by
W. Ward Gasque*
Most Christian Americans who have been vaguely aware of the fact that there
are other world faiths in conflict with the claims of the Christian gospel
have become acutely aware of this fact since September 11 of this past year.
A group of men, claiming to be motivated by the Muslim faith, managed to
hijack three commercial airplanes, turning them into weapons of war. This
event has scarcely been out of the daily news since then.
The president of the US was quick to point out that Islam is not necessarily
a religion of terror but rather, as its very name implies, a religion of
peace. So we should not assume that the terrorists of 9/11 or the suicide
bombers of contemporary Palestine are representative of the core values of
Islam any more than the extremist Catholic and Protestant terrorists of
Northern Ireland represent the core values of our faith.
But this event has underlined for us the fact that religion is still a major
force in world politics and that there are a variety of competing faiths
that vie for our attention.
Scholars have, in fact, identified approximately 10,000 distinct religions
in the world. Not denominations or sects but distinct religions! And then
there are millions of professed atheists and others who do not claim any
religion.
The world faiths include
· CHRISTIANITYwith 1/3rd of world’s population;
· ISLAM with 1/5th of world’s population;
· HINDUISM with 1/8th of world’s population;
· BUDDHISM with 1/16th of world’s population;
· SIKHISM with 24 million adherents;
· JUDAISM with 15 million.
A couple of decades ago you might have been tempted to include Marxism among
the world faiths, but Communism represents the modern god that has died in
our lifetime.
About 1/25th of the world’s population represent the local, indigenous
religions that we used to call ‘animism’ or ‘primitive religions’. And then,
of course, there are the myriad of new religions that are popping up around
the world on a daily basis.
To look at these statistics another way: 2/3rds of the world’s population do
not profess faith in Christ (and, of course, many of those who profess faith
in Christ are very nominal and are unlikely to have a personal relationship
with the living God).
Approximately 1/4th of the world’s population — that’s 1.6 billion people
— have never even heard about the good news of Jesus Christ; and, then,
there are many who have vaguely heard but who have not really comprehended
the good news.
How do we respond to this reality of 4 billion people who do not believe in
the God who has revealed himself through Jesus Christ, 1.6 billion of whom
have never even heard the message about Jesus the Saviour?
William Carey, a Baptist lay preacher in England just over two centuries
ago, reflected on the reality that the majority of the world’s peoples had
not heard the good news about Jesus and published a small book on the
subject, arguing that it is the obligation of all who profess to follow
Jesus Christ to do everything within their power to bring the message of
good news to those who have not heard.
Carey’s view, while opposed by many at first, gradually was accepted by the
major Protestant denominations and became the driving force behind the great
mission movement of the 19th and 20th centuries, a movement that continues
on to this day Because salvation is only through the sacrificial death of
Jesus Christ on the cross, it was argued that it was urgent that those who
had not heard of what Jesus had done and the salvation he had procured
should have the opportunity to hear the good news and join in the experience
of salvation and the fellowship of the church.
And so the mainline churches of the 19th century, joined by new
denominations and quasi-denominations invented in America and the dynamic
new churches of Africa, Asia, and Latin America in the 20th century, have
mobilized to take the good news into all the world. The result has been a
four-fold increase in the number of Christians in the past century alone.
But toward the end of the 19th century a new perspective began to be
promoted. This new view suggested that it is arrogant for Christians to
believe that only they have the truth, that the Christian gospel is the only
way of salvation, that Jesus Christ is the only way to God.
Recognizing that millions of people — today, billions — follow other ways
of salvation that have a quite different understanding of God and salvation;
that many of these non-Christians are both sincere in their faith and
conscientious in their life-style; that there are many areas of agreement
between the Christian religion and other religions, especially in the area
of ethics (e.g., the golden rule); that people who profess other religions
are often very nice people, sometimes nicer than some of the Christians you
know. Recognizing these things, isn’t it about time for Christians to give
up on the practice of trying to force their religion on to other people?
Rather, should we not seek to learn from people of other religions rather
than to convert them? While Christ may be our Saviour, he may not be the
Saviour of others. They may have different ways of salvation.
To put it in its most naive form: does it really matter what you believe as
long as you are sincere? “Man looks on the outward appearance; God looks on
the heart. He judges us by the sincerity of our hearts rather than by the
words of our confessions!”
At one extreme, there are those who opt out of the church and have decided
that if no one religion can claim to be absolutely true, then all religions
are false. So let’s just be fellow human beings, of any or no religion, and
let’s join together in making the world a better place for all of us to
live.
For those who remain Christians and who seek to bring a more pluralistic
understanding of faith into the church, the suggestion is made that while
Jesus may be the way of salvation for all men and women, this salvation can
be realized in many different contexts. Thus, Christians are saved by their
faith in Christ. But Muslims, Hindus, Jews, Sikhs, Buddhists, etc. are saved
by their sincere attempt to follow God or the truth within the context of
their religion.
And those who do not have any religious profession at all but who live a
good life, or who are open to the truth, will be saved by the death and
resurrection of Christ even though they will not know anything about Christ
until the life to come.
There are, broadly, three different positions that have been taken on the
subject:
(1) INCLUSIVISM: Jesus is the only way of salvation but this salvation
can be realized within many different contexts, quite apart from an
encounter with the explicit Christian gospel.
(2) EXCLUSIVISM: Jesus is the only way and one needs to hear the good
news and respond personally.
(3) PLURALISM: There are many ways of salvation, maybe 10,000 different
ways!
For the pluralist, all human religions are equally true; each represents a
different historical and cultural response to “ultimate divine reality.” The
different names for God, or ultimate reality, are like the masks worn by the
actors in classical Greek dramas. Each face may look very different, but the
reality behind each is the same.
