Religious pluralism is anything but new. More than three centuries ago, John Bunyan wondered why such a small proportion of the planet had access to the Christian gospel: "Could I think that so many ten thousands in so many Countreys and Kingdoms, should be without the knowledge of the right way to Heaven?"

Indeed, 1,800 years ago the church was confronted by as much religious diversity as exists in a major metropolis today, and its first theologians worked hard to relate Jesus to Greco-Roman religion and philosophy. In the second and third centuries, Irenaeus and the Greek apologists (Justin Martyr and Clement of Alexandria) developed theologies of history and revelation that understood God to be at work in non-Christian traditions and Christ, the logos, to be teaching and saving souls outside of Israel and the church.

During the first millennium, however, most Christians were convinced that extra ecclesiam nulla salus—outside the church there is no salvation. As Cyprian (d. 258) put it, "You cannot have God for your Father if you don't have the Church for your mother." Cyprian could say this because he shared the prevailing presumption that the gospel had been promulgated everywhere and that everyone had the opportunity to accept it. Even Augustine (354-430), who knew some African tribes had not yet heard, generally restricted salvation to the church: he believed that God had foreseen that those Africans would not accept Christ if He were offered to them.

In the second millennium, attitudes began to change. Abelard (1079-1142) spoke of pagan saints such as Job, Noah, and Enoch. Pope Gregory VII (d. 1085) conceded that Muslims who obey the Qur'an might find salvation in the bosom of Abraham, and St. Francis (1181-1226) referred to Muslim "brothers." Thomas Aquinas (1225-74) introduced "implicit faith" and the "baptism of desire" for those who have not heard but would have embraced the gospel. Dante's Divina Commedia (c. 1314) places Avicenna, Averroes, and Saladin in Limbo, along with Greek and Roman sages and heroes from antiquity. Some Anabaptists (16th century) posited an interfaith church of spiritual Semites with three covenants: Jewish, Christian, and Muslim.

The discovery of the New World and its teeming millions of unevangelized souls stimulated new thinking about how non-Christians could be saved—by special illumination at the point of death, for example, or by evangelism after death. On these and other grounds, the likes of 17th-century Reformed divine Richard Baxter allowed for some outside the church to be saved. By the 19th century, Pius IX had redefined extra ecclesiam nulla salus to refer only to those culpably outside of the church. And yet many Christians—a majority, probably—continued to believe that adherents of other religions were doomed to damnation unless they came to explicit faith in Christ.

For much of the 20th century, inheriting this ambivalent tradition, Christian thinking about the religions was dominated by the question of salvation: can non-Christians be saved? Vatican II (1962-65) took Pius IX's logic a step further to say that the religions contain seeds of the Word and "may sometimes be taken as leading the way (paedagogia) to the true God and as a preparation for the Gospel."

In 1983, Alan Race, an Anglican priest and theologian, developed the typology that has largely set the terms for discussion of this question over the last two decades. Race defined the available options as pluralism, inclusivism, and exclusivism (also known as restrictivism). Pluralism is the position that there are many saviors, and Jesus is just one of them. Exclusivists contend that Jesus is the only savior and explicit confession of this is necessary before one dies. Inclusivists maintain that while Christ is the only way to the Father, explicit knowledge of Him is not. "Good" Buddhists can be saved by Jesus if they recognize their inability to save themselves and cry out for mercy. Inclusivists say they are casting themselves unwittingly upon Christ, who is God's mercy.

Recently, however, this typology has come under severe attack. Joseph DiNoia and S. Mark Heim have argued that inclusivism is incoherent because it presumes that every religion has the same goal: union with a personal God. Then what is one to make of Theravadin Buddhists who seek a nirvana without beings or souls or consciousness? And what about Hindu advaitins, who insist that there is no duality or distinction, which means there cannot be a personal God or for that matter a distinct human self?

Neither—so DiNoia and Heim contend—does pluralism make sense, because it is crypto-inclusivist. It claims to believe in many goals but actually believes in only one—"reality-centeredness" for John Hick, liberation from social oppression for Paul Knitter, or universal faith and rationality for Wilfred Cantwell Smith. Pluralists believe religion is like toothpaste: brand differences are inconsequential because they all have the same function and end. In effect, then, pluralists deny any pluralism of real consequence.

