Confronting Other Religions

Conversation is more and more replacing conversion as a Christian missionary objective.

Good reason doubtless exists for dialogue between Christianity and the non-Christian religions. Wide areas of concern attach to man’s universal humanity, and not solely to his religious views. There ought to be some possibility of cooperation among major religions in matters of social justice, relief of human suffering and need, and even the moderation of international conflict. In a world in which Communism and secularism undermine the inherited faiths by their assault on supernaturalism, the great theistic religions might well stress the importance of objective justice, eternal truth, and supernatural reality.

One must confess, however, the chilling effect of events in the Middle East upon proposals for any limited tactical cooperation of theistic religions. For all their predominantly theistic heritage, Arabs and Jews seem unable to make headway on the issues of peace and the relief of human misery.

Interreligious dialogue is important for the reciprocal understanding of positions and motivations. Certain types of missionary propaganda eagerly distort the differences between various religions; in such circumstances, theological precision can only serve the cause of truth.

One issue of central missionary importance is whether the Christian vanguard seeks destruction of the non-Christian religions. Christendom now takes in 30 per cent of the global population. Unless there is a formidable age of missionary expansion, it will claim only 25 per cent by the year 2000. Is evangelical Christianity called to denigrate the existing religious alternatives that supply for vast multitudes of people a glimmer of personal meaning and a measure of cultural cohesion?

At the Asia—South Pacific Congress on Evangelism (Singapore, 1968), Asian Christians, who now number only 3 per cent of the vast population of that continent, voiced their determination not to abandon Asia to a non-Christian future. But without a declaration of Christian goals and strategy in the world of non-Christian religions, interest in conversion is open to much misunderstanding and misrepresentation. Are evangelicals committed to the destruction of non-Christian religions? If they do not make their position clear, they will needlessly inherit ill will in non-Christian lands, simply from the growing ecumenical disposition to emphasize that non-Christian religions have positive value, and that ecumenical Christianity wishes to cooperate with them for common ends, even to promote them as culturally necessary and desirable.

There can be little doubt that the recent influence of Karl Barth and Hendrik Kraemer upon ecumenical missionary thought is waning. A shift from antithesis to synthesis is detectable in the relating of Christianity and non-biblical religion. One hears, for example, that New Testament Logos-doctrine encourages one to find valid truth in the non-biblical religious systems; that founders of all the great world religions are to be viewed as having been in active communion with the Living God; or that, since within the providence of God the nonbiblical religions have been preserved through long centuries, they must be interpreted within a working of the Holy Spirit that looks anticipatively to Jesus Christ (for all their emphasis on works-salvation) and hence as reflections of God’s common grace. Universalism—the expectation of final salvation for all men irrespective of their beliefs about God and their decision for or against Christ in this life—eliminates the need to call for conversion. That some great world religions have after many centuries incorporated certain Christian ideals is held to justify a patient attitude of ideological cooperation rather than competition for the souls of men.

All this sounds rather strange to evangelicals, who—though they do not deny the universal revelation of God, or a providential divine purpose in history, nor doubt that the Logos lights every man—cannot detach Christianity from the New Testament truth that men come to the Father only by Jesus Christ and that “no other name” is given whereby men must be saved. But it sounds equally strange to spokesmen for non-Christian religions, who are not convinced that Christianity is to be welcomed as an ideological partner and reinforcer of their own inherited religious values.

When a Roman Catholic churchman in predominantly Buddhist Ceylon proclaimed that Buddha “was surely in communion with God,” the reaction of Buddhist spokesmen was hardly conciliatory. Ceylonese Buddhists view Rome’s recent mea culpa attitude as primarily strategic (an offer of friendship to non-Catholics when the church is weak, intolerance when it is powerful). Even the effort to find so-called quasi-Christian values in Buddhism was scotched as a subtle move to attract Buddhists to Christianity. After all, the Buddha did not believe that ultimate reality is personal, and Buddhism therefore has an atheistic or antitheistic foundation.

Ecumenists fail to make some important distinctions when they promote a “brotherhood of religious co-existence” as the alternative to future religious wars and call for Christian cooperation with non-Christian religions as systems incorporating spiritual truth and values that help to stabilize personal life and preserve culture.

For one thing, the Apostle Paul emphasizes that God wills the state, or civil government, as an instrument to preserve justice and order in a fallen society. The alternative to social anarchy is just government, not the non-Christian religions.

For another, the Apostle also has some very precise things to say about non-Christian religions, and these references ought once more to become required reading.

To destroy existing religions without replacing them with the truth of revelation could accelerate social anarchy. But it should be abundantly clear that evangelical Christianity has quite another task in the world. It is committed solely to the faithful and winsome proclamation of the truth of the Gospel. In a sense, it is not even committed to conversion as an indispensable goal. The effective use of gospel proclamation in the persuasion and conversion of sinners is the work of the Holy Spirit. And it is to Jesus Christ that the Gospel and the Spirit witness. Christianity thinks of ethical values not as abstract ideals but in terms of intelligible divine revelation and incarnation in the single historical figure of Jesus of Nazareth.

The time has come for a major missionary conference of evangelical leaders on missionary concerns relating to the non-biblical religions. Were such a conference ventured under the sponsorship of a respected agency like World Vision, perhaps under the auspices of World Vision magazine, it could do immeasurable good in articulating solid evangelical perspectives in a constructive way. The only adequate alternative to dialogue that deletes the evangelical view is dialogue that expounds it. The late twentieth century is no time to shirk that dialogue.

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