This text was written as one of a twin. The second chapter, on mission and the Jewish-Christian particularity, was indeed published and is chapter two of this work: https://www.woolf.cam.ac.uk/assets/file-downloads/Jews-and-Christians-Perspectives-on-Mission.pdf
I think it (the above) is one of the better things that I have written (from a low base, you may say).
This chapter, on Christian mission more broadly, as a point of initial orientation, was to be part of a web version of the printed document. It did not see the light of even-virtual day. So, here it is!
Contents
I think it (the above) is one of the better things that I have written (from a low base, you may say).
This chapter, on Christian mission more broadly, as a point of initial orientation, was to be part of a web version of the printed document. It did not see the light of even-virtual day. So, here it is!
Contents
Part One: Christian
Mission
A. Introduction
B. Christian Theologies of Mission
i.
Kraemer and ‘Biblical Realism’
ii.
Rahner and ‘Anonymous Christians’
iii.
Donovan and ‘Christianity Rediscovered’
iv.
The ‘Pluralist’ Rejection of ‘Exclusivist’ and ‘Inclusivist’
Missionising
v.
Beyond the Threefold Paradigm?
C.
The Way Ahead?
A.
Introduction
Now the
eleven disciples went to Galilee, to the mountain to which Jesus had directed
them. When they saw him, they worshiped
him; but some doubted. And Jesus came
and said to them, ‘All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to
me. 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, and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you.
And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.’ (Matthew 28.16-20)
Christian mission is
unquestionably a difficult word for many, including many Christians. Such will
think of the Great Commission (above), and imagine a straight line to the
conviction of Cyprian (d. 258), extra ecclesiam nulla salus (‘outside
the Church there is no salvation’), and thence to the European/Western
‘missionaries’, who were wed to colonial expansion and imperialism. Christian
mission is thus seen as the ideology of Christians’ arrogance, coercion and/or
manipulation.
At the outset, then, it is
important to note another story, of mission as a positive word, even if (if!)
it be a minority report. For Christians, the term can stand for acts of
selfless service, for love of neighbour, and a refusal to be an inward-looking
holy huddle. ‘Non-Christians’ on the receiving end of explicit Christian
‘missions’ at least sometimes speak of them warmly, as the means through which
healthcare, education and more were provided. Indeed, it is not unheard-of for the
‘missionised’ to find that exposure to Christian claims and beauty deepen their
own faith, other than Christian though it remain.
There has, then, long been an
understanding within the churches of ‘mission’ as all that we do to look
outwards, for others. It is in this sense that the Church of England is
currently urged to become a ‘mission-shaped church’.[1] Even more
broadly, mission can mean to live purposeful Christian lives. The sense of
mission as self-aware purpose also resonates in the secular world. Even if
‘mission statements’ are not quite as central in the corporate world as once
they were, businesses are at least as likely to have them as is any religious
organisation. For many, it seems, mission can be experienced as a neutral -
rather than an unduly emotionally charged - word.
There is a sense in which the
Church is constitutionally bound to be ‘missionary’, which is easily but
wrongly overlooked: in Christian understanding, no one is born (or is ‘by
nature’) a Christian. In this, Christianity differs from some other faiths. Not
only in Judaism, but also in Hinduism and Parseeism, for example, one is
(normally) born into the faith community. Initiation rites within these faiths
can consequently be seen simply in terms of pastoral ministry to existing
members. But in Christianity, the rite of initiation (overwhelmingly likely to
be baptism) is understood to mean becoming a Christian. Thus all preparations
for such initiations are necessarily ‘mission’, offered to a non-Christian
invitee, even if the candidate is born under a crucifix to Christian saints.
In any event, the Great
Commission (like every other Bible passage) does not come to us as a
self-interpreting text, and Christians must work to find their own best
translation and understanding. For example, ‘all nations’ is one translation of
the Greek ‘panta ta ethne’, but a more natural one might be ‘all the
peoples’, i.e. all the ethnic groups you meet, and not just the Jews, who were
the proper focus of Jesus’ earthly ministry.[2]
Here is outreach, yes, but not necessarily global imperialism. Overall, a
plausible paraphrase is ‘Go and give teaching to all the peoples you meet, and
baptise from among them’.[3] Even extra
ecclesiam nulla salus might mean something much more generous than seems to
be the case. At its broadest, it has been interpreted as ‘wherever there is
salvation, there the Church already is (and the institutional body must in time
catch up)’.[4] Now, in no
sense whatsoever is the claim made here that these interpretations have been proved.
The purpose is simply to draw attention to the fact that we are dealing with
matters no less subtle and nuanced than the finer points of (say)
Christological or Trinitarian theology.
The New Testament presents a
collage on Christian mission (though both terms may be judged anachronistic).
Mission is shown to be about vulnerability, given Jesus’ injunction to his own
missionaries to ‘carry no purse, no bag no sandals’.[5] Mission takes
into account what can and cannot be ‘heard’ by the other; it is unafraid of
silence when speech would simply not work. This is shown supremely in the
‘messianic secret’, Jesus’ demand that others say nothing about his work, most
famously in Mark, though found elsewhere too.[6] Mission
also takes the forms of healing and restoration, at least as much as teaching.[7] It is about
discerning where the Spirit already is active in the wider world. The paradigm
here must be the conversion of Cornelius;[8] this might
as readily be called the conversion of Peter - to a broader definition of what
the household of faith is.
