Schubert M. Ogden - Is There Only One True Religion or Are There Many - Southern Methodist University Press (1992)

!
Is There Only
One True
Religion or
Are There Many?
Southern Methodist University Press
Dallas
Copyright © 1992 by Schubert M. Ogden
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
First edition, 1992
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Ogden, Schubert Miles, 1928-
Is there only one true religion or are there many? / Schubert M.
Ogden.
p. cm.
Originally delivered as the 1990 Samuel Ferguson Lectures,
University of Manchester (England).
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-87074-328-7 ISBN 0-87074-329-5 (pbk.)
1. Christianity and other religions. 2. Religious pluralism.
I. Title.
BR128.C4033 1992
261.2—dc20 91-52781
To my dialogue partners
in the
International Buddhist-Christian
Theological Encounter Group
CONTENTS
Preface ix
1. The Challenge of Pluralism 1
2. The Case against Exclusivism 27
3. Difficulties with the Case for Pluralism 53
4. Beyond the Usual Options 79
Works Cited 105
Index 109
PREFACE
F or some time now, the

question addressed by
this book has been a
central question for Christian theology. In fact, dis¬
cussion of it has already reached the point where it
is widely assumed on all sides that the only ways
open for answering it are either one of the two older
and now challenged options of exclusivism and in-
clusivism or else the relatively new and challenging
option of pluralism. My view is that this assumption
is mistaken and that an adequate answer to the ques¬
tion waits upon considering yet a fourth option that
has not even been clearly recognized, much less
carefully considered. The aim of the book, then, is
to reduce this deficit in the previous discussion, by
clarifying the issue that the question raises and,
therefore, by also taking account of a neglected pos¬
sibility for answering it beyond the usual options.
That there is such a fourth option is, of course,
a matter of logic, of recognizing that the usual
ways of answering the question do not exhaust the
IX
possibilities that are, in fact, open to a Christian
theology of religions. But I have certainly been
helped in recognizing this, as in clarifying the un¬
derlying issue, by certain traditional theological in¬
sights, which readers may well want to bear in
mind in following my argument. Particularly im¬
portant for clarifying the basic concept of a “true
religion” is the analogy suggested by the concept of
a “true church” in classical Protestant ecclesiology.
No less important is the further analogy I em¬
ploy—here following much recent Roman Catholic
theology—in thinking and speaking of Jesus Christ
himself as the primal Christian sacrament or
means of salvation. Indeed, it is not too much to
say, I think, that the kind of representative christol-
ogy that is fundamental to the fourth option is not
likely to carry conviction unless my way of develop¬
ing this analogy is deemed appropriate.
As for my speaking simply of “the fourth op¬
tion,” I do so only because none of the labels for it
that have occurred to me has seemed entirely happy,
not because I suppose it to be any less of an ideal
type than any of the other three options. As between
the extreme contrary positions of exclusivism and
pluralism, it is, in a way, closest to pluralism, some¬
what as inclusivism, in its way, is closest to exclu¬
sivism. But it is also, in a way, close to inclusivism,
with which it shares the middle ground between the
other two extremes. Perhaps if we could agree to
qualify what is here as well as elsewhere distin¬
guished simply as “inclusivism” by speaking instead
of “monistic inclusivism,” we could appropriately
speak of the fourth option as “pluralistic inclu-
sivism." In any event, the position itself should be
clear, and clearly distinguished from all three of the
usual options.
Apart from mostly minor changes in style and
wording, the four chapters of the book were given in
March 1990 as the Samuel Ferguson Lectures at the
University of Manchester. To Dean A. O. Dyson and
his colleagues in the Faculty of Theology, their stu¬
dents, and all of my other hearers I express my
warm thanks both for their cordial reception of my
lectures and for the many stimulating discussions
occasioned by their comments and questions. I am
especially grateful to Dr. David A. Pailin, to whose
efforts I owe the invitation to do the lectures and
who, with his wife Gwyneth, extended to me the
gracious hospitality of their home throughout my
stay in Manchester.
Four other persons also deserve special thanks
for their contributions to the book: Franklin I.
Gam well, for reading the lectures and giving me the
benefit of his criticisms; Betty Manning, for pro¬
cessing all drafts of the lectures as well as of the
book; Freddie Goff, for copy editing; and Keith Gre¬
gory, for editorial advice and seeing the book
through to publication.
PREFACE XI
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True religion is right tempers towards God and
man. It is, in two words, gratitude and benevolence:
gratitude to our Creator and supreme Benefactor,
and benevolence to our fellow-creatures. In other
words, it is the loving God with all our heart, and our
neighbour as ourselves.
John Wesley
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CHAPTER 1
The Challenge of Pluralism
A mong the many ways

of formulating the
Christian claim is to
assert that the Christian religion is the true religion.
In fact, throughout most of their history, Christians
have typically asserted or implied that the Christian
religion is the only true religion. But if this asser¬
tion may be fairly taken as typical of Christian wit¬
ness, it has also long been more or less problematic
in Christian theology—and for theologians charged
with the responsibility of critically reflecting on
this witness.
One thinks, for instance, of what the aged Au¬
gustine, determined to clarify his earlier writings
and to retract any errors in them, had to say about
his treatise, "Of True Religion”:
Again, in the same chapter, I said “That is the Chris¬

tian religion in our times, which to know and follow
is most sure and certain salvation.” I was speaking
of the name here, and not of the thing so named. For
what is now called the Christian religion existed of
1
old and was never absent from the beginning of the
human race until Christ came in the flesh. Then
true religion which already existed began to be
called Christian. After the resurrection and ascen¬
sion of Christ into heaven, the apostles began to
preach him and many believed, and the disciples
were first called Christian in Antioch, as it is writ¬
ten. When I said, “This is the Christian religion in
our times,” I did not mean that it had not existed in
former times, but that it received that name later.
(Augustine, 218f.)
Just what Augustine’s clarification or retraction

comes to may not be entirely certain. But it makes
clear enough that he was no longer willing to en¬
dorse any simple identification of the true religion
with the Christian religion such as many Christians
both before and since have asserted or implied in
advancing the Christian claim.
One generalization that can be safely made
about Christian theologians today is that more and
more of them are evidencing the same unwilling¬
ness. Far from endorsing the claim that the Chris¬
tian religion is the only true religion, they are
increasingly asking whether this can possibly be a
valid Christian claim. The principal reason for this
is that an ever larger number not only of theolo¬
gians but of Christians generally are now making
or implying another very different, indeed con¬
trary, claim. According to them, the Christian reli¬
gion is but one of many religions, or logically
comparable ways of understanding human exist¬
ence, some if not all of which are as true as Chris¬
tianity. Thus, from the standpoint of Christians and
2
theologians who make or imply this contrary
claim, the Christian religion may indeed be the
true religion, but only in the sense in which the
same may be said of other religions or comparable
ways of existing as human beings. Because of this
insistence that there are many true religions rather
than one, the name by which this claim has now
come to be generally known is “pluralism." And it
is because of pluralism in this sense that Christian
theologians today have increasingly had to ask
whether the monism typical of most Christian tra¬
dition can any longer be accepted as valid.
Of course, in some senses religious pluralism is
nothing new. If the word “pluralism” is under¬
stood, as it often is, simply as a synonym for the
word “plurality,” religious pluralism has always ex¬
isted, since there has always been a plurality of
religions in the world in which Christians have had
to bear their witness and reflect theologically on
the validity of their claims in doing so. Until quite
recently, however, the many religions, like the
many cultures with which they are of a piece, lived
for the most part in mutual isolation. Only with the
revolutions of the recent past, especially the tech¬
nological revolution in transportation and commu¬
nication, has this isolation finally been broken
through, to the point where the many religions and
cultures are now compelled to live with one an¬
other as next-door neighbors in a single global vil¬
lage. It is this enforced proximity of each religion
and culture to every other that is the really new
thing about religious and cultural plurality in our
situation today.
THE CHALLENGE OF PLURALISM 3

On the other hand, the word “pluralism” is also
properly understood to mean not simply the state or
condition of plurality, but the belief or doctrine that
affirms and advocates plurality as a good thing (cf.
Ogden 1983), And in this sense, too, religious plural¬
ism is not entirely new. At least since the Renais¬
sance, theologians have spoken, in Nicholas of Cusa’s
words, of “one faith in the diversity of religions”; and
already at the beginning of the nineteenth century,
in the theology of Friedrich Schleiermacher, there
was a clean break with the claim that Christianity is
the only true religion. But what does seem to be new
to our century, especially the second half of it, is the
growing number of Christians and theologians who
are proposing a pluralistic theology of religions. Out
of their experiences of religious plurality, and thus
a keener and more informed sense both of the
strengths of other religious traditions and of the
weaknesses of their own, they have come to affirm
and advocate such plurality as a good thing—not in
spite of their Christian commitment, but because of
it. More and more of them are religious pluralists
precisely as Christians and theologians; and this is
why the challenge they pose to Christian witness and
theology is new, and importantly new at that.
My concern as a theologian and in this book is
to address the question that this challenge has now
made theologically central: Is there only one true
religion, or are there many? Clearly, if the propo¬
nents of religious pluralism are correct, the older
options between which Christians and theologians
have typically chosen in answering this question
cannot be theologically valid insofar as they alike
4
imply religious monism in asserting that there is
only one true religion. But the issue for theology is
whether religious pluralists are right about this and
whether their new option can itself be theologically
validated, or whether, on the contrary, their asser¬
tion that there are many true religions is, in its way,
problematic enough that it, too, is vulnerable to the
challenge of some more adequate option.
This is the issue that I hope to clarify, if hardly
settle, in subsequent chapters. Meanwhile, we need
to look more closely at the challenge of pluralism to
the older options for answering our central ques¬
tion. In order to do this, I want, first of all, to con¬
sider in some detail the question itself: the terms in
which it is formulated and certain of their presuppo¬
sitions and implications, as I understand them.
The basic term here, of course, is “religion,”
and the difficulties involved in satisfactorily defin¬
ing it are notorious. Even so, we cannot expect a
clear answer to the question of whether there is only
one true religion or rather many without clarifying
how we are using "religion” in asking it. Without
claiming, then, to give a wholly satisfactory defini¬
tion of the term, I offer the following clarification
of its meaning in the present inquiry.
By "religion” I understand the primary form of
culture in terms of which we human beings explic¬
itly ask and answer the existential question of the
meaning of ultimate reality for us. Presupposed by
this summary clarification is, first of all and most
fundamentally, that among the questions that we
human beings find ourselves typically asking and
answering is what I call "the existential question.”

To be human is not only to exist together with
others, both human and nonhuman, but also to un¬
derstand oneself and others and reality generally
and, within limits, to be responsible for them. At the
root of this responsibility is the distinctive freedom
that is ours in consequence of our capacity for un¬
derstanding both ourselves and others and the en¬
compassing whole of reality of which we are all
parts. Unlike other animals whose overall course of
life is largely determined by species-specific in¬
stincts, we are “instinct poor.” Not only the details of
our lives but even their overall pattern as authenti¬
cally human remain undecided by our membership
in the human species and are left to our own free¬
dom and responsibility to decide. To be sure, the
freedom of any one of us as an individual is in a way
preempted by the decisions already made by those
who have gone before us in the particular society
and culture into which we are born or in which it is
given to us to become human. But while none of us
can be socialized and acculturated without internal¬
izing some already decided understanding of human
existence, the very process of internalization serves
to develop our capacity for understanding and,
therefore, for questioning the validity of our cul¬
tural inheritance. In other words, we acquire the
ability to ask the existential question of how we are
to understand ourselves and others in relation to the
whole if ours is to be an authentic human existence.
Underlying this question as its “basic supposi¬
tion” is the faith that there is such an authentic self¬
understanding—that the ultimate reality of one's
own existence together with others in the whole is
6
such that some way of understanding oneself is
uniquely appropriate, or authorized, and that one
both can and should understand oneself accordingly
(cf. Christian, 84-88). I speak of this faith as “basic
faith (or confidence) in the meaning of life,” and on
my analysis it is a necessary condition of the possi¬
bility of all our self-understanding and praxis (cf.
Ogden 1977, 21-43, 120-43; 1986, 69-72, 106-11;
1987, 87-91). Literally everything that we think,
say, or do, insofar, at least, as it makes or implies
a claim to validity, necessarily presupposes that
ultimate reality is such as to authorize some under¬
standing of ourselves as authentic and that, con¬
versely, some understanding of our existence is
authentic because it is authorized by ultimate real¬
ity. But if this presupposition enables us to ask the
existential question, it in no way suffices to answer
it, any more than the basic supposition of science
that the world has some kind of order suffices to tell
us how the world as we experience it is in fact or¬
dered. How we are to understand ourselves if we are
to do so authentically remains an open question
even with the confidence that there is and must be
an answer to it.
If my analysis is correct, we must be asking and
answering this question at least implicitly in all our
self-understanding and praxis and thus in anything
that we think or say or do. Assuming, then, that by
“culture” is properly meant the concepts and sym¬
bols in terms of which we understand our existence
and act to maintain and transform ourselves to¬
gether with others, we may say that all forms of
culture, including religion, must at least implicitly

ask and answer the existential question. The distinc¬
tive thing about religion, however, is that it is the
primary form of culture in which this question is
also asked and answered explicitly, in concepts and
symbols whose express function is to mediate au¬
thentic self-understanding.
I stress that religion is the primary form of cul¬
ture in which this is done, because it is clearly not
the only form in which we explicitly ask and answer
the question of our existence. Aside from the sec¬
ondary form of culture that I should distinguish as
theology, in the generic sense of critical reflection
on the validity claims of some specific religion, the
existential question is also explicitly asked and an¬
swered by philosophy. But philosophy, too, is clearly
a secondary form of culture, in that it presupposes
all of the primary forms, including religion, as the
data of its reflection. Thus, while its ultimate objec¬
tive may indeed be authentic self-understanding, it
is like theology in asking and answering the existen¬
tial question only indirectly, by critically reflecting
on the claims to validity expressed or implied by all
the forms of culture, secular as well as religious.
Of course, there is no complete separation be¬
tween primary and secondary forms of culture in
the sense in which I am using the terms. The results
of theological or philosophical reflection not un¬
commonly find their way back to the level of primary
culture and there serve a properly religious as dis¬
tinct from a properly theological or philosophical
function. Even so, the distinction remains between
making or implying claims to validity and critically
validating them; and this is sufficient to distinguish
8
religion as a primary form of culture from such sec¬
ondary forms as are more or less closely related to it.
My contention, however, is that this is all that is
required to distinguish religion not only from theol¬
ogy but also from philosophy. Unlike substantive
definitions of religion in terms of some particular
way of conceptualizing and symbolizing ultimate re¬
ality, the understanding offered here is strictly
functional and, therefore, much broader and more
inclusive. Thus, whether or not a particular “cul¬
tural system” allows for thinking and speaking of
human existence in terms of “God” or “Emptiness,”
“the One” or “the True Self,” it is properly under¬
stood as a religion, provided only that it is the pri¬
mary form of culture through which persons living
in some social group are given to explicitly ask and
answer the existential question (cf. Geertz, 87-125).
This means that even so-called secular understand¬
ings of existence that satisfy this same condition
may be forthrightly designated “religions,” rather
than categorized as “ideologies” or merely as “reli¬
gion surrogates” or “quasi-religions” (cf. Tillich
1963, 1-25). It further implies, for reasons that will
presently become clear, that the number of at least
potential candidates for the title “true religion” is
considerably larger than might well be supposed,
assuming some narrower, substantive understand¬
ing of “religion.”
On the other hand, the functional understand¬
ing of religion that I am trying to clarify is not
nearly so broad as are understandings of it as sim¬
ply a basic human attitude—such as, for instance,
Paul Tillich's well-known definition, according to

which “religion is the state of being grasped by an
ultimate concern” (4). Although my concept of
“self-understanding," or “understanding of exist¬
ence,” is indeed functionally equivalent to Tillich’s
concept of “ultimate concern,” I have not defined
religion simply as “self-understanding.” On the con¬
trary, I am concerned to clarify it as the primary
form of culture, or, in Clifford Geertz’s sense, the
“cultural system,” in terms of which human beings
are given to understand themselves in an explicit
way. Thus, in my view, the term “religion” by its
very meaning always has an objective as well as a
subjective reference—analogously to the way in
which, on a traditional theological analysis, the
term “faith” refers to the “faith which is believed”
(fides quae creditur) as well as to the “faith through
which (it) is believed” {fides qua creditur) (see, for
example, Schmid, 265). Accordingly, religion is not
only the explicit understanding through which our
existence is understood; it is also the explicit under¬
standing which is understood as and when we so
understand ourselves. Being in both respects ex¬
plicit understanding, however, religion essentially
involves not only an understanding of our existence,
but also, and just as essentially, the particular con¬
cepts and symbols through which the question of
our existence can alone be asked and answered in
an explicit way.
Yet another implication of this understanding
of religion is that it never exists in general or simply
as such, but always and only as some specific reli¬
gion or religions. Like all other forms of culture,
secondary and primary alike, religion is thoroughly
10
historical and, therefore, is “natural” only in the
sense that, while it is evidently the nature of human
beings to be religious in one way or another, none of
these ways may fairly claim to be the natural way of
being religious. On the contrary, all religions show
themselves to be historical emergents enjoying de
facto authority only within some limited social and
cultural group. This is particularly obvious in the
case of the so-called axial religions, each of which
traces its origin to a historical founder, or to some
special moment of insight or revelation occurring at
a particular time and place. But even in the case of
"primitive,” or preaxial, religions, there is as little
reason to think them natural as to suppose this of
the languages or of any other components of the
cultures of which they are integral parts.
Nevertheless, it is a defining characteristic of
religion generically, and hence of every specif ic reli¬
gion, preaxial as well as axial, to lay claim to decisive
authority. Precisely as the primary form of a culture
in which the question of our existence is explicitly
asked and answered, a religion claims to be the au¬
thorized representation of the answer to this ques¬
tion. Here, again, the axial religions exhibit this
characteristic of a religion with particular clarity,
since they make this claim explicitly over against the
preaxial ways of being religious of which they are the
more or less radical criticism. But even in these
preaxial ways themselves, there is at least an implicit
claim to de jure existential authority. Because the
self-understanding they represent is uniquely appro¬
priate to, or authorized by, the very structure of
ultimate reality, their own representations of it

