The Non-absoluteness of Christianity

Abstract

Ernst Troeltsch’s famous book The Absoluteness of Christianity (1901) focused on what has always been from the point of view of the Christian church the central issue in its relationship to other streams of religious life. Until fairly recently it was a virtually universal Christian assumption, an implicit dogma with almost credal status, that Christ/the Christian gospel/Christianity is ‘absolute’, ‘unique’, ‘final’, ‘normative’, ‘ultimate’ — decisively superior to all other saviours, gospels, religions. Troeltsch’s own intellectual journey illustrates how this implicit dogma has now come under serious question. In the lecture that he wrote for delivery at Oxford in 1923 (he died before delivering it), he criticised his own earlier position and opted for the very different view that Christianity is ‘absolute’ for Christians, and the other world faiths are likewise ‘absolute’ for their own adherents.¹ Clearly the ‘relative absoluteness’ of his 1923 paper is very different in its implications from the unqualified absoluteness of his 1901 book.