However, it cannot be gainsaid
that New Testament mission involves an all-important invitation. There is a note
of krisis – of a call to a definitive decision - in Jesus’ encounters in
the synoptic gospels.[9] There are
the all-transforming ‘I am’ statements in John.[10] Within the
greater mission, then, there is mission as invitation. I will call this ‘invitational
mission’. Even the good news to be thus shared is however to be transmitted appropriately.
This is perhaps supremely spelled out in 1 Peter 3.15b-16a:
Always be
ready to make your defence to anyone who demands from you an accounting for the
hope that is in you; yet do it with gentleness [praütes] and reverence [phobos].
Keep your conscience clear…
It can be good to remember that
the Christian message is one of hope. In a world where many, on good grounds,
struggle to find even hope-against-hope, some will be grateful to hear such a
message, even if they ultimately do not accept it.
Nevertheless, we start where we
are. Christian missions have often been complicit in all manner of manipulative
and aggressive acts. For some Jews in particular, it is too trivial a judgement
to admit that Christian mission can be bullying. Rather, it is a practice which
readily descends into evil. Some have called it an attempt at spiritual genocide,
not unrelated to the Nazi attempt at physical extermination:
Would those
who preach conversion for all Jews really want a world Judenrein [sic], a world
free of Jews?... After the Holocaust, can any well-meaning Christian look into
my eyes and make that claim, the call for a kind of ‘spiritual final solution’?[11]
This is the claim at its
starkest. Christians need to hear it before they react defensively. Once they
have heard the case in full, Christians might yet offer more than one response.
There is unquestionably a need for repentance (a change of heart, metanoia),
for historical and concrete sins. This repentance will in itself make the real-life
Church a different thing. Alongside this, Christians will need to consider the
case for and against, inter alia, the uniqueness of Judaism (whether
Christians believe it is in God’s eyes sui generis); the enduring nature
of the biblical covenant(s) preceding Christ; the Messianic difference Jesus
Christ makes; the nature of the apparent commonalities between Judaism and
Christianity. One’s position on each of these will shape one’s understanding of
how Christian mission and Judaism/Israel should interact. These will be
discussed in the second half of this paper.
First there follows a survey of
some recent thinking on:
· some
principal theologians who have considered mission
·
their critics
· some
reflections on the way ahead.
Not all these writers would consider
their subject to be mission(s). Yet this material is relevant. Much of what
comes under the head of ‘Christian theology of religion’ is at heart a critique
of the very idea of invitational-missionary approaches to those of other
faiths, even if this criticism is sometimes implicit rather than explicit. I
make no pretence that this overview is comprehensive, but hope that those
thinkers included offer a valuable illustration of the breadth and depth of
thinking on and around mission and missions.
It must not be assumed that
Christian history is replete with self-defining ‘missionaries’ who, with
others, reflected on ‘mission’ or ‘the missions’. Such self-aware reflection on
self-conscious activity is actually rare. Bluntly, that ‘mission’ means
‘Christian attempts to make others change their religious allegiance to
Christianity’ is itself a relatively new idea in Christian discourse. As Bosch
suggested:
Until the
sixteenth century the term was used exclusively with reference to the doctrine
of the Trinity, that is, of the sending of the Son by the Father and of the
Holy Spirit by the Father and the Son. The Jesuits were the first to use it in
terms of the spread of the Christian faith among people (including Protestants)
who were not members of the Catholic Church…[12]
Thus the modern insistence that
the real mission is the missio Dei - God’s own sending of Son and Spirit
into the world out of love and divine cherishing - actually recaptures the
original locus of the word. However, that divine missio has of course
always led to human ‘movement out’, towards and for others, of one form or
another, from Abraham’s call to ‘go’ from his native land,[13] to the
apostolic commission. [14] An apostle
is, after all, ‘one sent out’.
We can reorient ourselves by
keeping in mind the breadth of the Anglican Communion’s Five Marks of Mission:
To
proclaim the Good News of the Kingdom
To
teach, baptise and nurture new believers
To
respond to human need by loving service
To
seek to transform unjust structures of society
To
strive to safeguard the integrity of creation and sustain and renew the life of
the earth.[15]
Here
is confirmation that, while mission can never be reduced to the invitation to
others to join (and thereby challenge and renew) the Church, neither can this
element be omitted. It is an integral part. That said, the efforts to remove
all coercion and manipulation from that invitation (however ‘successful’ they
had been) may well make authentic invitational mission look and feel like
something radically different from ‘mission’ as conventionally understood.
B.
Christian Theologies of Mission
i.
Kraemer and ‘Biblical Realism’
Hendrik Kraemer, influenced by
Karl Barth and himself hugely influential within the WCC, articulated a version
of ‘biblical realism’.[16]
This reflected his conviction that in Christ there comes the definitive – the
all-defining – revelation from God, which consists not of useful advice to make
people better, but of the divine self-communication.[17] In this
light, all human striving after God, though it be as beautiful and noble as
anything human, is exposed as inadequate. It is a form of self-justification,
and ultimately rebellion against God, a desire to meet God on one’s own terms,
and even to be God.