explicitly in concepts and symbols have decisive au¬
thority for the understanding of human existence.
To recognize this is to be in position to under¬
stand the other more specific term in our question—
namely, “true religion.” If it belongs to any religion
to express or imply a claim to decisive existential
authority, the reason for this is that every religion at
least implicitly claims to be the true religion. To see
just what this further claim implies, however, re¬
quires introducing a distinction between two senses
in which a religion may be said to be true.
An analogue of this distinction is provided by
the concept of the "true church" in traditional
Protestant ecclesiology (see, for example, Schmid,
370, 376f.). According to this concept, a church is
correctly said to be “true” or “false” depending
upon whether or not the pure doctrine of the gospel
is proclaimed in it and the means of salvation other¬
wise are rightly administered. Whether or not this is
in fact the case is always to be determined by com¬
paring the church’s doctrine and sacramental prac¬
tice with those of the apostolic church as attested by
the formally normative witness of scripture. Thus a
church may be said to be substantially true provided
that its doctrine and practice agree with those of
the apostles, whose church alone may be said to be
formally true. I should say by analogy that a reli¬
gion, also, may be said to be true in either of these
two senses. It may be said to be formally true pro¬
vided that its representation of the meaning of hu¬
man existence is that with which all others must
agree in order themselves to be true religions. On
the other hand, it may be said to be substantially
12
true provided that it exhibits just such agreement
with whatever religion is correctly said to be the
formally true religion.
Making use of this distinction, we may say that
the claim to be true that is characteristic of a
specific religion is the claim to be formally, and not
merely substantially, true. In other words, it belongs
to a religion to claim to be the true religion, and
hence the formal norm by which all other true reli¬
gion, if any, has to be determined. It is typical of
religious traditions, of course, that they are more or
less explicitly self-defining in that they specify cer¬
tain of their elements as normative for some or all of
the rest. Thus, in the Christian tradition, for exam¬
ple, the elements comprising the Old and New Testa¬
ments have been specified as the formal norm or
canon for determining whether other elements puta¬
tively belonging to the tradition do, in fact, substan¬
tially belong to it. But thus to determine whether or
not elements claiming to belong to the Christian tra¬
dition have a valid claim is not the only or the most
important function that the canon of scripture is
ordinarily taken to perform. On the contrary, given
the claim of the Christian religion itself to be for¬
mally true, Christians typically employ their canon
also to determine any and all religious truth. They
do so, however, not because they are Christians, but
because they are religious, and because it is the very
nature of a religion to make or imply the claim to
formal religious truth.
What exactly does this claim imply? What truth
is it of which a religion as such claims to be the
formal norm? From what has already been said, it

should be clear that the truth in question is existen¬
tial truth, or truth about the meaning of ultimate
reality for us. But just what it means to say this still
needs to be unpacked.
We saw earlier that human beings find them¬
selves typically asking the existential question, be¬
cause how they are to exist as authentically human
is not already decided simply by their membership
in the human species. Although they exist and must
exist in the basic faith that there is an answer to
their question, it is left to their own freedom and
responsibility to determine the answer. This is true,
indeed, even though, having been somehow social¬
ized and acculturated, they have normally already
internalized the answer to the question that is ex¬
pressed and implied in some specific religion and
culture. Because the process of internalization
serves to develop their capacity for understanding,
and thus for asking the question as well as answer¬
ing it, they remain free and responsible in any an¬
swer they give to it; and under particular social and
cultural conditions, or at a certain stage in their
individual development, they may well feel them¬
selves pressed by the question, notwithstanding
claims made for the answer to it in their religious
and cultural tradition.
Nor is this the only reason why the existential
question may become pressing. On the contrary, all
of the so-called boundary situations of human exist¬
ence, social as well as individual, not only challenge
any naive understanding of the meaning of life but
may also call into question even well-established
religious answers. The keen sense of having to die.
14
or, often more poignantly, the experience of the
death of another, may reopen the question with
such elemental force that no answer to it any longer
seems credible. And the same thing may happen
with experiences of suffering and guilt, or of loneli¬
ness and misfortune, or when one is condemned to
exist in poverty in the midst of plenty under condi¬
tions of structural injustice and systemic violence.
In all of these situations, and others like them, one's
underlying faith that life has a meaning and that
one can and should understand oneself accordingly
becomes profoundly problematic—somewhat in
the way in which one's basic faith that the world
has an order is rendered problematic by unfulfilled
expectations or falsified predictions. Consequently,
the need arises to make sense at once of one's basic
faith in the meaning of life and of the actual facts of
one’s experience, by which attempts at understand¬
ing one’s faith are again and again confounded.
This need for a deeper and more adequate un¬
derstanding of one's faith is clearly the more or less
urgent need to which all religions are so many at¬
tempts to respond. They exist not only to provide the
terms in which the question of existence can be ex¬
plicitly asked and answered, but also somehow to
solve the basic problem of making sense of one's
faith and of the facts of life as we live it, which drive
one beyond all superficial answers to the question.
Therefore, the truth of which each religion claims to
be the formal norm is the truth that solves this ba¬
sic problem and so answers to the urgent need.
There are important differences, of course, in
the ways in which specific religions represent this

truth. They typically focus the problem on different
situations and facts of life, and they vary consider¬
ably in both the scope and the depth of their pro¬
posed solutions. One such difference is sufficiently
great, in fact, to require the distinction already in¬
troduced between the axial and the preaxial reli¬
gions. Characteristic of the axial religions is their
focusing of the existential problem, not on any of
the boundary situations of individual and social ex¬
istence, but on a fundamental flaw in each individ¬
ual person. At the root of the human predicament is
an inauthentic understanding of our own existence,
a thoroughgoing self-misunderstanding, that per¬
vades the whole of our ordinary life in society and
culture. Indeed, even religion as it ordinarily exists
serves more to further this misunderstanding than
to overcome it. Accordingly, the only solution to our
problem is a correspondingly radical transforma¬
tion of our own individual existence; and the truth
of which the axial religions each claim to be the
formal norm is the truth that authorizes the transi¬
tion to such a transformed self-understanding. But
great as the difference certainly is between the ax¬
ial and the preaxial religions, there is no mistaking
their fundamental similarity. Both are responses to
the same basic problem, and the truth they repre¬
sent, insofar as they do so, is the same existential
truth.
How far they represent such truth has to be
determined, naturally, by procedures appropriate
to determining this kind of truth. We noted at
the outset that the existential question to which
any religion claims to represent the answer is the
16
question of the meaning of ultimate reality for us.
This means, first of all, that the reality about which
it asks is the ultimate reality of our own existence
in relation to others and the whole. I speak of this
reality as “ultimate” on the assumption that by the
term “reality" used without qualification, we mean,
in William James's words, “what we in some way
find ourselves obliged to take account of” (James,
101). Clearly, whatever else we may or may not find
ourselves obliged to take account of, we can never
fail to take account somehow of ourselves, others,
and the whole to which we all belong. In this sense,
the threefold reality of our existence simply as such
is the ultimate reality that we all have to allow for
in leading our own individual lives. But if this real¬
ity is what the existential question asks about, the
second thing to note is how it does this—namely,
by asking about this reality, not in its structure in
itself, but in its meaning for us. This implies that
in asking about ultimate reality, the existential
question asks, at one and the same time, about our
authentic self-understanding, about the under¬
standing of ourselves in relation to others and the
whole that is appropriate to, or authorized by, this
ultimate reality itself.
Thus, by its very nature, the existential ques¬
tion is a single question having two closely related
and yet clearly distinguishable aspects. In one of
these aspects, it asks about the ultimate reality of
our own existence in relation to others and the
whole. This I distinguish as its metaphysical aspect,
because, while it is distinct from metaphysics
proper in asking about this ultimate reality in its

meaning for us rather than in its structure in itself,
it is nonetheless closely related to metaphysics in
that any answer to it necessarily has metaphysical
implications. Unless ultimate reality in itself has
one structure rather than another, it cannot have
the meaning for us that a specific religion repre¬
sents it as having. In its other aspect, which I distin¬
guish as ethical, the existential question asks about
our authentic self-understanding. Thus, while it is
distinct from ethics proper in asking how we are to
understand ourselves rather than how we are to act
and what we are to do, it is nonetheless closely re¬
lated to ethics in that any answer to it necessarily
has ethical implications. Unless acting in one way
rather than another is how we ought to act in rela¬
tion to others, ultimate reality cannot authorize the
understanding of our existence that a specific reli¬
gion represents it as authorizing.
This means, of course, that, by the very nature
of the existential question, there are also two main
aspects to the procedures appropriate to determin¬
ing the truth of specific religious answers to it.
Broadly speaking, we may say that a specific answer
is true insofar as it so responds to the question as to
solve the problem that all religions exist to solve—
the problem, namely, of making sense somehow of
our basic faith in the meaning of life, given the facts
of life as we actually experience it. But whether, or
to what extent, a specific religious answer is capable
of doing this can be determined only by verifying its
necessary implications, ethical as well as metaphys¬
ical. If it is true, its implications also must be true;
and unless they can be verified by procedures ap-
18
propriate to ethical and metaphysical claims respec¬
tively, it cannot be verified, either.
To recognize this is to understand the diffi¬
culties of validating claims to religious truth. As
compared with science and technology, where there
is extensive agreement concerning appropriate pro¬
cedures of verification, ethics and metaphysics are
both profoundly controversial fields of inquiry, even
at the level of the principles and procedures by
which true claims are to be distinguished from
false. In fact, there is not even agreement about the
proper analysis of metaphysical and ethical utter¬
ances, which some philosophers construe as having
a noncognitive kind of meaning that obviates even
asking about their truth or falsity. Small wonder,
then, that one of the standing temptations of reli¬
gious believers is to try to find some way of avoiding
the difficulties of validating their claims, whether
by simply deducing their truth from some alleged
divine revelation or by construing them as matters
of faith, whose truth supposedly cannot and need
not be validated. But only a little reflection con¬
firms the futility of all such moves, especially in a
situation such as ours today, in which the plurality
of religious claims is an ever-present fact of life.
Unless one is prepared to allow that one's claim to
religious truth is something very different from the
kind of cognitive claim that it gives every appear¬
ance of being, one is left either with reneging on the
promise implied in making the claim or with re¬
deeming its validity in a non-question-begging way
by the only procedures appropriate to doing so.
Consequently, there is no avoiding the difficulties of

validating religious claims if one is to be responsible
in making them as claims to truth. By the very logic
of such claims, the only way to validate them is to
verify their necessary implications both metaphysi¬
cal and ethical by the same procedures that would
be appropriate for any other claims of the same logi¬
cal types.
This is not to say that any specific religious an¬
swer can be deduced simply from a true meta¬
physics and a true ethics, taken either singly or to¬
gether. Any religion, as we have seen, is more than
self-understanding insofar as it is also the primary
“cultural system" through which a certain under¬
standing of existence is explicitly represented as
authentic. Therefore, while the truth of its self¬
understanding, insofar as it is true, must indeed be
implied by a true metaphysics and a true ethics, it
itself as a particular way of conceiving and symbol¬
izing its self-understanding is irreducibly historical.
As such, it is simply given—a datum for meta¬
physics and ethics rather than a deduction from
them. And this means that validating its claim to
truth also always involves certain properly histori¬
cal and hermeneutical procedures.
I should perhaps also make clear that I in no
way suppose that one must first have a true meta¬
physics and a true ethics before one can determine
whether or not a specific religion is true. To argue,
as I have, that determining the truth of a religion
logically requires verifying its necessary implica¬
tions for both belief and action does not imply that
one must already be in possession of metaphysical
and ethical truth when one undertakes to verify
20
them. On the contrary, it is entirely possible that in
following the procedures requisite to their verifica¬
tion, one will not only determine the truth of the
religion implying them, but will also determine the
falsity of a metaphysics or an ethics that one previ¬
ously took to be true.
To sum up, then, the term "true religion" refers
to one or more specific religions whose claim to be
formally true, and hence the norm for determining
all other true religion, is a valid claim, as deter¬
mined by the procedures of verification that have
just been indicated. I stress the words "one or more”
here because in other things that I have written on
this subject I have sometimes failed to express my¬
self with sufficient care. Thus, in one such passage,
I inferred from the statement that "religion never
exists in general, . . . but always only as a religion”
that "even the true religion, if there be such a thing,
could not be identified with religion in general or
simply as such. It could only be one particular reli¬
gion among others distinguished from all the rest
solely by the unique adequacy with which its partic¬
ular concepts and symbols answered to the need
that each religion exists to meet” (Ogden 1986, 110).
No doubt, the main point of this inference was to
underscore my claim that religion is like any other
form of culture in never existing in general but al¬
ways only in particular. But the way in which I
made this point unfortunately suggests that, by the
very meaning of the term, there could be only one
true religion. And if this were so we could not ask
our central question except by begging it. This, how¬
ever, I in no way want to suggest; and so I emphasize

that the term “true religion,” as I have tried to clar¬
ify its meaning, fully allows for the possibility that
there is more than one specific religion whose claim
to be formally true is a valid claim.
Of course, there is another important question
that is, in fact, begged by asking. Is there only one
true religion, or are there many? The supposition of
this question is that either some religion is or some
religions are formally true; and the point of asking it
is to decide which of these two possibilities is really
the case. But to suppose that either is the case is to
take neither of two other positions, both of which
are also possibilities from a purely logical point of
view (cf. Kiing, 278-85).
Thus it is not to take the position, first of all,
that no religion is the true religion. Indeed, as the
logical contradictory of this position, the supposi¬
tion that we make simply in asking our question al¬
ready rules it out as necessarily false. This may not
seem unreasonable, considering that ours, after all,
is a theological inquiry occasioned by the challenge
of pluralism to the monistic claim that there is only
one true religion. But thus to suppose that not all
religions are false because one or more religions are
true is clearly to beg a question to which others have
given a contradictory answer only after offering rel¬
evant evidence and argument to support it. Often
enough, to be sure, the convincingness of their case
has depended upon some substantive definition of
“religion” much narrower and more exclusive than
the strictly functional understanding that I have ar¬
gued for here. Given this broader, more inclusive
understanding, it is certainly not obvious that no
22
religion is formally true. Even so, whether or not
any religion at all is true is and remains an impor¬
tant question; and this is so even if it is not the ques¬
tion that we are pursuing in these chapters.
The second position that is not taken in asking
our question is the logical contrary of the first—
namely, that all religions are formally true. Al¬
though this position is in no way ruled out by suppos¬
ing that one or more religions are true, neither is it
immediately implied thereby in the way in which it,
in turn, implies the supposition. This may well ex¬
plain why, with certain notable exceptions, religious
pluralists have not usually claimed that ail religions
are true or have equal adequacy (see, however. Hick
and Knitter, 137-48; cf. Ogden 1988, 498-503). In
any event, I shall assume here that what pluralists
wish to hold is not that all religions are true but only
that some of them are. Thus, while monists hold that
there is only one true religion, the pluralists' posi¬
tion that there are many true religions requires, as a
bare minimum, only that there be more than one
specific religion that is formally true.
But is this, in fact, the pluralists' position? Or
do they wish to hold, not that there are many true
religions, but only that there can be?
I raise this question because it is not always
clear from the statements of pluralists themselves
just what their challenge amounts to. Of course, my
concern here is with pluralism as a certain type of
theological position, rather than with the views of
individual theologians who are regarded, or regard
themselves, as pluralists. But there would be little
point in taking up a challenge unless it represented

the best thinking of at least some theologians who
are concerned to deal with the real theological
problems now facing us. For this reason, I was more
than a little interested in a recent attempt by Paul F.
Knitter to avoid what he speaks of as “common mis¬
understandings” of the “pluralist option.” Promi¬
nent among the things that this option does not
mean, he holds, is that “this is necessarily the case—
that Christianity is one among many; rather, a plu¬
ralist theology urges that this may well be the case
and that Christians must explore it.” In Knitter's
view, then, a “pluralist approach to other faiths” is
“one that recognizes the possible independent valid¬
ity and ‘rough parity' of other religious paths”; and
Christians who take this approach “feel obliged to
face the possibility that Christianity may be ‘one
among many"' (Knitter 1988, 2).
Clearly, if these statements are accepted at face
value, the challenge of pluralism is rather different
from what I have up to now taken it to be. It is not
made from the position that there actually are many
true religions, but rather proceeds from holding
only that this is a possibility, and that Christianity,
therefore, may be but one true religion among many
others. One difficulty with so interpreting Knitter's
statements, however, is that this is hardly the view
that he himself goes on to express in what immedi¬
ately follows them, to say nothing of his arguments
in other writings. Thus, for example, he holds that
“Christ remains a universally normative, a tremen¬
dously important, manifestation of what the human
condition can be, but he is not the only”—“is not
the only,” it will be noted, not, as one might have
24
expected Knitter to say, “may not be the only” (30).
Considering this and other passages to the same ef¬
fect, I incline to think that Knitter’s statements
should be interpreted somewhat differently—not as
qualifying the position for which he and other plu-
ralists are prepared to argue, but, rather, as qualify¬
ing the way in which they hold their position and the
obligations that they take to devolve upon both
themselves and others in consequence of their hold¬
ing it. He is allowing, in other words, that pluralists
have to make a case for holding that there are many
true religions; he is not denying that this is the posi¬
tion that pluralists wish to hold.
But whether or not this is a sound interpreta¬
tion of Knitter, other theologians undoubtedly ar¬
gue not only that there can be many true religions
but that there actually are. Thus John Hick, for one,
has long defended just such a view. As he uses the
term, “religious pluralism” refers to the kind of the¬
ological position from which “the Christian tradi¬
tion is . . . seen as one of a plurality of contexts of
salvation—contexts, that is to say, within which
the transformation of human existence from self-
centeredness to God- or Reality-centeredness is oc¬
curring.” Thus for the pluralist, in Hick’s view,
“Christianity is not the one and only way of salva¬
tion, but one among several”—“one of the great
world faiths, one of the streams of religious life
through which human beings can be savingly re¬
lated to that ultimate Reality Christians know as
the heavenly Father” (Hick and Knitter, 23, 33, 22;
cf. Hick 1989, 297-380). Several other theologians
argue for essentially the same view; and I find it

significant that interpreters who have developed
typologies of the positions represented in the
Christian theology of religions have agreed in tak¬
ing this to be the pluralistic position (cf., e.g.,
D’Costa; Race).
In any event, this is the position that I under¬
stand pluralists to want to hold. Their contention is
not only that there can be many true religions, but
that there actually are and that, therefore, the
monistic position that there is only one is invalid.
The issue raised by the challenge of pluralism, then,
is whether or not this contention is correct. And the
task of the chapters to follow is to clarify this issue.
26
CHAPTER 2
The Case against Exclusivism
n Chapter 1,1 attempted
I to clarify the challenge

of pluralism to
claim typical of much Christian witness, that Chris¬
the
tianity is the only true religion. To this end, I consid¬

