More Than One Way? Affirming the Uniqueness of Christ’s Person and Work in a Pluralistic Culture

Increasingly, any worldview consensus the U.S ever had is breaking apart. Today there is no escape from the rival religious and moral claims that surround us. We live in an age of “pluralism”—a challenge to orthodox Christians who make exclusive claims such as “Jesus Christ is the Lord of the universe.” This exclusivism does not set well with a culture that prides itself on letting each person have his or her own opinion when it comes to matters of religious belief or moral behavior. Such claims are increasingly viewed as intolerant or arrogant by a culture that demands that we accept different ethical and religious beliefs as equally valid. The implicit claim is that there are no real differences between moral and religious systems. These are just culturally-derived matters of taste. In the academic arena some theologians at Christian seminaries have bluntly rejected Christianity’s exclusive truth claims; as Rosemary Radford Reuther once put it, “The idea that Christianity [has] a monopoly on religious truth is an outrageous and absurd religious chauvinism.”

Why Pluralism Now?

There are many reasons why the consensus is breaking down and why Christianity’s exclusive claims sound so outrageous. Besides a swiftly shrinking planet made accessible by advances in communication and transportation technology, the demographics at home are changing. As an example, the fastest growing religion in the U.S. (let alone in the world) is Islam; estimates are that in the past 7 years alone, there has been a 25% increase in the number of mosques in the U.S. And whereas in the 1960s it would have been nearly impossible to find a “Happy Hanukkah” card in the local Hallmark, now the signs in our community don’t even read “Merry Christmas,” but simply “Happy Holidays.”

Perhaps the most profound contributor to pluralism in our culture is the proliferation of choice. Just a stroll down the cereal aisle of the local supermarket is enough to paralyze a shopper with overload; indeed, in 1996 the average grocery store carried 30,000 product choices, an increase of over 300% in 20 years. The supermarket of spiritualities is nearly as prolific: in 1999 the Encyclopedia of American Religions1 listed over 2100 different religious groups in the U.S.—a doubling in two decades. It’s enough to make sociologist Alan Ehrenhalt lament that most of what we do on a daily basis resembles channel surfing, “marked by a numbing and seemingly endless progression from one option to the next, all without the benefit of a chart, logistical or moral, because there are simply too many choices and no one to help sort them out.”2 In addition to the breakdown of an ostensibly “Christian” consensus, technology’s marvels, changes in demographics, and the proliferation of choice, another factor contributing to the rise of pluralism is the privatization of religion—the kind of thing that Robert Bellah named “Sheilaism” in Habits of the Heart.3 This privatization is exacerbated by diminishing loyalty to denominations and the rise of so-called “community” (albeit untethered) churches. These characteristics of contemporary American spirituality fit like a well designed glove on the receptive hand of our consumer mentality. Even our Christian churches suffer when folks join a church as a result of comparison shopping rather than of divine calling.

The Practice of Pluralism

In part, these factors account for the rise of a formidable form of religious pluralism.4 Vignettes of this pluralism in actual practice illustrate what is at stake for the church.

The August 1998 Utne Reader announced the lead article on its cover: “Designer God: In a mix-and-match world, why not create your own religion?” Entitled “God with a Million Faces,” the essay discussed the recent trend of …-style religions” or “religion a la carte.” One example the article cites is the cult of Anne Marie: it includes one member who has turned her spirituality into a creative collage of Hinduism, Buddhism, Shintoism, quantitative physics, and childhood Christian remnants.5 Unfortunately, the same kind of creative syncretism is becoming all too common in the Christian church today. One prime example was a recent PBS Christmas special using a script written by the narrator Thomas Moore, author of The Care of the Soul. In his narration, interspersed with wonderful renditions of Christmas songs and hymns (some of which, in a spirit of Northern hemispheric exclusivism, celebrated the “dark night” and barren cold of December), Moore lures us into the “real” significance of the holiday:

Although I was brought up as a Catholic, and know and love the stories and rites of Christianity, Buddhism has also profoundly affected my life, as have the ancient religions of the Greeks and Romans, Chinese wisdom, and African practices. At a certain level, every religion is a world religion, and in that spirit we can imagine a world Christmas, a holy time where the emphasis is on the mystery of human life, and not on sectarian arguments over doctrine and theology [presumably about the incarnation of the Word]. The “real meaning” of Christmas is not what you believe, but how deeply and genuinely you are transformed by the spirit of the festival in the direction of hope, peace, and community.

