Pluralism

Religious pluralism asserts the theological value of more than one religious belief or form of life.

The issue of pluralism goes right back to the discussions of the ancient philosophers about the One and the Many. When we look at the world, it appears as a jumble of many entities, yet we still speak in the singular about ‘the world’ and our ‘experience of the world’, as though the vast array of different objects in our field of vision were also united into one thing called ‘the world’ or ‘the cosmos’. The monist assumes that the separate parts of our experience are unified. The pluralist takes the view that the multiplicity of separate things in the world is the true reality: the world is not singular, but composed of many distinct entities.

The phrase ‘religious pluralism’ is not generally used to mean that there is more than one god (that is ‘polytheism’), but that there are several true understandings of God. So the pluralist might argue that the Muslim, the Christian and the Jew are all worshipping God in their different ways, as John Hick put it in the book of the same title: ‘God has many names.’

Religious pluralism is also not necessarily the same thing as religious relativism. The relativist argues that there are no absolute truths. The pluralist may argue that there is absolute truth, but that it is expressed in many different ways.

The pluralist view may be contrasted with the ‘exclusivist’ view (which takes one’s own religion to be the only true path to God) and the ‘inclusivist’ view (which allows for the possibility that other religions might be alternative expressions of one’s own true religion). So the ‘exclusivist’ Christian would say that Muslims are wrong; the ‘inclusivist’ Christian would say that Muslims have found another way of expressing Christian truth; and the ‘pluralist’ Christian would say that Muslims have an equally valid but different religion.

John Hick offers a ‘Kantian’ version of pluralism, arguing that God is still one, even if we travel there by different paths. In this way, Hick did not challenge the singular reality of God. Hick’s view also made the differences between religions appear insignificant. David Ray Griffin has argued the more radical view that the different religious paths actually lead to different destinations, but that these plural destinations are equally valid. The Muslim path takes you to one place, and the Christian path leads to another. So our separate paths are not just alternative routes to God, but the only means of reaching our particular religious goal.

More radically still, the Catholic theologian Joseph O’Leary (Religious Pluralism and Christian Truth, Edinburgh University Press, 1996) has argued that authentic religion must abandon its claim to be absolute: ‘Release from … absolutism requires the insight that neither individuals nor nations nor creeds possess a stable identity unchanging throughout history. What they have instead is a story, a trajectory, in which they are constantly reinventing their identity.’

All pluralist views are anathema to conservative Roman Catholics, who argue that ‘outside the Church there is no salvation’, and to conservative Evangelicals, who argue that salvation only comes through a relationship with Jesus Christ. Conservatives find it equally difficult to tolerate pluralism within their own religion, insisting on an exclusivist understanding of orthodoxy as rigid dogma from which there can be no deviation.

THINKERS

Wilfred Cantwell-Smith (1916–2000), in The Meaning and End of Religion (1963), distinguished between ‘faith’ and ‘belief’. ‘Faith’ is a trust in God that cuts across religious cultures, whereas ‘beliefs’ are specific to particular religious communities.

Jacques Dupuis (1923–2005), a Roman Catholic, argued in Toward a Pluralist Theology of Religions (1997) that God is also present in other religious traditions. He was cross-examined by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and was suspended from his position at the Gregorian University.

John Hick (1922– ) used Kant’s distinction between an object ‘in itself’ and how it appears in our perception to construct a theory of religious pluralism that distinguishes between God in himself and how he appears to the different world religions: ‘Each concrete historical divine personality – Jahweh, the heavenly Father, the Qur’anic Allah – is a joint product of the universal divine presence and a particular historically formed mode of constructive religious imagination’ (Disputed Questions in Theology and the Philosophy of Religion).

Karl Rahner (1904–84) argued that those of other faiths and none could be included in the Church as ‘anonymous Christians’.

IDEAS

Pleroma: the Greek word for ‘everything’ that is used in the New Testament to mean the fullness of creation.

Trinity: It can be argued that the doctrine of the Trinity (see separate entry) tries to contain both the pluralist and the monist positions in one view of God: God is irreducibly plural yet absolutely singular.

BOOKS

John Hick, God Has Many Names (Westminster John Knox Press, 1982)

David Ray Griffin, Deep Religious Pluralism (Westminster John Knox Press, 2005)