ered in some detail the question that this challenge
has now made theologically central and that I pro¬
pose to address in this book: Is there only one true
religion, or are there many? Pluralists, I argued,
typically take the second position on this question
insofar as they hold not only that there can he many
true religions but that there actually are. They thus
contend that the claim of more than one specific
religion to be formally true, and, therefore, the
norm for determining any other true religion, is a
valid claim.
The issue before us in this and succeeding chap¬
ters is the correctness of this contention. To clarify
this issue, I want to begin by looking more closely at
the first position on our question against which the
challenge of pluralism is directed.
27
Up to this point, I have spoken of this position
simply as “religious monism” so as to contrast it
explicitly and directly with religious pluralism. But
in actual fact, pluralism is a challenge not merely to
one but to two ways of answering our question,
which are significantly different, even though they
alike claim that the Christian religion is the only
true religion. Therefore, if we are to clarify the issue
before us, we need to take account of both of these
other options and to understand the difference as
well as the similarity between their two answers.
We noted at the beginning of the first chapter
that Christians have typically claimed that the
Christian religion alone is the true religion. This
they have claimed for the very good reason that,
from their standpoint, no other religion even can be
true in the same sense in which this can be said of
Christianity. Although all religions make or imply
the claim to be formally true, and hence normative
for determining all other religious truth, the only
religion whose claim to this effect can possibly be
valid is the religion established by God in the unique
saving event of Jesus Christ. Since only the Christian
religion can be said to be thus established, it alone
can validly claim to be the formally true religion.
For many, if not most, Christians this kind of
religious monism has been understood exclusivisti-
cally in that they have denied the possibility of par¬
ticipating in the true religion, and thus obtaining
salvation, to any and all non-Christians. The classi¬
cal formula for such exclusivism is the dictum that
goes back to the Latin church father Cyprian: extra
ecclesiam nulla salus—"outside of the church there
28
is no salvation." Some interpreters have held that
this formula strictly applies only to the Roman
Catholic form of exclusivism, since Protestant exclu-
sivists have typically claimed instead that there is
no salvation outside of Christianity (Hick and Knit¬
ter, 16f.). But this seems to me to be a misleading
way of stating the relevant difference, since in both
cases salvation is possible only in and through the
visible church and its proclamation. In the case of
Roman Catholics, however, who have classically
identified the visible church with their own institu¬
tional church, exclusivism has meant that there is
no salvation, because no participation in the true
religion, outside of the Church of Rome. In the case
of Protestants, by contrast, exclusivism has meant
that no one could expect to belong to the invisible
church of the chosen except by belonging to the visi¬
ble church of the called through membership in
some true institutional church. In both cases, exclu¬
sivism is the option that not only asserts Christian¬
ity to be the only true religion, but also holds that
Christians alone, as participants in this religion
through their membership in the visible church, ob¬
tain the salvation that God established it to mediate.
From late antiquity through the nineteenth cen¬
tury, Christians in the West typically exercised this
option of exclusivism in one or the other of its dif¬
ferent forms. Throughout this period, they widely
believed that Christianity was destined to spread
throughout the world, eventually displacing all of
the other non-Christian religions; and firm in this
belief, they increasingly gave themselves to the
missionary outreach that led to modern Christian
THE CASE AGAINST EXCLUSIVISM 29

expansion. But exclusivism has never been the only
option open to Christians; and since roughly World
War I, which in this as in other ways was the real
end of the nineteenth century, there has been a
growing movement away from it. This has happened
in part, no doubt, because of increasing knowledge,
as well as extensive first-hand experience, of other
religious and cultural traditions, especially of the
other axial religions. But ever since World War II
and the breakup of the European colonial empires
in Africa and Asia, many Christians have also be¬
come more and more aware of the negative impact
of exclusivism on the non-Christian majority of the
world’s population. Having served only too often to
sanction the acquisitiveness and violence of Western
imperialism, exclusivistic claims are now seen to be
profoundly ambiguous if not yet totally discredited.
The upshot is that for some three-quarters of a
century, and increasingly during the last thirty
years or so, Christians have been moving away from
traditional exclusivism toward a more inclusivistic
way of claiming that theirs is the only true religion.
To a considerable extent, this has happened by their
retrieving an alternative theological tradition that,
ever since the New Testament, has made the possi¬
bility of salvation independent of participation in
the true religion through membership in the visible
church. In any case, clear evidences of the emer¬
gence of such inclusivism are to be seen on the Ro¬
man Catholic side in the theological developments
leading up to the Second Vatican Council and its
official statements about the church and the rela¬
tion of the church to non-Christian religions; and on
30
the Protestant and Orthodox side in the parallel de¬
velopments taking place in the World Council of
Churches Subunit on Dialogue with People of Living
Faiths and Ideologies.
If we ignore certain differences in nuance and
formulation, these developments have all led to a
way of answering our question that is significantly
different from that of exclusivism. According to
this answer, the possibility of salvation uniquely
constituted by the event of Jesus Christ is somehow
made available to each and every human being
without exception and, therefore, is exclusive of no
one unless she or he excludes her- or himself from
its effect by a free and responsible decision to re¬
ject it. Since salvation itself is thus universally pos¬
sible, and in this sense is all-inclusive, there is also
the possibility of all religions being more or less
substantially true insofar as this salvation becomes
effective in human beings, thereby transforming
their self-objectification in the explicit forms of re¬
ligion as well as in culture generally. Thus not only
can all individuals be saved by the salvation consti¬
tuted by Christ, but all religions also can be more
or less valid means of this salvation to those who
either are not or cannot become members of the
visible church. At the same time, Christian inclu-
sivists continue to maintain that Christianity alone
can be the formally true religion, since it alone is
the religion established by God in the unique saving
event of Jesus Christ and, therefore, alone expresses
normatively the religious truth that is represented
at best fragmentarily and inadequately in all other
religious ways. Thus, while, according to Christian

inclusivism, non-Christians can indeed be saved
because or insofar as they accept Christ’s salvation
as it is made available to them anonymously and
unknowingly and through the means of their own
religions, Christians alone are related to the same
salvation explicitly and knowingly in the way which
it is the abiding mission of the visible church to
bring about in the life of each and every person.
Notwithstanding its significant difference from
exclusivism, then, inclusivism is, in its way, monis¬
tic rather than pluralistic in its understanding of
true religion. For it, too, there not only is but can be
only one true religion, in the sense that Christianity
alone can validly claim to be formally true. Recog¬
nizing this, one of its most astute critics, John Hick,
dismisses it as anomalous—"like the anomaly of ac¬
cepting the Copernican revolution in astronomy, in
which the earth ceased to be regarded as the center
of the universe and was seen instead as one of the
planets circling the sun, but still insisting that the
sun’s life-giving rays can reach the other planets
only by first being reflected from the earth!” (Hick
and Knitter, 23).
We will return to a consideration of inclusivism
in later chapters, especially the last. Meanwhile,
having distinguished it from exclusivism, we have
now taken account of all three of the usual options
for answering our central question. In addition to
the relatively new and challenging option of plural¬
ism, there are the two older options of exclusivism
and inclusivism, both of which are now being chal¬
lenged in their monistic answers to the question.
32
Not surprisingly, pluralists are particularly
keen to distinguish their position from that of inclu-
sivists, which they consider anomalous and un¬
stable. In their view, either inclusivists must fall
back on the exclusivism from which they have
turned away, or else they must push ahead to the
pluralism that alone offers a consistent alternative.
For all of their sharp criticism of inclusivism, how¬
ever, pluralists are more than willing to accept its
help in overthrowing the common enemy of exclu¬
sivism. In fact, the combined opposition that their
alliance with inclusivists makes possible means that
exclusivism has become an increasingly embattled
position. Even so, the theological issue is whether
this development is justified. Does exclusivism de¬
serve to be overthrown? How strong is the case
against it?
My judgment is that the case against it is excep¬
tionally strong—as strong, in fact, as a theological
case is likely to be. But an adequate defense of this
judgment, such as I shall attempt in this chapter,
requires that we first pay attention to what has to be
done to make a theological case. The benefits of
attending to this, of course, are not limited to the
largely critical case to be made in this chapter, but
also extend to the argument of the book generally,
in its more constructive as well as its more critical
aspects.
I begin by recalling a reference made in passing
in Chapter 1 to what I distinguished as theology in
the generic sense of the word. Theology in this sense,
I said, is a secondary form of culture consisting in

critical reflection on the validity claims of some
specific religion. Whereas religion as a primary
form of culture involves making or implying certain
claims to validity, theology as a secondary form of
culture involves critically validating or invalidating
these same claims. Theology is not alone in doing
this, of course, since philosophy, also, involves criti¬
cally reflecting on the claims of religion, along with
those of so-called secular forms of praxis and cul¬
ture. But what distinguishes theology in the generic
sense from philosophy, including what I refer to as
“philosophical theology,” is that it is constituted as
such by critical reflection on the validity claims of
this or that specific religion (cf. Ogden 1986, 69-93,
121-33). This means that theology in the specific
sense of Christian theology, which is our immediate
concern here, neither would nor could exist at all
but for the prior existence of the Christian religion,
whose claims to validity it is constituted to validate.
The problem with putting it this way, however,
is that it is much too abstract. The claims in question
are not really made or implied by the Christian reli¬
gion, but by concrete human beings, as groups and
as individuals, who think and speak of themselves as
Christians in making or implying them. Conse¬
quently, the concrete data of Christian theological
reflection are provided by the religious praxis, or, as
I like to call it, the “witness,” of all of these human
beings who profess to be Christians.
Analysis discloses, I maintain, that any instance
of such Christian witness expresses or implies two
distinctive claims to validity. On the one hand, it
claims to be adequate to its content and, therefore.
34
substantially if not formally true; on the other hand,
it claims to be fitting to its situation. Actually, Chris¬
tian witness makes or implies three claims, since its
claim to be adequate to its content and hence also
true itself involves two further claims: first, that
what is thought, said, or done in bearing the witness
is appropriate to Jesus Christ; and second, that it is
credible to human existence. In the broadest sense,
then, Christian theology as critical reflection on the
claims to validity expressed or implied by Christian
witness consists in critically validating all three of
these claims: to be adequate to its content and,
therefore, appropriate and credible, and to be fitting
to its situation.
But the words “Christian theology” are also
commonly used in a narrower sense to refer to the
particular discipline of Christian systematic theol¬
ogy, rather than to the field of Christian theology as
a whole. Here, again, our immediate concern war¬
rants our focusing on Christian theology in this nar¬
rower sense of the words. This means that, in the
sense intended here, theology consists in critically
validating the claim of Christian witness to be ade¬
quate to its content, the task of validating the other
claim of witness to be fitting to its situation being
the proper task of Christian practical theology.
What has to be done, then, to make the theological
case against exclusivism that I propose to make is to
invalidate its claim to be adequate to its content
and, therefore, substantially true; and this entails,
of course, invalidating its two further claims to be
appropriate to Jesus Christ and credible to human
existence.

I underscore that making the case against ex-
clusivism entails invalidating both of these further
claims. There is no question that traditional Chris¬
tian exclusivism has long since ceased to be plausi¬
ble, much less credible, to many men and women
both within the church and outside of it. On this
ground alone, then, it is widely rejected as an unten¬
able position, and Christian theologians commonly
assume that it must at all costs be abandoned. But
this, in my opinion, is to follow a defective theologi¬
cal procedure, and this would be so even if what is
widely held to be incredible were to be critically
invalidated as exactly that. Pending the critical re¬
flection necessary to determine otherwise, one
must allow, at least as a possibility, that Christian
exclusivism’s other claim to be appropriate to Jesus
Christ could be critically validated. In that event, of
course, invalidating its claim to be credible would
invalidate the constitutive assertion of Christian
witness itself, since Jesus could not then be the deci¬
sive re-presentation of the truth about human exist¬
ence that Christians attest him to be in asserting
him to be the Christ. But concern to avoid this even¬
tuality cannot excuse following a procedure in the¬
ology that is in principle faulty. On the contrary, the
only way to make a theological case against exclu¬
sivism is to invalidate both of its claims—its claim
to be appropriate to Jesus Christ as well as its claim
to be credible to human existence.
To invalidate either claim naturally requires
employing relevant criteria or norms. In the case
of the claim to be credible, the relevant criteria
are common human experience and reason. If
36
exclusivism is worthy of being believed, it can only
be because it somehow has the support of what any
human being can experience and understand. If,
on the other hand, exclusivism is incredible, this
must be because it is lacking in such support—
whether because experience and reason clearly tell
against it or simply because they are not sufficient
to bear it out. To invalidate its claim to be credible
is to show one or the other of these possibilities to
be the actual situation.
In the case of its claim to be appropriate, the
relevant criteria or norms are quite different. Like
other religious traditions, the Christian tradition is
heterogeneous in composition insofar as, through
special acts of self-definition, it has specified cer¬
tain of its elements as normative for some or all of
the others. Thus, whether or not a given witness or
theology is appropriate to Jesus Christ must be de¬
termined by whether or not it is in substantial
agreement with these normative elements, and, ul¬
timately, with the formal norm or canon with
which all other elements must substantially agree.
The difficulty in determining this, however, is
that there has never been complete agreement
among Christians about what elements are to count
as formally normative, either in fact or in principle.
To be sure, they have generally agreed during most
of their history that it is the original and originating
witness of the apostles that is in principle formally
normative. But aside from the fact, evidenced by the
history of the canon, that they have always disagreed
about just what witness or witnesses can be vali¬
dated as apostolic, exactly what apostolicity itself

is to mean even as a principle has also been pro¬
foundly controversial. Thus, while Protestants, Ro¬
man Catholics, and Orthodox have all traditionally
accepted the same apostolic principle, they have un¬
derstood it in sharply different ways—Protestants
appealing to “scripture alone” as apostolic, Roman
Catholics and Orthodox invoking alternative under¬
standings of "scripture and tradition” as the real
meaning of apostolicity. And as if this were not
enough, the revisionary forms of witness and theol¬
ogy that have emerged in modern Christian history
have challenged the very principle of apostolicity
itself, replacing appeal to it with appeal to the so-
called historical Jesus as the real principle of for¬
mally normative witness.
This is not the place, obviously, to try to elimi¬
nate this difficulty. There are simply different views
on what is to count as formally normative both in
principle and in fact, and none of these views is com¬
pletely free of more or less serious problems. All I
can do, therefore, is briefly summarize my own
view on the question, and refer to discussions I have
provided elsewhere that more amply explain and de¬
fend it (see, for example, Ogden 1982, 96-105; 1986,
45-68).
My view is that the answer to the question clas¬
sically given in the Protestant formula, sola scrip-
tura—"scripture alone”—is sound in principle even
though it is no longer tenable in fact. It is sound in
principle because there are the very best of reasons
for acknowledging the unique authority of the origi¬
nal and originating witness of the apostles. With the
emergence of their witness, although not before, the
38
Christian religion was definitively established; and
it is solely through their witness, finally, that all
others who have come to participate in this religion
have been authorized to do so. Insofar, then, as the
Protestant scriptural principle acknowledges the
sole primary authority of the apostolic witness, it is
and remains entirely sound. But what is no longer
tenable is its identification of scripture, or the New
Testament, as in fact apostolic witness. Given the
methods and results of historical knowledge now
available to us, we know that not a single New Testa¬
ment writing can be apostolic in the sense of origi¬
nal and originating Christian witness, since their
authors all make use of other Christian witnesses,
oral and/or written, earlier than themselves. Conse¬
quently, to apply the apostolic principle today, in the
light of such knowledge, is perforce to abandon the
scriptural principle as such, in its classical Protes¬
tant form. It is to locate what is formally normative
in fact, not in the canon of scripture, or in some
“canon within the canon,” but in a canon before the
canon—specifically, in the earliest stratum of
Christian witness now accessible to us through the
methods and results of our own historical knowl¬
edge, which is all that we can responsibly identify as
apostolic witness.
In my view, then, whether or not a given wit¬
ness or theology is appropriate to Jesus Christ must
be determined, finally, by whether or not it is in
substantial agreement with this earliest accessible
stratum of Christian witness. Thus, if exclusivism
validly claims to be appropriate, it can only be be¬
cause it substantially agrees with this witness. If, on

the other hand, the claim of exclusivism is to be
invalidated, this can be done only by showing its
disagreement with the very substance of this wit¬
ness, which is to say, the understanding of existence
of which the witness as such is the formally norma¬
tive formulation.
So much, then, for what has to be done to make
the case against exclusivism. I now want to develop
what I take to be the decisive objections against it.
To this end, I shall first consider somewhat more
closely just what it is that exclusivists today typically
hold. I stress that it is with a typical position that
my argument is concerned and that what I mean by
exclusivists is simply Christians or theologians who
hold this type of position, to whatever extent they in
fact do so.
According to the presuppositions of exclu¬
sivism, the predicament of human beings univer¬
sally is a consequence of their sin, understood not
merely as moral transgression, which is rather the
result of sin, but as the deeper refusal of a human
being to live, finally, in radical dependence upon
God, solely by God’s grace. Thus, while each and
every person is created good and in God's own im¬
age, all human beings so misuse their freedom as
to sin in this deeper sense of the word. In thus de¬
ciding for existence in sin, however, they forfeit
their original possibility of existence in faith; and
they have no prospect of ever actualizing this possi¬
bility unless God acts preveniently to restore it to
them. But it is just this that God has in fact done in
sending Jesus Christ and in thereby establishing the
visible church with its proclamation of salvation.
40
Anyone who is encountered by this proclamation is
once again restored to the possibility of faith, sin
notwithstanding; and actualization of this possibil¬
ity through acceptance of the proclamation is sal¬
vation from sin and liberation from the human
predicament.
It is just as true, however, that everyone else
remains trapped in this predicament and without
prospect of salvation. And this is the great diffi¬
culty; for it means, in effect, that the human
predicament of some persons is radically different
from that of others. Since the coming of Jesus Christ
and the establishment of the Christian proclamation
are events occurring at a particular time and place
in history, only persons living after these events and
somehow capable of being encountered by the
proclamation have any possibility of being saved
from their sin. But, then, the predicament of all
other persons is not simply a consequence of their
sin, in the sense of something for which they them¬
selves, through the misuse of their freedom, are
each individually responsible; it is also the predica¬
ment of having unfortunately been born at the
wrong time or place, a matter of fate rather than
freedom, in no way their own responsibility.
To be sure, in the classical formulations of ex-
clusivism in orthodox theology, this difficulty is
considerably mitigated or qualified by a larger con¬
text of other theological claims. Thus exclusivists
have traditionally been able to believe that the Chris¬
tian proclamation of Jesus Christ was already
present prophetically in the Hebrew scriptures,
and hence to everyone included in the old covenant.

