My Journey as a Religious Pluralist

A Christian Theology of Religions Reclaimed

Alan Race

• Publisher: Resource Publications
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781725298248
• Topic: Théologie et religion
• Subtopic: Œcuménisme religieux et interconfessionnel

Christian theology of religions remains a central component of the Christian response to global religious diversity. In the face of theological refusals to engage with issues of religious absolutism and new impressions from interreligious encounters, this book seeks to inject fresh energy into a debate that has stalled in recent years. The encounter between Christians and people of different religious persuasions raises questions of how to interpret Christian absolutism for a new and developing consciousness that values the experience of the religious other.This book argues that interreligious dialogue, interreligious ethical collaboration, and comparative studies all point to a pluralist future, where we are obliged to recognize the spiritual authenticity of the experience animating many religions. Building friendly relations between faith communities is to be applauded but it is insufficient in the face of the many challenges confronting the global human community. Whether we are speaking of cooperation in civil society, peace in the world, or the overarching ecological crisis encompassing the planet as a whole, the acceptance of the diversity of religions as a positive religious value will strengthen the sense of global responsibility that is needed.

Part One

Critical Foundations

1

Christianity

2000 Years of Inventiveness

This chapter presents a history of Christian faith, highlighting change and development as an hermeneutical pattern of inventiveness. It argues that, with the end of Christendom, Christian faith needs to discover a more modest form, one that is open to the possibilities of truth from wherever it beckons. The exchange with a trenchant Muslim critic clarifies further the hermeneutic principles underlying the need for a dialogical future embracing interreligious theology.

“Jesus proclaimed the kingdom, and what came was the church.”1 In the European Catholic Church of 1902, that was a dangerous distinction to make. As a result of it, the French theologian, Alfred Loisy (1857–1940), was condemned and the Archbishop of Paris, Cardinal Richard, forbade people to read his book, The Gospel and the Church. Loisy had spotted a lacuna at the heart of Christian understanding: what Jesus had promised was different from what history had delivered. But there was more. Loisy continued his infamous sentence above: “It came by broadening the form of the gospel, which it was impossible to keep as it was . . . “2 And in the same passage Loisy also declared the unnerving impact of nineteenth century historical consciousness when he noted that “a considerable change in the state of science (i.e., ‘the general state of knowledge in the time and place where they were formed’) can necessitate a new interpretation of ancient formulae which, conceived as they were in another intellectual atmosphere, can no longer say all that they need to, or do not say it as they should.”3 It was all too much for the hierarchy of the church. Loisy responded to his condemnation by writing another book.

Loisy’s theological dilemma was not an isolated occurrence. Other intellectuals were also noticing that centuries-old assumptions did not necessarily stand up to historical scrutiny. For example, Albert Schweitzer, who was born in 1875, and acquired doctorates in philosophy, theology, and music before the age of thirty, and later a doctorate in medicine, published in 1906 a disturbing book, Von Reimarus zu Wrede, which later became a classic in English translation as The Quest of the Historical Jesus. In this book, Schweitzer concluded that Jesus remains “a stranger and an enigma to our time . . . who will not allow himself to be modernized as an historical figure.”4 It is easy to imagine how unsettling such remarks might be for a religion centred primarily on a figure of history and not on a holy book. Later in his life, Schweitzer himself turned towards the formulation of what he called “reverence for life” as his religious philosophy, and he exemplified it splendidly pursuing medical missionary work through the hospital he founded in Lambaréné, in French Equatorial Africa.

From a century’s distance, this modernist crisis, as it is called, at the beginning of the twentieth century could seem rather exaggerated. For what is controversial in pointing out that Christianity has worn different masks at different times and in different places? Geographically, French Christianity is bound to exhibit different contours from Chinese Christianity, or from Quaker Christianity in American Pennsylvania, or from Christianity in the Outer Hebrides. And in the perspective of history, Christianity in Rome in the late fifties of the first Christian century, when Paul was writing his epistle to the small band of Jewish and Gentile Christian believers there, was light years away from the kind of Christianity alive in the same city in the first decade of the sixteenth century, when the renaissance genius, Michelangelo, was splashing paint on the Cardinals below him while he was painting the Vatican’s Sistine Chapel ceiling. Faced with the need to make sense of such teeming diversity and cultural differences in the expressions of Christian faith, the modernist crisis was not exaggerated. Indeed, it is still with us, essentially because the last century of Christianity’s two millennia history has witnessed an even greater diversification of Christian thought and life, with new lines of division and argument opening up as Christianity finally reaches its status as a world faith.

The problem of integrating historical change into Christian consciousness still comes as a massive shock to the Christian system, which many have thought is not meant to change.