God’s
revelation in Christ, according to Biblical realism, is therefore not only the
revelation of God, but also of man. Man is revealed as a being who in his
deepest instincts and desires wants to be god.[18]
To be stressed is that this is a
theological judgement, not a phenomenological one. As a missionary thinker,
Kraemer was involved in teaching the other faiths to Christians, and sought to
be scrupulous in describing them such that their own adherents would recognise
the account. This position requires no polemics. Indeed, the aspect of other
faiths which is noble and beautiful is readily acknowledged, and not as
something freakish. It implies God’s loving involvement in one way or another.[19]
Equally worthy of stress is that
it is the Revelation in Christ (or Christ as Revelation) which relativises and
judges all religions. Christianity and the Church, as the human bodies with
which humans interact, are here among the judged, never the judge.[20]
While the Church must be humble,
and serve the world, its constitution is such that this affects how, not
whether it seeks to share its message. Invitational mission is the Church’s
life-blood, and it is as radical and as urgent a call as can be made:
the great
religions, at their most profound and in the very fundamentals of their
message, fail to give any adequate account of the sheer contrariety, the utter
mysteriousness, of man, his greatness and his wretchedness, his reaching out
towards the highest and his satanic devilishness, his place half-way between
angel and ape; and they fail because they never give any real weight to the one
basic fact which the Bible calls ‘sin’…
surrendering
to Jesus Christ means in effect making a break with one’s own past, religiously
speaking, however impressive that past may be and often is; and the Christian
Church is in duty bound to require this break, because one must openly confess
Him.
This is one
way of expressing the right and duty of Mission; for put in that way, it is
seen to go much deeper than all the talk – natural and inevitable enough in a
constitutional and democratic state – about the liberty of every man, within
the bounds of law and order, to utter and propagate such (religious) beliefs as
he may hold.[21]
Those who cannot entertain the
idea of Revelation, with its implication that the divine brings a particular
message within human history, are likely to find this whole approach arrogant
and arbitrary. It must seem a form of special pleading. Of all the forms of
life in the world, the one which comes with divine backing just happens to be
my own! However, those who do look for or trust in Revelation (wherever they
believe it may be found) might be able to feel the force of this argument, even
as they criticise it. Naturally, not all claims to Revelation actually claim
that Revelation judges all human striving after God as rebellion. In
particular, Jewish understandings certainly do not. Nevertheless, there is
logic to the argument that, if God speaks, God must be free to define the
content of that speech, and must be free to ‘overturn the tables’. It is
possible to believe that God has done so in Christ, and still (or therefore) be
a humble Christian, open to all.
ii.
Rahner and ‘Anonymous Christians’
Rahner is not an easy theologian.
The premises on which he builds his theology of other religions involve complex
understandings of nature, grace, and the human longing and capacity for
transcendence, in short: a whole theological anthropology. Yet it might be
suggested – controversially – that the statements spelled out in his seminal
essay, ‘Christianity and the Non-Christian Religions’, can be detached from his
greater networks of thought. Certainly, for these purposes, they shall be. The
paper has four theses:
Christianity
understands itself as the absolute religion, intended for all men, which cannot
recognize any other religion beside itself as of equal right… Christianity is
God’s own interpretation in his Word of this relationship of God to man founded
in Christ by God himself.[22]
Here is as robust a defence of
Christian mission as urgent invitation as it is possible to imagine. But the
next sentence is crucial:
And so
Christianity can recognize itself as the true and lawful religion for all men only
where and when it enters with existential power and demanding force into the
realm of another religion…[23]
There follows an insistence that
Christianity has its own prehistory. So it has not always been this way,
concretely and explicitly. And the question is raised whether the emergence of
Christianity as the ‘absolute’ religion, the religion of God’s own making in
history, happens for all people at the same time. This is raised with great
caution, but it is hard to see how it could be answered affirmatively with
confidence. What of those who have never heard the name of Jesus? Or those who
hear it mixed up with violence or other sins, or merely from people acting out
well-intentioned wrong-headedness? In short, must it not be said that the
‘Pentecost moment’, when the absoluteness of Christianity becomes an
existential reality, upon which one’s salvation depends, can and does happen at
different times for different people? Once that is allowed, can it be
denied that this moment’s presence or absence is a mystery within each human
heart, as such (normally) hidden from even the Church’s wisest saint? The
second thesis picks this up:
Until the
moment when the gospel really enters into the historical situation of an
individual, a non-Christian religion (even outside the Mosaic religion) does
not merely contain elements of a natural knowledge of God, elements, moreover,
mixed up with human depravity which is the result of original sin and later
aberrations. It contains also supernatural elements arising out of the grace
which is given to men as a gratuitous gift on account of Christ. For this
reason a non-Christian religion can be recognized as a lawful [legitim]
religion (although only in different degrees) without thereby denying the error
and depravity contained in it.[24]
This lengthier quotation brings
out the caution with which Rahner moves (some time before the Second Vatican
Council and its new/renewed ecclesiology). He is far from suggesting that
missionary work should be ended, or that the salvation of non-Christians is
everywhere guaranteed, as some have later caricatured his position. Instead he
is concerned to strengthen missionary work through putting it on a truer
footing. Rahner is clear that his reasoning is based on Christian conviction
concerning the nature of God, who wills all to be saved. Thus God must offer
grace to all (though it might be rejected), in the concrete setting in which
they find themselves (rather than through communicating with some putative
disembodied soul).
The third thesis:
If the
second thesis is correct, then Christianity does not simply confront the member
of an extra-Christian religion as a mere non-Christian but as someone who can
and must already be regarded in this or that respect as an anonymous Christian.[25]
God who graciously wills all
people to be saved is the God who communicates the divine self in Christ.