Furthermore, it is a traditional teaching going all
the way back to the church fathers that the gospel
was first proclaimed to Adam and Eve through the
so-called proto-evangelium of Gen. 3:15 and in this
way was already made available to the whole human
race. Finally, exclusivists have always been able to
qualify their position by allowing for extraordinary
acts of God through which individuals are given the
possibility of salvation otherwise than through the
ordinary means thereof that God has established in
the visible church and its word and sacraments. But
all of these other claims have long since ceased to
provide a credible context for Christian exclusivism.
Historical-critical study of scripture has undercut
any claim that Jesus Christ was already proclaimed
prophetically in the Hebrew scriptures. It has made
clear, in fact, that this claim is the classic case of
Christians in the present using such methods as are
available to them for interpreting their past as will
yield what is now called, by a revealing phrase,
"usable tradition.” Still less plausible is any notion
that the gospel was already proclaimed figuratively
to Adam and Eve, so that all of their descendants
originally had the possibility of faith restored to
them. Such allegorical interpretation is totally dis¬
credited, and there is no evidence whatever of the
gospel’s ever having been universally disseminated
to all members of the human race. As for special sav¬
ing acts of God, they are on the face of it arbitrary
and ad hoc and are so far from providing any solu¬
tion to the problem as to be simply another case of it.
Add to this, then, that the sciences continue to
date the origins of human life ever earlier in the
42
history of our planet, and it is clear that exclu-
sivists today face a difficult choice. Either they
must so alter their original position that only Chris¬
tians are saved as to allow for the salvation also of
non-Christians, at least of participants in God’s
covenant with Israel and, possibly, of persons in¬
cluded in other dispensations of God's grace; or
else they can maintain their original position, but
only by conceding that even those included in the
old covenant, along with the overwhelming major¬
ity of the human race, could not possibly have been
saved. Through no fault of their own, all but a tiny
minority of the human beings who have lived and
died have been allowed to remain in their sin, with
despair of salvation the only realistic attitude to
their condition.
Assuming now that this is the typical position of
Christian exclusivists, I want to object, first of all,
that it cannot be validated as credible in terms of
common human experience and reason. In princi¬
ple, at least, one could be so encountered by the
Christian proclamation as to experience it as mak¬
ing one’s salvation possible, somewhat in the way in
which one can experience the words or deeds of
another person as enabling one to exist with a new
sense of confidence and hope for the future,
notwithstanding one’s faults in the past. On the ba¬
sis of this experience, then, one could also make or
imply the kind of assertion about the decisive signif¬
icance of Jesus Christ for salvation that Christians
have been wont to make or imply, beginning with
the formally normative witness of the apostles.
Moreover, this assertion would very definitely imply

an exclusivistic claim of sorts—that even as Jesus
Christ is the one through whom God decisively acts
to save, so the only God who saves is the one who
acts decisively through Jesus Christ. Whether or not
this claim were true, then, could be determined,
again, at least in principle, by validating its neces¬
sary implications for both belief and action by fol¬
lowing appropriate procedures of metaphysical and
ethical verification. But nothing that even a Chris¬
tian could experience would warrant holding that
the way in which she or he and other Christians have
been given the possibility of salvation is the only
way in which it has been or can be given. In fact,
even if one could say that Christianity is the only
religion that can be formally true, because it alone
is established by God in the unique saving event of
Jesus Christ, one would still have no basis for saying
that Christians alone are saved or that the possibil¬
ity of salvation is given only by the Christian procla¬
mation. And if one did say it, there would be no way,
even in principle, of ever verifying it in terms of
common human experience and reason, since no
human experience could show that God has not
given or cannot give the possibility of salvation in
some other way.
In short, if exclusivism has any basis in experi¬
ence at all, it can only be in divine experience, not
in human. God alone could experience the Chris¬
tian proclamation as the only way, or, at least, the
only ordinary way, in which God gives men and
women the possibility of salvation. But this means
that exclusivism is indeed an incredible theological
position, since human experience and reason are
44
insufficient to support it. Even if it were true, it
could not be shown to be so in the only terms that
would warrant our accepting it as worthy of belief.
We saw earlier that the same objection would
need to be made to the Christian witness itself if ex-
clusivism could make good its further claim to be
appropriate to Jesus Christ. But if I am right, this
claim, also, is invalid, and this is the second decisive
objection against the exclusivistic answer to our
question. Far from being appropriate to Jesus Christ,
it is, in fact, deeply inappropriate to him in denying
the understanding of God that he necessarily implies
in explicitly authorizing Christian faith. Consider
the following argument.
According to the analysis of religion developed
in Chapter 1, specifically Christian faith, like any
other, may be characterized purely formally as
an explicit self-understanding, or understanding
of one's existence in relation to others and the
whole. As such, however, it is the only explicit self¬
understanding decisively authorized by Jesus
whom Christians assert to be the Christ, the point
of their assertion being that it is at one and the
same time the very self-understanding implicitly
authorized as the authentic understanding of hu¬
man existence by ultimate reality itself in its
meaning for us. If we ask, then, for the material
content of this self-understanding, the only appro¬
priate answer, judging from the formally norma¬
tive witness of the apostles, is that it is an under¬
standing of ourselves and all others as alike the
objects of God’s all-embracing love. It is precisely
as himself the explicit gift and demand of God’s

love that Jesus is represented in this earliest wit¬
ness; and to understand oneself as one is given and
called to do decisively through him is to under¬
stand oneself as both loved by God and claimed by
God's love.
Essential to this self-understanding is a distinc¬
tive double structure: it is both trust in God's love
alone for the ultimate meaning of our lives and loy¬
alty to God's love as the only final cause that our
lives, and all lives, are intended to serve. Although
in both aspects, faith is a human response to God's
love, but for which it would not be possible, its first
aspect of trust is relatively more passive, while its
second aspect of loyalty is relatively more active.
Moreover, the priority of the first and more passive
aspect of trust to the second and more active aspect
of loyalty is irreversible. It is only through first ac¬
cepting God's love in trust that we become suffi¬
ciently free from ourselves and all others to be truly
loyal to God's cause. It is just as true, however, that
if we truly trust in God's love, we cannot fail to live
in loyalty to it. Therefore, while this second aspect
of faith is and must be strictly posterior to the first,
there is nevertheless but one faith with two aspects,
each of which necessarily implies the other.
To be loyal to God's love, however, is to be loyal
not only to God but also to all to whom God is loyal;
and this means, of course, everyone, all others as
well as ourselves. But to be loyal to another neces¬
sarily involves—if, indeed, it is not simply another
word for—loving the other, in the sense of so accept¬
ing the other as to take account of the other's inter¬
ests and then acting toward the other on the basis of
46
such acceptance. So it is that the faith that can origi¬
nate only by our trusting in God’s prevenient love
for all of us can eventuate only in our returning
love for God and, in God, for all whom God loves.
But if the meaning of God for us is the gift and
demand of unbounded love that authorizes trust in
this love and loyalty to its cause as our authentic
self-understanding, the strictly ultimate reality
called “God” has to have a unique structure in itself.
Just as it must be inclusive both of self and of all
others and, therefore, completely universal in scope
and function, so it must also be genuinely individual
in being a single center of interaction, both acting
on and being acted on by itself and all others. In all
ordinary cases, of course, universality and individu¬
ality are distinguishing propei ties, the most univer¬
sal things being the least individual, and vice versa.
But if the kind of trust in God’s love and loyalty to its
cause that are Christian faith are, in fact, authorized
by ultimate reality in its meaning for us, then the
structure of this reality in itself, in its strictly ulti¬
mate aspect, must be as individual as it is universal,
or as universal as it is individual, and hence the one
great exception to the rule by which individuals and
universals are otherwise distinguished.
The same conclusion follows from the demand
of God’s love as summarized in the commandments
that we shall love the Lord our God with the whole of
our being and that we shall love our neighbors as
ourselves. Clearly, if it is God whom we are to love
with all of our powers, God must be one individual
distinct from all others whose interests we can take
account of and act to realize. At the same time, if we

are also to accept our neighbors as ourselves and act
so as to realize all of their interests, even while all of
our powers are to be exercised in our love for God,
God must also be completely universal in that there
can be no interest either of ourselves or of our neigh¬
bors that is not somehow included in God’s interests.
The God implied by love for God as well as by
faith in God, then, cannot be simply one individual
among others but must be the one and only com¬
pletely universal individual. This means that the
strictly ultimate whole of reality that we experience
as necessary in contrast to the radical contingency
both of ourselves and all others must also be distinc¬
tively dipolar in its essential structure. It belongs to
the very concept of an individual, and hence to any
individual whatever, that it be a center of interac¬
tion that both acts on itself and others and is acted
on by them. Consequently, even the universal indi¬
vidual called “God” must be conceived as having
two essential aspects: a relatively more active aspect
in which it acts on or makes a difference to both
itself and all others and a relatively more passive
aspect in which all others as well as itself act on or
make a difference to it. Thus the uniqueness of God
in comparison with all other individuals does not
lie, as classical Christian theology has held, in God’s
only acting on others and in no way being acted on
by them, but rather in the completely universal
scope of God’s field of interaction with others as
well as with Godself. Whereas any other individual
interacts with itself for a finite time only, God’s act¬
ing on Godself and being acted on by Godself has
never begun nor will it ever end. And so, too, with
48
respect to interaction with others: whereas any indi¬
vidual other than God interacts with some others
only, God interacts with all, not only acting on them
but also being acted on by them.
In both aspects, God as the universal individual
is strictly unsurpassable; and only by being thus un¬
surpassable both actively and passively can God be
the God necessarily implied by the distinctive dou¬
ble structure of Christian faith, and thus be both the
ground of unreserved trust and the object of unqual¬
ified loyalty. We may trust in God without reserva¬
tion only because God is unsurpassably active, ever
doing all that could conceivably be done by anyone
for all others as well as Godself. Likewise, we may
be loyal to God without qualification only because
God is unsurpassably passive, being ever open to all
that could conceivably be done or suffered by any¬
one as something that is also done to God.
It is for the best of reasons, then, that Christian
theology has traditionally understood God to be
both all-good and all-powerful. To be both unsur¬
passably active and unsurpassably passive in one’s
interaction with others is to be precisely unsurpass¬
ably good and unsurpassably powerful, since good¬
ness and power alike have both active and passive
aspects as applied to individuals. An individual's
goodness toward others is always, first of all, open¬
ness to their interests and only then action further¬
ing their interests on the basis of such openness.
Similarly, an individual’s power in relation to others
is never merely the capacity to act on them, but is
also always the capacity to be acted on by them. The
great tragedy of traditional theology, of course, is

that this has been forgotten in thinking and speak¬
ing about God, whose goodness and power have
been classically conceived one-sidedly as wholly ac¬
tive. Thus God's power has been understood as
"omnipotence,” in the sense of all the power there
is, as distinct from all the power that any one indi¬
vidual could have consistently with there being
other individuals also having power, however mini¬
mal. The result is that classical Christian theology
has been saddled with an insoluble problem of evil.
If God's is a sheer monopoly of power, then it cannot
be true both that God is also omnibeneficent or all¬
good and that evil of some kind or in some form is
real or exists.
Once allow, however, that God's is not the only
power, and the problem of evil is capable of solution.
Such evil as is real or exists can then be accounted
for by the decision or agency of other powers, and
God can without difficulty be said to be all-good as
well as all-powerful. This is so, at any rate, if allow¬
ing that there are powers other than God need not
deny that God is unsurpassably powerful as well as
unsurpassably good.
But now what does all this have to do with the
inappropriateness of Christian exclusivism? The
connection, I maintain, is this: by establishing, in
effect, a double standard for obtaining salvation, ex¬
clusivism creates a form of the problem of evil to
which there can be no such solution. I say that ex¬
clusivism establishes a double standard, because, as
I have shown, it implies that the human predica¬
ment of the vast majority of men and women is radi¬
cally different from that of the tiny minority who
50
have been able to become Christians by being en¬
countered by the Christian proclamation. Through
no fault of their own, by far most human beings have
been allowed to remain in their sin without any
prospect of salvation. But this, clearly, is an evil; in
fact, on exclusivism’s own presuppositions, it must
be an evil of the first magnitude that all but a few
persons are left utterly without hope and are finally
lost. It is also an evil, however, that logically com¬
pels one to deny either that God is all-powerful or
that God is all-good. For in the nature of the case, it
is not an evil that can be accounted for by any deci¬
sion or agency other than God’s own. In the case of
other forms of evil—such as, for example, the evil of
sin or the moral evil committed by human beings or
by other beings created with moral freedom such
a “free will defense” of the all-goodness and the all¬
powerfulness of God is at least available. But in this
case, there is no possibility of arguing in this way;
for, as we have seen, the fact, if it were a fact, that by
far most human beings, having once forfeited their
possibility of existing in faith, would then have no
prospect of ever actualizing it would be due, not
to their own decision or agency, but to God’s—
specifically to God’s abandoning them to their
predicament instead of so acting as to liberate them
from it, as God would have done for at least the few
human beings who are in a position to become
Christians.
I conclude, therefore, that there is no escaping
the problem of evil that is necessarily implied by
exclusivism. If exclusivism were true, the only infer¬
ence from the fact that by far most human beings

could have no hope of salvation would be either that
God is not good enough to want them to be saved or
that God is not powerful enough to do all that any¬
one could do to save them, except what they must do
themselves. Either way, the understanding of God
necessarily implied by Christian faith, as at once
unsurpassably good and unsurpassably powerful,
could no longer be upheld.
Recognizing this, we may confirm my judgment
that exclusivism is deeply inappropriate to Jesus
Christ and that, for this reason, also, the case
against it is unusually strong. We may also insist
over against it that, if the Christian understanding of
God as unsurpassable in both goodness and power
is really to be maintained, no woman or man can
ever be without the possibility of existing in faith as
soon and as long as she or he is a human being at all.
52
CHAPTER 3
Difficulties with the Case

for Pluralism
T he burden of the last

chapter was to show
that the case against
exclusivism is exceptionally strong—and that this is
true not only because exclusivism is an incredible
theological position, being incapable of validation in
terms of common human experience and reason,
but also because it is deeply inappropriate to Jesus
Christ. Implying, as it does, a double standard for
obtaining salvation, exclusivism creates a form of
the problem of evil that is insoluble. If it were true,
the only inference from the fact that Christians
alone are saved would be either that God is not good
enough to want to save all others or that God is not
powerful enough to make their salvation possible.
Either way, the understanding of God implied by the
assertion that Jesus is the Christ could not be con¬
sistently upheld.
If this argument is sound, we have good reason
to look to some option other than exclusivism for
the answer to our central question. It is by no means
53
obvious, however, that it is to pluralism that we
should look. We have seen, to be sure, that pluralists
are wont to claim over against inclusivists that their
position is the only consistent alternative to exclu-
sivism. But there are difficulties with their argu¬
ment for pluralism, not the least of which is why this
claim itself should be thought valid (cf. Ogden 1988).
To see why I say this, we need to recall just
what it is that Christians and theologians who con¬
tend for pluralism understand by it. I argued at the
end of Chapter 1 that, contrary to what might be
supposed from the recent statements of certain plu¬
ralists, the position they hold is not only that there
can be many true religions, but that there actually
are. Thus the assertion typical of pluralism is that
Christianity is not the only true religion, but, in
John Hick's words, “one of a plurality of contexts of
salvation . . . within which the transformation of
human existence from self-centeredness to God- or
Reality-centeredness is occurring.” Such an asser¬
tion, Hick claims, is the “logical” (or “natural”) con¬
clusion of the trajectory whose path can be traced
“from an exclusivist to an inclusivist view of other
religions” (Hick and Knitter, 23, 16, 22). But how
valid is this claim?
In the earlier discussion of exclusivism and in-
clusivism as both forms of religious monism, I
noted that the reason for their claim that Christian¬
ity alone is the true religion is the, for them, very
good reason that it alone can be formally true. Be¬
cause in their views the only religion that can be
true in this sense is the religion established by God
in the unique saving event of Jesus Christ, they can
54
confidently assert that the Christian religion alone
is true in this sense because there simply cannot be
many ways of salvation of which the Christian way
is only one. But, then, this is the assertion, com¬
mon to both monistic views, that has to be coun¬
tered if there is to be a complete break with
monism, whether exclusivistic or inclusivistic. To
counter it, however, in no way requires one to as¬
sert with pluralism that there actually are many
ways of salvation of which Christianity is but one.
All that one needs to assert is that there can be
these many ways, even if, as a matter of fact, Chris¬
tianity should turn out to be the only way of salva¬
tion there is.
For this reason. Hick's claim is unfounded. Plu¬
ralism is not the logical conclusion of a consistent
movement away from exclusivism, but is an inde¬
pendent assertion to be evaluated on its merits. Ex¬
clusivism and inclusivism could both be invalidated
without in any way validating pluralism as the an¬
swer to our question.
Unfortunately, this is not the only logical diffi¬
culty with the typical case for pluralism. Among
other fallacious arguments that pluralists some¬
times offer is that genuine interreligious dialogue is
possible only on the basis of a consistent pluralism.
Thus Alan Race, for instance, commends “pluralism
in the Christian theology of religions” because it
“seeks to draw the faiths of the world’s religious past
into a mutual recognition of one another's truths
and values, in order for truth itself to come into
proper focus” (Race, 148). But no such mutual
recognition of one another’s truths and values is
DIFFICULTIES WITH THE CASE FOR PLURALISM 55

logically required in order for truth itself to come
into proper focus. All that is necessary to this end is
a mutual recognition of one another's truth- and
v3\\xQ-claims as exactly that—claims to validity that
are equally in need and equally deserving of critical
validation in terms of our common human experi¬
ence and reason. Implied by such recognition, no
doubt, is the further recognition of one another as
persons, who can make and validate such claims and
who are, therefore, entitled to a distinctive kind of
moral respect. But such mutual respect for one an¬
other as persons in no way depends upon asserting
that the claims to truth and value of either person
are valid claims. I can be wrong, and so can my
partner; and yet both of us can and should be open
to one another in genuine dialogue and in a com¬
mon inquiry into the true and the good.
In short, the case for pluralism can no more be
made by arguing for interreligious dialogue than by
arguing against religious monism; and to reason in
either way on the contrary supposition is to reason
fallaciously. Pluralism is not the logical conclusion
of a consistent movement toward the other religions,
but is an independent assertion that must stand or
fall on its own. Interreligious dialogue could very
well be validated without in the least validating plu¬
ralism as the answer to our question (cf. Lochhead).
Nor can validating it ever be easy by the very
logic of such an answer. Whether any religion at all
is true must, in the nature of the case, be more or
less difficult to determine. We noted one of the prin¬
cipal reasons for this already in the first chapter,
when we considered the procedures necessary to
56
determine religious truth. Because these proce¬
dures require verifying the necessary implications
of a religion for both belief and action, they unavoid¬
ably involve all the well-known difficulties of both
metaphysical and ethical verification. For this rea¬
son alone, one might well hesitate to pronounce any
religion true, much less a plurality of them.
But not only are there such philosophical diffi¬
culties; there are historical and hermeneutical diffi¬
culties as well. Every religion is a historical emer¬
gent, and it is available concretely, as just this or that
specific religion, only in and through the religious
praxis of some particular social and cultural group.
Furthermore, every religious tradition is to some
extent self-defining in that it specifies certain of its
elements as normative for some or all of the others.
But these normative elements, no less than all the
rest, are thoroughly historical and are accessible as
such only empirically, through historical experience
and inquiry. Thus what counts as formally norma¬
tive for a particular religion both in principle and in
fact must be determined historically by actually en¬
countering its particular tradition. And such deter¬
mination may very well be complicated by the fact
that there is no consensus in the religion about what
is normative for its tradition. Indeed, its tradition
so-called may turn out to be little more than a plu¬
rality of religious traditions, each specifying what is
normative for it in a somewhat different way.
Yet even after one determines what is to count
as normative for a religion, there remain the by
no means minor difficulties of rightly interpreting
its norms so that they can perform their proper

