Can Only One Religion Be True?

Paul Knitter and Harold Netland in Dialogue

Robert B. Stewart

• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780800699284
• eBook ISBN: 9781451426373
• Topic: Teologia e religione
• Subtopic: Teologia cristiana

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Can Only One Religion Be True?: A Dialogue

Paul F. Knitter and Harold A. Netland

Opening Remarks

Harold A. Netland

Given the bewildering degree of religious diversity in our world, the assertion that Christianity is the one true religion for all people strikes many today as hopelessly out of touch with current realities. The claim seems to display generous amounts of both intellectual naïveté and arrogance. Nevertheless, with proper qualification, I do believe that the Christian faith, as defined by the Christian Scriptures, is true and that this sets it apart from other religious traditions. But tonight I will not be arguing that Christianity is in fact the only true religion. Rather, I will be exploring what is involved in making such a claim, clarifying what is and what is not included in it, and considering in a very preliminary way how one might defend such a thesis.

But first, some preliminary remarks. Like many people today, I would very much like for all religions to be true and for all morally good and sincere religious believers, of whatever faith, to be correct in their beliefs and practices. Life would certainly be much simpler if this were the case. But, as I have discovered in other areas, reality frequently has a stubborn way of not conforming to my desires. I suspect the same is true here. Given the very different, at times mutually incompatible, claims advanced by the major religions, I simply do not see how we can affirm them all as somehow being true.^[1]

Let me clarify at the outset what is not included in the assertion that Christianity is the one true religion. Affirming Christian faith as the true religion does not mean that there is no truth or goodness or beauty in other religions. If the Christian faith is true, then any teachings from other religions which are incompatible with essential teachings of Christianity must be rejected. But this does not mean that there are no truths embraced by other religions. Indeed, I think that the Christian faith shares some significant common beliefs with other religions, with some more so than with others. And surely we can and must acknowledge that there is goodness and beauty in other religious traditions as well.

Nor, in claiming that the Christian faith is true, am I suggesting that Christians are necessarily morally better people than, say, Muslims or Hindus or Sikhs. Nor am I defending everything that the institutional church has done or represented over the past two millennia. Sadly, there is much in the history of the Christian church that betrays the teachings of our Lord.

Furthermore, in claiming that Christianity is the true religion, I am not saying that Christians should not cooperate with other religious communities in a variety of ways to further the common good. Given the very real religious tensions in our world, I think that leaders of the major religions need to be especially vigilant in working to reduce conflict between religious communities and to cooperate together in addressing our many global problems. Nothing that I say tonight should be taken as in any way detracting from the urgency of such interreligious understanding and cooperation.

In speaking of the truth of Christianity, we must also distinguish the issue of truth from the question of salvation. To affirm that Christianity is the true religion does not, by itself, commit one to any particular view about the extent of salvation. Christians, including Evangelicals, disagree over important questions concerning the extent of salvation.^[2] But this issue needs to be settled on the basis of criteria internal to the Christian faith itself, including questions of the proper interpretation of Scripture and the historical understandings of the church. There is no logical connection between the claim that Christianity is the true religion and any particular view of the extent of salvation.

For example, it is no doubt the case that most who believe that Christianity is the true religion also believe that not everyone will be saved. Yet there certainly are those who believe that Christianity is uniquely true but who also embrace soteriological universalism (e.g., Origen, John Scotus Erigena, Jacques Ellul, and perhaps Karl Barth). Conversely, while it might be the case that many religious pluralists are also universalists, in the sense that they hold that ultimately all people will attain the desired soteriological state, there is nothing about religious pluralism as such that requires universalism. Religious pluralism maintains that the major religions are roughly equal with respect to truth and soteriological efficacy,^[3] and thus it affirms “equal soteriological access” among the religions. But it is compatible with this to maintain that, despite such equality, in fact relatively few people will actually attain the soteriological goal, however this is understood. Thus, questions about the extent of salvation must be addressed separately from the issue of the truth of Christian theism itself.

Religion and Truth

Our world today is deeply religious. According to The Atlas of Religion, from the University of California, Berkeley, 80 percent of people worldwide profess some religious affiliation.^[4] There are today roughly 2.1 billion Christians, 1.3 billion Muslims, 860 million Hindus, 380 million Buddhists, 25 million Sikhs, and 15 million Jews. To these numbers must be added the many millions who follow indigenous religious traditions or one of the thousands of new religious movements.

But what do we mean by the term religion, and how is truth to be understood in religion? The concept of religion is notoriously difficult to define, but we might adopt Roger Schmidt’s definition of religions as “systems of meaning embodied in a pattern of life, a community of faith, and a worldview that articulate a view of the sacred and of what ultimately matters.”^[5] Religions are thus multifaceted phenomena, and there is some overlap between the concepts of religion and culture, although neither concept can be reduced to the other. Ninian Smart has helpfully suggested that we think in terms of seven dimensions of religion.^[6] These include the ritual dimension, the mythological or narrative dimension, the experiential, the doctrinal, the ethical, the social, and the material dimensions of religion. A complete discussion of religion would also include what is called folk religion—the religious expression of the common people in ordinary life—as well as the high religion of the intellectuals and the authoritative structures of a given religion.