Therefore all grace is in Christ, and all graced human beings are – at least to
the extent that they make grace their own – in Christ. This is not an
aggressive assimilation of the other into the explicit Church against their
will. Nowhere does Rahner recommend addressing others as ‘anonymous
Christians’. Crucially, if the other is already graced, they may have a
particular truth the self-defining Christian most needs to hear at some point
in their pilgrimage.
The fourth thesis:
It is
possibly too much to hope, on the one hand, that the religious pluralism which
exists in the concrete situation of Christians will disappear in the
foreseeable future. On the other hand, it is nevertheless absolutely
permissible for the Christian himself to interpret this non-Christianity as
Christianity of an anonymous kind which he does always still go out to meet as
a missionary, seeing it as a world which is to be brought to the explicit
consciousness of what already belongs to it as a divine offer or already
pertains to it also over and above this as a divine gift of grace accepted unreflectedly
and implicitly.[26]
Here we see Rahner’s missionary
focus explicitly. One does not have to share his apparent wistful ‘hope’ that
religious plurality might disappear, to understand his argument that, if the
first three theses are the case, then Christian mission works to make explicit
what is implicit, that people might live out God’s grace with more awareness,
and in more embodied ways.
Many criticisms are possible. In
some ways, Rahner’s confidence about the absoluteness of Christianity needs qualification,
precisely from Kraemer’s insistence that this is true only as long as the
Church judges itself first, without any indulgence or favouritism. And Rahner’s
caution about affirming other forms of holiness looks dated in the light of the
Second Vatican Council’s own forthright beginning to Nostra Aetate:
The Catholic
Church rejects nothing of what is true and holy in these religions. She has a
high regard for the manner of life and conduct, the precepts and doctrines
which, although differing in many ways from her own teaching, nevertheless
often reflect a ray of truth which enlightens all men.[27]
It has also often been said that
Rahner is frustratingly ambiguous about the role which non-Christian religion
plays in conveying the grace of which he speaks: might the religion be constitutive
of grace, or is it merely the circumstance where God’s grace, unseen,
enters in?[28]
All criticism notwithstanding,
Rahner’s genius here is to come alongside the ecclesiocentric conservative, and
show them how, through taking seriously the reality of who we all are as
concrete and historical beings, they must think of persons of other faiths as
(at least potentially) already partners with God, however different and
‘un-Christian’ they seem to be.
iii.
Donovan and ‘Christianity Rediscovered’
One Roman Catholic missionary who
has had a huge impact on missionary thinking, and who might plausibly be called
a disciple of Kraemer or Rahner, is the American Vincent Donovan. His
book Christianity Rediscovered[29]
is a seminal work. Drawing on his many years as a missionary among the Masai of
Tanzania, it serves as a personal apologia for the missionary approach to which
he felt himself powerfully called.
Donovan’s argument is that
missionary work which identifies itself with schooling, healthcare and the
building up of ecclesial and other infrastructures is misplaced. Such work is
valuable as the ongoing (never ending) pastoral work of the Church but is
properly the work of the local Church rather than some missionary subsidiary.[30]
Missionary work should rather be the telling of the gospel, in a way which
makes sense to the host culture, and the offer to accept it, or reject it, to
be baptised, or not. Missionary work is thus ‘finishable’.[31]
All that follows that moment of choosing (if it happens – it may not) is the
vocation of the now-baptised.
Donovan’s reputation is based on
his willingness to think through what this might mean in terms of re-imagining
baptism, eucharist, ministry, and relations with the wider Church. Again and again,
he insists that things are different with the Masai, who think communally,
rather than as individuals, or as institutions. He is also clear-eyed that this
is a lonely call:
a missionary
is essentially a social martyr, cut off from his roots, his stock, his
blood, his land, his background, his culture. He is destined to walk forever a
stranger in a strange land.[32]
In criticism, it might be said
that Donovan has some naivety about the communal relations of the Masai. We
today would not calmly record, as he does, that the Masai ‘circumcise’ their
girls as well as their boys, for example.[33]
He may also be accused of being too sanguine about the ease with which the
missionary can uncouple the pure gospel message from its ‘accretions’ within
Jewish, and then Hellenistic/Roman/European settings, as if there were an
evident evangelical essence. Yet there is no doubt that here was a sincere
effort to be and think as a missionary, to speak boldly, but without
aggression, or the offer of any favours, and to be excited by envisioning a
radically new Church, over which the missionary was to have no control.
iv. The ‘Pluralist’ Rejection
of ‘Exclusivist’ and ‘Inclusivist’ Missionising
Many – both Christians and others
– will be appalled by all of the above examples of ‘missionary thinking’,
however carefully qualified. Indeed, many have rejected such positions, seeing
them as further evidence of continued Christian presumption, and ‘arbitrary superiority-by-definition’.[34] The most
obvious criticism within this school has come from self-defining ‘pluralists’.
Given that ‘pluralism’ is a term also used to describe the simple fact of
religious plurality on the ground (whether seen as good, bad or indifferent),
this term needs a little explaining.
