Dart / Packer Christianity and Pluralism

1. Auflage 2019
ISBN: 978-1-68359-288-4
Verlag: Lexham Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 72 Seiten

Are the world's great religions ultimately all the same? Christianity and Pluralism is a collection of concise yet thoughtful essays by J. I. Packer and Ron Dart, interacting with and responding to the four traditional models used to answer the existence of multiple faiths (exclusive, inclusive, pluralist, and syncretist), but focusing particularly that form of syncretism which claims that all faiths find commonality through their mystical traditions. Written in response to key events in the history of the Anglican church, Packer and Dart's analysis gives us a perennially relevant model for how the church ought to respond to our own pluralistic culture with integrity and kindnessâ?'and how to uphold the distinctiveness of the gospel. Christians directly or indirectly engaging our pluralist world will find their ideas enriched by this short yet powerful book.

Ron Dart (PhD, McMaster University) is associate professor of political science at the University of Fraser Valley (Abbotsford, BC). He is author of numerous books, including The Marks of the Church and Renewal and The North American High Tory Tradition.#J. I. Packer (PhD, Oxford University) is Board of Governors' Professor of Theology at Regent College (Vancouver, BC). He is author of many books, including Knowing God, Affirming the Apostles' Creed, and Divine Sovereignty and Human Responsibility.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Dart, Ron

Packer, J.I.

Leseproben

CHAPTER 2

THE WAY, THE TRUTH, AND THE LIFE

A Discussion of Mansions of the Spirit

J. I. Packer

Michael Ingham, Bishop of New Westminster, is a nice man. We who form his diocese knew that before; now Mansions of the Spirit makes it plain to every reader.

Throughout this book, Bishop Michael comes across as a person of great goodwill who loves peace, who hates bigotry and violence of every kind, who abhors the fierce dogmatism that sets people at each other’s throats and the proud elitism that says some people do not matter, and who wants to see religion operating as a force for world peace rather than world war. To this end he aims to affirm all the world’s main religions and all those who practice them, and wants to see religion spread among the many whose very humanity is at risk for their current lack of it.

To be sure, there is one form of religion that is clearly anathema to him. He ascribes this repugnant form to what he calls “the conservative-evangelical-fundamentalist coalition” but which two millennia of history entitle us to describe as mainstream Christianity. This is the view that Jesus Christ is the second person of the Trinity incarnate, that personal discipleship to him is the only path of eternal life, and that making disciples of all the nations is the church’s unending primary task. Roman Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy, and classical Protestantism share at least a nominal commitment to this belief, which world Anglicanism also shared till about fifty years ago. Bishop Michael does not understand it well and is unable to be fully respectful and temperate in what he says about it. But otherwise he is charmingly sympathetic and courteous to a fault toward all the positions of which he takes notice.

The sad burden of the present critique is that Bishop Michael’s niceness and passion to affirm people has led him to a position that in effect abolishes what Anglicans generally, indeed Christians generally, understand Christianity to be. Yet the niceness itself is a quality to appreciate, and the proper way to start is surely by celebrating the fact that Michael displays it so fully.

What, now, of his book? First let us note that its title, Mansions of the Spirit, is a phrase lifted from Robert Runcie, former Archbishop of Canterbury, who in a public lecture in 1993 declared that “dialogue can help us recognize that other faiths than our own are genuine mansions of the Spirit with many rooms to be discovered.… From the perspective of faith, different world religions can be seen as different gifts of the Spirit to humanity” (cited, p. 33). This in essence is the precise persuasion that Bishop Michael wants to share with us. It is significant that Michael sought an endorsement of his book both from Runcie himself and also from the Dalai Lama of Tibet; it is doubly significant that the Dalai Lama gave him one. Michael wishes to turn the Christian world mission into worldwide inter-faith dialogue in which no one changes their faith but all are enriched by coming to understand the faiths of others. The Dalai Lama’s comment expressed his approval of this.

Is Michael’s agenda new? Some readers will find it novel, particularly as coming from a bishop, but as Michael explains it has always been the program of the inter-faith movement that broke the surface with the 1893 Parliament of the World’s Religions, and it has in fact been advocated from different quarters in the world of liberal Protestant thought since the 1920s at least. As Bishop Michael said in a newspaper interview at the time of his book’s release, there is little here that is new to Christian scholars: “All I have tried to do is crystallize a lot of academic work into readable form.”

