[From The Church Next Door: Local Christians Face America’s New Religious Diversity, draft manuscript by Dr. Paul D. Numrich. Please do not quote or cite without author’s permission.]
[figure approx. here: SimCity-style illustration showing a church in a neighborhood along with a Jewish synagogue, Buddhist and Hindu temples, and a Muslim mosque]
A
few years ago, walking along
As
noted in the Introduction, the quantitative markers of
Writers from Bend, Oregon, Sacramento, California, Ellijay, Georgia, Lacey, Washington, and New York City wrote in regarding the story of “Happy Hindu in the Bible Belt,” who had sought Abby’s advice about Christian friends attempting to convert her. The writers disagreed among themselves on the appropriateness of the friends’ evangelizing efforts, in terms of both theology and social etiquette. One writer explained, “You have to understand that, with evangelicals, it is an article of faith, and it’s their Christian duty to preach their version of the Gospel, especially if they care about you and are genuinely concerned about your soul.” But other writers expressed chagrin at such efforts, while Abby, aka Jeanne Phillips, who is Jewish, advised that “Anyone who proselytizes is treading on ‘sacred ground.’ It’s regarded as offensive, even if it is heartfelt.”
This book has described the variety of Christian responses to multi-religious neighborhoods, towns, and nation. As we have seen, there is no one way that “the church next door,” or American Christianity collectively, relates to new non-Christian groups and individuals in this country. There is even disagreement within congregations on this issue. This concluding chapter will address the following questions: 1) What models of Christian approaches emerge from the local case studies in this book, and how might these models provide a fresh way of looking at the important topic of Christian relations with other religions? 2) How would all Christians, regardless of their particular approaches, wish adherents of other religions to think of them and the Christian faith?
What models of Christian approaches emerge from the local case studies in this book, and how might these models provide a fresh way of looking at the important topic of Christian relations with other religions?
Christian theologians and authors in recent decades have offered many typologies of Christian approaches to other religions. Some of these typologies are unhelpfully complex, others deceptively simple (perhaps even unhelpfully simplistic), but all attempt to sort out the variety of responses to non-Christian religions found among the many traditions, denominations, and groups making up the Christian faith, and all recognize the growing importance of the topic in the modern world. For instance, Owen C. Thomas’ 1969 volume, Attitudes toward Other Religions: Some Christian Interpretations, in effect presented two overlapping typologies comprising a total of 18 types—an example of unhelpful complexity—but his observation that other religions present “a pressing theoretical and practical issue for Christians” hit the nail on the head. Paul F. Knitter’s more recent book, Introducing Theologies of Religions, describes four ways in which Christians “have been trying to come to grips with this new experience of religious pluralism,” four models of Christianity’s place among the world’s religions: replacement, fulfillment, mutuality, and acceptance.
Alan Race, in his 1983 book, Christians and Religious Pluralism: Patterns in the Christian Theology of Religions, examined the “dilemma” of the modern era, brought on by new knowledge from the comparative study of religions and increasing contacts among the religious peoples of the world. A “Christian theology of religions,” Race explained, seeks “to evaluate the relationship between the Christian faith and the faith of the other religions.” Race proposed a typology of Christian approaches to other religions that caught on, dominating the discussion until recent criticisms have questioned its usefulness. One critic, evangelical seminary professor and key participant in Buddhist-Christian dialogues, Terry C. Muck (see Chapter 1), dubbed this typology “The Paradigm, with a capital T and a capital P” due to its wide usage.
In her 1993
spiritual autobiography, Encountering God,
First, there is the exclusivist response: Our own community, our tradition, our understanding of reality, our encounter with God, is the one and only truth, excluding all others. Second, there is the inclusivist response: There are, indeed, many communities, traditions, and truths, but our own way of seeing things is the culmination of the others, superior to the others, or at least wide enough to include the others under our universal canopy and in our own terms. A third response is that of the pluralist: Truth is not the exclusive or inclusive possession of any one tradition or community. Therefore the diversity of communities, traditions, understandings of the truth, and visions of God is not an obstacle for us to overcome, but an opportunity for our energetic engagement and dialogue with one another. It does not mean giving up our commitments; rather, it means opening up those commitments to the give-and-take of mutual discovery, understanding, and, indeed, transformation.