Pluralism is embedded in a
threefold classification of approaches to other faiths, the other categories
being ‘exclusivism’ and ‘inclusivism’. Its origins are attributed to Alan Race,
whose sympathies were, and still are pluralist.[35] Sometimes the terms are used with great precision,
more often not. At its broadest the typology might be presented thus:
· exclusivism
is the oppositional, if not aggressive option, the belief that only one’s own
group has the relevant religious quality, whatever it is;
· inclusivism
is the superior if not patronising option, the belief that one’s own group has
the religious quality normatively or fully, but others may have it derivatively
or partially;
· pluralism is
the belief that the religious quality is available to one’s own and other
groups, in ways which deny any group any advantage, normativeness or
exclusivity.
Set out thus by pluralists,
pluralism is situated as the climactic third of three, the truly radical
option. As inclusivism is an ‘advance’ on exclusivism, so pluralism ‘advances’
further still, and completes the process. While here the claim is made that the
threefold paradigm, inasmuch as it has merit, can apply to any supposed
religious ‘good’, in most Christian writing, the attitudes have related to (a)
truth or (b) salvation or (c) both. Much confusion has been caused by a lack of
clarity about which applies.
A famous articulation of this
pluralism is Hick’s call for a ‘Copernican revolution’:
Now the
Copernican revolution in astronomy consisted in a transformation in the way in which men understood the universe
and their own location within it… the needed Copernican revolution in theology
involves an equally radical transformation… a shift from the dogma that
Christianity is at the centre to the realisation that his is God who is
at the centre, and that all the religions of mankind, including our own, serve
and revolve around him.[36]
Significantly, Hick’s revolution
has itself revolved. He soon recognised that this ‘theocentrism’ privileged
theistic over non-theistic religion. So he comes to propose an utterly
transcendent Real, a noumenon in Kantian terms, as the focus of the world
faiths.[37]
Since this Real an sich is eternally unknown and unknowable in itself,
within human communities of faith the operational centre of our respective
orbits becomes salvation. Salvation is here understood as a move from egoism or
self-centredness to altruism or self-transcendence.[38]
Thus Hick’s mature pluralism is appropriately also called soteriocentrism.
Paul Knitter is in many ways a
fellow pluralist according to this typology. Yet for him, an orientation
towards altruism is an inadequate way of describing the salvation around which
all the faiths revolve, or may revolve. His call is for a ‘globally
responsible, correlational dialogue of religions’, which he expands as:
urging that
religious persons seek to understand and speak with each other on the basis of
a common commitment to human and ecological well-being. Global responsibility
therefore includes the notion of liberation intended by traditional liberation
theologies but goes beyond it in seeking not just social justice but eco-human
justice and well-being; it does so aware that such a project, in order truly to
attend to the needs of all the globe, must be an effort by the entire globe and
all its nations and religions.[39]
On the one hand, ‘Christians with
a correlational mentality hold that at the outset of dialogue every partner in
the conversation should recognize the equal rights within the dialogue
of all religious believers’.[40] On the
other hand, it is not that all world-views are themselves equal. A
non-liberationist mentality – however widely held – must be resisted:
I have to
speak with and learn from both the voice of the religious Other and of the
suffering Other. If this isn’t possible… then I have to make a choice… I would
have to abandon dialogue and pursue justice and the alleviation of suffering.[41]
With Hick and Knitter as
exemplary proponents of pluralism, it is not hard to deduce what mission within
the pluralist frame must be. It is work for the common good and/or a plea for
right spiritual disposition (not necessarily religious but not anti-religious).
At least between recognised faiths, all invitational mission is
redundant, a waste of time, and probably deeply harmful.[42]
As with Kraemer, Rahner and
Donovan, so with the pluralists, substantial criticism is possible. While many
have felt it an attractive idea to hold that the world faiths are variants on
the same theme, philosophically articulating how this is the case has proved
hard. Hick has often been criticised for inconsistency in the way his argument
unfolds.[43]
Moreover, since Hick’s pluralism is very clear in its call to relativise the
particular claims of each world faith (not only Christianity),[44] it has been
held to drain world faiths of their purpose and energy (whether or not these
are called ‘mission’), in the name of the lowest common denominator.
v. Beyond the Threefold
Paradigm?
The threefold paradigm itself has
been much criticised. As it has been widely used, even by its critics, it is
unlikely to be nonsense. Indeed, Kraemer, Rahner and Hick do offer different
positions. However, Kraemer and Rahner are not so far apart as the polarisation
of ‘exclusivism’ and ‘inclusivism’ would imply. The term ‘exclusivism’ strikes
a polemical tone. In fact, Kraemer nowhere claims to know that non-Christians
are ‘excluded’ from heaven; he (like many who are given this label) is simply agnostic
on this point. More importantly, pluralism must demonstrate (and not simply repeat,
as if it is self-evidently the case) that pluralism is an ‘advance’ on
inclusivism, as ‘inclusivism’ is an advance on ‘exclusivism’. Only then would
it deserve its current nomenclature and its position as the climax. This
pluralists tend to struggle to demonstrate. With regard to truth, they are
either exclusivist or inclusivist. There is no suggestion that those whose
propositions directly contradict their own are somehow ‘as true’ or accurate as
they. With regard to salvation, they are
inclusivist. They do believe that people with wrong or imperfect beliefs can achieve
salvation (however understood). But so does the inclusivist Rahner. Thus ‘pluralism’
may in fact be a variation on ‘inclusivism’. It is true that it is, or aspires
to be a generic rather than tradition-specific inclusivism. But this may be a
variation on a theme, rather than the definitive radical advance.
In response to criticisms, one
pluralist, Perry Schmidt-Leukel has insisted that the classification is
coherent, indeed exhaustive.[45]
Fourth options or confounding claims, he argues, are not logically possible.
