Witnessing to Christ In a Multi Religious Context

Beate Fagerli

• Publisher: Regnum
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781911372011
• eBook ISBN: 9781912343645
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Ministry

The essays in this volume focus on the developing multi religious context in Norway, but like all good contextual theology they also have implications for the wider church. Because of this, these essays are like paradigms of the kind of theology and missiology that needs to be done in many contexts throughout the world. The face of our world is changing, and so must the way we think about -- or, better, imagine -- our witness to Christ. Stephen Bevans SVD, Louis J Luzbetak Professor of Mission and Culture (Emeritus) at Catholic Theological Union, Chicago

SECTION TWO

CHRIST AS LORD

I BELIEVE IN JESUS CHRIST… OUR LORD

Kirsteen Kim

After analysing different faiths from the point of view of what animates them and the contact points with Christianity, the report of Commission IV to the World Missionary Conference at Edinburgh in 1910 concluded that:

Nowhere is the slightest support found for the idea that Christianity is only one religion among others, or that all religions are simply different ways of seeking the one Father, and therefore equally pleasing in His sight. One massive conviction animates the whole evidence that Jesus Christ fulfils and supersedes all other religions, and that the day is approaching when to Him every knee shall bow and every tongue confess that He is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.¹

David Cairns, the chair of the Commission, who drafted the conclusion, argued that this a priori conviction of Christ’s lordship made possible the ‘generous’ and ‘tolerant’ approach towards other faiths of those who had reported to the Commission. However, this generosity and tolerance did not recognise the validity of the religions in themselves; rather, knowledge of the lordship of Christ revealed human need more starkly and exposed the inadequacy of other religious responses.

The unexamined nature of the assertion of Christ’s lordship at Edinburgh in 1910 shows how what we are discussing today is a relatively new problem in the West. In this presentation, I shall first discuss the nature of the problem of confessing Christ as Lord as it arose in the late 1970s and then trace the pneumatological response to the problem that sought to go around the ‘Christological impasse’ in theology of religions and begin Christian witness from confession of the Holy Spirit. Finally, I shall return to’I believe in Jesus Christ… Our Lord’ in the light of this pneumatological excursion to discuss how Christ’s lordship may be proclaimed in today’s situation. My hypothesis that the confession ‘I believe in Jesus Christ… Our Lord’ can and should be maintained but understood in the context of subjection to other lords, set in the Trinitarian setting of the Creed, and made in the Spirit of Christ.

The Problem of Christ’s Lordship

In 1979, a conference was held at Union Theological Seminary in Richmond, Virginia, at the invitation of Donald Dawe. Its proceedings were published in 1981 as Christ’s Lordship and Religious Pluralism, edited by the Evangelical-Catholic partnership of Gerald Anderson and Thomas Stransky.² Reading this volume shows the problem of proclaiming the lordship of Christ in the context of religious pluralism as it was then.

Several contributors pointed out that ‘lordship’ is inseparable from the imperialist language of domination. This association was brought home by the presence and contributions at the conference of several whose communities had been on the receiving end of colonial, racial and gender oppression: Stanley Samartha from India, Kofi Appiah-Kubi from Ghana, Orlando Costas from Puerto Rico, Deotis Roberts, an African American, and Mary Carroll Smith, a feminist. They and other contributors pointed out the complicity of Christian assertions of lordship with western triumphalism,³ white racial supremacy⁴ and male domination.⁵ Several of them drew the corollary that the confession ‘Jesus is Lord’ was to assert the supremacy of Christianity over other religions, which they found unacceptable.

It is clear from Christ’s Lordship and Religious Pluralism that the question of Christ’s lordship was being linked with other theological issues such as the uniqueness of Christ in the context of many approaches to God,⁶ the nature of truth and whether it had any absolute foundation,⁷ the use of the name of Christ and the nature of Christian authority, and the understanding of the church and Christian communities vis-à-vis other communities.⁸ It was also connected with the broader issue of liberalism versus conservatism, especially in biblical interpretation,⁹ and to missional questions such as the proper approach to people of other faiths – be it proclamation or dialogue,¹⁰ the meaning of salvation and the issue of who has access to it¹¹ and the priority for Christian mission – along with evangelism or social action.¹² Although these dichotomies were expressed in the language of theology and religious studies, we can, with the benefit of hindsight, see two ideological developments that impinged on Christian thinking in this period and which polarized views. The first is the clash of communism and capitalism that we know of as the Cold War. It is nowhere explicitly mentioned but the vehemence of the dismissal by Dawe of Costas’ liberation theological contribution can hardly be explained other than by this ‘elephant in the room’.¹³ In the 1950s, Christians of all persuasions had lined up to defeat Communism and assert the supremacy of liberal democracy. The need for a united front against Communism now divided them over whether claiming lordship for Christ was the way to deal with a religiously plural world. This was in spite of the fact noted by Samartha that other religions were asserting themselves and making similarly universal claims.¹⁴ He did not need to look further than the Iranian Islamic Revolution which was concluded earlier in 1979, the same year as the conference.