The book has a subtitle, “The Gospel in a Multi-Faith World.” We should now note that both title, and subtitle, illustrate one of the strategies of which those in what Michael calls “the modernist-liberal-progressive coalition” constantly avail themselves, namely using historic Christian terms, drawn from the Bible, in an altered sense. This habit, though perhaps inevitable, creates problems. It encourages the users to feel closer to the authentic Christian heritage than they really are, and not to see how far they have moved away from it. The hearers take the words as meaning what they themselves mean by them, so that the communication is deceptive in its effect. Ambiguity, double-talk, fuzzy speech, and fuzzy thought become unavoidable, and understanding is blocked. Michael’s title and subtitle already reflect this.

“Spirit” in the title is not being used in the historic Trinitarian sense (indeed, on the showing of this book, Bishop Michael is not a historic Trinitarian at all). Michael understands the word as an evocative yet uninformative image for what Runcie called “the Divine” and what he himself is happy to call “the Nameless Nothing, which is at the heart of everything” (p. 111). And “Gospel” in the subtitle is not being used in the historic apostolic sense, in which it signifies non-negotiable truths about judgment, Jesus, and joy that constitute the good news from God. At one point Michael states, “What I am arguing for is a commitment among Christians to a gospel that compels us beyond fundamentalism to see in other religions the God we know in Jesus Christ” (p. 138). Whatever exactly this implies, it is clearly on a different wavelength from that of all the New Testament writers.

What is Michael’s wavelength? It is an evolutionary hypothesis about world religion and world welfare, as we have already begun to see. The idea is that as the Old Testament chronicles an “emerging God-consciousness” (p. 128) that turned Yahweh from a local deity, one of many, into the God of the whole earth, and as the Jesus-event enlarged that God-consciousness (“the religious imagination,” p. 132) into an affirmation of God’s love for all, so the religious pluralism of our latter-day global village should enlarge our God-consciousness still further, to find in other faiths the same grace that Christians know. Michael’s handling, or mishandling, of Scripture, his down slapping of the positions he calls exclusivism, inclusivism, and pluralism, and his zealous exposition of “grounded openness” on the basis of the theorizing in Frithjof Schuon’s The Transcendent Unity of Religions (1993), put out by the Theosophical Publishing House, is all special pleading for this hypothesis. The bishop’s book is cleverly calculated advocacy all the way. This must be borne in mind as we proceed.

To pull the threads together, then: Why did Bishop Michael write his book? For two reasons, it seems.

First reason: to promote inter-faith dialogue, with ground rules that are egalitarian (all world religions are ways to God and deserve equal honor) and trans-theological (no world religion offers definitive conceptual truth in its dogmas, though all make contact with “the Truth that transcends the truth,” p. 123). Such dialogue, Michael believes, would lead to healthy recognition of defects in all religious traditions, and would promote religious peace world-wide and religious enrichment all round.

Second reason: to be honest in letting the church know what he stands for, and in coming clean about some of his purposes in his own diocese. Bishop Michael has the courage of his convictions; whatever we think of his views, we must admire him as a gutsy man who takes the risk of putting his cards on the table. Michael’s honesty sets a searching standard for responses (this one, for instance).

Whom should we see him as addressing most directly? The book is brief (less than 140 pages by Michael himself); it is non-technical (there are no footnotes, page references, or index, and only a short one-sided bibliography “for the interested general reader”); and it is written in a sort of pulpitese which, though smooth-flowing and clear on the surface, is sometimes logically loose. Michael’s ideal reader seems to be a middlebrow layperson, Anglican or Anglican-like, for whom religion, meaning observances (public worship and private prayer), lifestyle (uprightness and friendliness), and social concern (poverty and the environment), has importance, but who does not care about theology, or the difference between one faith and another. A hostile critic might say that Michael writes for Anglicans who are half-way to Hinduism in order in effect to take them right there; a fairer statement might be that he sees their sort of Anglicanism as basically right, so he gives them a theology to support it while rousing their interest in multi-faith conversations and witness to Jesus Christ in the course of them. But the book in fact challenges everyone who has any sense of historic Anglican identity, and it must be dealt with accordingly.

THE STORY LINE

Mansions unfolds thus. After relating how an experience in India showed him that his lack of interest in Hinduism was wrong, and urging that neighbor-love in the religiously pluralist and spiritually impoverished West requires active involvement with others’ religions (chapters 1 and 2), Bishop Michael tracks the inter-faith movement since 1893 (chapter 3), and generalizes about it as follows:

Both within the religions themselves, as well as among those who have abandoned traditional orthodoxies...