Note how the exclusivism/inclusivism/pluralism typology focuses on the issue of religious truth claims. Christian exclusivists claim that Christianity represents the only truth, Christian inclusivists claim that Christianity’s truth subsumes or fulfils other religious truths, Christian pluralists claim that Christianity’s truth is one among many understandings of truth. Don Pittman, Ruben Habito, and Terry Muck, in their volume, Ministry and Theology in Global Perspective: Contemporary Challenges for the Church, call these “theological options,” pointing up the emphasis on Christian doctrines such as revelation, sin, grace, and salvation.
This focus on
religious truth claims explains a lot, and we have certainly seen examples of
each type throughout this book. Recall,
for instance, the internal debate at St. Silas Lutheran Church (Chapter 5),
where Pastor Jack Fischer took an exclusivist approach of contrasting the truth
claims of Christianity and Islam (the latter being false claims, in his view),
while the missionary Rev. Wilton DeMast took an inclusivist approach of finding
points in Islamic theology that contain partial perceptions of the full divine
revelation found in Jesus Christ. We
also saw the pluralist approach, for instance at
But what if we shift the focus away from religious truths claims and applications of Christian doctrines? What happens when other issues take priority in inter-religious relations?
Consider Chapter 9, “Solidarity in the African-American Experience: Churches and the Nation of Islam.” There the key issue was not religious truth claims but rather the powerful social realities of racism. Their shared minority status impelled black Christians and black Muslims to set aside doctrinal differences in order to collaborate on important community concerns. For the pastors featured in that chapter, a theology of the African-American experience, not a calculus of theological doctrines, shapes their relationship with the Nation of Islam.
Recall also Rev. Larry Hodge (Chapters 1 and 11). He and likeminded theological exclusivists in Aurora, Illinois give no quarter to the religious truth claims of their non-Christian neighbors, but they differ from other Christian exclusivists who wish to ban all such idolaters from the city. Rev. Hodge balances his theological exclusivism with a civic pluralism that grants the Hindus, Muslims, and other non-Christians in town their constitutional right to pursue their false religious claims. Rev. Hodge was always willing to cooperate with spiritually benighted non-Christians for the good of the city, setting aside his truth-claim exclusivism to focus on other issues.
The
“friendship evangelism” featured in Chapters 2 and 3 also shifts the emphasis
away from competing religious truth claims, though in a complex way. None of the evangelical Christians in either
chapter would entertain the notion that other religions offer hope for eternal
salvation. The Christian Gospel must be
spread throughout the non-Christian world, including among the non-Christian
immigrants and refugees of
The Orthodox Christian experience featured in Chapter 10 also speaks to this point. No Christian group surpasses the Orthodox concern to protect the ancient truth they represent. Whether one labels them exclusivists or inclusivists, the Orthodox are certainly not pluralists. To them, Christianity is not one among many equally legitimate understandings of truth—witness the Orthodox delegation’s withdrawal from the 1993 Parliament of the World’s Religions mentioned in the Introduction. Yet the Orthodox encounter with Islam, in both the Old World and the United States, shifts the emphasis away from competing doctrines to that of dialogue and cooperation, a movement away from past conflicts and toward potential mutual redemption as peoples of shared destiny.
Does this analysis suggest a useful typology of Christian approaches to other religions? Some would argue that we already have enough typologies, all more or less useful in their own ways (see the resources listed below under “For More Information”). Paul Knitter reminds us “that models are slippery. While they’re useful for describing general approaches and attitudes, they almost never perfectly fit an individual theologian; they’re fluid and often spill into each other.”
Our analysis suggests that we should consider how Christians define “the other.” What is “the other” that local Christians feel impelled to approach? If “the other” is competing religious truth claims, then typologies that focus on truth claims, such as the exclusivism/inclusivism/pluralism schematic, can be useful. But if “the other” is a neighbor in need, whether immigrants and refugees (Chapter 3) or a Muslim group without a place to pray (Chapter 4), or if “the other” represents a historical antagonist (Chapter 10), then the otherness of their religious truth claims becomes a secondary consideration. The same holds for Christians who belong to a minority group threatened by an outside “other” that ignores distinctions of truth claims within the group. As Rev. James Demus noted (Chapter 9), “Within the African-American community, the issue is not the Nation of Islam versus Christianity, but religion versus the lure of the streets.” For the Focolare Movement, the spirituality of “the other” creates a dialogue of love, an interfaith unity of kindred souls in the family of God that can transcend the diversity of religious truth claims to a great extent (Chapter 8).