Aside from the fact that the last sentence could equally apply to a Peter, Paul, and Mary concert I attended at Ravinia, Moore expands the fellowship when he makes the following assertions:

With all its traditions and theological niceties, Christmas is still fundamentally the celebration of the world’s birth and life’s nativity. Nothing could be more important to this celebration than whatever it takes to waken the child wherever it is sleeping.

This is the real meaning of Christmas—the Child— whatever this Christmas child mysteriously might be, come to life, found everywhere, the source of hope and, tender and mild, the way toward peace. We will never fully understand Christmas, but we can believe in it and allow the world to be refreshed by it. We can let its spirit enter into us and do its work in our hearts. We can honor it by observing its traditions as thoughtfully and intimately as we can. As we give ourselves to it, it will bless our lives. As we tell its story and sing its song, it will transform us. Then others will find the mystery in us and be entertained and refreshed by it.6

It’s not just the Christian meaning of Christmas that is challenged by contemporary pluralism. Easter’s significance is undermined as well. A Chicago Tribune headline is paradigmatic: “Message of Easter Transcends Religions.” The article was about Muslims, Jews, and Christians using Easter as an occasion to celebrate each other’s rituals. Nothing was mentioned about the soteriological significance of Christ’s resurrection.

The danger in this designer approach to religious faith and syncretistic practice is that it does not lead to conversion; indeed, it tends to reinforce self-deception. In this regard, Frederica Matthewes-Green’s comment is poignant:

We are so indoctrinated by our culture that we can’t trust our standards of evaluation. We can only gain wisdom that transcends time by exiting our time and entering upon an ancient path—and accepting it on its own terms. We can only learn by submitting to something bigger than we are. The faith I was building out of my prejudices and preconceptions could never be bigger than I was. I was constructing a safe, tidy, unsurprising God who could never transform me, but would only confirm my residence in that familiar bog I called home. I had to have more than that.7

This reminds us that what is at stake in this discussion of Christ’s claims over against contemporary pluralism is not merely the eternal destiny of people, but the quality of their lives now—that is, whether or not they will flourish.8

We should not underestimate the viciousness of this pluralism nor the severity with which it attacks the Christian’s claims about the particularity of Christ.9 For instance, during the keynote address at the recent UN Millennium Peace Summit, conference sponsor and media mogul Ted Turner shared his story about growing up in a Christian church in the South and hearing talk of the exclusive claims of Christ. He was cheered when he announced, “There is one God who manifests himself in different ways.” But this pluralist’s assertion did not keep him from wagging his finger at the Christians who believe that Christ is the only way to salvation—a reprimand that echoed his 1990 speech in which he called Christianity “a religion for losers,” ridiculed Pope John Paul II, and declared the Ten Commandments outdated.

Again, the intensity of the attack is felt within the Christian church. Some Roman Catholics denounced the Vatican for its document “On the Unity and Salvific Universality of Jesus Christ and the Church” a clarification of the Second Vatican Council’s position on the “principle of tolerance and respect for freedom” and the equality of the “personal dignity of individuals,” which Ratzinger noted had been “manipulated and wrongfully surpassed” to teach the equality of religious doctrines. And in a Chicago presbytery meeting a few years ago, a panelist advocating the legitimacy of the homosexual lifestyle adamantly insisted that it was time for the church to stop telling the culture what to think about sex, and time for the church to listen to what the culture can teach it about diversity in sexual practices.