Or to use the parable of the blind philosophers and the elephant, each
religion represents an aspect of God’s self-revelation. We need to put them
all together to have a complete picture.
The major weakness of the pluralist approach is that of all relativisms,
namely, it claims absolute truth for its own claim that all truth claims are
relative. It also relativizes all truth claims of all religions (not just
Christianity). Pluralism overlooks the radical, and often incompatible,
differences between faiths. While there are similarities between faiths,
there are also significant differences. For example, New Testament concept
of `salvation by grace,’ as a gift of God rather than something that one
earns seems to be quite unique. The major world religions also differ
radically on the nature of sin.
The pluralist approach also renders God abstract and impersonal, since
he/she/it cannot be named, defined or characterized in terms of any of the
great religious traditions. Finally, the pluralistic approach relativizes
and diminishes Jesus, rejecting the classical incarnational Christology of
the church as having anything other than functional value.
It goes without saying that such an approach undercuts the great commission
of Jesus to “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them
in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching
them to observe all that I have commanded you” (Matt 28:19-20).
The inclusivist sees Jesus Christ as central to salvation, but believes that
God has also revealed himself, and, indeed, the essence of the good news, in
other faiths. It is argued that Christ is present, though hidden, in other
faiths, though only in the Christian faith is he fully known.
The inclusivist position focuses on continuity rather than discontinuity
between Christian faith and other faiths — on the half full rather than the
half empty glass of non-Christian religions; or it sees Christianity as the
fulfillment of what is looked for, hidden or being prepared for in other
faiths.
Karl Rahner, perhaps the greatest Roman Catholic theologian of the 20th
century, developed the concept of ‘anonymous Christians,’ men and women who
genuinely respond to god’s grace through non-Christian religions. These
people will be saved by Christ, but through the `sacraments’ of their own
religion.
The greatest weakness in this position is that the Bible teaches that
salvation is not through religion but by `grace through faith.’ Viewing any
religion, even the Christian religion, as a means of salvation, undercuts
the essence of the gospel of Jesus Christ. Religion does not save anybody.
God does! The Bible tells the story of what God has done to save humankind.
Salvation is the achievement of God on our behalf, not the end result of
religious activity on our part.
Salvation is received by turning from sin to reach out and accept God’s
gracious gift of forgiveness and deliverance. Even Christianity as a
religion can keep people from God when it is understood as a means of
gaining favor with God!
This brings us to the exclusivist position. It is important to note that the
word is not being used in a personal, attitudinal, or social sense. It is
not a term of pride, superiority or a desire to exclude anyone from God’s
grace. Rather, the word is used theologically to indicate that ultimate
truth and salvation are to be found exclusively in Christ.
If Jesus Christ is uniquely the truth and the only way of salvation for
humanity, then this excludes the possibility of other faiths being true in
the same way, or being ways of salvation.
There is only one God, the living God who has revealed himself in the Bible.
His ultimate revelation was in the person and work of Jesus, who not only
taught us how to live (ethics) but who was crucified, died, was buried, and
was raised up by God “for us and for our salvation,” as the words of the
Nicene Creed put it.
This is the faith of the New Testament church, and this has been the
conviction of the church down through nearly twenty centuries of history. To
quote the words of the apostle Peter: “There is salvation in no one else,
for there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be
saved.” To quote the apostle Paul: “There is one God, and there is one
mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus….” The words of Jesus
in John’s gospel read: “I am the way, and the truth, and the life; no one
comes to the Father, but by me.”
It has been the conviction that salvation is only through Christ that has
motivated Christians down through the centuries to lay down their lives for
the gospel. It is this conviction that has sustained the missionary movement
of the church for the past two thousand years and continues to sustain it
today.
It is interesting that it is primarily in the established churches of the
West, in North America and Europe, that the pluralist and inclusivist views
are propagated; rarely, in the younger and frequently flourishing churches
of the south and the east. Leaders of the formerly mission churches are
often shocked when they hear church leaders in the West advocating what they
deem to be a denial of what they felt was at the heart of the Christian
faith.
Sadly, some younger church leaders who come to be educated in North America
or Europe are theologically brainwashed by their training in the West and
return home to undercut the work of the very churches they were sent away to
be equipped to serve.
At the heart of the New Testament is the conviction that Jesus is Lord. This
title is given to him more than 300 times in the New Testament!
He is the only Saviour. And he left his disciples with the charge to take
his message of good news to all the world.
This does not mean that there is not a lot of truth in other faiths. Nor
does this mean that we should be unfriendly to our non-Christian neighbors
— quite to the contrary!
Recognizing Jesus as the only way of salvation does not mean that we condemn
anyone to hell. God is the ultimate judge. We can leave the final judgment
in his hands.
But what about those who have not heard the gospel? Can they be saved
without having heard of Jesus?
The proper answer is, I believe, we don’t know. There is nothing in the New
Testament that gives me hope that anyone will be saved apart from responding
to the gospel of Christ, but we can leave that question in God’s hands. He
is ‘just and true in all his ways’ (Rev 15:3).
Our responsibility is not to decide the fate of those who have not heard the
gospel, but, rather, doing all we can to make sure that everyone has the
privilege of learning of Jesus and his love.
_____________________________
*W. Ward Gasque (BA, BD, MTh, PhD) is a member of University Presbyterian
Church of Seattle, WA. He is the President of Pacific Association for
Theological Studies [1] , the New Testament editor for the _New
International Biblical Commentary _(Hendrickson), and the founder of KOINOS,
a grassroots lay study program.
[1] http://www.koinos.org