Religions, then, include much more than just beliefs or doctrines. Nevertheless, beliefs are central to religion. A religious community is expected to live in a certain way and to regard all of life from a particular perspective. A religious tradition expresses a distinctive worldview, or way of understanding reality. At the heart of a religious worldview are some basic beliefs about the nature of the cosmos, the religious ultimate, and the relation of humankind to this ultimate. Religious beliefs are significant, for as Ninian Smart observes, “The world religions owe some of their living power to their success in presenting a total picture of reality, through a coherent system of doctrines.”^[7] Thus, religious believers are expected to accept the authoritative teachings of their tradition and to pattern their lives in accordance with such beliefs. Religions make claims, and adherents of a given religion are expected to accept and to act upon the claims as true. As Paul Griffiths puts it, “A religious claim . . . is a claim about the way things are, acceptance of or assent to which is required or strongly suggested by the fact of belonging to a particular form of religious life.”^[8]

How should we understand the concept of truth in religion? There are many issues here, but let me say simply that I think that the major religions do intend to make truth claims and that these claims can and should be understood in terms of a realist and propositionalist understanding of truth. Following William Alston, then, “a statement (proposition, belief . . .) is true if and only if what the statement says to be the case actually is the case.”^[9] For our purposes, statements, beliefs, and propositions are interchangeable.

Now, understanding religious truth as propositional truth is strongly resisted by many today, especially by those in religious studies. Much more popular are pragmatic or subjective views which regard religious truth as a function of the dynamic, personal relation between a religious believer and his or her religious tradition. Wilfred Cantwell Smith, for example, argued that religious truth should be understood as personal truth, or the faithfulness and authenticity of life that accompanies the existential appropriation by the religious believer of a particular religious way of living. Applying this to religions, Smith states, “Christianity, I would suggest, is not true absolutely, impersonally, statically; rather, it can become true, if and as you or I appropriate it to ourselves and interiorize it, insofar as we live it out from day to day. It becomes true as we take it off the shelf and personalize it, in actual existence.”^[10] Similarly, John Hick, who was influenced by Smith, speaks of religious truth as mythological truth: “A statement or set of propositions about X is mythologically true if it is not literally true but nevertheless tends to evoke an appropriate dispositional attitude toward X.”^[11] Claims about God being incarnate in Jesus of Nazareth, or about the Qur’an being dictated by the angel Gabriel to Muhammad, or about the essential identity between atman and Brahman, while not literally true nevertheless can be mythologically true to the extent that they tend to evoke in Christians, Muslims, and Hindus appropriate dispositional responses to what is religiously ultimate.

But there are at least two significant problems with these views.^[12] First, it seems clear that the great religious leaders, and many ordinary believers as well, do not think of their religious beliefs as true merely in the sense of personal or mythological truth. For them, the beliefs do actually reflect the way reality is, whether one existentially appropriates such beliefs or not. And the religions characteristically maintain that a proper understanding of the way things are is essential to attaining the soteriological goal. Second, personal or mythological truth cannot be an alternative to propositional truth in religion. For one can only existentially appropriate religious beliefs in the sense of personal truth, or adopt an appropriate dispositional response to the religious ultimate, as in mythological truth, if one first accepts certain beliefs about the religious ultimate and our relation to this ultimate as being true in a nonpersonal or nonmythological sense. Thus, the statement “Allah is a righteous judge” can become true for a Muslim in the sense of either personal truth or mythological truth only if the Muslim accepts certain beliefs about Allah and judgment in a propositional sense—that is, if the Muslim actually believes that Allah is a righteous judge and then responds appropriately to this belief.^[13]

Conflicting Truth Claims

Applying the seven dimensions of religion to the major religions will reveal both similarities and differences across the religions. And this is what produces such rich diversity in religious expression. Now, differences in dress, food, architecture, or rituals are not particularly problematic. But what does create difficulty is the fact that the religions advance very different teachings, and thus difference often turns into disagreement. Each religion regards its own assertions as correct or superior to those of its rivals.

To be sure, there are significant areas of agreement in beliefs among the religions. Such similarities are perhaps most apparent in the ethical teachings of the religions. The ethical principle behind the Golden Rule, for example, is reflected in the teachings of many religions.^[14] Without minimizing this, however, it is clear that when we consider carefully what the religions have to say about the religious ultimate, the human predicament, and the nature of and conditions for salvation/enlightenment/liberation, there is significant disagreement among them.

Christians and Muslims, for example, believe that the universe was created by an eternal Creator; Buddhists deny this. Christians traditionally have insisted that Jesus Christ is the incarnate Word of God, fully God and fully man. Muslims reject this as blasphemous. While Hindus, Buddhists, and Jains all agree that there is rebirth, they disagree vigorously over whether there is an enduring, substantial person or soul that is reborn. All of the religions acknowledge that the present state of the world is not as it should be, but they disagree over the cause of this unsatisfactory state and its proper remedy. For Christians, the root cause is sin against a holy God, and the cure consists in repentance and reconciliation with God through the person and work of Jesus Christ on the cross. For many Buddhists, Hindus, and Jains, by contrast, the cause lies in a fundamentally mistaken view of reality, and the remedy involves overcoming the limitations of such false views. But Hindus, Buddhists, and Jains disagree among themselves over the nature of the error and how it is to be overcome. Early Indian philosophical literature contains vigorous disputes among them over just which view is correct and thus how liberation is to be attained.^[15]

Disagreements over beliefs result in differences over how we are to pattern our lives. Differences between Christianity and Theravada Buddhism, for example, over what one ought to do—whether one should repent of one’s sins and follow ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Table of Contents
• Copyright
• Contributors
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Can Only One Religion Be True? Considering This Question
• 1. Can Only One Religion Be True?: A Dialogue
• 2. Theologies of Religious Diversity: Toward a Catholic and catholic Assessment
• 3. No Other Name: The Gospel and True Religions
• 4. General Revelation, Inclusivism, Pluralism, and Postmodernism
• 5. Is Christianity the Only True Religion, or One among Others?
• 6. John Hick’s Monotheistic Shadow
• 7. Why the World Is Not Religiously Ambiguous: A Critique of Religious Pluralism
• 8. Has Normative Religious Pluralism a Rationale?
• 9. Religious Diversity and the Futility of Neutrality
• 10. Can the Jews Be the Chosen People of God?