Sometimes the viciousness is personal. In fact, my acquaintance with religious pluralism has not been confined to the theoretical and abstract. Several years ago I was asked to join a panel at the National Headquarters of the Theosophical Society in Wheaton. The topic was “Many Faiths, One Reality,” and I shared the platform with a Sikh, a Buddhist monk, and a Jain. Though I tried graciously to make it clear that the Christian story was not easily convertible to the other religions represented on the panel, the panel moderator (who was the national president of the Theosophical Society) correctively pointed out after my presentation that the Christian belief in the resurrection was really no different than some of the others’ belief in reincarnation.10 That same year I was a guest on a popular Chicago radio program. The evening’s topic was precipitated by a book on salvation in a pluralistic world that my colleague and I had recently edited. A quarter of the way into the show when the host pressed me to assert my adherence to the exclusive claims of Jesus in John 14:6 (even though I would be reminded twice that the “Jesus Seminar” had cast doubt on the authenticity of Jesus’ words), the Jewish rabbi on the panel began an hour-and-a-half attack on my faith as a doctrine that had undergirded the Nazi Holocaust. Though even the Muslim imam saw through the rabbi’s politicization of the conversation, I went home that evening emotionally wounded, especially by the rabbi’s closing insistence that he would die for the rejection of Jesus Christ and teach his children to do the same. That open wound did not close for over a year.

So I do not underestimate the vicious challenge that contemporary pluralists pose to orthodox Christians who affirm with John that when Jesus was born 2000 years ago it was the unique and definitive incarnate revelation of God in human flesh and who affirm with Paul that, when the Kingdom that was established by Christ’s resurrection is consummated, every knee will bow and every tongue will confess that Jesus Christ is Lord.

Defining Pluralism

Before responding to pluralism we should more carefully define what pluralism is. There are actually two types of pluralism—descriptive and normative (or ideological).11 The first is welcomed by the Christian; the second must be rejected.

Descriptive pluralism is just that: it describes the actual situation in which we live, where people with a diversity of moral and religious commitments live together in the same physical space. We all agree not to use social and political force to suppress any citizen’s free thought, expression, or practice, unless that freedom harms someone. That does not mean that we have to like other views. It does not prohibit us from appropriately expressing our disagreements or dislikes. And it allows us to respectfully attempt to persuade others out of their views.

On the other hand, normative pluralism insists that all religious claims are equally true and valid. This amounts to relativism and leaves us with little more than matters of taste and self-expression. (There is a variation of normative pluralism in the writings of Troeltsch, Hegel, and the early Schleiermacher which insists that some religions are more valid or plausible than others.)

Perhaps the most prominent spokesperson for normative pluralism in religion has been John Hick, especially in his book An Interpretation of Religion: Human Responses to the Transcendent. His thesis is that “we always perceive the transcendent through the lens of a particular religious culture with its distinctive set of concepts, myths, historical exemplars and devotional and meditative techniques.”12 Hick is going beyond descriptive pluralism at this point by insisting that the existence of religious pluralism is itself a religious truth: the major world religions end up referring to some ineffable transcendent Reality. For Hick, all major religions are “true” to one degree or another (depending on their ethical orientation). What appear to be differences among religions arise only because of our varying cultural and historical contexts. If they result in a life of love and concern for others, the claims of the Buddhist, the Muslim, the Christian, and even the atheist must be accepted as equally true and salvific.

This sits well with many people in our culture—from academicians to talk show hosts. The point of many discussions in the university and in the media is not to arrive at the truth of the matter, if the “matter” has to do with religious beliefs and moral values. The point is simply to keep the discussion going and respect the divergent points of view, because, as one talk show guest said about pornography, “The great thing about our society is that you can have your opinion, and I can have mine.”

According to Lesslie Newbigin’s analysis in Foolishness to the Greeks,13 what undergirds this attitude is a post-Enlightenment Western division of the world into two realms. One realm is the public world of scientific fact that explains how something occurred by examining its causal connections. Claims which can be verified through the scientific method (such as “atoms exist”) are assumed to be true; people would be fools to deny them and talk show hosts would lose sponsors if such claims became the topics for debate. The other realm is the private world of religious beliefs and moral values, which deals with why and what for questions: Why is there a world? What is the purpose of human existence? As a society we have found no way to reach agreement on what human life ought to be. So claims such as “Homosexual behavior is morally wrong” and “It is only through Jesus of Nazareth that a person can be saved” are banished to the realm of private opinion. Our religious beliefs and moral values have been “democratized” in a way unthinkable with most claims in the public realm. That makes for good ratings on talk shows, but it should not be acceptable to Christians who confess the Nicene Creed on Sunday.

It should not even be acceptable to any thinking person who must admit that there are some things that are absolutely wrong and some things that are absolutely right in the realm of morality. For instance, ramming jets through the World Trade Center towers to kill a few thousand people because devotion to God demands it is not a matter to be left up to personal taste or private opinion. Presumably, any honest person in our pluralistic society would not say, “What the terrorists did was okay for them, but it would not be okay for us.”

