The Uniqueness of Christ and Committed Pluralism: PART 1
By Knud Jørgensen
September 2010
I have, for some years, been struggling with how to understand the meaning of the uniqueness of Christ in a pluralistic world. The challenges have come from my fellowship with Christians in Southeast Asia and the encounters with their pluralistic context. Often, they have let me know that my thinking around these issues was rather black-and-white in a typical Western world of either/or. Another challenge has come from the memories of my youth when the mission preachers told us that all who had not heard the good news were doomed to perdition.
It is against this background that I use a term I have learned from Lesslie Newbigin: committed pluralism. “Commitment” is not a new concept in my life, but how do I, as an evangelical, uphold commitment in a pluralist world? And how does my commitment fare as my thinking has moved in a direction where I struggle with the concept of “a wideness in God’s mercy?”
One could, in this situation, simply quote from the World Council of Churches San Antonio statement from 1992: “We cannot point to any other way of salvation than Jesus Christ. At the same time we cannot set limits to God’s saving power….This tension we shall not attempt to solve.” Here I shall try to take a few cautious steps further into a plural world. As I do so, I shall particularly lean on the British missiologist and theologian Newbigin.
Committed Pluralism
The claims of Rationalism have left us with a heritage that gives priority to the world of facts in the public sphere, while faith and values belong in the private sphere. In the private sphere our Western culture has accepted pluralism. The Christian faith, together with other religions and religious worldviews, has been relegated to this sphere, where pluralism reigns in a growing jungle of religiosity and values, and where facts and truth are absent and belong to science in the public sphere.
One major consequence is that we have lost the concept of Christian faith as a public truth (i.e., as a truth that relates to all of us and which has importance for society and community). This development may be acceptable for some religious views and for new spiritualities which view themselves as an esoteric gnosis to be worshipped in closed circles.
For the Christian faith it is different. The Christian faith is a confession of Jesus Christ as Lord, not only my Lord or the Lord of the Church, but Lord of creation. Therefore, the Christian faith cannot accept to be relegated to the sphere of the individual, and it cannot accept that there is more than the reality over which Christ is Lord. The claim of the incarnation is that God has entered our common history, not just as one offer of interpretation among many, but as his presence in flesh and blood.1
This does not imply that we should return to a Constantine era where only one truth was allowed. Neither does public truth imply a truth that cannot be discussed or queried, as if it originated from mathematics. It is rather so that only claims that may be questioned have to do with real life. When talking about the Christian faith as a public truth, we therefore accept pluralism in the public room, instead of relegating it to a private sphere.
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Dr. Knud Jørgensen is dean of Tao Fong Shan in Hong Kong and associate professor at the Norwegian School of Theology. |