Close inspection reveals that in fact every religion is exclusivist in its claims insofar as each teaches that its religious goals can be met only by following its prescriptions. For example, Gavin D'Costa has shown recently (The Meeting of Religions and the Trinity, 2000) that while the Dalai Lama tells the world that no religion is the best, he also believes that only his dGe lugs school of Tibetan Buddhism sees reality in its fullness, and that one can achieve the highest level of enlightenment only by Tibetan Buddhist practice. Hence each religion teaches its own unique salvation and way to attain it.

Race's typology, or some modified form of it, still has its defenders. But for many who are engaged in Christian theology of the religions, the need for a new framework is clear. Heim's Depth of the Riches makes a bold proposal: perhaps the religions really do get their devotees to their respective salvations, and these diverse salvations represent different dimensions of the triune God of Jesus Christ. For example, Heim wonders whether Theravada Buddhism's impersonal nirvana might be the impersonal dimension of the personal God, just as every human person contains impersonal elements such as blood chemistry. And perhaps Theravadin Buddhists have insights into that dimension of God from which Christians can learn, while at the same time missing out on the far greater riches of communion with the Trinity, which only Christians enjoy.

Heim supports this vision with a Dantean appeal to the diversity of ends found in the broader Christian tradition (Limbo, Purgatory, and Hell, the last of which Heim reserves for those who refuse to relate to others or God). He makes a biblical case for different ends by citing the variety of offices in Revelation's picture of heaven (martyrs, elders, and angels), the variety of gifts in the Pauline epistles, Paul's promise that God "will repay according to each one's deeds" (Rom. 2:6), and different "locations" such as the distinction between "death" and "Hades" in Rev. 20:13.

While Heim has finally given us true pluralism (truly different ends for the religions), and makes a way for Christians to be able to say that other religions have truth but only Christians receive the fullness of God, Protestants will protest the relative paucity of biblical support for his proposal. They will also note his comment that Christ is not "constitutive" of non-Christian religious ends, despite those ends being various dimensions of the Triune God. This is a problem for many of the new theologians of the religions, and to this we will return.

If Heim has brought discussions of salvation for non-Christians to a new plateau, Michael Barnes' Theology and the Dialogue of Religions tries to bring the discussion through the postmodern turn to the subject. In other words, Barnes wants Christian theology of the religions to think less of the object (the non-Christian believer or religion) and more of the subject (the Christian observer) by focusing less on theory and more on what happens concretely when a Christian meets a non-Christian in dialogue.

Barnes draws heavily on the work of Emmanuel Levinas, the Jewish emigré philosopher who was imprisoned during World War II. Levinas stressed that the encounter with another is an opening to the Infinite that demands a certain passivity on our part if we are to receive what might be given. Using early church logos theology, Barnes urges Christians to "listen to the seeds of the Word" in other religions and movements in history. Inspired by (Vatican II) Nostra Aetate's observation that the religions "frequently reflect a ray of that truth which enlightens everyone," Barnes insists that Christians do not have "panoptic" vision, and so must not approach the religious other with an a priori theology that locates the non-Christian in a predefined Christian space. Such a "tidy theological synthesis" is "totalizing," thinking of the other as a "problem" or in terms of what is already known rather than considering the "strangeness" of the other as an opening for new learning about God. Christians must reread their tradition not over against but through the encounter with the religious other.

But what if the religious other is demonic? David Marshall writes of Taoist sects using their Secret Instructions of the Jade Chamber to encourage men seeking long life to mix yin and yang by sexual intercourse with teenage girls. And what of secular religions like Marxism that have been used to kill millions in pursuit of this-worldly millenarian visions?

Harold Netland and Amos Yong, among others, have emphasized the need for spiritual discernment in interreligious dialogue. In Encountering Religious Pluralism, his fine review of the history of Christian encounters with religious others (which includes a devastating critique of John Hick's pluralism), Netland urges at least two criteria: the principle of noncontradiction and moral recognition. By non-contradiction he means, as pluralist Raimundo Panikkar has put it, "A believing member of a religion in one way or another considers his religion to be true. Now, the claim to truth has a certain built-in exclusivity. If a given statement is true, its contradictory cannot also be true." Netland, who was a missionary to Japan, concludes from this that Zen Buddhism, which entails both contradictory statements and the denial of the principle of noncontradiction itself, must be at least partly false. Because Christian faith affirms a final distinction between good and evil, systems such as (Hindu) advaita vedanta that deny such a distinction must also be considered less than fully true. The same must be said for Marxist claims that morality is defined by whatever the Communist Party needs to reach its temporal goals.