function. No norm can function as such except by
being somehow understood; and yet how it is to be
rightly understood is likely to be even more contro¬
versial than whether it or something else is really
normative. This would be true, in fact, even if there
were agreement, as there is not, that religious
claims are properly analyzed as existential claims
and as therefore having an existential kind of
meaning and truth. Exactly what it means to say
this, and thus how religious claims are and are not
related to other logically distinct kinds of claims,
continue to be matters of controversy among
philosophers and students of religion as well as the¬
ologians. In any event, whether what this or that
specific religion offers as its answer to the existen¬
tial question is true cannot be determined merely
philosophically. As also in part a properly histori¬
cal and hermeneutical question, it can be answered
only by actually encountering the specific religion
and rightly interpreting what it asserts or implies
about the meaning of ultimate reality for us.
Naturally, to be a religious believer is one and
the same with claiming either explicitly or implicitly
that one's own religion is true. But, aside from the
fact that this is simply one more claim to religious
truth, whose validity also has to be determined
along with that of every other, all that its being vali¬
dated would allow one to affirm a priori about the
truth of any other specific religion is that it either
can or cannot be true. Thus, even assuming that,
from a Christian standpoint, not only exclusivism
but inclusivism also could be shown to be invalid,
the most that a Christian could possibly know, prior
58
to actually encountering the many religions and
rightly interpreting them, is not that they in fact are
true, but only that they at least can be true.
Of course, it is not particularly difficult to un¬
dertake the empirical study of religion, or of specific
religions, and to do this, as we say, comparatively. In
this way, one can learn, for example, that human
beings quite generally, after a certain amount of so¬
cial and cultural development, seem to feel the need
for some sort of radical transformation of their own
individual existence in relation to ultimate reality.
Thus not only Christianity but all of the other axial
religions as well are evidently addressed to this need
and present themselves as the means of just such ulti¬
mate transformation. But learning only this about
the axial religions entitles one to make no more than
a purely formal statement about them—to the effect
that they all exhibit the same essential structure
both in focusing the existential problem in the indi¬
vidual person and in seeking to solve it by radically
transforming her or his self-understanding. Such a
statement in no way excludes, but obviously allows
for, a wide range of material differences, not exclud¬
ing substantial contrariety and contradiction, be¬
tween one religion and another in their respective
understandings of human existence.
The great difficulty for pluralists, however, is
to get beyond this purely formal statement in a rea¬
soned way. If there are many true religions, the
similarities between them, notwithstanding all
their differences, must be material as well as for¬
mal, matters of content as well as of structure. In
other words, with whatever differences in concepts

and symbols, they must express substantially the
same self-understanding, the same way of under¬
standing ourselves in relation to others and the
whole. And this means, for reasons explained in the
first chapter, that they must also have substantially
the same necessary implications, both metaphysi¬
cal and ethical. But if my own experience of inter¬
religious dialogue is any indication, it is likely to
remain exceedingly difficult, even after the most
extensive study and first-hand experience of an¬
other person’s religious claims, to know just where,
or even whether, one's own religion expresses the
same religious truth.
This has come home to me with particular force
during the course of my involvement in Buddhist-
Christian dialogue. For over a decade now, I have
been engaged, in one way or another, in extended
discussion with Buddhists, especially with certain
members of the Kyoto School of Japanese Zen
Buddhism. As this discussion has deepened, I have
become increasingly convinced that, for all of the
obvious differences between the formulations of our
respective positions, there are striking similarities
between the understanding of human existence for
which my Zen Buddhist partners typically argue
and what I as a Christian theologian understand to
be our authentic self-understanding as human be-
ings. I realize, of course, that my understanding of
authentic existence is not the only Christian under¬
standing of faith in God, any more than their under¬
standing of authenticity is the only Buddhist un¬
derstanding of the realization of emptiness. But
fully recognizing that the discussion between us is
60
only part of the larger Buddhist-Christian dialogue, I
am still struck by the convergence between their
self-understanding as Buddhists and my own as a
Christian. In fact, when I apply my existentialist
equivalent of a pragmatist criterion of meaning—
according to which different formulations that
make no difference in how one must understand
oneself to appropriate them are insofar only ver¬
bally different—I strongly incline to think that such
real differences as there may be between our two
self-understandings can only be rather subtle and
hard to pin down.
Thus I am quite unable to share the view often
expressed by other Christians and theologians that,
despite their obvious formal similarity as axial
religions, or religions of ultimate transformation.
Buddhism and Christianity are deeply opposed un¬
derstandings of human existence. Contrary to the
claim that, for Buddhism, the human problem is
focused on our sheer existence as fragmentary
beings, I find that Buddhist talk of the deepest level
of human suffering identifies it as an ignorance of
our essential condition which is not merely a mat¬
ter of fate, but for which we are each in some way
responsible. To this extent, there is a clear parallel,
if not a convergence, between the Buddhist under¬
standing of suffering as the consequence of igno¬
rance and the Christian understanding of death as
the wages of sin. This is clear, at any rate, if we
avoid not only a naturalistic misunderstanding of
what Buddhists mean by ignorance but also a
moralistic misunderstanding of what Christians
mean by sin. Provided sin is understood, as it

should be, not as moral transgression, but as the
deeper refusal of one's existence as a creature of
God, it is not merely one among the many options
of our freedom, but our “natural" condition, the
basic state of existence, or way of understanding
ourselves, in which we ordinarily exist. Thus, in the
Christian understanding, existence in sin and
death is, in its way, a matter of destiny as well as of
freedom, even as, in the Buddhist view, existence
in ignorance and suffering is, in its way, a matter of
freedom as well as of destiny.
Likewise, I do not find that the Buddhist under¬
standing of authentic existence is the kind of ahis-
torical and world-denying understanding that it is
commonly taken to be. On the contrary, I see my
Buddhist colleagues being at least as concerned as
Christians are with the whole range of human needs,
of body and mind as well as of soul and spirit, and
hence as turned toward the world and history, not
away from them. Nor am I able to explain this simply
by their being modern women and men who have
been shaped as much as modern Christians have by
historical consciousness and by the resultant sense
of responsibility to transform the entire setting of
human life, social and cultural as well as natural. As
much as they have indeed been influenced by mod¬
ern secularity, they have the confidence, which I
take to be entirely justified, that the deepest roots of
their commitment to transforming social and cul¬
tural structures as well as individual persons lie in
their own religious tradition as Buddhists. Just as for
Christians any living faith cannot fail to be active in
love, so for Buddhists the wisdom that overcomes
62
our ignorance must inevitably express itself in com¬
passion. Given a modern sense of historical responsi¬
bility, then, compassion, like love, must concern
itself not only with meeting human needs within
societies and cultures, but also with transforming
their basic structures so as to overcome injustice
and oppression (see Habito; Ray).
Consequently, when my Buddhist colleagues
talk of what it means to exist authentically, they
seem to point to something like the same genuinely
dialectical, or “paradoxical,” way of existing to
which I seek to point as a Christian. On the one
hand, it is an existence in radical freedom from one¬
self and the world, in which one is inwardly released
from clinging to them in ignorance and suffering or
in sin and death; on the other hand, it is an exist¬
ence in radical freedom for oneself and the world, in
which one is inwardly released to affirm and to fur¬
ther them in compassion or in love (see Park).
True as all this is, however, I still have not been
able to conclude that Buddhism and Christianity are
really only different formulations of the same un¬
derstanding of existence. Subtle as their real differ¬
ences may be, there nonetheless seem to me to be
such; and up to now, at least, I have not found any
way of reducing them. This becomes particularly
clear whenever I consider not only Buddhist and
Christian self-understandings as such, but also their
metaphysical implications.
Of course, one has to be careful at this point
to distinguish clearly between the metaphysical
implications of a given self-understanding and
the metaphysical consequences of some particular

formulation of it. Just as a self-understanding is one
thing, its explicit formulation in particular con¬
cepts and symbols, something else, so the neces¬
sary implications of a self-understanding ought
never to be confused with the consequences that
follow, given certain concepts and symbols in
which it happens to be formulated. This means,
among other things, that one must always allow for
the possibility that what are widely supposed to be
the metaphysical implications of a self-understand¬
ing are not really that at all, but are simply the
metaphysical consequences of a particular way of
formulating it, or of the assumptions made in doing
so. Thus, for example, it is at least arguable that the
traditional Christian doctrine of the impassibility
of God follows, not from a Christian self-under¬
standing as such, but rather from certain meta¬
physical assumptions about who God has to be that
were made more or less uncritically by the church
fathers who classically formulated it. But even if
one allows that something like this may also be the
case in Buddhism, the fact remains that what are
widely supposed to be the metaphysical implica¬
tions of Buddhist self-understanding are really and
significantly different from what I, for one, take to
be necessarily implied by a Christian understand¬
ing of existence.
This is clear enough from the differences indi¬
cated by Christian theism, on the one hand, and
Buddhist nontheism, on the other. Whereas for
Christians, the self-understanding of faith necessar¬
ily implies the reality of God as the sole primal
source and the sole final end of all things, for
64
Buddhists, the self-understanding of wisdom is held
to imply, rather, the dependent coorigination of all
things and their essential emptiness. So, according
to Christianity, the world and history develop
irreversibly from the past into the future, and the
relations between things are external as well as in¬
ternal, grounding real differences between them.
According to Buddhism, on the contrary, nothing
whatever is or can be independent and self-existing,
because everything is of necessity interdependent
with, and interpenetrated by, everything else. But if
this is the ultimate metaphysical truth about things,
then any development from the past into the future
is reversible, and either there are no relations be¬
tween things at all or else all relations between
them are internal only, and any differences between
things sufficient to ground differential thought and
action with respect to them are ultimately delusive.
With this, however, the rationale for responsi¬
ble thought and action in and for the world clearly
seems to be undercut. For if it need not imply that
we are to be concerned for nothing at all, it does
imply something hardly less stultifying of responsi¬
ble thought and action—namely, that we are to be
equally concerned for everything. Thus there at
least appears to be a basic contradiction between
the kind of metaphysical monism that Buddhist self¬
understanding is widely supposed to imply and this
self-understanding as such, especially the develop¬
ment of it by contemporary Buddhists who are
clearly as concerned as modern Christians are with
responsibly making history and transforming the
world (cf. Ogden 1990).

whether or not such a contradiction is real, or
how it is to be resolved, is not my present concern. I
have gone into it only to explain why, on the basis of
my own continuing encounter with Buddhism, I am
still not able to say that its understanding of exist¬
ence is materially the same as Christianity’s. For all
of their striking similarities, they still seem to me to
be really different, at least as they have been formu¬
lated up to now. Therefore, I have more and more
found myself agreeing with the observation of Clif¬
ford Geertz that "what all sacred symbols assert is
that the good for man is to live realistically; where
they differ is in the vision of reality they construct”
(Geertz, 130). Clearly, a serious difficulty in making
any case for pluralism is coming to terms with this
difference.
There are still other difficulties, however, per¬
taining to the evidence and argument that at least
some pluralists offer to support their claim that
there are many true religions or ways of salvation.
Thus John Hick, notably, assumes that the evidence
appropriate to validating the claim is provided by
“the fruits of religious faith in human life,” and so
by the extent of individual and social transforma¬
tion effected by the different specific religions
(Hick and Knitter, 23-24). As a matter of fact. Hick
appears to feel confirmed in his pluralistic position
primarily on the negative ground that none of the
axial religions, taken as a whole, proves to be supe¬
rior to the others when they are all assessed in terms
of their effectiveness as contexts of salvation or lib¬
eration, both individual and social (Hick 1989, 297-
380). But this way of arguing for the equality, or
66
“rough parity,” of the axial religions, and hence for
pluralism, will not stand up under close scrutiny.
This is clear, first of all, from the fact that there
is no valid inference from the so-called fruits of
religious faith in human life to the reality or pres¬
ence of such faith itself. It is indeed the case, for
reasons explained in the first chapter, that any reli¬
gious faith as an understanding of human existence
has necessary implications for ethical action as well
as for metaphysical belief. And its ethical implica¬
tions may very well extend to transforming the
structures of society and culture as well as to the
transformation of individual moral behavior. But to
do what faith would do, or to act as faith would act,
is not necessarily to exist in faith itself, any more
than believing what faith would believe is possible
only for a person of faith. And this is true even if we
prescind altogether from the case of insincere or
hypocritical action. Even if one does what faith
would do, or acts as it would act, in all sincerity, one
may or may not understand oneself in faith and act
on the basis of it instead of something else. Thus, in
the well-known passage from his correspondence
with the Corinthians, Paul can say of even the ap¬
parently most radical expressions of love that one
can give away all that one has and even sacrifice
one’s life, and yet "have not love” (1 Cor 13:3).
I realize, naturally, that what Paul and other
Christians can say about the radical transformation
of faith working through love applies, in the first
instance, to Christian faith, rather than to religious
faith more generally. But I have the distinct impres¬
sion that much the same thing could be said about

the radical transformation to which any of the
other axial religions points in its own understand¬
ing of human existence. Although any such trans¬
formation must indeed bear fruits both in individ¬
ual moral behavior and in the structures of society
and culture, it itself takes place solely in our inner¬
most self-understanding, and, therefore, can never
be either simply identified with its fruits or validly
inferred from them, however validly they can be
inferred from it.
There is another closely related objection to this
whole way of reasoning. Granted that individual and
social changes can indeed be observed to occur in
the context of a specific religion, how does one rule
out the possibility that changes thus associated with
the religion have nonetheless occurred independ¬
ently of it or been effected less because of it than in
spite of it? One of the striking things to me about the
behavior of human beings in extreme situations is
that their specific religious or philosophical affilia¬
tions seem to make relatively little difference. Dur¬
ing the Nazi time in Germany, for instance, the re¬
sistance against Hitler included persons of the most
diverse religious and philosophical persuasions,
even as the same was true of those who passively
supported his regime or actively collaborated with
it. I submit that the case is not likely to be different
in other more or less similar situations familiar to
all of us. But, then, what force can there be in argu¬
ing for the truth of a specific religion from changes
occurring in either individuals or societies in its
particular context?
68
The still deeper difficulty, however, is with the
underlying assumption of any such argument—
namely, that the truth of a specific religion could be
logically determined from its effectiveness as a con¬
text of salvation or liberation. To make this assump¬
tion is to fall into a serious logical confusion—as
serious, indeed, as if we were to suppose that the
truth of ordinary judgments of fact could be deter¬
mined from their effectiveness in getting themselves
sincerely believed. To believe ever so sincerely that a
factual judgment is true is to do nothing whatever
from which its truth could be determined. If it is
true, it is not because it is believed, but because it is
worthy of belief, even if no one ever believed it; and
whether this can or cannot be said depends entirely
upon whether or not it can be validated by the proce¬
dures appropriate to verifying judgments of fact. In
the same way, one may most sincerely understand
oneself as a specific religion calls one to do without
providing even the least reason for thinking that the
religion is true. If it is true, it is not because one so
understands oneself, but because one ought so to
understand oneself, even if one were to fail to do so;
and whether this is or is not the case entirely de¬
pends upon whether or not one's self-understanding
can be validated by the procedures appropriate to
determining religious truth. For this reason, the ex¬
tent to which a specific religion is effective in secur¬
ing even the most committed adherents is logically
irrelevant to validating its claim to be formally true.
Yet even if pluralists were to take account of
this and were to support their claim only by

evidence and argument appropriate to doing so,
they would still face a fundamental difficulty in
making their case. This is so, at any rate, on the
assumption that pluralism is indeed to be distin¬
guished from complete relativism, by which I mean
the position according to which all religions are for¬
mally true. According to Alan Race, “the pertinent
question mark which hovers over all theories of plu¬
ralism is how far they succeed in overcoming the
sense of ‘debilitating relativism’ which is their ap¬
parent danger.” Thus Race explicitly rejects “the
view that all faiths are equally true, or of equal
value, or are ultimately saying the same thing,” and
insists that pluralists, in their way, in the way of
genuine interreligious dialogue, must participate
“in the search to distinguish the more from the less
profound, the more from the less ‘true’ religious
belief” (Race, 90, 143f.). In his clear intention to
avoid complete relativism. Race seems to me to be
representative of most of his fellow pluralists, even
if, as I noted in an earlier chapter, a few of them
have claimed, perhaps carelessly, that all religions
are equally true or adequate. In any event, what I
take pluralism to mean is significantly different
from relativism in allowing that there at least can
be specific religions, or ways of salvation, that are
false rather than true.
But if pluralism does indeed allow this, there is
no way of making a reasoned case for its claim that
there are many true religions except by employing,
either tacitly or openly, some norm of religious
truth. If at least some specific religion can be false,
no specific religion can be judged to be true without
70
reason, which is to say, without appropriate evi¬
dence and argument. Necessarily entailed by such
argument is some norm for judging true religion,
whether it be the formal norm already given simply
by some specific religion or theology or, alterna¬
tively, a norm derived from philosophy, in the sense
of critical reflection on all religions as well as on all
secular forms of culture. This means that pluralists
must either employ such a norm and give a convinc¬
ing account of their reasons for doing so or else
content themselves with making no more than the
purely formal statement about religions that, as we
saw earlier, falls far short of their pluralistic claim.
To recognize this is to understand why pluralists
who want to avoid relativism cannot finally escape
what they often seem to regard as a difficulty pecu¬
liar to inclusivism—the difficulty, namely, of taking
some one specific religion to be formally true, and
hence the norm for determining all other religious
truth. To be sure, they do have the alternative of
looking to philosophy to provide their norm, rather
than to some specific religion or theology. But here,
too, there are difficulties. For one thing, any sound
philosophical analysis itself confirms that it belongs
to the very nature of a religion to make or imply the
claim to be formally true. It thus claims to be the
formal norm not only for all other true religion, but
also for any other existential truth whatever, includ¬
ing that of philosophy. Even if one allows, then, that
a philosophy, also, makes or implies the claim to tell
the truth about human existence, and hence to be
formally normative for determining the truth of
specific religions, one cannot simply ignore their

claim to be formally true. On the contrary, one must
allow that the truth in any philosophy not only has to
confirm that in any religion, but also has to be con¬
firmed by it. So, pending the inquiry necessary to
validate both of their claims to truth, one cannot
look simply to some philosophy to provide one's
norm, but must assume, rather, that any specific re¬
ligion is as much the source of normative judgment
as its object, while any particular philosophy is as
much the object of such judgment as its source (see
also Ogden 1986, 84-93).
Quite aside from this difficulty, however, there
is no essential difference at the crucial point be¬
tween employing a norm derived from philosophi¬
cal reflection and employing the formal norm of
some specific religion or theology. In the first case
as much as in the second, one takes some explicit
understanding of human existence to be formally
true, and hence the norm for determining all other
religious truth. In either case, the essential diffi¬
culty remains, and there is no escaping it as long as
one wishes to claim in a reasoned way that any reli¬
gion is true.
That this is so is made abundantly clear by the
development over the years of the case for plural¬
ism. Early on in this development, pluralists like
John Hick contended for their pluralistic position
by arguing for a “theocentric,” as over against an
“ecclesiocentric,” or a “christocentric,” under¬
standing of Christianity and the other religions. In¬
deed, the “Copernican revolution" in theology for
which Hick originally called involved “a shift from
the dogma that Christianity is at the centre to the
72
realisation that it is God who is at the centre, and
that all the religions of mankind, including our
own, serve and revolve around him” (Hick 1973,
131). But as many critics have been quick to point
out, a God-centered norm for determining the truth
of specific religions is still “Ptolemaic,” or is only
slightly less so than a Christ- or church-centered
norm. To argue that many religions are true be¬
cause or insofar as they serve and revolve around
God is still to make some one religion or philoso¬
phy normative for all religious truth. This is so, at
any rate, as long as the term “God” is understood in
anything like its ordinary Christian or theistic sig¬
nification and is not taken in a purely formal sense
as synonymous with “ultimate reality.” Provided
“God” represents one way among others of think¬
ing and speaking about ultimate reality, which is
materially different from, even if formally similar
to, other such ways, a “theocentric” understanding
of religions must be as problematic in principle as a
christocentric one. Thus the theocentric pluralist
is still faced with the same essential dilemma: ei¬
ther to avoid employing a norm of judgment, and
thus never to get beyond the purely formal state¬
ment that all religions claim to be true; or else to
make a reasoned judgment about their truth, but
only by employing, openly or tacitly, some one of
them, or some philosophy, as the norm required to
make it.
Recognizing this, as well as other difficulties
in theocentrism, pluralists have more recently ar¬
gued their case in other terms. Hick himself now
speaks, not of “God-centeredness,” but of “Reality-

