Christianity at the Religious Roundtable

Evangelicalism in Conversation with Hinduism, Buddhism, and Islam

Timothy C. Tennent

• Publisher: Baker Academic
• Year: 2002
• Print ISBN: 9780801026027
• eBook ISBN: 9781585586158
• Topic: Teología y religión
• Subtopic: Religión comparada

Argues that Christian dialogue with other faiths is an integral part of our call to proclaim the message of Christ.

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Interreligious Dialogue

An Evangelical Perspective

I confess that although I have read dozens of books on interreligious dialogue, I have enjoyed precious few of them. Yet I am now in the curious position of writing such a book. Upon reflection, the basic reason for my dissatisfaction is that the average Christian would hardly recognize the Christianity that is often presented in such works. Certainly, the apostles—the eye- and ear-witnesses of Christ’s life and the first to testify about him—would go away scratching their heads in bewilderment. The Christian gospel is often presented as one among many different paths to God. Christianity is ranked side by side with religions such as Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism in much the same way as films are displayed at a multiplex cinema. The Islamic Qurʾān or the Hindu Upanishads are as likely to yield spiritual light as the Sermon on the Mount.

I do not believe that the authors of such books distort the gospel message intentionally or maliciously. Rather, most of them simply do not affirm the historic Christian confessions; yet curiously they continue to identify themselves as Christians. Even scholars among the non-Christian religions have begun to recognize this phenomenon. For example, Grace Burford, a practicing Buddhist scholar, comments on this in a recent Buddhist-Christian dialogue titled Buddhists Talk about Jesus—Christians Talk about the Buddha.[1] Her chapter is insightfully titled “If the Buddha Is So Great, Why Are These People Christians?” She bluntly asks about these scholars, “If they were so taken by Buddhism, why did they hang on to Christianity?”[2] Her remarks are limited to the Buddhist-Christian dialogue but could easily be observed throughout the whole field of interreligious studies. Why would people be prepared to surrender every central claim of historic Christianity and yet be so doggedly determined to remain spokespersons for Christianity? The same point is made by evangelical scholar Ron Nash in his excellent book Is Jesus the Only Savior?[3] He points out how John Hick, who is widely regarded as one of the leading voices in the Christian dialogue with other religions, continues to call himself a Christian despite having abandoned the historic faith. Nash goes on to say, “I mean no ill-will when I say that Hick is not a Christian in any historical, traditional, or biblical sense of the word. This is not being unkind; it is only being accurate.”[4] These observations from a Buddhist scholar and a leading evangelical scholar testify to the current state of interreligious dialogue. People who stand outside the boundaries of historic Christianity are representing Christianity. The tragic result is that many readers assume that the positions taken by these scholars reflect a broad consensus among Christians around the world.

This is not to say that there have not been several excellent books written to defend historic Christianity in light of the particular challenges of world religions. Lesslie Newbigin’s The Gospel in a Pluralist Society, J. N. D. Anderson’s Christianity and Comparative Religion, and Ravi Zacharias’s Jesus Among Other Gods, are a few examples of excellent contributions to this field.[5] However, these books are not examples of interreligious dialogue per se. They are defenses of historic Christianity in light of growing religious pluralism. These books are extremely important and we need more like them, but we also need more evangelical Christians involved in genuine dialogue with members of other religions. This book seeks to meet that need and to prepare Christians as they begin to take more seriously our obligation to listen and respond to the objections of non-Christian religions.

Genuine dialogue can occur in a way that is faithful to historic Christianity while being willing to listen and genuinely respond to the honest objections of those who remain unconvinced. This underlying premise for the current work serves to challenge the perspective of both conservative and liberal Christians for several reasons.

Conservative Christians and Interreligious Dialogue

Many Christians who have embraced the historic Christian confessions and who hold fast to the faith remain reluctant to listen and respond to the objections of Hindus, Buddhists, and Muslims. Dialogue is discouraged because non-Christian religions are dismissed out-of-hand as examples of human blindness and the fruit of unbelief. Sometimes non-Christian religions are regarded as the direct work of Satan. The result has been to avoid any serious dialogue lest Christians unwittingly place the gospel on equal footing with other religions. It is one thing to personally hold fast to the faith; it is entirely different to share it with another person. This is even more daunting if the person belongs to another religion and has many questions about Christianity. The temptation is to go on the defensive and to avoid such encounters. This “safety box” approach has the initial appearance of preserving the gospel. Because the gospel is so valuable, we should lock it up for safekeeping. But the gospel is not nearly so fragile. Christianity is a faith for the world. It flourishes when challenged by unbelief, ridicule, and skepticism. Early Christians defended their faith in the face of martyrdom, and in this context Tertullian first observed that “the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church.”[6] Nevertheless, many of these staunch defenders of orthodoxy were also creatively seeking to effectively communicate the gospel amid the particular cultural, philosophical, and religious challenges of their Hellenistic environment.