Yong, a prolific young Pentecostal theologian at Bethel College, has been the most insistent among contemporary theologians warning of the need for discernment, particularly in the face of the demonic and the idolatrous. Yong writes in Beyond the Impasse that discernment is both a spiritual gift and a faculty requiring development. There is need for fasting, prayer and exorcism, but also for long-term observation of the broadest range of phenomena in the religions—not simply their doctrinal beliefs. Yong puts particular emphasis on whether and to what extent a religion enables a person to fulfill her "divinely appointed reason for being." One wishes, however, that Yong's application of such criteria would have gone beyond his analysis of an Assembly of God college to the study of a living non-Christian tradition.

Timothy Tennent is among those who have heeded the call for close empirical studies of religious others. In Christianity at the Religious Roundtable, unlike some previous evangelical commentators on the religions, Tennent uses sophisticated and detailed analysis of Hindu, Buddhist, and Islamic texts to engage in dialogue that is devoted not to finding what we all have in common but to what is different yet conducive to learning for all. For example, he argues that the Qur'an does not reject the orthodox Trinity but only caricatures of the same (tritheism and divine cohabitation with a deified Mary), and does not teach that Jesus never died but instead rebukes Jews for taking credit for Allah's sovereign act. From this both Christians and Muslims can learn that the religious other is not as heretical as imagined.

In three intriguing but frustrating chapters at the end of the book, Tennent discusses Justin Martyr's logos theology, the possibility that the Upanishads might shed light on the Christian Trinity, and A.G. Hogg's inclusivism. They will be frustrating to many Christians because the very issues which these discussions raise are left as unanswered questions: Should we acknowledge God working in and perhaps speaking through other religions at those points where, as Tennent acknowledges, they convey religious truth? Was Christ at work in the African or Islamic religious pasts of Christian converts? Disappointingly, Tennent does not follow the lead of Andrew Walls (distinguished missiologist at the University of Edinburgh, where Tennent took his Ph.D.), who has shown the recurring pattern in Christian missions of the church's understanding of Christ being enlarged by cross-cultural contact. In other words, there is the possibility that from "dialogue" with religious others, Christians can learn more about the meaning of the blinding revelation of Jesus Christ.

Christian theology of the religions is at a crossroads. Its dominant paradigm for understanding salvation (exclusivist/inclusivist/pluralist) is widely challenged, and its understanding of God's revelation in Jesus Christ is confused. Heim claims that "the Trinity teaches us that Jesus Christ cannot be an exhaustive or exclusive source for knowledge of God nor the exhaustive and exclusive act of God to save us." Barnes asserts that the Logos (Christ as Word) "does not exhaust the meaning" of God because the Spirit "blows where it will" (John 3:8) and goes ahead of the disciples in Acts of the Apostles.

A particularly important example of this confusion is the recent book by Jacques Dupuis, one of the most distinguished Roman Catholic theologians of the religions, who was rebuked by the Vatican in 2001 for a previous book that "could lead a reader to erroneous or harmful opinions" such as the separation of Word from Spirit and the incompleteness of the revelation of Jesus Christ. Dupuis' new book calls to mind Einstein's advice that if you want to understand science, you should not listen to what scientists say but watch what they do.

In Christianity and the Religions, Dupuis says that there are no other saviors unrelated to Jesus, and the Christian tradition does not need to be completed by other traditions as if they were to fill a void. But at the same time, he argues that the "working of the Word" goes beyond the working presence of the glorified humanity of Jesus, and the Spirit is not always linked to the risen humanity of Jesus. His reasoning uses language we have already seen in Heim and Barnes, language used in an earlier work which both Heim and Barnes cite (Toward a Christian Theology of Religious Pluralism [1997]): Jesus' "human consciousness" was "limited" and so did not "exhaust the divine mystery."