centeredness,” thereby acknowledging that “God”
is but one of two main ways in which the different
axial religions think and speak about "the Ulti¬
mate” or “the Real” (see Hick 1989; Hick and Knit¬
ter, 16-36). But important as this development cer¬
tainly is in contributing toward a more adequate,
because less tendentious, conceptuality in which to
think and speak about religions in a purely formal
way, it does not overcome the essential difficulty
in making the case for pluralism. Either the con¬
cept of “Reality-centeredness” is purely formal and
heuristic, in which case it provides no norm for
judging the truth of religions, and thus leaves plu¬
ralism a sheer unsupported assertion; or else it
serves to support pluralism by providing such a
norm, but only because it has the material and de¬
terminate sense given it by some one specific reli¬
gion or philosophy.
The same is true of the other recent develop¬
ment in which Paul Knitter especially has taken the
lead. Influenced, as he is, by the theologies of liber¬
ation, he has increasingly argued for “a liberation
theology of religions." Whereas in his 1985 book A/o
Other Name? he described the evolution in Chris¬
tian attitudes toward other faiths as moving from
ecclesiocentrism to christocentrism and then to
theocentrism, he has since called for them to move
on to “what in Christian symbols might be called
‘kingdom-centrism,’ or more universally, 'soterio-
centrism.’” “For Christians,” he argues, “that which
constitutes the basis and the goal for interreligious
dialogue, that which makes mutual understanding
and cooperation between the religions possible (the
74
‘condition of the possibility’), that which unites the
religions in common discourse and praxis, is not
how they are related to the church, ... or how
they are related to Christ, . . . nor even how they
respond to and conceive of God, but rather, to what
extent they are promoting Soteria (in Christian im¬
ages, the basileia)—to what extent they are engaged
in promoting human welfare and bringing about
liberation with and for the poor and nonpersons”
(Hick and Knitter, 187).
Here, again, it seems to me that many of the
intentions of pluralists are sound and that they
have a contribution to make to our common theo¬
logical task. In fact, I am particularly appreciative
of Knitter’s efforts because, in a rather different
way from Hick’s, they can help to develop a more
adequate conceptuality in which to think and
speak about religion and religions in a purely for¬
mal sense. The problem with the kind of existential¬
ist conceptuality that I have developed and em¬
ployed in these chapters is that it may be thought to
isolate all that is properly religious from the specif¬
ically political aspect of praxis and culture with
which Knitter and other liberation theologians are
rightly concerned. By interpreting religion as ex¬
plicit self-understanding at the level of primary cul¬
ture, it allows well enough for the metaphysical
and ethical implications of religion, but without
making clear that its ethical implications always
have a specifically political aspect. One value of
Knitter’s expressly, although not exclusively, politi¬
cal understanding of “soteria ” is that it can help to
clarify this, so that one can say, as I have stressed

elsewhere, that the existentialist interpretation of
religion must always be also its political interpreta¬
tion (see Ogden 1982, 89-96, 148-68; 1986, 143-50).
But the point of Knitter's soteriocentrism is
clearly more than any such purely formal point.
Anomalous as it may seem for a pluralist to do so, he
undoubtedly formulates the norm by which he pro¬
poses to judge the truth of all specific religions. If
pluralism in his view is valid, it is because there is
not only one religion that satisfies this norm, but
many—many religions that are more or less equally
engaged in promoting human welfare and liberating
the poor and oppressed. As a matter of fact. Knitter
goes so far as to make this norm "the basis and goal
for interreligious dialogue” and the “condition of
the possibility” of "mutual understanding and coop¬
eration between the religions.” But this only shows
the more clearly that in this respect, at least, the
difference between his soteriocentric pluralism and
the inclusivism that he rejects is not a difference in
principle but only a difference in fact. Whereas in-
clusivists appeal to the salvation constituted by the
event of Jesus Christ, Knitter appeals to the salva¬
tion to be realized by following the historical Jesus
in his service of God’s kingdom, and thus in promot¬
ing liberation and transforming the world (Knitter
1988, 33-48). In both cases, however, the norms ap¬
pealed to are provided by some one specific religion
or philosophy, which is thereby made normative for
all the others.
There is, to be sure, this significant difference
between Knitter's Christian pluralism and Chris¬
tian inclusivism: whereas for inclusivism there not
76
only is but can be only one religion that is formally
true, for pluralism there not only can be but are
many religions that are true in this sense. Thus Knit¬
ter is express in saying that it is “for Christians” that
the norm of religious truth is as he formulates it,
leaving open the possibility, which inclusivism pre¬
cludes, that persons of other faiths express substan¬
tially the same truth even while validly formulating
different formal norms for judging it. But important
as this difference certainly is, it in no way alters the
fact that Knitter employs a norm of judgment as
surely as inclusivists do and that his norm, like
theirs, is derived from some one religion or philoso¬
phy, as distinct from any of the others that may ex¬
press substantially the same religious truth.
The moral of this whole development seems ob¬
vious. Claims of pluralists to the contrary notwith¬
standing, pluralism in no v/ay offers an alternative
to employing some norm of religious truth, and
thus to making some one religion or philosophy
normative for judging all the rest. Provided that
pluralism is distinct from complete relativism,
there is simply no other way to make good its claim
that more than one specific religion is formally
true. The relevant question, then, is not whether a
norm is to be employed, but only how: openly and
critically, with the clear recognition that even one's
norm may be problematic and need to be validated;
or, rather, tacitly and uncritically, without allowing
for the possibility that validating one's norm itself
may also be required. And here, ironically enough, a
pluralist like Knitter can speak of his norm as itself
the “basis and goal for interreligious dialogue,"

while an inclusivist such as Gavin D'Costa can allow
that the "possibility and risk” of abandoning his
Christian beliefs and even being converted "cannot
be discounted if dialogue is genuinely open and
trusting” (D’Costa, 121).
At any rate, it should now be clear that there are
I a number of difficulties with the case for pluralism
) and that they are sufficiently serious to make it
j doubtful whether it can be a valid answer to our
y question. Like exclusivism, it is logically an extreme
( position. This is evident from the fact that it coun-
ters exclusivism’s claim that there cannot be more
( than one religion that is formally true, not with the
/ contradictory claim that there can be, but with the
contrary claim that there is, that there are many
/ religions that are true in this sense of the word. The
S difficulty with extreme contraries on any issue,
) however, is that, while both cannot be true, both
V can be false. Therefore, it is entirely possible that
( pluralism's claim that there are many true religions
I is as false as the claim of exclusivism that there can-
i not be more than one, which, as we have seen, is the
/ real meaning of its contrary answer to our question.
/ If the argument of this chapter is sound, one
^ may well ask whether this is not, in fact, the case.
I But, then, one must look beyond pluralism as well
j as exclusivism for the answer to our question, as I
y propose to do in the concluding chapter.
78
CHAPTER 4
Beyond the Usual Options
I n preceding chapters, I
considered two of the
three main ways in
which our central question is usually answered—
namely, exclusivism and pluralism. So far as exclu-
sivism is concerned, the results of this consideration
were strongly negative, since it proved to be not only
incapable of validation as credible in terms of com¬
mon human experience and reason, but also deeply
inappropriate to Jesus Christ. In the case of plural¬
ism, the results of my consideration were skeptical
rather than negative. I argued that there are a num¬
ber of difficulties with the case that pluralists make
for it and that these difficulties are sufficiently seri¬
ous to make one question its validity. Certainly un¬
founded, I held, is the claim that pluralism is the
only consistent alternative to exclusivism. In point of
fact, the position that there are many true religions
is logically as extreme as the contrary position of
exclusivism that there can be only one; and so invali¬
dating exclusivism, and inclusivism as well, would in
79
no way validate pluralism, since both positions, be¬
ing contraries, could very well be false, even though
both could not be true. Still other difficulties per¬
taining to the evidence and argument that pluralists
offer and, above all, to establishing more than
merely formal similarities between different reli¬
gions raise doubts whether they have yet succeeded
in making their case.
Assuming now that these results are sound, we
might be tempted to conclude, in the light of our
analysis of the usual options, that it is to the third
option of inclusivism that we should look for a valid
answer to our question. After all, it is significantly
different from both of the other positions; and con¬
sidering what I have said about the common diffi¬
culty of logical contraries, we might expect it to
provide something like a mean between the two
extremes.
We would be encouraged in this, naturally, by
inclusivists, who tend to think of themselves as oc¬
cupying just such a third, mediating position be¬
tween the other more extreme positions. But there
is a problem in agreeing with them about this, as
should be clear from what has already been said—
namely, that inclusivism in its way is also an ex¬
treme position. Significantly different as it is from
exclusivism in asserting that a decision for Christ’s
salvation is in some way a universal possibility for
each and every human being, it is nonetheless essen¬
tially similar to exclusivism in its monistic insist¬
ence that Christianity alone is the formally true
religion. Like exclusivists, inclusivists hold that the
only religion that even can be true in this sense is
80
the religion established by God in the unique saving
event of Jesus Christ. Therefore, even though they
allow that non-Christians can be saved by Christ
anonymously and unknowingly outside of the visible
church and that any religion transformed by his sal¬
vation can itself be substantially true and a means of
salvation, they still maintain that his is the only sal¬
vation and that it is mediated explicitly and know¬
ingly as such solely by the Christian religion. To this
extent, inclusivists are no less extreme than exclu-
sivists or pluralists in their answer to our question.
Here, again, of course, I am speaking in terms of
an ideal type of theological position, not of the posi¬
tions actually held by this or that theologian or
group of theologians. What I mean by inclusivists
are simply those who hold the theological position
that I have just defined, however they may other¬
wise be identified or identify themselves. Essential
to the inclusivistic position thus understood, how¬
ever, is the same logically extreme claim essential to
exclusivism, to the effect that there not only is but
can be only one true religion, in the sense that Chris¬
tianity alone can validly claim to be formally true.
Recognizing this, we may well hesitate to con¬
clude that inclusivism is the option we are seeking.
And such hesitation will seem the more prudent if
we reflect that in the case of many a disputed ques¬
tion the usual options for answering it are not the
only answers that are logically possible. On the con¬
trary, nothing is more common than disputes that
stubbornly persist precisely because the disputants
insist upon both themselves choosing and forcing
others to choose between only some of the possible
BEYOND THE USUAL OPTIONS 81

options, any one of which is about as good or as bad
as the others.
That something like this may be true of the
question before us in these chapters appears to me
extremely likely. The several parties to the current
discussion more and more tend to assume that the
only ways open for answering it are the usual op¬
tions of exclusivism, inclusivism, and pluralism.
Even so, there is at least one other way of answering
it that is a distinct alternative to all three of these
usual ways, although it has not been clearly recog¬
nized, much less carefully considered, in the discus¬
sion up to now. It will be apparent, I am sure, that it
is this fourth way that I judge to be the relatively
more adequate option open to us. But whether or
not I am right in this judgment, we can hardly ex¬
pect to be clear about the issue raised for theology
by the challenge of pluralism unless we at least take
account of all of the main possibilities for answering
our question. The purpose of what follows, then,
even as of the preceding chapters, is not to settle
this issue, by finally arguing for the answer to the
question, but, rather, to clarify the issue itself, by at
last attending to this neglected possibility for an¬
swering the question beyond the usual options.
I begin with a summary characterization of the
fourth option in relation to the other three. At one
extreme, we have religious, or, more exactly, Chris¬
tian, monism in its two forms of exclusivism and
inclusivism respectively. Common to both monistic
positions is the claim that there not only is but can
be only one true religion because Christianity alone
can validly claim to be formally true. At the other
82
extreme is religious, or Christian, pluralism, with
its logically contrary position that there not only
can be but are other religions whose claim to be
formally true is as valid as Christianity’s. Now, as I
showed in the last chapter, there is no need to assert
Christian pluralism in order to make a complete
break with Christian monism, whether exclusivistic
or inclusivistic. What one needs to assert to counter
monism is not that there actually are many true
religions, but only that there can he, this being the
logical contradictory of any position that there can¬
not be because Christianity alone can be true. But if
this assertion is clearly as distinct from pluralism
as it is contradictory of monism, it could also be
true even if the assertion of pluralism were false or
the case for it still had to be made. One could hold,
in other words, that religions other than Christian¬
ity can also be formally true even if, in point of fact,
none of them actually is true or has as yet been
shown to be so in a reasoned way.
This is the position that I take to be the fourth
option open to Christians and theologians for an¬
swering our central question. What I want to do in
the remainder of the chapter is to explain what is
and is not involved in holding it, at least in the form
in which I should wish to do so. In doing this, I shall
be further elaborating its differences from the
other options, especially inclusivism, whose claims
to validity remain to be considered.
The essential difference between the two monis¬
tic options, on the one hand, and the fourth option,
on the other, is that they deny what it affirms—
namely, that religions other than Christianity can as

validly claim to be formally true as it can. If we ask
now what underlies and explains this essential dif¬
ference, the answer can only be a difference in chris-
tology. By this I mean that, while in each case there
is a way of thinking and speaking about Jesus as of
decisive significance for human existence, there is
nonetheless a difference between these two ways
amounting to a difference in christological type.
One way of trying to formulate this difference is
to distinguish between a “christocentric” and a
"theocentric” type of christology. But an obvious
objection to this formulation is that both types of
christology are, in their ways, christocentric as well
as theocentric. Both understand Christian faith to
be nothing other or less than faith in the one true
God in whom alone is salvation, even as they both
affirm that the only true God is the God who has in
fact acted to save explicitly and decisively through
Jesus Christ. Nevertheless, there is a crucial differ¬
ence between their respective understandings of the
unique saving event of Jesus Christ, which I prefer to
formulate as follows: whereas for Christian monists,
whether exclusivists or inclusivists, this event not
only represents the possibility of salvation but also
in some way constitutes it, for those holding the
fourth position, this event in no way constitutes the
possibility of salvation but only represents it.
I trust that the distinction I have employed here
between a constitutive and a representative event is
already familiar, in substance if not also under these
particular labels. But if an ordinary example of it is
needed, I know of none better than that provided by
the old story about the conversation between the
84
three baseball umpires. The youngest and least ex¬
perienced umpire allows, “I call 'em as I see ’em.”
Whereupon the second umpire, being older and
more sure of himself, claims, ‘T call 'em as they
are." But to all this the oldest and shrewdest umpire
responds with complete self-confidence, “They ain't
nothin' till I call 'em!" By an event constitutive of
the possibility of salvation I mean an event that is
like the third umpire’s calls in that the possibility of
salvation is nothing until the event occurs. On the
contrary, what I mean by an event representative of
the possibility of salvation is an event similar to the
calls of the second umpire in that it serves to de¬
clare a possibility of salvation that already is as it is
prior to the event's occurring to declare it.
Another example of a representative event
drawn from the explicitly religious context is a min¬
ister’s solemnizing the marriage of a man and a
woman. Since it is generally understood that a mar¬
riage is constituted as such by the man and woman
themselves, each pledging troth to the other, the
office of the minister is properly to represent or
declare their union, in no way to constitute it. This
is evident from the formula customarily used by the
minister in performing the service: “Forasmuch as
so and so have consented together in holy wed¬
lock, ... I pronounce that they are husband and
wife together.”
To be sure, other acts performed by Christian
ministers are commonly thought to have a con¬
stitutive, rather than a merely representative, signif¬
icance even with respect to salvation. This is partic¬
ularly true of preaching the word and administering

the sacraments, where they themselves are under¬
stood, as they typically are by exclusivists, to be
constitutive of the possibility of salvation. Baptiz¬
ing a person, for instance, may be viewed as itself
effecting her or his transition from a state of sin to
a state of grace, so that she or he could be expected
to affirm, in the words of a well-known catechism,
that baptism was the event “wherein I was made a
member of Christ, the child of God, and an inheri¬
tor of the kingdom of heaven.” But even for Chris¬
tian inclusivists, any such view of baptism, or of
any other means of salvation, is mistaken. Even in
their understanding, all acts of the church's min¬
istry and, for that matter, even the church itself are
representative of the possibility of salvation rather
than constitutive of it—whence their rejection of
the claim of exclusivists that there is no salvation
outside of the church.
An alternative view of baptism that I have long
found instructive was resourcefully defended al¬
ready in the nineteenth century by the Anglican
theologian, Frederick W. Robertson. Like others of
his contemporaries, such as Frederick Denison
Maurice and Charles Kingsley, Robertson particu¬
larly struggled to understand the language of the
Anglican Catechism to which I just alluded and ac¬
cording to which one is “made” a child of God in
baptism. Believing, as he put it, that “baptism
could not make me a child of God unless I were one
by reason of my Humanity already,” he sought to
identify uses of the verb “to make” that were sup¬
portive of his belief. The results of his search are
well represented by the teaching he prepared for his
86
candidates for confirmation, in the questions and
answers on baptism:
Q. What is baptism?
A. The authoritative declaration of a fact.
Q. What fact?
A. That I am God’s child.
Q. Why then do you say that I am so made, in bap¬
tism?
A. Being made, I mean—declared to be.
Q. Explain what you mean.
A. As soon as a king dies, his successor is king.
Coronation declares the fact but does not make
him king. He was one before, but it corrobo¬
rates, declares, affirms, seals the fact by a recog¬
nized form used for that purpose.
Elsewhere, Robertson uses the same illustra¬

tion slightly differently, arguing that “a sovereign is
made king by coronation, but only because he was
de jure such before.” And he confirms a similar
sense of “to make” by means of a further illustra¬
tion: “At mid-day, at sea, after the observation of
the sun's altitude has been taken, the following
form takes place: The commander asks, what is the
hour? The reply is, 12 o'clock. He then rejoins,
make it so! No act of his can literally determine
mid-day; that is one of the facts of the universe, but
that authoritative declaration in a most important
sense does make it 12 o'clock, it makes it 12 o'clock
to them; it regulates their hours, their views, the
arrangement of their daily life, their whole
course. ... So does baptism—pronouncing the
fact in God's name to exist, make that real on earth
which, in itself real before, was unreal to those to

