The One True Universal Faith tagged: , , , ,

The One True Universal Faith

Posted by in Bible & Theology, Church & Missions

In preparation for a seminar in my studies at SEBTS entitled “Soteriology and World Religions,” I have been reading through several assigned texts on the topic of religious pluralism. Though there are several different versions of it, and different thinkers and theologians have approached it from different angles, the basic idea behind religious pluralism is that, at the core, all religions are the same. Though they may differ widely in regard to the specific ceremonies that are performed, the specific doctrines that are taught, and the specific stories that are told to give support to these doctrines, the basic function they serve and the ultimate aim of all of them is the same: they are just different paths for connecting mankind with Ultimate Reality, or some sense or another of the Transcendent—whether you personalize it and call it God, or whether you impersonalize it and call it something else—and for giving people a hope for a better life by means of learning to look beyond themselves and following something akin to the Golden Rule.

As I have been reading these books and thinking through the implications behind them, I have come to the conclusion that a major part of what is at stake hinges on what one believes concerning the divine authority of the Bible. If you believe that the Bible is really and truly the Word of God, in which He Himself has taken the initiative to supernaturally reveal His will to mankind, the pluralistic hypothesis makes little sense. If, however, it merely reflects the thoughts of certain men and women, in a certain time and cultural context, as they have sought to get in touch with Ultimate Reality, it makes much more sense.

For many pluralists, the Bible may well be true, but it is not literally true. It is true in the sense that Aesop’s Fables are true. If, for instance, you start asking whether there was a literal tortoise and a literal hare who literally ran a literal race, you are missing the point altogether. The moral of the story is still the same, and it is a true moral, which serves a helpful purpose for us as humans as we seek to face the challenges that come our way during our pilgrimage on this earth. In the same way, say the pluralists, the Bible is true.

If that’s the way in which we are to understand the authority of the Bible, though, it would make total sense that different people in different cultural settings might just as well come up with different stories to illustrate the same basic universal truths. And, if your story works well for you, then great, no problem. Just don’t tell people who grew up somewhere else with a completely different cultural background that their story doesn’t work just as well for them.

Paul F. Knitter, one of the more radical pluralists, states it this way:

To have a friend, a colleague, or a neighbor who has found meaning according to a religious path that apparently is quite different from Christianity not only impresses but disturbs us. A Zen Buddhist who has found peace through a practice that does not even teach the existence of God, or a Hindu who has discovered “salvation” in the realization that there is no essential difference between her and other persons and a tree—what does this mean for our lives and our beliefs? Such friends, we know, are not religious fanatics. They are normal, happy human beings, getting their jobs done, raising their families as well, perhaps better, then we, and living lives of love, of service, of commitment…

The impact becomes more pressing when we look carefully at what nineteen centuries of Christian missionary activity have actually accomplished. Certainly the achievements are extensive and laudable. Thanks to the blood and sweat of generations of missioners, the Christian church is “planted” and present on all continents and in almost every nation. Also, as Gandhi recognized, the vision and values of the Nazarene, as contained in the Sermon on the Mount, have notably influenced cultures that staunchly refuse to call themselves Christian. But if we consider the goal of Christian missions to be conversion, the picture becomes less impressive, in fact quite disheartening. After two thousand years of missionary labors, Christians number only about 31 percent of the world population…

We are confronted with further sobering reflections when we consider just who has been and is being converted to Christianity: “Superstitious folk religions and religious decadence are essentially what fell before Christianity’s remarkable advance in the Mediterranean and European worlds when the faith staked its claim to what is now the seat of Christian cultural tradition. It is this kind of field that is always whitest for the Christian harvest.”¹ Admitting the ethnocentric overtones in dubbing any religion “superstitious,” we have to face the facts of the history of Christian missions: the vast majority of converts have come from polytheistic or animistic religions or from religions that had already lost their personal hold on the hearts of their peoples.²

Personally, I do not agree with Knitter that the validity of the Christian faith rises or falls on the effectiveness of Christian missions in its endeavor to penetrate all the different cultures and make disciples of all the people groups of the earth. The gospel stands on its own two feet. It is true because the God who revealed it to us is the one true God, and Jesus is the one and only Son of God who died on the cross to take away the sins, not only of the Jews, but of all the world.

As Christians, we may well have failed to a large degree in our obedience to the Great Commission. However, if we truly believe the Word of God, we believe that it is God’s will for the gospel to take root among all the nations of the earth, and that, at the final day, there will be a multitude gathered “from every nation, tribe, people and language, standing before the throne and before the Lamb” (Rev. 7: 9). While we do not believe in universalism (in the sense that, in the end, everyone will be saved), we do believe in a faith that is universally valid and binding on people from all ethnic backgrounds and cultures.

According to Knitter, and other pluralists, Christianity is a religion of the West. A major chunk of 2,000 years of church history has taken place on Western soil. Along the way, it has drunk deeply from the well of Western culture and has also left its indelible mark on Western society. It has been, by and large, Western missionaries who have sought to introduce Christianity to the rest of the world.

But, if you take the view that true Christianity is, first and foremost, a faith rooted in Jesus Himself, and in the Bible, and not so much in 2,000 years of historical accretions and culturally-influenced traditions, I believe it can successfully be argued that the faith we embrace is as much a Middle-Eastern religion as it is a Western one. After all, Jesus and the vast majority of the writers of the Bible were Jews, not Europeans or Americans.