Theology, however, is one thing, history is another; and history is virtually synonymous with change. Even a cursory glance down the tunnel of 2000 years demonstrates the power of Christian faith for change, for survival and transmutation into numerous forms. Whether by conscious adaptation arising from within the dynamism of its own spiritual momentum, or by forced response to external circumstances inherent in the flux of historical change itself, or, more accurately, by a fusion of both factors, Christian history has per force been inventive. In terms of cultural forms, habits of cultic and ethical practice, patterns of believing and community organisation, to be a Christian in the year 50 CE, or in the year 750, or 1550, or 1950, has been as different as the different historical periods that shaped Christian life have allowed Christianity to be.

I am tempted to argue even more boldly and press the case that inventiveness implies that Christianity has been, and continues to be, a faith restlessly in search of itself. Some may object at this seeming boldness and complain of hubris. Surely a faith in search of itself is almost an oxymoron: how can a historical movement which readily exists and has achieved its status as a world faith, be in search of itself? I believe that that objection raises profound issues, but it is one which reveals essentially a theological anxiety. I shall return to theology later in order to defend my notion of “a faith in search of itself” and its implications for future Christian identity. Although anxiety about change continues to dog Christian theological consciousness, I shall argue that it does so mostly for the wrong reasons. For the moment, let me stick to history and my claim that inventiveness is simply what a historian observes: the twists and turns, the shaping and re-shaping of a historical movement in time.

My central thesis, therefore, is utterly simple to state: the history of 2000 years of Christianity is a history of continuous inventiveness.

Let me give you one obvious—you might think it even playful—illustration of that inventiveness. It has been mentioned quite a lot in Christian literature designed for the celebrations marking the second Millennium of Christianity and relates to how we think of the passage of time itself. I am thinking of the adoption of the Anno Domini (the year of the Lord) method of dating, which through western expansion has become a near-universal convention. At the beginning of the sixth century in the western European church, Pope Gelasius appointed a certain monk named Dionysius Exiguus (Denys the Short, to his friends) to be his archivist in the Vatican. Dionysius could read Greek and so he was employed as a translator. He also chanced his hand at a new way of calculating the correct date of Easter, which had always been a deeply controversial matter in the church. By assuming that he knew the date of the birth of Jesus, Dionysius literally invented what has become known as the Christian era. That was about the year 525 AD. (Today we would use the notation CE, meaning Common Era, deriving from and intending to signify a new rapprochement between Christians and Jews after the holocaust; but more about that later). The fact that no-one bothered much about Dionysius’s calculations at the time didn’t matter, because 200 years later the English monk, the Venerable Bede, read the archivist’s manuscript and popularized the dating scheme through his highly influential book, The Ecclesiastical History of the English People. The method of dating caught on. Hence the Christian, and, by extension—having adopted it or having had it thrust upon them—the whole world’s indebtedness to Denys the Short and Bede the Venerable!

After 2000 years, from being a small insignificant band of converts, initially lodged uneasily within another religion, Christianity has become proportionately the largest religious grouping in the world—roughly 2,400,000,000 Christians—and spread to every corner of the world. I mention this not in order to boast, but simply to acknowledge that the fact of it alone is historically and geographically mesmerizing. For good or ill, and the effect has been for both, Christianity can be counted as a cultural success story that cries out for explanation.

Part of an explanation that Christian philosophers and others sometimes offer is the spiritually sensitive one that Christianity has been able to meet human needs at profound spiritual levels. As these needs and levels are bound to vary for different people, it is a virtue that Christian faith has been able to generate a wide spectrum of religious types. These types, moreover, may even be portrayed as opposites. For example, Christianity has supported belief both in what transcendentalist theologians have called “the infinite qualitative distance between God and the world” and also what mystics have considered as the “sharp dart of longing love” that pierces “the cloud of unknowing,” leaving the impression not of infinite distance but of a deep unity at the heart of all reality. Or again, Christianity has fostered both the strong articulation of love as the defining quality of our very humanity and simultaneously held out for justice in all our personal and social relationships.

We could set in contrast other human needs that Christian faith has sought to meet. So, it has catered for quietists as well as activists; it has appealed to the intellect as well as the emotions; it has raised up Mother Julian-type optimism that, in her celebrated phrase—”all shall be well, all manner of things shall be well”—as well as deep despair exemplified most severely by the doctrinal threat of eternal damnation in the flames of hell for those who are unrepentant of their wrong-doing. Perhaps through it all, the appeal of Christianity’s central belief in the incarnation of the love of God embodied in human form has given human beings a sense of living within the presence of God who knows from the inside our deepest human needs, pains, and desires. In the person of Jesus, the claim goes, the greatest chasm that separates earth from heaven has been bridged. There is a bigger story of our being human after all: the material has been sanctified as a bearer of the divine, and that must be Good News.

Some have even wondered whether the via media positioning of the Christian incarnational outlook—half-way on the scale between the Semitic suspicion about divine embodiment and the...