Perhaps this is why Dupuis, in 263 pages of text, never mentions atonement through the Cross, salvation as redemption from sin, or the reign of God as discipleship to Jesus—and insists that Jesus' uniqueness and universality are not "absolute." For such claims would require the notion that God was fully revealed in Jesus Christ, as the early church suggested: in Christ the fullness of the Deity lives bodily (Col. 2:9), in Him were hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge (Col. 2:3), the entire truth would be revealed to the apostles (John 16:13), Jesus had the Spirit without measure (John 3:34), and everything the Father had was shared with Jesus (John 16:15).

Dupuis and others often return to Jesus' limited human consciousness (he did not know the precise time of the end, for example) to argue for the limits of the revelation through him. But why need the first clause lead to the second? According to the classical understanding of the communio idiomatum, the divine person of the Logos in the Incarnation had available to itself both its limited human nature and the divine omniscience of the divine nature—even while choosing at times to restrict itself to the former.

More tellingly, however, this argument from Jesus' consciousness reflects assumptions about the human predicament and the nature of salvation at odds with the Christian tradition. In other words, if the human predicament is insufficient knowledge of God's mystery and salvation is therefore by revelation that provides information about God that we can follow, then Jesus' limited consciousness is a problem. But if the human predicament instead is alienation from God because of sin, and salvation means reconciliation, then Jesus' limited human consciousness is in fact our guarantee that God has taken to himself our sinful humanity with all its limitations in exchange for giving us his righteousness and Spirit.

What this exchange reveals, then, is not information about God but God's action to include sinners in his own Trinitarian life. Hence Jesus' limited consciousness demonstrates not partial revelation of the divine mystery but the full picture of what salvation entails.

Dupuis and others have the same problem with Jesus that the Enlightenment had: Jesus was one of the "accidents of history" inaccessible to humanity as a whole. For Kant, Hegel, and Schleiermacher, Jesus was the prime example of a process that does not logically require Jesus. To make Jesus logically necessary to salvation would violate the fundamental Enlightenment axiom: that ultimate meaning must be expressed in general but not particular terms. As Lessing famously put it, "Accidental truths of history can never become the proof of necessary truths of reason."

But why should this be true? Why should it be impossible that historical events could be the source of ultimate truth? How do Lessing or Dupuis know that truth is greater than any particular expression of it, such as the claim that "Jesus is the truth"? Refusal to consider this possibility seems as arrogant and arbitrary as Diderot's proclamation that if the entire population of Paris were to assure him that a dead man had just been raised from the dead, he would not believe a word of it. Or Rousseau's failure to understand why, if God had something to say to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, he would not say it directly but had to go through Moses. Hence the question that tested the Enlightenment is the same question that will determine the future of Christian theology of religion: Who do you say that I am?

Does the insistence that Jesus Christ was the full revelation of God mean that Christians have nothing to learn from other religions? Paul Griffiths, Roman Catholic philosopher at the University of Illinois, Chicago, does not think so. Using the old paradigm in new ways, Griffiths' Problems of Religious Diversity helpfully argues for an "open inclusivism" that holds to a "deposit of faith" in Jesus Christ that contains "implicitly everything of religious significance" but recognizes that the Church may learn what some of these implications are from those outside its boundaries—such as scientists, economists, and practitioners of other religions. Griffiths suggests that if Christians believe that their faith has developed through history, they should believe all the more in the possibility of learning from other traditions. For the church has done just that in 2,000 years of interpreting the implications of the revelation in Christ. And a quantum leap in understanding may be yet to come: the "neuralgia" produced by Christian wrestling with religious others may be as creatively fruitful as has been "attention to the question of apparently unmerited suffering."

Griffiths' proposal echoes the observations made by Lesslie Newbigin several decades ago. Newbigin noted that Jesus told the disciples there was still much to learn (John 16:13) and that the learning would come through the church's mission to the nations. Therefore the mission of the church always involves change for the church, just as it changed when it learned new things from the experiences of Cornelius the convert. Newbigin concluded that the church will continue to be challenged by the gospel as it hears from people who have read the Bible with minds shaped by other cultures, which in turn are rooted in religious visions.

Gerald McDermott teaches at Roanoke College. He has written several books on Christian faith and the religions, and is now writing a book on the theological meaning of religious pluralism.

Books discussed in this essay:

Copyright © 2004 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click for reprint information on Books & Culture.