What Has Jerusalem to Do with Mecca?
Two new books on the world's religions raise new possibilities, and new questions, for evangelicals
John G. Stackhouse, Jr. | posted 9/03/2001 12:00AM
How things have changed in a decade! About ten years ago, theologians Clark Pinnock and John Sanders shook up evangelical theology with two books that together offered a defense of what is now widely known as "inclusivism." Christian inclusivism is the view that the work of Jesus Christ is the foundation for salvation, but that people do not have to know about it to benefit from it. Therefore, many of the unevangelized will yet be saved because they have put their trust in God, as far as they know him, and are accepted by faith on the basis of the work of Christ.
Pinnock's and Sanders's arguments have by no means swept the field; indeed, they have been widely cited as evidence of dangerous theological drift within the evangelical movement. But neither has the case for inclusivism been decisively refuted. Indeed, two recent books show just how far the discussion has advanced in a decade. Taken together, they suggest that evangelicals have only begun to explore the implications for all of theology in taking seriously the reality of the world's religions. But these two books also highlight, in their different ways, something of the challenge and the danger of such exploration.
Learning from Buddha
Gerald McDermott, a professor of religion and philosophy at Roanoke College in Virginia, seems perhaps an unlikely person to ask the provocative question, Can Evangelicals Learn from World Religions? (InterVarsity, 2000). He is widely respected as an expert on the thought of Jonathan Edwards, and it seems quite a distance from the theology of the 18th-century revival leader on the American frontier to contemporary theologizing about world religions. Yet McDermott has recently examined Edwards's thought about other religions, in his scholarly monograph Jonathan Edwards Confronts the Gods (Oxford, 2001), and that encounter forms the basis for his consideration of contemporary questions as well.
McDermott here takes up Pinnock's suggestion that evangelicals ought to move on from considering whether anyone outside the Christian religion can be saved to considering whether Christians can actually learn from people of other faiths. Yes, Christ is the center of God's revelation and salvation. But if other religions have recognized truth, goodness, and beauty in the world, they have done so as recipients of grace from the one source of all good, the Holy Spirit of God. So is it possible that we can learn from them some good things we have not already learned in the Christian tradition?
Christians have been doing exactly that for centuries. We learned from our Jewish forebears, of course, but also from Jewish contemporaries down through the years, from Philo of Alexandria to the great medieval scholar Maimonides to our own contemporaries Martin Buber, Abraham Heschel, and Elie Wiesel. We learned from our Greek and Hellenistic heritages, from Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, and others. We learned from the European religions that have influenced so many of our Christian rituals—not least, Christmas and Easter. So why not learn from other religions as well?
One of the strengths of McDermott's book is that he provides extended examples of such learning, from four disparate religions: Buddhism, Taoism, Confucianism, and Islam. From Buddhism, for example, Christians can learn more about their moment-by-moment dependence on God for their very existence, and about the limitations of theology in the face of God's inexpressible transcendence. Taoism reminds Christians to trust and cooperate with the mysterious workings of the wise and good God in what appear sometimes to be foolish or ugly circumstances.
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