The second ideological factor was secularism in its a-religious form which was being used politically to avoid clashes of religious viewpoints. It undermined the public confession of Christian faith by making it appear socially divisive. The secularization thesis that modernization would inevitably lead to the demise of religions and the ushering in of a secular age, which was so influential in western Christian theology in the 1960s,¹⁵ was challenged by the resurgence of other religions, such as in Iran, and of Christianity in the form of Pentecostal and charismatic revivals and the growth of world Christianity.¹⁶ However, it divided Christian mission by separating development-related activities from religious ones, and social transformation from the formation of Christian communities. Furthermore, militant secularism in the form of atheism not only insisted that scientific method, within which proof of religion was impossible, was the only method of enquiry, and denied the right of Christian commitment to function as a worldview,¹⁷ but also sought to exclude or marginalize religion in public life.

Although the tripartite response to the perceived problem of proclaiming Christ’s lordship in the context of many religions was not articulated by Allan Race until 1983¹⁸ or by Paul Knitter until 1985,¹⁹ it was already clear in Christ’s Lordship and Religious Pluralism how the lines were going to lie. The first three keynote addresses express what became labelled – by pluralists – as the pluralist, inclusivist and exclusivist views (although not in that order).

Samartha, secretary of the dialogue unit of the World Council of Churches (WCC), described proclamation of Christ’s lordship as ideologically motivated or patronizing to people of other faiths. He pointed out that religion in India is a whole way and view of life, and that religions as organisations can be misused in the power relations between communities so that Christian claims have pastoral as well as theological import. He showed that Jesus’ lordship was exercised in suffering, self-emptying and servanthood, and in conquest of death (by resurrection), not by conquest of other religions. He worried that proclamation of Jesus as Lord risked becoming a personality cult and also fell into what Orthodox theologians had described as Christo-monism. Jesus himself, he argued, was theocentric and we should agree on God alone as absolute. In this light, all religions are relativized and seen as interim expressions of approaches to the Ultimate who is beyond all of them and accessible only by the Spirit. Why logically, he asked, should the religion of Sinai be superior to that of the Ganges? Biblically, he insisted, the life of Christians should be the main witness, and Christian love and respect should be shown in the way we treat ‘our neighbours of other faiths’ as partners, not statistics. We should approach them through dialogue, an attitude of both commitment and openness.²⁰ Earlier in 1979, Samartha had succeeded in getting dialogue established as the standard approach to people of other faiths in the WCC Guidelines on Dialogue,²¹ despite strong opposition at the Nairobi general assembly of the WCC by those who advocated mission, such as Lesslie Newbigin.²²

Pietro Rossano, secretary of the Vatican Secretariat for Non-Christian Religions, presented the official Roman Catholic view of the period. Following Nostra Aetate (1965), the declaration on the relationship of the church to non-Christian religions, from the Second Vatican Council,²³ he began with the universal search for truth, which is a sign of human dignity. He insisted that, as there were distinctions between religions, the same applied to their relationship with Christianity. Because ethnicity, culture, history, founders, and so on, give rise to different responses to the divine, it is not logical to suppose that each religion is valid and true. Furthermore, because they are different, each religion has its own theology of religion. Rossano saw the Bible as testifying to both the universal sovereignty of Christ and particularity of the incarnation. For the Christian, Christ is the religious truth; although grace and truth may reach the hearts and minds of all, revelation in Christ is another matter. Christ Pantocrator may take up aspects of the religions and unite the wisdom of individuals, families and nations, but they are also subject to judgement. He found that the Bible generally commends other religious people, and its writers are only hostile to religions when they threaten the covenant, are monistic or idolatrous. The global approach of Nostra Aetate advocates both proclamation and dialogue – announcing and learning – in relationship with the religions of others. But, Rossano concluded, the ‘two-fold fidelity of the Christian to the “riches of creation” and to the gospel message’ depends on the universal sovereignty of Christ who births, takes up, purifies and fulfils religions that God may be ‘all in all’.²⁴

In 1974, Waldron Scott, general secretary of the World Evangelical Alliance (WEA), took his brief from the Lausanne Covenant formulated that year.²⁵ He took the lordship of Christ as the given, biblical starting-point of faith. He understood Christ’s lordship as equivalent to declaring that ‘there is no other name… by which we must be saved’ (Acts 4:12).²⁶ Citing the covenant, he rejected any suggestion from pluralists that God speaks equally through different religions and ideologies. He denied that all religions offer salvation or could be covered by what God had accomplished in Christ. He asserted the uniqueness of Christ and the continuing obligation to fulfil the Great Commission. Scott admitted that evangelic...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword: Mission Is not What It Was
• Editorial Introduction
• Witnessing to Christ in a Multicultural and Multi-Religious Context
• Section One: Christ as Reconciler
• Section Two: Christ as Lord
• Section Three: Christ as Redeemer and Saviour
• Concluding Chapters
• Editors and Contributors
• Index of Subjects, Names and Places
• Back Cover