It is comforting to know that Christianity can handle the tough questions even if we sometimes feel inadequate. Some readers may already be convinced of the need for evangelicals to become more seriously engaged in dialogue but are genuinely apprehensive because of the paucity of their knowledge about other religions. Perhaps you are afraid that your own faith is not strong enough to stand up against the difficult questions that members of other religions often pose. If that is your situation, these dialogues will introduce some of the key theological and ethical issues that separate Christianity from the non-Christian religions and will expose many of our own false stereotypes.

Because this book is based on many conversations I have had with Muslims, Hindus, and Buddhists from all over the world, it will help to prepare you for some of the more difficult questions that may arise. Unfortunately, much of the literature concerning world religions produced by evangelical Christians has been embarrassingly superficial. There are, of course, several notable exceptions, such as Sabapathy Kulandran’s extensive study of the doctrine of grace in Christianity and Hinduism.[7] More often, however, grappling with the views of other religions is reduced to simplistic charts or sweeping generalizations that operate at a superficial level. Mercifully, in recent years more substantial material is beginning to emerge from evangelical pens. For example, Norman Geisler and Abdul Saleeb’s Answering Islam provides an excellent resource for those seeking to understand how to respond to Muslim objections to Christianity.[8] However, once Geisler and Saleeb give their answers, there is no opportunity to hear what a Muslim would say in response. As anyone knows who has spent time in dialogue, it is in the actual give-and-take of a full conversation that our ability to understand the basis for an objection finally begins to emerge.[9] In my experience, a Christian response to a question posed by a Hindu, Muslim, or Buddhist often raises surprising follow-up questions which expose new issues that cry out for our attention and reflection. This happens several times in the dialogues contained in this book.

Thus, despite all the risks and the vulnerability involved, our confidence in the gospel demands that we can no longer give space to any kind of cultural, ideological, or religious apartheid whereby we conveniently isolate ourselves from the beliefs and practices of the world we live in. Our Lord has sent us out into the world. It is not some generic world to which Christ calls us, like a distant planet where no one lives. We are called to bear witness to Christ in the Hindu world, the Islamic world, the secular world, and so forth. This book seeks to make the journey easier by charting a fresh path to follow as we go out.

While the command to go out into the world has always rested with the church, until recently it has been all too easy to ignore the implications of this command for the Christian interface with world religions. There are two main reasons for the unique position we are facing in the twenty-first century. First, to make light of the claims and challenges of non-Christian religions is to fail to recognize the changing religious context of the modern world. There was a time when encounters with Muslims, Buddhists, and Hindus were the domain of the foreign missionary who lived in some distant place. He or she was presumably more prepared for such encounters, so we did not think we needed to study those strange, far-off religions. Certainly, we would never come face to face with living, breathing Hindus, for example, and be forced to respond to any of their questions or objections. However, the twenty-first century does not afford us the luxury of such excuses or isolation. The majority of Christians now live in the southern continents of the non-Western world, not in North America and Western Europe. Today the gospel is growing and thriving in places where other religions have long held sway. As for the Western world, Muslims, Buddhists, and Hindus are now our coworkers, our schoolmates, and our neighbors. It is not unusual to see Hindus celebrating dewali or Muslims keeping Ramaḍān in many cities throughout North America and Western Europe. Islam has recently passed Judaism as the largest non-Christian religion in North America. This new atmosphere of religious pluralism has dramatically influenced how Christians think about their faith, and certainly it has forced us to rethink what is required to witness to the gospel in today’s world.

Second, ignoring the challenge of other religions fails to take the biblical witness seriously. Paul’s spirited defense of the gospel on Mars Hill (Acts 17) and John’s creative application of the logos to the incarnation (John 1) demonstrate how deeply the earliest Christians understood the context to which they were called to witness. This book challenges conservative Christians to far more intentional, serious engagements with an increasingly diverse and pluralistic world. In this respect, we are in a position not unlike those in the first century who first heard the Great Commission in the context of a religiously and culturally pluralistic world. Undoubtedly, the earliest Christians understood what it was like to be a minority faith in a pluralistic context.

Liberal Christians and Interreligious Dialogue

Because of the lack of engagement that has characterized much of conservative Christianity, interreligious dialogue has been sustained and participated in primarily by Protestants and Catholics who identify themselves with various liberal positions, several of which will be explored in more detail. From an evangelical perspective, it is safe to say that it is rare for any of these dialogues to defend historic Christianity. Unfortunately, they are often characterized by a lack of vigilance in defending the gospel, and frequently they have conceded ground that lies at the heart of the Christian message. When this occurs, it is often because of several faulty presuppositions that are in force long before the dialogue ever begins.

