Guest list: at the divine banquet

Christian Century, Dec 28, 2004 by Rodney Clapp

This is not to say that such pictures as Dante's and Lewis's rule out a hell of active agony. The residents of Dante's lowest circles of hell, or of Lewis's farthest distance from heaven, are those who deliberately habituated themselves to unmitigated evil. They have so distorted their humanity that, inescapably faced with final reality, they can only suffer horribly. To again use the metaphor of light, it is as if they have intentionally and so thoroughly accustomed themselves to darkness that even the faintest and most distant glow of truth burns their eves.

Dante's Virgil suggests yet another possibility, quite compatible with orthodoxy, for followers of the great spiritual traditions other than Christianity. (Here I can barely sketch a picture more compellingly presented in S. Mark Heim's extraordinary book The Depth of the Riches.) As I mentioned, Virgil's wisdom and goodness are not entirely denied. Virgil has something to teach the Christian pilgrim in the afterlife, even if Virgil himself does not attain the fullness of paradise. Similarly, we need not pretend that the Buddhist or Hindu or holy person of another faith is necessarily stripped of all real wisdom and goodness after death. In earthly life the Hindu, for example, may through grace and discipline come to know something of the reality of God in Christ. She may finally reach an end that is not salvation--personal communion with the triune God--but is another religious end.

For the orthodox Christian, this end can be seen only as a lesser end or goal than salvation, just as the Hindu would see the Christian's personal communion as a less mature and full spiritual goal than a monistic unity; with the cosmic principle Brahman. But the traditional Christian can affirm real wisdom and insight in the devoted Hindu's intense awareness and pursuit of impersonal union with the cosmic principle underlying and sustaining really. After all, Christians understand God not simply as personal and transcendent but also as immanent in creation, undergirding and upholding it by "natural law" or other impersonal means. From the Christian vantage point it is better, of course, to know God more fully and triunely; yet the Hindu may--in this world and in the coming new world--have something to teach the Christian about meditation or about God's willingness to empty God's self (Phil. 2:5-8).

Far from simply being generous, this view strikes me as an occasion for Christian sobriety and humanity. A Gandhi or a Dalai Lama might travel farther and more faithfully on their paths than many Christians have on the way toward Christ. Inasmuch as they have been drawn to a true vision of an aspect of the true God, they can be the Christian's worthy--if not final or only--teachers.

SO CLASSICAL Christian spirituality is and can be generous without relinquishing its convictions and worshipful practices centered on Christ as the unique, only and final Savior of the world. It is the Creator-Redeemer God who sustains the cosmos, whether or not every person in the world consciously knows this. The rain falls and the sun shines "on the righteous and on the unrighteous" (Matt. 5:45). Christ's death and resurrection saved and will save the world from self-destruction. At history's end, the Christian faith and hope could be proven wrong (just as other faiths and philosophies will be proven wrong if creation is consummated in the kingdom of God). Of course, orthodox Christian conviction and practice is not regarded by those committed to it as wrong or false. Classical Christian spirituality is grounded in what its adherents take as objective reality--objective in the sense of being true whether or not any given person thinks or feels it to be true.