Responding to Pluralism

How do we respond to such pluralism in the religious arena? Isn’t our culture right to assume that if pantheism works for one person and Christian theism for another then what is true is “what works for you”? There is something to be said for this pragmatic test. After all, we Christians do argue that Christian orthodoxy results in a flourishing life. Indeed, the problem with heresy (from the Greek word meaning “I choose”) is that it will kill you. But when a Christian makes a religious claim, such as “Jesus of Nazareth is the only way to God,” he or she is stating a truth about reality which, if true, excludes all rival claims of the naturalist, pantheist, dualist and deist—let alone all non-Christian theists. Either this claim is true and all other similar claims are false, or it is false and some other (or no other) religious claim is true. This feature of truth-claims is a lesson my son Ryan learned one day when he ran out of gas in our van. Over against his sister’s warnings, his insistence that the fuel gauge was not accurate did not alter the reality that the van was indeed about out of fuel. Truth and reality do not adapt to us; we must adapt to truth and reality.

Beyond this rather obvious point, how can the orthodox Christian affirm her claims about Christ’s unique person and work in our pluralistic culture? How should we conceive the act of God in Christ having ultimate validity for all people in all places at all times? A good approach will involve both a defensive and an offensive strategy.

What’s Wrong with Pluralism?

On the defensive side of things we begin by noting that although relativism is often a characteristic of postmodernism, a proposal like Hick’s really smacks of modernism. That is to say, the valuable lesson postmodernism has taught us is what some folks in the academy and even in the seminaries have failed to appreciate: there is no such thing as a completely detached observer; we are always interpreting reality through the eyes of our own social location. But Hick’s pluralist approach buys into modernism’s “myth of the neutral observer” (even though he insists that he comes at religion from the Christian camp). There are three problems with this kind of modernist pluralism.

First, it is arrogant. Pluralism applauds the infamous tale of the four blind men who touch different parts of the same elephant because it appears to illustrate the fact that all religions are merely different partial ways of knowing the same “God.” One blind man holds the tail and concludes he has a rope. Another feels the elephant’s side and concludes it’s a wall. The third man grasps the leg and believes he is embracing a column. The last mistakes the elephant’s trunk for a snake. In like manner each religion is experiencing the same God in different ways and calling it different names. But the pluralist’s appreciation of this metaphor is really arrogant, because the only person who actually knows that each blind man is touching the same reality is the enlightened, all-seeing, unblinded pluralist! The implication is that the rest of us are to be pitied unless we too can become as privileged as the supposed neutral observer who stands back watching the human race.

Second, it is presumptuous. Alistair McGrath calls Hick’s modernist imperialism a form of “intellectual ….”14 Ironically, Hick knows that not all religions are equally plausible as they stand. Indeed, religious experiences in other religions are different experiences, not just different interpretations of religious experience. All religions are “ways of salvation,” but not all salvations are the same. Concepts of the transcendent reality and of salvation differ from religion to religion, and to reduce them in such a way that all phenomenal religions are simply referring to the same noumenal reality turns out to be an intolerant imposition on cultured despisers of religion who do not want to be told that they are going to have to end up in some universalist heaven. Worse, it is an act of violence against unique explanations of salvation offered by the world’s religions. In the end, McGrath is right when he writes of Hick’s pluralism: “The belief that all religions are ultimately expressions of the same transcendent reality is at best illusory and at worst oppressive.”15 (A blatant example of this presumption occurred on Oprah, when she would not tolerate an audience member’s skepticism about God’s existence. When the agnostic admitted that she did believe in love and the “human spirit,” Oprah insisted that she therefore did believe in God and told her to sit down.)