In
effect, any identifiable group, religious or not, creates “otherness” simply by
defining itself, since boundaries distinguish “insiders” and “outsiders.” Thus, by definition, Christian congregations must
face the other religions around them on
Religious Tolerance Index:
The Gallup Organization devised an index of American attitudes toward adherents of other religions. Based on the results of a telephone poll in 2002, Gallup created three categories of religious tolerance, defined as follows: 1) Isolated, those who “tend to believe that their religion is right or true and all other religions are wrong or false”; 2) Tolerant, those who take a “live-and-let-live” attitude toward other religions and are unlikely to make much effort to learn about them; and 3) Integrated, those who go beyond the “live-and-let-live” attitude of the Tolerant category, “actively seeking to learn more from others of different religious traditions.” The accompanying bar graph shows the percentages of each category represented in the poll.
[reproduce bar graph here]
[www.gallup.com/poll/tb/religvalue/20030318.asp]
How would all Christians, regardless of their particular approaches, wish adherents of other religions to think of them and the Christian faith?
While
researching this book, I was asked to preach at a church whose membership
reflects two of the perspectives on religious diversity described in the
previous chapters. Most of the members
are immigrants whose forebears in
I told everyone during that sermon that I did not care what perspective they take regarding other religions, as long as they exhibit what I call “meek Christianity” in their dealings with the adherents of those religions. Motivations, goals, strategies, truth claims—none of these matter as much to me as attitude, the attitude of meekness described throughout the New Testament.
The
pertinent Greek word here carries a meaning of meekness, mildness, gentleness,
and humility. The word, in its various
forms, appears 16 times in the New Testament.
We find it in the Beatitude, “Blessed are the meek [praus]: for
they shall inherit the earth” (Matthew 5:5, KJV). It is used of Jesus on Palm Sunday, citing
the prophet Zechariah: “Look, your king is coming to you, humble [praus],
and mounted on a donkey” (Matthew 21:5, NRSV).
Jesus beckons: “Come to me, all who labor and are heavy-laden, and I will
give you rest. Take my yoke upon you,
and learn from me; for I am gentle [praus] and lowly in heart, and you
will find rest for you souls. For my
yoke is easy, and my burden is light” (Matthew
The
word appears several times in the Epistles.
Paul entreats the Christians in
Christian meekness should not be confused with weakness. This meekness is spiritual strength, which can flow only when one empties oneself completely and fills the void with God’s grace. The resulting attitude exudes divine love toward others, the kind of love Paul speaks about in the famous “love chapter” of 1 Corinthians, which he directed toward a church full of boasters about their spiritual gifts: “Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth” (1 Corinthians 13:4-6, NRSV).
Here is a reminder to Christians that truth comes from God, a cause for rejoicing but never for boasting or arrogance. Whatever approach a Christian takes to adherents of other religions, it should involve meekness of spirit. Consider the impression this will make.
Diana
L. Eck, Encountering God: A Spiritual
Journey from
Terry C. Muck, “Instrumentality, Complexity, and Reason: A Christian Approach to Religions,” Buddhist-Christian Studies 22 (2002): 115-121. Muck, who identifies himself as a Christian exclusivist in another book (Those Other Religions in Your Neighborhood, see below), here writes, “I will describe why I think The Paradigm [exclusivism/inclusivism/pluralism] is losing its usefulness, make a proposal for a new way of looking at the other religions, and list both the losses/dangers and benefits of thinking in a new way.”
Alan
Race, Christians and Religious Pluralism: Patterns in the Christian Theology
of Religions (London:
Owen C. Thomas, ed., Attitudes toward Other Religions: Some Christian Interpretations (New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1969). Thomas offers a complex typological discussion of Christian approaches to other religions, suitable only for the hardiest of readers.
New
Testament quotes come from the following English translations: Jerusalem Bible
(JB), King James Version (KJV), New English Bible (