Yet there are frequently attempted. One striking challenge is that of S. Mark
Heim. Heim[46]
has emphasised that the threefold classification risks blindly assuming that
all faiths are cultural variants of the same thing. More particularly, it
assumed they all have the same goal. This, he suggests, is manifestly not the
case. Thus the possibility exists that there are multiple religious ends, and
each faith offers the means to their respective end, to those who commit
sincerely to it.[47]
This does not mean, for Heim, that each faith is an island. Rather the
respective ends are all held together in the dialogue and interrelationality
which is the Holy Trinity.[48]
Depending on
which item in the picture is emphasised, Heim can thus be seen as an
exclusivist, inclusivist or pluralist. He himself is not unhappy with the
inclusivist label,[49]
and so it might be said that the paradigm is nuanced and not superseded.
Nevertheless, here is a serious challenge to what might be called the
Enlightenment obsession with classification, which can see humanity’s
infinitely diverse religiosity only as a number of species within one genus.
C. The
Way Ahead?
What is the most authentic
manifestation of Christian mission in our days, where religious plurality is
embedded in our consciousness and reality? This question will abide. I ask
forgiveness for a little parochialism, in that I happen to believe that two of
the more creative contributions related to these themes come from my own
Church, the Church of England.
In 2010 Archbishop Rowan Williams
made a speech in Guildford, as a defence of the doctrine of the finality of
Christ.[50] He
recognised that the doctrine faces three objections, questioning its morality
(does it not restrict the putative benefits of recognising the finality of
Christ to Christians, apparently making God capricious?), its politics (is it
not too close to colonialism or the colonial mindset?) and its philosophical
coherence (is it not an arbitrary claim that one’s own truth is the one that is
not local?). He notes the exclusive-sounding sayings of Bible and tradition, most
(in)famously Jesus’ claim in John to be the way, the truth and the life.[51]
He argues that, whatever they mean, it is not:
‘unless you
hold the following propositions to be true there is not life in you’. What it does
say is, ‘without a vital relationship with Jesus Christ who is the word of
God made flesh, you will not become what you were made to be. You will not live
into the fullness of your human destiny.’… I am very content to let God be the
judge of how anyone outside the visible family of faith is related to Jesus or
is turned towards the Father.
What Williams helpfully
foregrounds is Christian anthropology. He presents the case that Christians
must hold to some understanding of the uniqueness and finality of Christ,
however inclusively understood, because of its doctrine of hope. Christianity
is a yearning and working for a consummation that truly is the consummation of
all human beings’ hopes and the transfiguration of all suffering:
at the heart
of this is the question… ‘do we believe that ultimately, what is good for human
beings is somehow coherent and convergent? Are human beings so different that
what is right for one to grow into is not right for another? Because that, I
think, is one of the difficult consequences of letting go of a doctrine of
finality or uniqueness – the idea that it’s right for some parts of the human
world to think of their destiny as becoming sons and daughters of God, but,
elsewhere in the world, that’s neither here nor there, as there will be another
definition of what constitutes full humanity. I think we ought to be a bit
uncomfortable about that.
If I may summarise, the idea that
Judaism, Christianity and other faiths may be working to different, eternally parallel
ends is just too religious, or too ideas-bound. Certainly in the case of
Christianity and Judaism, our liturgies look forward to a time when all shall
be well, this wellbeing itself constituting revelation of and intimacy with God
for all who will it.[52] The concern is real humanity, and not
ultimately the battle of ideas.
Also with the development within
the Church of England of the Presence and Engagement programme, the
Church has been called, through its General Synod, to reflect on the uniqueness
of Christ in its multifaith context. This has led to the publication of the
document, Sharing the Gospel of Salvation.[53] To this
writer, some of its paragraphs strike a defensive tone. It seems that the
authors have an urgent need to stress (rightly) that interfaith relations in no
sense require one to be committed to the pluralist frame of a Hick or Knitter.
Yet also within this text, there are what are for our purposes especially intriguing
references to John Milbank and Stanley Hauerwas.[54] The
paragraphs come under the telling heading ‘The Christian Narrative’. A lengthy
quotation is required:
72. For
Milbank, the Christian story is, quite simply, the most attractive account of
the world and the human condition. Theology is not an adjunct to the social
sciences – on the contrary, Christian theology is the prism through which the
social sciences make the most sense. The task of Christians is not to persuade
others of the truth of the gospel story through propositional argument (which,
he claims, always carries undertones of violence) but to ‘out narrate’ other,
rival and less attractive narratives. Christians must so live out their faith,
in communities which embody the gospel (especially in practices of worship)
that others are attracted by the sublime beauty of God reflected in the Church.
Conversion, he suggests, is a matter of ‘taste’ – but in a much more profound
sense than that expression is usually used.
73.
Hauerwas’s position is similar, although it is arrived at from different
starting points. The Church, he argues, is called to be a ‘community of
character’, embodying ‘the peaceable kingdom’. It is not called to prop up
other social institutions, such as democracy or capitalism, however useful they
may be, but to exhibit in its corporate life the radically alternative life of
those who follow Christ. Others will wish to join this community, not because
they are convinced intellectually of its arguments but because they are captivated
by its example of virtuous living.