Third, normative or ideological pluralism ends up trivializing religions. Hick’s admission that he is a Christian who does not take the incarnation seriously is a bit like a person who takes pride in being a Texan but believes the territory still belongs to Mexico. In the popular idiom, this trivialization showed up in an advertisement for an HBO special entitled, “How do you spell God?” Listed were the names Vishnu, Jesus, Buddha, Wakonda, and—because they privileged Judaism or did not know what they were putting in the ad copy— Jehovah and Adonai. These are not merely different spellings of “God.” They represent different conceptions of transcendent reality—conceptions that are sometimes as incommensurate as Islam’s denial of the crucifixion of Jesus and of a triune God and Christianity’s central insistence on both. But the pluralist will not tolerate real differences in an ultimate sense. In the end, this trivialization cuts off genuine dialogue among religions and devalues the exchange of ideas that adherents consider to be more than mere opinion. Ironically, this “intellectual Stalinism” is usually committed by us Westerners who think that our brand of normative pluralism must be carried to the rest of the “ignorant” people in the world as part of the “white man’s burden.”

Asserting the “Scandal of Particularity”

How might the offense play out the exclusive claims of Christ? First, our strategy requires a proper attitude. Commitment to an unswerving confession of Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior actually opens up dialogue with those who differ from us, for commitment to this Christ permits no smug self-righteousness. The more we are committed to confessing the Christ of the Gospels, the more we the church are committed to a confession that stresses service (especially to those on society’s margins), moves outward in mission, and respects the freedom of the Other even to reject Christ. We can insist that Christ is the ultimate norm or criterion for determining where and how God’s self-revelation takes place, while allowing for other sources of the knowledge of God, which Christian theologians have referred to as general revelation.16 We can learn about ourselves in the light of other religions. We can accept what is compatible in other religions, while confronting what is contrary, albeit even in a peacemaking posture. At the same time, we elevate the particularity of the Christian faith without letting that commitment to particularity become a mere matter of personal taste like a predilection for Ben and Jerry’s Chunky Monkey or Woody Allen movies.

Paul admonishes Christians to have the mind of Christ as they imitate him in the humility of his incarnation (Phil 2). Indeed, if we are to follow Christ in humility, the claim that Jesus Christ is the definitive revelation of God and the only one through whom one must come to God does not mean that we know everything about God. There are still mysteries to be unveiled. Still, partial truth is not untruth nor inclusive of all claims made about God. If I see someone heading toward Milwaukee on the Dan Ryan Expressway in Chicago when he wants to get to Gary, Indiana, the loving thing to do is to point out his error without haughtiness. I might not know all there is to know about getting to Gary itself, but I know enough to realize that heading north is not compatible with the traveler’s destination.

With this same humility we must admit that Christianity has not produced the highest attainment of ethical behavior; in fact, it stands accused of immorality in the Crusades and the Holocaust. Indeed, one of Hick’s primary reasons for rejecting the exclusive claims of Christianity has to do with its relative lackluster ethical performance vis-à-vis the practitioners of other major religions. Certainly Hick is correct in his assessment, yet the fact remains that the claims of exclusivity have not to do with the ethical performance of Christians, but with the identity and salvific work of Jesus Christ. While it is true that Christianity is guilty by association, it is equally the case that Christianity cannot be reduced to an ethical religion. To do so is to confuse salvation with morality. That said, it is the case that if Christians did live up to the demands of Christ this world would be a far better place.

The second bit of offensive strategy begins with the recognition that the church’s job description is to herald the story of Jesus. The church’s most effective witness is to be the church—to be more (not less) Christian in a dominant culture whose fundamental assumptions are contrary to the Christian faith. This is precisely what folks like Stanley Hauerwas and Lesslie Newbigin have been saying. In Hauerwas’s terms, the church is to be a “resident alien” living out God’s story in the world.17 The current dislocation of the church in a world that lacks consensus is an opportunity for the church to intentionally define itself theologically and culturally, not unlike those in Babylon to whom Jeremiah addressed his letter of encouragement (Jer 29:1-14). As Newbigin put it, the church is to be a “hermeneutic of the Gospel” in its day-to-day life. The church is a witness to the coming Kingdom, speaking the “language of testimony” rather than hawking a commodity like a pushy salesperson, arguing the case like a defense attorney with a rationalistic, evidentialist brief, or deciding the case for the world like the jury or judge (which it is not).18 By the way, that the church is not the judge is good news to people who have experienced bad calls in a ballgame. In fact, we fallible Christians cannot pontificate in either direction about the exceptional cases—those who never hear the claims of Christ, people with mental deficiencies, and infants who die. We place our confidence in a God who is both merciful and just, and with whose judgments we will be pleased when they are revealed.