Now, it is true that the Holy Spirit Himself, by way of a vision of a man from Macedonia, specifically led Paul to the West, and that, as a result of that turn of events, the gospel took root in the West, and influenced Western culture, and, to a large degree, Christendom itself was influenced by Western culture. None of this is particularly surprising, though, seeing as how the same Bible upon which we base our faith tells us that God sovereignly chose Abraham—and subsequently, his descendants—from among all the people on earth as the ones He would bless, and, more importantly still, the ones through whom He would bless all the nations of the earth.

However, to the degree we, as Christians, are content to see our faith as merely a Western religion, I think that, in certain aspects, the accusation that Knitter and the pluralists throw at us as conservative evangelical exclusivists sticks. It is an apologetic necessity to rightly divide between our cultural preferences and our faith. If the faith we believe is not true for people in any culture and any time, then it is not ultimately and exclusively true for us either. It is little better than one more tribal religion that other people groups use to validate their own cultural values and prop up the prosperity of their own society and the continuance of their own traditions.

What does this mean for us as American Christians today?

I think it means, first of all, we need to examine our own traditions and practices, and ask ourselves how much of what we do is more a reflection of our culture than it is of the Bible we profess as our supreme guide of faith and practice. We need to ask ourselves to what degree our religion is a syncretistic blend of biblical Christianity and American civil religion.

Next, I think it means we need to be increasingly conscious of our responsibility to play our due part in the fulfillment of the Great Commission. If our faith is truly a universal faith, then it must reach and take root among all the cultures and people groups of the world. And, though this is ultimately the responsibility of the Lord of the Harvest, He has called and appointed each one of us to play our respective roles as His coworkers in the gathering of the Harvest.

Next, I think it means we also need to be increasingly conscious of the fact that the fulfillment of the Great Commission is not our responsibility alone. It is the responsibility of the whole church around the world. We need to do all we can not only to go into all the world, but also to help our brothers and sisters from other lands to go into all the world and preach the gospel. The Great Commission must come full circle. And, in many ways, today (contrary to what Knitter claimed back in 1985 when he wrote his book), it is doing just that in spectacular, unprecedented ways (read, for example, The Church is Bigger than You Think, by Patrick Johnstone; and The Next Christendom, and The New Faces of Christianity, by Philip Jenkins).

But it also means we need to do the best job possible as American Christians to see to it that the Christianity we export to the rest of the world is not, at the core, a Western religion.

This, however, is a whole lot harder than what it might seem. After all, we are what we are, and we are Westerners. It would be disingenuous for us to try to somehow extricate our culture and socio-political history from our persona and be some type of culturally neutral automatons. And, while pioneers of missionary contextualization such as J. Hudson Taylor were greatly used by God as catalysts for significant breakthroughs in missionary advance, the history of missions is also littered with the epithets of those who took “going native” to neurotic extremes and even caused the locals with whom they tried so hard to identify to notice there was something strange and unnatural about them.

Having said that, I think, as missionaries and supporters of the missionary enterprise, we must ask ourselves some hard questions about the way we go about our work. Will the platforms we use to introduce the gospel in our host culture ultimately lead to a local expression of Christianity that will be open to the accusation of being a Western import? Or will they lead to a culturally indigenous Christianity?

As outsiders in a new culture, we look for connecting points—something in our past, some skill we bring to the table, some resource or novelty that will raise the interest of the people around us, and gather a crowd who we hope will also respond positively to the gospel message we attach to it. On occasions, these connecting points have a specific tie-in to our American background. This is fine and well, up to a point. If we are to gain people’s ears and their hearts, we must first establish authentic relationships. And, if we are going to establish authentic relationships, we must not hide who we really are. We should not put up a false façade.

But we must do our best, at the same time, to build bridges with the people we are seeking to win. We must seek to also understand their culture and appreciate them for who they are. And, we must be deeply conscious of the fact that, in the long run, the gospel is going to make a much deeper inroads into the culture, and we are going to make many more authentic, indigenous disciples of the Lord Jesus, if, early on, we can transfer the primary responsibility for evangelism and disciple-making over to cultural insiders.

Considered from this perspective, there are certain activities that may work well at attracting a crowd, and may give us an initial sense of accomplishment, but which, in the long run, will prove counterproductive in regard to our end goal of a truly indigenous church—a church that is capable of bearing witness to the fact the faith of the Bible is not a Western religion, only valid for those in the West and those on the cultural fringe who may, for whatever reason, be attracted to foreign ideas.

It may mean intentionally choosing not to be out front, and being content to remain behind the scenes. Instead of preaching to multitudes, it may mean pouring our time and effort into discipling and equipping a few choice indigenous believers and helping them to be effective at reaching their fellow countrymen.

In any case, whether we do our job well as Great Commission Christians or not, the gospel is still true. And it is not just true like Aesop’s fables are true. “It is the power of God that brings salvation to everyone who believes: first to the Jew, then to the Gentile (that is, to all the other people groups of the earth)” (Rom. 1:16). But it is still our responsibility to see to it that the gospel we preach, and the methods we use to preach it, effectively communicate the idea that it is not just a Western religion. It is the one true universal faith.

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¹Citing Burlan A. Sizemore, Jr., “Christian Faith in a Pluralistic World,” Journal of Ecumenical Studies 13 (1976) 411.

²Paul F. Knitter, No Other Name? (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 1985), pp. 3–4.