First, books on interreligious or interfaith dialogue often insist that participants suspend their own faith commitment before coming to the table. It is assumed that a commitment to the truth claims in one’s own religion results in disqualification for genuine dialogue with someone from another religion. For example, in Muslims in Dialogue Paul Knitter writes, “No matter how much truth and good one recognizes in another religion, if one enters the dialogue convinced that by God’s will the final, normative, unsurpassable truth for all religions resides in one’s own religion, that is not a dialogue between equals.”[10] I respectfully disagree with Knitter. I do not see how adopting his view actually assists in genuine dialogue. In fact, I see it quite the opposite. How can one have genuine dialogue without a faith commitment? How can interfaith dialogue exist without faith? That is like asking salt to become temporarily saltless so that someone can discover what salt is like in a nonthreatening atmosphere. But if salt is not salty, then it is not salt. I am convinced that genuine dialogue must bring persuaded people together. If convinced Muslims, Hindus, and Buddhists are willing to sit down with a convinced Christian, how is that not a dialogue between equals? When Paul stood up in the meeting of the Areopagus on Mars Hill and engaged with the Stoic and Epicurean philosophers, he did not suspend his faith, he proclaimed it. Yet Paul did so with sensitivity to their concerns and their writings and proved himself to be an able listener. He did not force them to come to God through Judaism; he appealed to general revelation and even quoted their own poets (Acts 17:28). Nevertheless, although the text indicates that one member of the Areopagus named Dionysius became a Christian, most of the Areopagus presumably remained unconvinced by Paul. In contrast to Knitter, I affirm the Zurich Consultation’s document on interreligious dialogue which states, “In the context of dialogue with men of other faiths, which demands genuine openness on both sides, the Christian is free to bear witness to the risen Christ, just as his partner of another faith is free to witness to what is most important in his own existence.”[11]

The second presupposition frequently found in books on interreligious dialogue is an odd view of truth. Before anyone ever sits down at the table of dialogue, there is often an underlying conviction that there are no absolute truths. Nothing can be asserted as true but only as true for me or true in my experience. Only in the context of relativity can participants avoid inflamed passions and narrow-minded dogmatism that tries to—and here I must invoke the well-worn phrase—cram something down someone’s throat. In this way, all transcendent truths get washed up on the shore of human experience, and all truth claims are regarded as having equal value. Religious differences are not real differences, but only apparent differences due to cultural perceptions and individual experiences. How many times have we heard the refrain that all religions are basically the same? Yet I have never seen convincing evidence that there is a common root or goal of the world religions. Indeed, most serious students of world religions know this to be false. It is only possible to talk in these terms when the participants invoke this highly subjective understanding of truth. Such a view effectively removes the transcendent from all interreligious dialogue. Transcendent, absolute truths are demoted to the level of human perceptions in a form of dialogue called interior dialogue.[12] The result is that anthropology quietly replaces theology as the focus of the dialogue. In other words, we are no longer speaking about a transcendent God; we are discussing equally valid individual experiences or a particular culture’s religious projections that they identify as God or ultimate reality. The whole discussion is man-centered, not God-centered. Anthropology has trumped all theology before the first word of dialogue begins. The universality of subjective experience has replaced all claims to objective truth.

Once truth is reduced to subjective experience, all religious truth claims can be harmonized. The Hindu who experiences ultimate reality as impersonal Brāhman and the Muslim who experiences ultimate reality as righteous Allah calling the world to obedience can be viewed as two subjective perspectives differing only in their vantage points. Subjectively speaking, both are equally valid.[13] This way of thinking is what allowed the Hindu apologist Swami Vivekananda to declare, “If one religion be true, then all the others also must be true.”[14] However, from an objective point of view, God either is or is not personal. Either God became incarnate in Jesus Christ or he did not. Either Allah spoke to Muhammad through Gabriel or he did not. This is a very different view of truth. From this perspective, there are genuine points of departure among the world’s religions. Undoubtedly, we will also discover places of honest agreement. In either case, it is a dialogue that has the courage of convictions. Jesus, at his trial, told Pilate that he “came into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone on the side of truth listens to me” (John 18:37). Pilate responded by asking, “What is truth?” Pilate’s question continues to be of tremendous consequence when we sit down at the table of dialogue.

The third presupposition dominating much of the current literature on interreligious dialogue is that no one is allowed to use the “c” word—conversion. Any reference to the missiological or evangelistic dimensions of one’s faith is normally a violation of the terms of dialogue. Any desire to convert a person is regarded as a narrow-minded, arrogant belief that one’s own religion is somehow superior to another. Because of the subjective view of truth, it amounts to saying that one’s personal experience is more valid than someone else’s. If, as some Hindus claim, there are many different paths to God, how can we as Christians arrogantly assert that our path is better than another? The apologetic, evangelistic side of dialogue becomes impossible because any persuasive speech can be interpreted as crass proselytizing. However, why can’t genuine dialogue involve people speaking persuasively to one another from faith to faith? As a committed Christian, I would like to see every Hindu and Buddhist and Muslim in the world fall on their faces before the l...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Interreligious Dialogue: An Evangelical Perspective
• Part 1: Christianity and Hinduism
• Part 2: Christianity and Buddhism
• Part 3: Christianity and Islam
• Part 4: Case Studies and Conclusion
• Epilogue: Closing Thoughts about Evangelicals and Interreligious Dialogue
• Glossary
• Bibliography
• Subject Index
• Scripture Index
• Notes
• Back Cover