In heralding the story of Jesus, the church also rests confident in the victory of Christ’s resurrection over the powers. The Christian church does not require cultural privilege nor social recognition to flourish. My visits to Sudan have convinced me of this fact. But the loss of privileged status in a pluralistic world should not discourage Christians from learning and teaching the biblical story. We should not apologize for making universal claims about creation, sin, and redemption. We should boldly proclaim that this world’s history ends with the victory of Jesus Christ and no other rival. Because we see the world in a different way—in the light of a defining story that embraces all time and all things (Eph 1:3-23)— we may sound strange to a world that is at home in its religious concoctions. In fact, what could sound so incomprehensible to our consumer culture but the proclamation of a grace that cannot be earned? The church lives its life and professes its faith in a way that cannot be understood apart from the God who is definitively revealed in Jesus Christ. Our morality does not make sense outside of the church and Jesus’ vision of life. To the watching and listening world, severed from a proper understanding of the biblical story, our actions and words should look and sound like a foreign culture and a foreign language. But it is a culture and language rooted in the biblical story for which we must not apologize; indeed, it is a story that provides a sense of coherence in a fragmented, decentered, pluralistic environment.

Third in our offensive strategy and implied by what we have just said, we cannot give up our claim that Jesus Christ is the definitive revelation of who God is. This is the “scandal of particularity.” But it is not an arrogant or imperialistic claim if Christ is indeed the one who establishes the eschatological kingdom. Pluralism is similar to the ancient heresy of modalism. The problem with modalism is that one can never be certain that God will not pop out on the world’s stage wearing another mask that we have never seen and did not expect—a fourth or fourteenth manifestation beyond the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. In the same way, Christian particularism means that, because God has revealed himself normatively in Jesus Christ, we will not find out later that some other religious adherent’s conception of God, such as that of a Montana skinhead, had equal validity. (The fact that pluralists do not want to allow such conceptions of God into the pantheon of religions indicates that they are exclusivists of some sort. For example, presumably they would question the alleged revelation of God to the terrorists who attacked the USA on September 11.)

If the church compromises its claim of God’s definitive self-disclosure in Christ, then, as George Hunsinger has written, such “compromises of her loyalty will slowly devastate the church,” just as they did in Nazi Germany. With appeals to Barth, Hunsinger continues:

The church prepared to offer binding loyalty to Hitler was a church which had died the death of a thousand smaller compromises. For more than two hundred years, it had been trying to divide its loyalty between Jesus Christ and other supposed sources of divine revelation. Whether reason, conscience, the emotions, history, nature, or culture, some second authority was continually proposed and ratified alongside the first. But no claim of exclusive loyalty can tolerate an external loyalty that is equally binding and obligatory. The attempt to turn an either/or into a both/and could only mean that the church’s loyalty was compromised and divided. For whether the church realized it or not, no second authority, however apparently benign, could represent anything other than an exclusive and competing counter-claim to that of God’s Word. By the time Hitler came along, the church was incapacitated by its history of compromises.19

Fourth, and finally, we must learn to distinguish what is nonnegotiable from what is not centrally important to the faith. The extent of our openness to other religions is constrained by our confession that God is the creator of all that is, that God is triune, that Christ is fully human and divine and thereby the sole means of our salvation, and that the Bible is our unique and normative scripture for belief and practice. In the essentials, maintaining orthodoxy—the “straight beliefs” that enable us to function well in life (just as orthodontics straightens teeth to enable us to chew well)—is key to avoiding heresies that will leave us crippled in self-centered legalism or escapism. We will have to marry conviction with compassion—particular claims with universal appeal. In doing this we can approach our pluralistic culture with the universal claims and universal appeal of the Apostle Paul, who wrote of Christ in the pluralist society of the Roman world:

He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation; for in him all things were created … all things have been created through him and for him. He himself is before all things, and in him all things hold together…. For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace through the blood of his cross. (Colossians 1:15-20)

To paraphrase Lesslie Newbigin, we have entered into a relationship with Jesus, through whom the creator of the universe has revealed himself and through whom we now understand and direct all of our lives. There is a whole community of us who are in this situation. And everyone is welcome to join!

This article first appeared in Theology Matters, Vol. 8, No. 1 (Jan/Feb 2002).