whom the ratification had not been shown"
(Brooke, 269, 513, 336, 513f.).
The most striking thing about Robertson’s view
is the analogy he clearly suggests between baptism
thus understood and the Christ event itself. "The
great fact for which the Redeemer died,” he says, is
“that all mankind are, de jure, God’s sons, and that
He bids them become such de facto. ’’ If this kind of
statement is evidently consistent with the tradi¬
tional doctrine of the death of Christ as the
“meritorious cause” of our salvation, Robertson’s
more characteristic way of making the same point is
to say simply that the fact of our being God’s chil¬
dren, which belongs to all humanity, “was revealed
by Christ.” “Christ revealed the fact that all men are
God’s children,” and as the gospel which proclaims
this is “the message to the world, ” so “baptism is
that message to the individual.” “Baptism is the
grand special revelation to an individual by name. A,
B, or C, of the great truth Christ revealed for the
race, that all, Greeks and barbarians, are the chil¬
dren of God. It is the fact which they are to believe, a
fact before they believe it, else how could they be
asked to believe it?” (337, 336, 268). Robertson does
not also say, to be sure, that this fact was true before
Christ’s revelation of it, and without his revelation.
But this seems to be the clear implication of his
analogy between baptism’s revelation of the fact to
the individual person and Christ’s revelation of it
to the world.
Of course, it is the whole point of analogy to
allow for difference as well as similarity. And
one might entirely agree with Robertson’s view of
88
baptism even while holding that the significance of
the Christ event for salvation is different precisely in
being somehow constitutive of its possibility rather
than merely representative of it. This, in fact, is just
the position typically taken by contemporary inclu-
sivists, some of whom can be quite radical in their
insistence on the strictly representative significance
of all that is specifically Christian.
Thus Clodovis Boff, for instance, vigorously
protests against the traditional identification of sal¬
vation, on the one hand, with revelation and faith,
on the other. Just as in general there is "a distinction
between the real and the known,” so one must
clearly distinguish between "salvation” and "con¬
sciousness or awareness of salvation (revelation,
faith, church, sacraments, theology, and so on).”
“Salvation touches every person, whereas revelation
is specific to those alone to whom it has been given
to become aware of this same salvation—to Chris¬
tians.” Accordingly, Boff proposes “a recasting of
‘salvation history’ as revelation history—as the his¬
tory of the revelation of salvation. . . . ‘Salvation
history' would then be the history of salvation mani¬
fested, acknowledged, proclaimed—not the history
of salvation as such.” At the same time, revelation
would be conceived as "a derived moment in the
global history of humankind—a second moment, a
moment ‘with a lag.’” Far from reaching human
beings universally, “it would perhaps pertain to its
essence to be, and necessarily, a sectorial phe¬
nomenon only—charged, however, with a meto¬
nymic {pars pro toto), symbolic (sacramentum
salutis) value” (Boff, 97, 99).

Boff realizes, naturally, that any such recasting
raises “the towering question” of “the function of
the economy of salvation.” But this question can be
answered, he believes, if, although only if, “it is pos¬
sible to demonstrate that scripture, and the events
reported there, as well as the whole salvif ic order of
the church, are, where salvation is concerned, not of
the order of its constitution, but of the order of its
manifestation. ” In that event, “we would be dealing
with a hermeneutic of salvation, not a history of sal¬
vation. Christianity would then be the interpretation
of the salvation of the world, and not the salvation of
the world itself, or even the exclusive instrument
of this salvation” (97f.).
Having said this, however, Boff immediately
blocks any inference that his is a representative type
of christology. “More delicate,” he says, “is the par¬
ticular, and central, case of Jesus Christ, whom faith
confesses as savior, and not merely as prophet, sage,
or saint.” True, “we must recognize that the church
began very early to theologize the salvation brought
by Jesus in less than totally intimate linkage to its
proclamation (revelation) and explicit acceptance
(faith).” Even in the New Testament there are
“universalizing interpretations” that divorce salva¬
tion from revelation, and this position has remained
“a constant in the history of Christian thought” from
the church fathers right up to our own time. Recog¬
nizing this, “we are . . . led to admit of a salvation
antecedent and exterior to revelation —antecedent to
and outside the historical Jesus—not, however, in¬
dependent of the Kyrios of glory” (98). But if all this
seems rather to support a representative christology
90
than to tell against it, there are clear indications
elsewhere that this can hardly be Boff's intention.
On the contrary, he speaks of “a constitutive refer¬
ence of the human being to the person of Jesus
Christ,” and asserts that "the single real order of
salvation” is “the christic order,” which is "an ontic
dimension, established in and for human beings, on
the plane of their divine calling, and independent of
their awareness.” Thus "the Christian is precisely
that human being in whom this constitutive refer¬
ence emerges on the plane of consciousness. In
the Christian, the ontic dimension is rendered onto-
logical: the implicit reference becomes explicit, the
latent reality becomes patent. . . . Thus the Chris¬
tian is the person who knows. Christians know their
reference to Jesus Christ, and know that all human
beings have this same reference” (122).
For Boff, then, the event of Jesus Christ clearly
is a special case, as compared with Christians and
Christianity and all that is specifically Christian,
whether faith and revelation or church and sacra¬
ments. Unlike the history of the church and all the
rest of “salvation history,” this event, at least, really
is history of salvation, as distinct from its "revela¬
tion,” its "hermeneutic,” or its "interpretation.” In
the terms of Boff's own distinction, Jesus Christ is
of the order of the constitution of salvation, not
merely of the order of its manifestation.
This same position, as I have said, is typically
taken by other Christian inclusivists, Protestant as
well as Roman Catholic. Recognizing with Boff that
Christian faith confesses Jesus Christ "as savior, and
not merely as prophet, sage, or saint,” they uphold a

constitutive, rather than a representative, type of
christology. They hold that the event of Jesus Christ
somehow constitutes the possibility of salvation,
which is nothing until this event occurs. But this
contention that the Christ event is, in some way, the
cause of salvation is open to a decisive objection.
This is the objection that, for any appropriate
understanding of the Christ event, it is so far from
being the cause of salvation as to be its conse¬
quence. The only cause of salvation, the argument
goes, is the primordial and everlasting love of God,
which is the sole primal source and the sole final
end of anything that is so much as possible. Because
of this love, which is nothing merely accidental in
God but God’s very essence, the same God who is the
Creator and Consummator of all things is also the
Savior of all men and women, as well as, pre¬
sumably, of any other beings who, having misused
their freedom, would likewise stand in need of sal¬
vation. But, then, no event in time and history, in¬
cluding the event of Jesus Christ, can be the cause of
salvation in the sense of the necessary condition of
its possibility. On the contrary, any event, including
the Christ event, can be at most a consequence of the
salvation, the sole necessary condition of the possi¬
bility of which is God's own essential being as all-
embracing love.
Theologians who develop this argument com¬
monly formulate it over against the so-called satis¬
faction theory of the atonement, according to which
salvation becomes possible only because of the obe¬
dience of Jesus Christ, especially the passive obedi¬
ence of his death on the cross. Thus Paul Tillich, for
92
instance, rejects the claim that "in the Cross” salva¬
tion “becomes possible” on the ground that it
necessarily implies that God “is the one who must
be reconciled.” Since the message of Christianity, on
the contrary, is that “God, who is eternally recon¬
ciled, wants us to be reconciled to him,” the only
appropriate thing to say is that "through the Cross”
salvation “becomes manifest” (Tillich 1957, 169f.,
175f.). But, however the argument is developed, the
objection to inclusivism is the same, and it clearly
seems decisive. The Christ event cannot be the cause
of salvation because its only cause, and the cause
of this event itself, is the boundless love of God of
which this event is the decisive re-presentation.
Not the least reason for being confident about
this is that certain inclusivists themselves concede
the decisiveness of the objection and go to great
lengths to try to show why the constitutive christol-
ogy they uphold is not vulnerable to it. This is par¬
ticularly striking in the work of Karl Rahner, who
entirely agrees that the saving event of Jesus Christ
must be understood rather as the consequence
than as the cause of God's universal will to save, at
least if “cause” is understood in the usual sense of
bringing about a physical or a moral change. Like
the other theologians already mentioned, Rahner is
especially critical in this connection of the satis¬
faction theory of the atonement on the ground that
it “all but inevitably insinuates the idea of a funda¬
mental change of mind in God, which is metaphysi¬
cally impossible, and obscures the origin of the
cross as a consequence of God's forgiving love”
(Rahner, 262).

At the same time, Rahner accepts the traditional
teaching according to which salvation is granted to
men and women intuitu meritorum Christi—“in
view of the merits of Christ” (263f.). Consequently,
he is constrained to argue for a constitutive type of
christology, which can understand the cross and the
Christ event as a whole as being at least in some
sense a cause with respect to salvation. The concep¬
tuality he employs to do this involves, on the one
hand, distinguishing between “efficient” and “final”
causality and, on the other hand, elaborating an
analogy between the kind of final causality proper to
sacraments in general and the unique causality of
the “primal sacrament” Jesus Christ. His thesis,
then, is that, while the Christ event neither is nor can
be the efficient cause of God’s universal will to save,
it is nonetheless the final cause of God’s will, in that
it is its definitive and irreversible sign and as such
“the universal primal sacrament of the salvation of
the whole world” (271).
Without claiming to offer an adequate criticism
of Rahner’s characteristically subtle and nuanced
argument for this thesis, I can say that I find it by
far the most ingenious defense of the constitutive
type of christology underlying inclusivism of which
I have any knowledge. If I were to be an inclusivist,
it would be because his reasons for being one
seemed to me to be good and sufficient reasons.
But, as it is, I do not find his argument convincing.
Despite his efforts, in effect, to avoid the choice be¬
tween a constitutive and a representative type of
christology, I do not see that he ever demonstrates a
94
real, as distinct from a merely verbal, alternative. If
there is a real and not merely a verbal difference in
the Christ event's not being the efficient cause of
God's saving will, but being its final cause instead,
then, so far as I can see, the Christ event is not really
constitutive of salvation after all, but only repre¬
sentative of it, similarly to the way in which sacra¬
ments in general are thus representative. If, on the
contrary, the Christ event is different enough from
sacraments generally not only to represent God's
saving will but also to really constitute it, then, in
my view, there is not a real, but only a verbal, differ¬
ence in its being called the final cause of God's will
to save instead of its efficient cause.
Therefore, my conclusion from Rahner's argu¬
ment is that one can meet the decisive objection to
the constitutive type of christology underlying in-
clusivism only by opting for a representative type of
christology. But does this mean, then, that one can
consistently think and speak of Jesus, not as savior,
but merely as prophet, sage, or saint?
I do not believe so, despite the widespread as¬
sumption to the contrary on all sides of the usual
discussion. Of course, if all that could be properly
meant by Jesus' being savior is that he not only rep¬
resents the possibility of salvation, but is also some¬
how constitutive of it, then one could not consist¬
ently think and speak of him as savior if one opted
for a representative type of christology. But that
one's only option, then, would be to think and speak
of him merely as one more human being who bore
witness to salvation or actualized it in his own life is

not so self-evidently true that one can simply as¬
sume it. On the contrary, there are good reasons for
rejecting it as false.
This should be clear enough from the analogy
already before us between the sacraments or means
of salvation and the event of Jesus Christ. This anal¬
ogy is clearly suggested, it will be recalled, by
Robertson’s statement that baptism is the revela¬
tion to an individual person of the same truth that
Christ revealed to the race—namely, that all, with¬
out exception, are already children of God de jure
by reason of their humanity. On the face of it, the
similarity that this analogy asserts is that the Christ
event, like baptism, is not constitutive of the possi¬
bility of salvation, but representative of it, while the
only difference it asserts is that baptism represents
this possibility particularly to the individual,
whereas Christ represents it universally to the
world. But this difference evidently implies the
further one, that baptism depends upon the Christ
event in a way in which the Christ event does not
depend upon baptism. In fact, we may say that the
Christ event is constitutive of baptism, whereas
baptism is only representative of the Christ event.
Thus, notwithstanding that baptism and the Christ
event are similar in that both represent the possibil¬
ity of salvation but do not constitute it, they are also
significantly different in the ways in which they
represent this possibility.
Recognizing this, one can well appropriate the
conceptuality of Rahner and other inclusivists and
think and speak of the Christ event as the primal
Christian sacrament. In doing so, naturally, one
96
must deny any inclusivistic implication that this pri¬
mal sacrament is somehow constitutive of the possi¬
bility of salvation itself. But there is no need to deny,
and every reason to affirm, that the event of Jesus
Christ is constitutive of the specifically Christian
understanding of this possibility, and thus of all
Christian sacraments and means of salvation as well
as of the visible church and everything specifically
Christian. For this reason, the Christ event cannot
be thought and spoken of as a Christian sacrament,
but only as the Christian sacrament, the one repre¬
sentation of the possibility of salvation upon which
all other Christian representations of it, and Chris¬
tian faith itself, are by their very nature dependent.
This means, however, that one not only cannot,
but also need not, think and speak of Jesus merely
as prophet, sage, or saint. One can not so think and
speak of him because prophets, sages, and saints
can never be constitutive of a faith or religion, in the
way in which Jesus is constitutive of Christianity. In
the nature of the case, they are always only one
among others, dependent for their authority upon
the explicit understanding of existence that alone is
thus constitutive of the faith they represent. In the
specific case of Christianity, however, this explicit
understanding is not, in the first instance, some law
or teaching or word of wisdom, but Jesus himself,
through whom the meaning of ultimate reality for
us is decisively re-presented. Consequently, the only
way in which Jesus can be thought and spoken of
consistently with his constitutive significance for
the Christian religion is not as one more authority
among others, even the first and foremost thereof.

but as the primal authorizing source by which all
Christian authorities, be they prophets, sages, or
saints, are explicitly authorized as such.
But Jesus also need not be understood other¬
wise, since there is the obvious alternative of think¬
ing and speaking of him with Rahner and others as
the primal Christian sacrament. By "sacrament”
here, of course, I mean what is better referred to
more generally as “means of salvation.” In my view,
at any rate, sacraments in the ordinary sense are
rightly thought of together with word as equivalent
means of salvation in that they are equally valid ways
of representing Jesus Christ as the explicit gift and
demand of God’s love. Thus it would be equally ap¬
propriate to develop an analogy between the word of
preaching and Jesus and to think and speak of him,
accordingly, as the primal Christian word, rather
than as the primal Christian sacrament. In either
case, the point of the analogy would be to assert both
the similarity and the difference between ordinary
means of salvation and Jesus Christ. Like both word
and sacraments, he does not constitute God’s love,
but represents it. But whereas they represent God’s
love by also representing him, he represents God’s
love by also constituting them. Because this analogy
is undoubtedly available, however, there is no need
to think and speak of Jesus merely as prophet, sage,
or saint. On the contrary, one can very well think
and speak of him as savior, in the precise sense that,
being the primal Christian word and sacrament, he
has a significance for the specifically Christian reli¬
gion and economy of salvation that is not merely rep¬
resentative but constitutive.
98
Even so, it is of the essence of the fourth option
to insist that the possibility of salvation itself, as dis¬
tinct from the specifically Christian representation
of it, is constituted solely and sufficiently by God's
primordial and everlasting love. This means, as I un¬
derstand it, that, just as it is of the essence of God's
love to create creatures and to consummate them
by accepting them into God's own all-embracing life,
so it is also essential to God's love to save sinners
by being the necessary condition of the possibility
of their salvation. I do not mean by this, naturally,
that God could not exist as God without the exist¬
ence of sinners needing salvation from the guilt
and the power of sin. Even if it is necessary to God's
existence ever to create and to consummate some
creatures, no particular creature could be thus nec¬
essary to God and still be a creature in more than
name only. Therefore, that sinners do in fact happen
to exist is nothing necessary to God, but is as utterly
contingent as is the fact that there happen to be be¬
ings for whom existence in the self-misunderstanding
of sin is always a possibility. But once given God's
creation of such beings and their misuse of their free¬
dom to actualize this possibility, God must be their
Savior as surely as God is their Creator and Consum-
mator; for God is love, and there is no way for God to
love sinners except to do all that could conceivably
be done to save them from their sin. In this sense, the
possibility of salvation that is decisively re-presented
through Jesus Christ is always already constituted for
each and every sinner by God's very being as love.
But if the Christian witness is true that it is just
this love of God that is the strictly ultimate reality

with which every human being has to do as soon and
as long as she or he exists humanly at all, then not
only Christianity but other religions as well can
validly claim to be formally true. They can do so be¬
cause all that is constitutive of the possibility of sal¬
vation and, therefore, also of any true religion is the
boundless love of God that is and must be presented
at least implicitly in every human existence. Pro¬
vided, then, that a religious praxis is so transformed
by God's love as to represent the possibility that it
constitutes as our authentic self-understanding, it is,
from a Christian standpoint, substantially true, and
its claim to be formally true can be a valid claim,
even if it is not the claim that Christians as such
would have any reason to make.
Of course, to say that religions can validly claim
to be formally true insofar as they explicitly repre¬
sent God's love is a specifically Christian way of ex¬
plaining this possibility. But to be a Christian and to
take Christianity to be the formally true religion are
one and the same thing. Every religion claims im¬
plicitly or explicitly to be formally true, and the ad¬
herents of any religion are bound to employ what it,
in turn, specifies as formally normative as exactly
that in judging all claims to religious truth. This
need not mean, to be sure, that Christians today
have to do this in the same dogmatic, uncritical way
in which most religious believers have undoubtedly
done it throughout the history of religion. There is
the distinct alternative of recognizing the truth
claim of the Christian religion to be exactly that—a
claim—and of being willing to critically validate
it through unrestricted dialogue and common
100
inquiry, whenever it is rendered problematic by
counterclaims to religious or existential truth. In
fact, Christians today can frankly acknowledge that
the only way in which they can continue to be Chris¬
tians is to accept the possibility and the risk of ceas¬
ing to be such in face of experiences and reasons
that on the whole invalidate their claim instead of
validating it. Even so, they cannot really be Chris¬
tians at all, as long as they are such, without think¬
ing and speaking of themselves and others and of
reality generally in specifically Christian concepts
and symbols.
This means that they cannot think and speak of
the strictly ultimate reality that alone constitutes
the possibility of salvation as anything other than
the love of God decisively re-presented through Je¬
sus Christ. It also means that they cannot think and
speak of salvation, wherever it may occur, except as
the radical transformation in self-understanding
that is effected by God's love as and when it is ac¬
cepted through faith. If persons are saved, it can
only be because or insofar as they so entrust them¬
selves to God’s love as thereby to be freed to live in
loyalty to it, in returning love for God and for all
whom God loves. But, then, there are excellent theo¬
logical reasons why Christians should think and
speak of any such persons, however they may explic¬
itly understand themselves, as fellow Christians—if
not explicit Christians like themselves, then what
Rahner and others have called “anonymous Chris¬
tians.” Just as Christians can consistently think and
speak of nothing whatever except as a creature of
God destined to be consummated by God's love, and