74. Both
these examples from contemporary theologians are important because they offer a
radical missionary ecclesiology. This is an understanding of ecclesiology as
the unique vocation of the Church, rather than ecclesiology as the theology of
church structures…
75. Most
important, perhaps, Milbank, Hauerwas and others make the life of the Church,
rather than propositional argument or the techniques of communication, central
to the calling of evangelisation. In the context of evangelism amongst people
who have their own rich religious culture with its own developed ‘language of
faith’, this may be an important approach to overcoming the immense difficulty
of translating between languages of faith. It makes example – the example of
the Church as a whole, as well as of individual Christians – the shared
vocabulary through which the Christian story may become known.
Some of this is resonant of the
homiletic insistence on the priority of living over speaking. There are echoes
of various teachings of saints and mystics through the ages, such as the
command attributed to St Francis: ‘Preach the gospel, and if you have to, use
words’. As powerful is Hélda Câmara’s warning: ‘Remember that for most people,
your life is the only gospel people will read’. I might add that this applies,
by and large, as much to the highly literate as to the illiterate; they will
read gospel texts sympathetically only if they can associate them with
open-hearted persons. Saint Seraphim of Sarov has the positive expression:
‘Cultivate a peaceful spirit, and thousands around you will be saved’. Again,
Catherine of Sienna exhorts: ‘Be who God meant you to be and you will set the
world on fire’.
True to the heart of things
though all these exhortatory statements may be, there is more to this claim.
Here is a robust orthodox Christian insistence that to focus on propositional
argument – on persuasion as it is normally understood – is to sell mission
short. Christianity is what Christianity does, and its speech serves
primarily to articulate what it does, that it may do it better. Confusing
mission with attempts to persuade others makes the mistake of assuming such
speaking can take place in some ‘neutral’ space, a ‘market-place of ideas’.
This very language may itself betray the presence of expectations drenched in
Enlightenment values. To say this is not to demonise the Enlightenment. It
simply reminds us that the Enlightenment cannot claim automatically to be
benign or even neutral.[55]
This writer would wish to
identify with this emphasis. It is Christian living in its entirety which itself
constitutes the most authentic form of mission. Further, as Silverman
demonstrates expertly elsewhere in this paper, this approach has genuine and meaningful
parallels to many Jewish understandings of Jewish mission as Jewish
purposefulness in the world.
Mission London
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bevans,
Stephen B & Schroeder Roger P, 2009, Constants in Context: A Theology of
Mission Orbis , New York
Bosch,
David J, 2008, Transforming Mission Mission Orbis , New
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D’Costa,
Gavin, 1985, ‘Karl Rahner’s Anonymous Christian: A Reappraisal’, Modern
Theology, 1:2, 131-148
Doctrine
Commission of the Church of England, 1995, The Mystery of Salvation: The
Story of God’s Gift, Church House Publishing, London
Donovan,
Vincent J, 2001, Christianity Rediscovered, 3rd edition, SCM,
London
Flannery, Austin Dublin
Fry, Helen (ed.), 1996, Christian-Jewish
Dialogue: A Reader, University
of Exeter Exeter
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2010, Sharing the Gospel of Salvation, http://www.presenceandengagement.org.uk/pdf_lib/69_resource.pdf
(accessed on 9 February 2011 )
Gill, Robin (ed), 1995, Readings in
Modern Theology, SPCK, London
Fry, Helen (ed.), 1996, Christian-Jewish
Dialogue: A Reader, Exeter
University Exeter
Heim, S Mark, 2001, The Depth of the
Riches: A Trinitarian Theology of Religious Ends, Eerdmans, Cambridge
Hick, John and Knitter, Paul F., 1987, The
Myth of Christian Uniqueness, SCM, London
Hick, John (ed.), 1977, The Myth of God
Incarnate, SCM, London
-, 1989, An Interpretation of Religion:
Human Responses to the Transcendent, Macmillan, Basingstoke
-, 1993, God and the Universe of Faiths,
Second Edition, Oneworld, Oxford
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London
Knitter, Paul F, 1995, One Earth Many
Religions: Multifaith Dialogue and Global Responsibility, Orbis , New York
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Message in a Non-Christian World, Edinburgh London
-, 1962, Why Christianity of All
Religions?, Lutterworth, London
Milbank, John, 1991, Theology and Social
Theory, Blackwell, Oxford
Perry, Tim S, 2001, Radical Difference:
A Defence of Hendrik Kraemer’s Theology of Religions, Wilfrid Laurier
University Press, Ontario
Race, Alan, 1983, Christians and
Religious Pluralism: Patterns in the Christian theology of religions, SCM, London
Race, Alan and Hedges, Paul M, 2008, SCM
Core Text: Christian Approaches to Other Faiths, SCM, London
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Non-Christian Religions’, in -, Theological Investigations, volume 5,
DLT, London
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-, 2010, ‘The Finality of
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[1] Mission London
[2] Cf Matt 10.5f.
[3] That not all are to be baptised may be the
implication of the change from the neuter of ‘ta ethne’ to the masculine
of ‘autous’.
[4] Cf. an Orthodox
defence: ‘Extra Ecclesiam nulla salus. All the categorical strength and
point of this aphorism lies in its tautology. Outside the Church there is no
salvation, because salvation is the Church. Does it therefore follow
that anyone who is not visibly within the Church is necessarily damned? Of
course not; still less does it follow that everyone who is visibly within the
Church is necessarily saved. As Augustine wisely remarked: “How many sheep are
there without, how many wolves within!’ While there is no division between a
“visible” and an “invisible Church”, yet there may be members of the Church who
are not visibly such, but whose membership is known to God alone. If anyone is
saved, he must in some sense be a member of the Church; in what sense,
we cannot always say’. Ware, Timothy [Kallistos], 1964, The Orthodox Church,
2nd edition, Penguin, London 251f .
