University of Kentucky (www.thechristianstudiescenter.com). He is also an adjunct instructor at Asbury Seminary.



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