of no human person except as created in God's im¬
age and thereby given and called to exist as God's
child, so they can consistently think and speak of no
one who actualizes an authentic self-understanding
except as either implicitly or explicitly a Christian.
And yet if the fourth option is valid, there is
always the real possibility that adherents of another
specific religion could just as validly explain why
religions can be formally true by taking theirs to be
the formally true religion. I do not mean by this
simply that adherents of any religion have the right
as well as the responsibility to think and to speak of
religion and religions as well as of everything else in
the concepts and symbols that their specific tradi¬
tion provides. I can only suppose that Buddhists, for
example, both may and must think and speak of any¬
one who actualizes an authentic self-understanding
as a fellow Buddhist, even if only an implicit or
anonymous one. Therefore, when one of my Bud¬
dhist dialogue partners inquires whether I may not
be an "anonymous Buddhist" or, at least, someone
whose “Buddha nature” implicitly gives and calls
him to be such, I can only applaud my partner's
clearheadedness and forthrightness about her or his
religious faith. My point, however, is that the truth
of my Christian explanation of why religions can
validly claim to be formally true need not preclude
the truth of the very different explanation of the
same possibility that would be offered by my
Buddhist partner. On the contrary, provided the
self-understandings made explicit in the two expla¬
nations are substantially the same, both explana¬
tions can be true even though only Christians have
102
reason to offer the one and only Buddhists have
reason to offer the other.
But if in allowing for this possibility the fourth
option is essentially different from inclusivism, it is
no less essentially different from pluralism in not
claiming that there in fact are many true religions
or ways of salvation. Just as asserting the universal
possibility of salvation does not require one to assert
that salvation itself is universal, so one can claim
with the fourth option that there can be many true
religions without having to claim that there actually
are such. All that the fourth option claims a priori,
in advance of actually encountering specific reli¬
gions and validating their claims to truth, is that, if
the Christian religion itself is true, then any and all
other religions can also be true in the very same
sense, because or insofar as they give expression to
substantially the same religious truth. This fully al¬
lows for holding, as Christians certainly have good
reason to hold, that there is not a little falsehood
and distortion in all religious praxis, including that
of persons who think and speak of themselves as
Christians. At the same time, it warrants a certain
optimism about all of the specific religions, even as
about human existence and praxis otherwise. In¬
deed, it gives one every reason to look for signs of
the actuality of the pluralism whose possibility is
securely grounded in the completely universal real¬
ity of God's love, which is savingly present through¬
out all human existence and, therefore, is also at
work in all religions.
Such, then, is the other, hitherto largely ne¬
glected, option for answering the question of this

book. My judgment, as I have said, is that it is, of all
the options, the least problematic and, therefore,
the most likely to offer a valid answer. But whether I
am right in this judgment or not, I trust that I have at
least shown that there are, in fact, four possible ways
of answering the question, instead of only the three
that alone are usually considered. And the impor¬
tance of this seems clear. If the fourth option is in¬
deed valid, one can not be either an exclusivist or an
inclusivist and one need not be a pluralist—even if
one would always have the possibility of becoming
such, provided that the case for pluralism were actu¬
ally to be made. On the other hand, one can affirm
instead that, because of the utterly universal and all-
embracing love of God decisively re-presented
through Jesus Christ, there is a universal possibility
of salvation for each and every human being and
that, for the same reason, there is a corresponding
possibility of as many true religions as there are reli¬
gions so transformed by God's love as to be consti¬
tuted by it and representative of it.
Whether or to what extent any religion is true,
even Christianity, is, in my view, always a theologi¬
cal question. But if the Christian claim to truth is
valid, and if the same can be said for the fourth
option, there is at least one true religion, and, be¬
cause it is true, there can be many.
104
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INDEX
Action, 20, 44, 57, 67 Christians, 1 f., 3 f., 13, 28 ff.,

Anglican Catechism, 86 34, 37, 53, 61, 64, 83,
Apostolicity, 37 f. 91, 100 f., 102 f.
Atonement, satisfaction “anonymous,” 32, 81, 101
theory of, 92, 93 Christology, 84
Augustine, 1 f. constitutive type of, 84 f.,
Authority, authorities, Ilf., 92, 93, 94, 95
39, 97 f. representative type of, x,
de facto, of religion(s), 11 84 f., 90, 92, 95
de jure existential, 11 Church, 12 f., 28 f., 30 f., 36,
86, 91
Baptism, 86 ff., 96 proclamation of, 29, 40 f.,
Basic confidence, 6 f., 14 f. 43, 50
Belief, 20, 44, 57, 67, 69 true/false, x, 12 f.
Boff, Clodovis, 89 ff. visible/invisible, 29, 30,
Buddhism, Buddhists, 60-66, 31,32,40, 42,81,97
102 f. Claim, claims, 12 f., 18 ff., 27,
Zen, Kyoto school of, 60 34, 56
Buddhist-Christian dialogue, Christian, 1 f., 27, 28, 100,
60 f., 102 104
critically validating, 8,
Canon, 13, 37 f. 19f., 34, 56, 100 f.
Christianity, 2, 24, 27, 28, 29, existential, 58
54 f., 59, 61-66, 81, 83, making or implying, 8, 34
91, 97, 100, 104 religious, 58, 60, 100
109
claim, claims (Continued) “basic supposition” of, 6 f.
truth, 13, 19 f., 56, 72, 100, ethical aspect of, 18
104 metaphysical aspect of, 17 f.
validity, 7, 8, 34 f., 56, 83 Existential problem, 15 f., 18,
value, 56 59, 61
Concepts, conceptuality, 7 f., Experience, 15, 18, 36 f.,
10, 59 f., 74, 75 f., 96, 43 ff., 53, 56, 79, 101
101,102
Constitutive event, 84 f. Faith, 6 f., 10, 14 f., 18, 46f.,
Criteria, 36-40 62 f., 67 f., 101
of appropriateness, 37-40 Christian, 45, 49, 52, 62 f.,
of credibility, 36 f. 67, 84, 91, 97
See also Norm, norms jides qua creditur, 10
Critical reflection, 8, 34, 36, fides quae creditur, 10
71 loyalty, as relatively active
Culture, cultures, 3, 5, 6, 7 f., aspect of, 46 f., 49,
11, 16, 21, 63 101
“cultural system,” 9, 10, 20 possibility of existence in,
definition of the term, 7 40, 42, 51, 52
primary/secondary forms trust, as relatively passive
of, 8, 33 f. aspect of, 46 f., 49,
secular/religious forms of, 101
8, 34, 71 Fourth option, the, ix ff.,
Cyprian, 28 82 ff., 99 f., 102 ff.
See also Inclusivism,
D’Costa, Gavin, 78 inclusivists,
pluralistic
Ecclesiology, classical
Protestant, x, 12 f. Geertz, Clifford, 10, 66
Ethics, 18-21, 57, 67 God, 44, 45 ff., 48, 52, 64, 73,
Evil, 50 ff. 84, 98, 99, 100, 101 f.,
Evil, problem of, 50 ff., 53 104
Exclusivism, exclusivists, as a single center of
ix ff., 28 ff., 32, 33, interaction, 47, 48
40-52, 53, 55, 58, 78, as all-good, 49 f., 50, 52
79, 81, 82, 86, 104 as all-powerful, 49 f., 50, 52
as logically an extreme as essentially the Creator
position, 78, 79 f. and Consummator of
case against, 33, 35 f., 40, all things, 92, 99
41-52, 53 as essentially the Savior of
Existential question, 5-8, 9, all men and women,
14 f., 16 ff., 58 92, 99
no
as strictly unsurpassable, understanding(s) of, 6, 7,
49, 52 10, Ilf., 18,40, 45,
as the ground of 60
unreserved trust
and the object of Inclusivism, inclusivists,
unqualified loyalty, ixff., 30 ff., 33, 54, 55,
49 58, 71, 76 f., 78, 79, 80 f.,
as the sole primal source 81,82,83,86, 89, 91 f.,
and the sole final 93, 95, 96 f., 103, 104
end of all things, 64 as also in its way an
as the universal extreme position,
individual, 47 ff. 80 f.
as unsurpassably active, monistic, x
49 pluralistic, x f.
as unsurpassably passive, Interreligious dialogue, 55 f.,
49 60, 70, 76, 77, 100
Christian understanding
of, 45, 49 f., 52, 53, 60 James, William, 17
love of, as the only cause Jesus, Jesus Christ, 28, 35, 36,
of salvation, 92 f., 99, 38,40,41,43,44, 45 f.,
100, 104 52, 53, 79, 84, 88, 91,
92, 95 ff., 104
Hick, John, 25, 32, 54 f., 66 f., as constitutive of
72 ff., 75 Christianity, 97
Hitler, Adolf, 68 as primal authorizing
Human being, beings, 5 f., 11, source, 98
14, 37,51,52,59, 99 f., as representative of the
104 possibility of
as “instinct poor,” 6 salvation, 84
freedom and responsibility as savior, 95, 98
of, 6, 14,51 as the decisive
predicament of, 40, 41, 50 f. re-presentation of the
Human existence, 35, 100, boundless love of
103 God, 93, 98
authentic, 6 f. as the decisive
boundary situations of, re-presentation of
14 ff. the truth about
inauthentic understanding human existence,
of, 16 36
threefold reality of, as self, as the explicit gift and
others, and the demand of God's
whole, 6, 17 love, 98
INDEX 111
Jesus, Jesus Christ Philosophy, 8, 34, 71 f., 76, 77
(Continued) as a secondary form of
as the primal Christian culture, 8 f.
sacrament, x, 94, Pluralism, pluralists, ix ff.,
96 f., 98 3 ff., 23-26, 27 f., 32, 33,
as the primal Christian 54, 55, 70, 72 ff., 76 ff.,
word, 98 79 f., 81, 82 f., 103, 104
unique saving event of, 28, as logically an extreme
31, 54 f., 81,84 position, 78, 79 f.
challenge of, 2 f., 4 f., 22,
Kingsley, Charles, 86 23-26, 27 f., 82
Knitter, Paul E, 24 f., 74-77 difficulties with the case
for, 54, 55, 57, 66,
Liberation, 41, 66, 69, 76 69 f., 72 ff., 78, 79 f.
theologies of, 74, 75 Plurality, 3 f., 19
Love, 46 ff., 62f., 67, 101 Praxis, 7, 34, 75, 100, 103
Protestants, 29, 38
Maurice, Frederick Denison,
86 Race, Alan, 55, 70
Meaning, 19, 58 Rahner, Karl, 93 ff., 96, 98,
existentialist equivalent 101
of a pragmatist Reality, 6, 17, 66, 101
criterion of, 61 Reason, 36 f., 43 ff., 53, 56,
Metaphysics, 17-21, 57, 63 ff. 71, 79, 101
Monism, monists, 3, 5, 22, 23, Relativism, 70, 77
26, 28, 32, 54, 55, 56, Religion, religions, 5-12, 15 f.,
80, 82 ff. 21 f.,29, 75
as a primary form of
New Testament, 13, 30, 39, culture, 8, 34
90 as thoroughly historical,
Nicholas of Cusa, 4 10 f., 57
Norm, norms, 13, 21, 27, axial, 11, 16, 30, 59, 61,
36-40, 57 f., 70 ff., 73, 66 ff., 74
74, 76, 77 Christian, 1 ff., 13, 28, 34,
See also Criteria 38f., 55, 81,98, 100,
103
Old Testament, 13, 41 ff. claim of, to be formally
Orthodox, 38 true, 13, 21, 27, 28,
71 f., 100
Paul, 67 claim of, to decisive
Philosophers, 58 authority, Ilf.
112
empirical study of, 59 means of, x, 31, 42, 86, 96,
ethical implications of, 18, 97, 98
20, 57, 60, 67, 75 possibility of, 30, 31 f., 42,
existentialist 43 ff., 84 f., 86, 92,
interpretation of, 76 96, 99, 100, 103, 104
formal ly/substantial ly Schleiermacher, Friedrich, 4
true, 12 f. Science, sciences, 7, 19, 42
functional understanding Scripture, 12, 38 ff., 42
of, 9 f., 22 “scripture alone,” 38
metaphysical implications “scripture and tradition,”
of, 18, 20, 57, 60, 38
63 f., 67, 75 Second Vatican Council, 30
non-Christian, 29, 30, 32 Secularity, 62
objective/subjective Self-understanding, 7, 10, 11,
reference of the 16, 45, 59, 60, 63 f., 68,
term, 10 69,102
political implications of, authentic, 8, 17, 18, 47, 60,
75 100, 102
political interpretation of, Sin, 40 f., 51,61 f., 99
76 Society, societies, 6, 16, 63
“primitive” or preaxial, Symbols, symbolism, 7 f., 10,
11, 16 59 f., 64, 66, 101, 102
substantive definitions of,
9, 22 Technology, 19
summary clarification of Theologians, 1 ff., 4 f., 36, 58,
the term, 5 61, 83
true, X, 1 f., 9, 12-23, 56 f., Theology, ix, 1 f., 4 f., 33 ff.,
69„ 103 f. 38, 49, 71 f.
Renaissance, the, 4 as a secondary form of
Representative event, 84 f. culture, 8 f., 33 f.
Revelation, 19, 88, 91, 96 in the generic sense, 8 f.,
Revolution, technological, 3 33 f.
Robertson, Frederick W., of religions, x, 4, 26, 55
86 ff., 96 philosophical, 34
Roman Catholics, 29, 38 practical, 35
Roman Catholic, x, 30
Sacraments, 42, 85 f., 91, 94, systematic, 35
95, 96, 97, 98 Tillich, Paul, 9 f., 92 f.
Salvation, 28 f., 30 ff., 43, Tradition, traditions, 3, 13,
66f., 69, 81,94, 101, 14, 30, 37
103 Christian, 3, 13, 37
INDEX 113
Tradition, traditions structure of, in itself, 11,
(Continued) 17 f., 47 f.
cultural, 14, 30
religious, 4, 13, 14, 30, 37, Verification, 18-21, 44, 57
57 procedures of, 44, 69
Transformation, 7, 62, 63, 65,
66, 67, 76, 100 Wesley, John, xiii
radical or ultimate, 16, 59, Witness, 1, 3, 4, 27, 34 ff., 38,
61, 67 f., 101 39, 45, 99
Truth, 13, 15 f., 69 claims to validity expressed
existential, 14, 16, 58, 71 or implied by, 34 f.,
procedures for 36, 43 ff.
determining, 18-21, constitutive assertion of,
44, 56 f. 36
religious, 13 f., 18-21, 56 f., earliest stratum of, as
58, 60, 68, 69, 70, 77 canon before the
canon, 39, 46
Ultimate reality, 6 f., 11, 17 f., of the apostles, as formally
45, 47, 59, 73 normative, 12, 37 ff.,
meaning of, for us, 5, 11, 43, 45
17 f., 45, 97 Word, 42, 85, 98
strictly, called "God,” 47, World Council of Churches, 31
99 f., 101
114
Delivered as the 1990 Samuel Ferguson Lectures at the Uni¬
versity of Manchester, these four insightful chapters address
the title question in the context of Christian theology.
The immediate occasion for doing so is the recent appear¬
ance within Christian theological discussion of the pluralist
answer to this question, namely, that there are many true
religions.
In attending to the pluralist challenge, Ogden moves in¬
cisively through the argument for pluralism as well as the
more traditional answer of Christian monism in both of its
forms—exclusivism and inclusivism. Finding all three posi¬
tions lacking, he develops a "fourth option” as "the relatively
more adequate option open to us.”
According to this fourth option, the possibility of salva¬
tion is constituted solely and sufficiently by the primordial
and everlasting love of God. Thus, not only Christians but all
human beings always already have the possibility of salva¬
tion, and there can be (whether or not pluralists are right that
there actually are) as many true religions as there are reli¬
gions that so respond to God's love as to be constituted by it
and representative of it.
"Addressed to a question that has been as vexing as it is fundamen¬

tal to the study of religion, this persistently incisive and com¬
pletely successful book is also unprecedented in the answer that it
clarifies and redeems. It is profoundly important for both theology
and religious studies.”—Franklin I. Gamwell, Professor of Ethics
and Society, The Divinity School, The University of Chicago
Schubert M. Ogden is University Distinguished Professor of Theol-

o§y Southern Methodist University. He is also author of, among
other books, Christ without Myth, The Reality of God and Other Es¬
says, The Point of Christology, and On Theology—all of which are
also available from the SMU Press.

ISBN □-a7B7M-351-S
90000
9 780870 743290

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

F or some time now, the

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The Challenge of Pluralism

A mong the many ways

Again, in the same chapter, I said “That is the Chris¬

Just what Augustine’s clarification or retraction

THE CHALLENGE OF PLURALISM 3

THE CHALLENGE OF PLURALISM 5

THE CHALLENGE OF PLURALISM 7

THE CHALLENGE OF PLURALISM 9

THE CHALLENGE OF PLURALISM 11

THE CHALLENGE OF PLURALISM 13

THE CHALLENGE OF PLURALISM 15

THE CHALLENGE OF PLURALISM 17

THE CHALLENGE OF PLURALISM 19

THE CHALLENGE OF PLURALISM 21

THE CHALLENGE OF PLURALISM 23

THE CHALLENGE OF PLURALISM 25

The Case against Exclusivism

n Chapter 1,1 attempted

I to clarify the challenge

tianity is the only true religion. To this end, I consid¬

THE CASE AGAINST EXCLUSIVISM 29

THE CASE AGAINST EXCLUSIVISM 31

THE CASE AGAINST EXCLUSIVISM 33

THE CASE AGAINST EXCLUSIVISM 35

THE CASE AGAINST EXCLUSIVISM 37

THE CASE AGAINST EXCLUSIVISM 39

THE CASE AGAINST EXCLUSIVISM 41

THE CASE AGAINST EXCLUSIVISM 43

THE CASE AGAINST EXCLUSIVISM 45

THE CASE AGAINST EXCLUSIVISM 47

THE CASE AGAINST EXCLUSIVISM 49

THE CASE AGAINST EXCLUSIVISM 51

Difficulties with the Case

T he burden of the last

DIFFICULTIES WITH THE CASE FOR PLURALISM 55

DIFFICULTIES WITH THE CASE FOR PLURALISM 57

DIFFICULTIES WITH THE CASE FOR PLURALISM 59

DIFFICULTIES WITH THE CASE FOR PLURALISM 61

DIFFICULTIES WITH THE CASE FOR PLURALISM 63

DIFFICULTIES WITH THE CASE FOR PLURALISM 65

DIFFICULTIES WITH THE CASE FOR PLURALISM 67

DIFFICULTIES WITH THE CASE FOR PLURALISM 69

DIFFICULTIES WITH THE CASE FOR PLURALISM 71

DIFFICULTIES WITH THE CASE FOR PLURALISM 73

DIFFICULTIES WITH THE CASE FOR PLURALISM 75

DIFFICULTIES WITH THE CASE FOR PLURALISM 77

Beyond the Usual Options

BEYOND THE USUAL OPTIONS 81

BEYOND THE USUAL OPTIONS 83

BEYOND THE USUAL OPTIONS 85