Cyprian’s own focus was those who had been Christians and had put themselves
outside the Church.
[5] Luke 10.3ff. Cf. Matthew 10.9f: ‘Take no gold, or
silver, or copper in your belts, no bag for your journey, or two tunics, or a
staff…’
[6] E.g. Mark 1.44, 7; 8.26; Matthew 8.4; 9.30; Luke
4.41; 5.14
[7] E.g. Matthew 10.7f; Luke 10.9 et passim
[8] Acts 10
[9] E.g. Matthew 7.24ff; Mark 8.34ff; Luke 19.9
[10] John 6.35, 48; 8.12; 9.5; 10.7, 11, 14, 25; 14.6;
15.1, 5
[11] Blu Greenberg, 1990, ‘Mission, Witness and
Proselytism’ in Evangelicals and Jews in an Age of Pluralism¸ University
Press of America, 228-230, cited in Fry, 1996, Christian-Jewish Dialogue: A Reader,
Exeter University, Exeter86.
[12] Bosch, David J,
2008, Transforming Mission Mission Orbis , New
York
[13] Genesis 12.1
[14] E.g. Matthew 10.16; Acts, passim
[16] Kraemer, Hendrik, 1938, The Christian Message in a
Non-Christian World, Edinburgh House, London Ontario
[17] This is not to be understood esoterically; this is
not a mystical union such as may be found in kabbalah. This Revelation is
public, simply is God’s declaration that God is here, among us.
[18] Christian Message, 70.
[19] See ibid, 104, for an insistence that the attitude to
other faiths must be positive and critical.
[20] See ibid, 24-30, on the crisis of the church.
[21] Kraemer, Hendrik, 1962, Why Christianity of All
Religions?, Lutterworth, London
[22] Rahner, Karl, 1966, Theological Investigations, volume
5, Darton, Longman and Todd, London
[23] Ibid, emphasis added.
[24] Ibid, 121
[25] Ibid. 131.
[26] Ibid. 133.
[27] Flannery, Austin Dublin
[28] Cf., for example, D’Costa, Gavin, 1985, ‘Karl
Rahner’s Anonymous Christian: A Reappraisal’, Modern Theology, 1:2,
131-148
[29] Donovan, Vincent, 2001, Christianity Rediscovered,
3rd edition, SCM, London
[30] Ibid, 3-11
[31] Ibid, 130
[32] Ibid, 158. Cf ibid, 106: ‘the very first principle
which must be invoked toward building up the younger church is that we do not
stay one day longer than is necessary’.
[33] Ibid, 16
[34] Hick, John, 1987, ‘The Non-Absoluteness of
Christianity’, in Hick, John and Knitter, Paul F., The Myth of Christian
Uniqueness, SCM, London
[35] Race, Alan, 1983, Christians and Religious
Pluralism: Patterns in the Christian theology of religions, SCM, London
[36] Hick, John, 1993, God and the Universe of Faiths,
Second Edition, Oneworld, Oxford 130f .
While here Hick seems to abandon any means of discerning bad faith – with his
insistence that ‘all’ the religions revolve around God – he is typically more
cautious, and his focus is elsewhere typically ‘the great world faiths’.
[37] Hick, John, 1989, An Interpretation of Religion:
Human Responses to the Transcendent, Macmillan, Basingstoke ,
240-249
[38] Ibid, 299-314
[39] Knitter, Paul F, 1995, One Faith, Many Religions:
Multifaith Dialogue and Global Responsibility, Orbis , New York
[40] Ibid, 29 emphasis original
[41] Ibid, 11
[42] Cf. Hick, John, 1995, The Rainbow of Faiths,
SCM, London
[43] Ibid, passim, for an introduction to some
principal critics, both philosophical and theological.
[44] Hick famously edited and contributed to The Myth
of God Incarnate (1977, SCM. London
[45] Schmidt-Leukel, Perry,
1993, ‘Zur Klassifikation religionstheologischer Modelle’, Catholica¸47,
163-183
[46] Heim, S. Mark, 2001, The Depth of the Riches: A
Trinitarian Theology of Religious Ends, Eerdmans, Cambridge
[47] Ibid, 17-45
[48] Ibid, 123-165
[49] Personal communication, 25 June 2003 .
[50] Williams, 2010; cf. Williams 2009
[51] John 14.6
[52] Examples include the conclusions of the Christian
Eucharistic Prayers, and the second paragraph of the rabbinic Aleinu
prayer. See also Rashkover, Randi and Pecknold, CC, 2006, Liturgy. Time and
the Politics of Redemption, SCM, London
[53] General Synod of the Church of England, 2010
[54] The description offered in the paper is a suggestive
summary only, and referencing is with a very light touch; the only reference is
to Milbank, John, 1991, Theology and Social Theory, Blackwell, Oxford,
and it is not proposed that this is directly useful, merely Milbank’s
best-known work.
[55] We have already noted its unhelpful tendency to
oversimplify through systematic classification, as if, in calling something a
‘faith’ or ‘religion’ one thereby knows what kind of phenomenon it is.
