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religious pluralism - Coggle Diagram

- - - - Universal-access exclusivists are those who hold that Christ’s salvation is offered to all and that it is the will of God that everyone should come to love him.
      - Some Catholic universal-access exclusivists, draw attention to the possibility of salvation after death that is part of the concept of purgatory.
      - As a Catholic theologian, D’Costa takes this second, universal-access position.
      - One of the biblical texts he uses in support of his views is
      - 1 Timothy 2:3–6: ‘God…wants all people to be saved and to come to a knowledge of the truth’
      - D’Costa uses this passage to emphasise that although there is only one exclusive way to salvation, God wills that this one route should be available to everyone and is offered to everyone.
    - - One well-known Christian exclusivist was Hendrik Kraemer (1888–1965), who was a leading figure in the Netherlands in the movement to bring different Christian denominations together (the ecumenical movement).
      - His book The Christian Message in a Non-Christian World (1938) was very influential for Christian missionaries working in non-Christian countries, as he emphasised that non-Christians cannot achieve salvation through their own faith systems but have to convert to Christianity.
      - Kraemer argued that God’s revelation can be seen by others outside the Christian faith.
    - - Barth believed that people cannot know God through their own efforts, but that God chooses to reveal himself through Jesus Christ, through the Bible and through the teachings of the church.
        
        One of Barth’s distinctive messages was his ‘theology of the Word’, in which he asserted that knowledge of God can be found only where God chooses to reveal it through his word.
        
        The opening of John’s gospel, on which Barth based his theology of the Word, reads: ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.’
        
        He argued that this Word consists of three forms.
        
        The most important form is Jesus Christ, present from creation and made known to humanity through his life, death and resurrection. Barth thought that teaching and exemplifying God’s love to humanity. Jesus was the Word of God in human form,
        
        The second form is the Bible, a ‘witness’ to the revelation of God in Christ.
        
        The third form of the Word is the church’s teaching, bringing the Christian message to people and spreading the gospel so that everyone has the chance to hear and respond to it.
        
        The Bible and the church become the Word of God when God chooses to use them to reveal himself.
- - - - Rahner explained that Christianity has a unique position in being the religion that is founded on God’s ultimate act of revelation, when God came to earth in the person of Jesus.
      - No other religion offers the salvation through Christ that is found in Christianity.
      - Rahner described Christianity as the ‘absolute’ religion, seeing it as normative, in the sense that it sets the standard by which other religions should be measured.
      - However, he went on to explain that an understanding of Christianity as absolute seems to exclude from salvation anyone who lived before.Jesus came to earth, and anyone who has not been able to hear about God’s revelation through Christ.
      - Rahner did not think that the exclusion of anyone who lived before Jesus came
        to earth, and anyone who has not been able to hear about God’s revelation
        through Christ was compatible with an omnibenevolent and all-wise God.
      - How can non christians be saved?
        
        Rahner believed that, once someone who belongs to a religion other than
        Christianity has heard about the salvation offered through Christ, then that
        person should become a Christian in order to be saved, as there would no longer
        be any excuse for rejecting the gospel.
        Rahner rejected the idea that all religions are in some ways equal as paths to
        God.
        
        Kraemer would criticise this view as he believes The religion either accepts the salvation offered by Christ or it does not;
        there is no middle ground or ‘partial truth’ to be found.
    - - what biblical examples does he use?
        
        Rahner used Old Testament examples to argue that the Bible supports the view that people who do not know Christ can have genuine faith in God, and that God recognises this.
        
        Rahner called such people ‘anonymous Christians’.
        
        These people do not call themselves Christian, they have not been baptised and they do not go to church or read the Bible; but in the decisions that they make and the attitudes they adopt, they are turning to Christ without knowing it and they are not excluded from salvation.
- - - - Hick was an evangelical Christian as a young man, firmly convinced of the truth of Christianity and of the need to convert others to the Christian message of salvation through Christ.
        
        However, when he worked in Birmingham he was impressed by the faith and the service to others of people he met who belonged to other religions, for example Sikhs, Hindus and Muslims.
        
        Hick noticed in many of them their commitment to prayer, their family values, their willingness to work together to help disadvantaged people and their genuine devotion to living godly lives.
      - For Hick, this raised serious questions.
        Was it really true that a God of love would condemn such people and deny them salvation, just because their cultural heritage was such that they were looking to serve God in a religion other than Christianity?
      - Hick suggested that there was a need for what he called a ‘Copernican revolution’ in theology.
        Copernicus caused a huge shift in the way scientists of his day understood the universe, by proposing that the Earth was not at the centre but that it was one of a number of planets that orbited the Sun.
      - Hick used the philosophy of Immanuel Kant in formulating his pluralist theology.
        
        Kant drew a distinction between the ‘noumenal’ and the ‘phenomenal’.
        
        The noumenal world is a world of things as they really are, whereas the phenomenal world is the world as it appears to us.
        
        We filter our experiences of the world and interpret them, not always consciously, so that the act of knowing something gives us a phenomenal understanding.
        
        We see things from a perspective, as they relate to us and as we can understand them, rather than as they are in themselves.
        
        Kant thought that the nature of God belongs in the noumenal world.
    - - Panikkar explicitly did not think that there are many different truths or that the world’s religions are different ways of expressing one truth.
        
        Instead he talked about the need for openness, rather than making any claims to know what ‘the truth’ is or where it might be found.
        
        Panikkar came from a mixed-faith family – his father was an Indian Hindu and his mother was a Spanish Catholic. So he grew up feeling equally at home in both religious traditions.
      - Panikkar did not claim to have uncovered a truth about the one and only correct way to understand the relationship between different world faiths, but instead emphasised the mystery of the divine.
        He talked about the need to discover truth by living it, choosing actions and words with a vision of harmony between people, and trying to find the essential nature of what it means to be human in the presence of the divine without destroying different cultural traditions and diversity.