Abstract
Crises in religion historically precipitate revolutions in religious thought. Today, the impressive piety and evident rationality of the belief systems of other religious traditions, inescapably confront Christians with a crisis — and a potential revolution. How should Christians respond responsibly to the conflicting claims of other faiths? More pointedly, should Christians abjure traditional claims to the one truth and the one way to salvation? As even Descartes (rather quaintly) observes in his Discourse on Method,
I further recognised in the course of my travels that all those whose sentiments are very contrary to ours are yet not necessarily barbarians or savages, but may be possessed of reason in as great or even a greater degree than ourselves. I also considered how very different the self-same man, identical in mind and spirit, may become, according as he is brought up from childhood amongst the French or Germans, or has passed his whole life amongst Chinese or cannibals.1
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Notes
René Descartes, Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting the Reason, in The Philosophical Works of Descartes, trans. Elizabeth S. Haldane and G. R. T. Ross (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), Vol. 1, p. 90.
Paul Tillich, Christianity and the Encounter of the World Religions (New York: Columbia University Press, 1963), p. 91.
Paul Tillich, Dynamics of Faith (New York: Harper and Row, Harper Torchbooks, 1958), p. 66.
On this point see R. C. Zaehner, ‘Religious Truth’, in Truth and Dialogue in World Religions: Conflicting Truth-Claims, ed. John Hick (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1974), p. 3.
Raimundo Panikkar offers a similar list of possible responses in ‘Religious Pluralism: The Metaphysical Challenge’ (in Religious Pluralism, ed. Leroy S. Rouner [Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984], p. 98), but he does not clearly distinguish and analyze Pluralism vs Relativism.
Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1956), I/2, p. 350.
Ernst Troeltsch, ‘The Place of Christianity Among the World Religions’, in Christian Thought: Its History and Applications, ed. Baron R. Hugel (New York: Meridian Books, Living Age Books, 1957), p. 52.
For an excellent analysis of the role of Exclusivism within Christianity to achieve and preserve unity within an emerging sect, see Jean Runzo, Communal Discipline in the Early Anabaptist Communities of Switzerland, South and Central Germany, Austria, and Moravia 1525–1550 (Ann Arbor, Michigan and London, England: University Microfilms International, 1978).
Karl Rahner, Theological Investigations, Vols 1–20 (London: Darton, Longman & Todd; New York: Seabury Press, 1961–84), Vol. 6, p. 391.
John Baillie, Our Knowledge of God (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1959), p. 255.
Frank Whaling, Christian Theology and World Religions: A Global Approach (Basingstoke: Marshall Pickering, 1986), p. 87.
Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (London: Macmillan, 1933), p. 93.
William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (New York: Random House, The Modern Library, 1902), p. 120.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 3rd edition, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (New York: Macmillan Co., 1953), I. 268 b.
John Hick, Problems of Religious Pluralism (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1985), p. 34.
John Hick, God Has Many Names (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1982), p. 96.
See Wilfred Cantwell Smith, The Meaning and End of Religion (New York: Harper and Row, 1978).
See Wilfred Cantwell Smith, ‘A History of Religion in the Singular’, in Towards a World Theology (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1981), pp. 3–20.
Wilfred Cantwell Smith, Religious Diversity (New York: Harper and Row, 1976), p. 16.
Maurice Wiles, Faith and the Mystery of God (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1982), p. 120.
On the relativity of reality to world-views, see e.g., W. V. O. Quine, ‘Ontological Relativity’ and ‘On What There Is’, in, respectively, Ontological Relativity and Other Essays (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969)
and From a Logical Point of View (New York: Harper and Row, Harper Torchbooks, 1953)
On the relativity of thinghood, see Nicholas Rescher, Conceptual Idealism (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1973), p. 108.
For related views on the idea that reality is relative and that there is more than one actual world, see Nelson Goodman, Ways of Worldmaking (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1978), e.g. pp. 20–1
and for an analysis of this notion as it applies to the sciences, see Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2nd edn, 1970), e.g. pp. 109 and 116
For example, this is explicit in Hick’s essay, ‘On Grading Religions’, Religious Studies, Vol. XVII (1982), reprinted in Problems of Religious Pluralism.
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© 1993 Joseph Runzo
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Runzo, J. (1993). God, Commitment, and Other Faiths: Pluralism vs Relativism. In: World Views and Perceiving God. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-23106-5_9
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