At home and not at home: religious pluralism and religious truth

Christian Century, April 19, 1995 by Robert N. Bellah

RELIGIOUS PLURALISM and religious truth are topics that preoccupied H. Richard Niebuhr at several points in his work but nowhere more than in The Meaning of Revelation. In the preface to that work Niebuhr recognizes both Ernst Troeltsch and Karl Barth as his teachers and notes that they are frequently thought to be "in diametrical opposition to each other." Nevertheless he proposes to "combine their main interests," though he is modest as to whether he has succeeded.

On the question of the uniqueness of the revelation of God in Christ, Troeltsch and Barth would indeed seem to be irreconcilable. Toward the end of his life Troeltsch came to recognize that the great world religions had equal claims to validity, though he did not quite leave it at that, as we mill see later. As for Barth, he drew an absolute distinction between the revelation of God in Christ and the religions, which are purely human expressions and as such more or less idolatrous. It would seem rather difficult to combine those insights.

Before making progress on that front, let us consider more closely how we understand the central Christian claim that God revealed himself in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. How are we to understand this claim--understand as opposed to evaluate it? I am convinced that this claim is not very well understood even in our own society and must be very hard to understand in non-Western societies.

To suggest the problem let me recount an incident that occurred while I was at the Institute for Islamic Studies at McGill University in Montreal in the 1950s. A couple of years earlier my wife and I had spent a summer conducting fieldwork in a Mormon community in Ramah, New Mexico. Being new to Canada and rather homesick, we invited in two Mormon missionaries from Utah when they called on us in Montreal and spoke with their familiar Western twang. After exchanging small talk, which is what we really wanted, the missionaries were eager to get down to the business of converting us. They pulled out an elaborate display of illustrated cardboards, depicting incidents from the Bible. The story developed sequentially along the lines of "if you believe this then you must believe this." I was willing to consent up to a certain point and then I had to discourage the discourse from continuing. I already knew a great deal about Mormonism and was not about to be converted.

Aside from disappointing our new friends, the thing that most impressed me on that occasion was that their entire pitch was based on the assumption that a) we were familiar enough with the Bible to follow their argument and b) that if they could demonstrate that the Bible said something they wanted to prove, we would be constrained to agree. Ignorance of the Bible or lack of confidence in its authority would have left them completely at sea. Or rather it would have forced them back to the beginning, to prove, as the would put it, that "the Bible is true," long before they would ever get to the topic of Joseph Smith.

It may seem as if I am making a long leap, but I believe the first Christians were in the same situation as those missionaries. There is only one point in the New Testament, as far as I know, at which the gospel is preached to those entirely lacking in knowledge of the scriptures (most of the gentiles to whom Paul preached were among the sympathizers of the synagogue, so Paul could presume what George Lindbeck calls "biblical literacy"), and that is Paul's famous address on the Areopagus. Paul's entering wedge is to tell the philosophically educated Athenians that he has discovered "an altar with the inscription, `to an unknown god.' What therefore you worship as unknown this I proclaim to you" (Acts 17:23). Then he goes on to speak of "the God who made the world and everything in it, he who is Lord of heaven and earth," and he proceeds to give a brief precis of Genesis. He ends with the notion that God will "have the world judged in righteousness by a man whom he has appointed, and of this he has given assurance to all by raising him from the dead" (17:24-33).

IN SHORT, in order to preach Jesus Christ and him crucified to the biblically illiterate Athenians, Paul must convince them of the fundamentally Jewish notion of a creator God who is Lord of all and who will bring the world to an end in a last judgment. Only in that context does the incarnation, crucufixion and resurrection of Jesus Christ make sense. Even though Paul abrogated the Jewish ritual law for the gentiles, he still, in a critically important sense, had to convert them to Judaism before he could convert them to Christianity. That is as much the case today as ever and is evidenced by the fact that the Hebrew scriptures are canonical for Christians.

To put this in Niebuhrian terms: converting people to Christianity without Paul's background of Hebrew radical monotheism would be converting them to a sort of henotheism, a belief in Jesus as a kind of "guardian spirit." It would confirm the suspicion of the Athenian philosophers about Paul: "He seems to be a proclaimer of foreign divinities" (Acts 17:18). Indeed, today much missionary work carried on by Americans or Western Europeans in the non-Western world, emphasizing individual salvation rather than a transformed way of life, may be only the proclamation of a foreign divinity. As the missionary-theologian Lesslie Newbigin puts it: "A religion of individual salvation had been taught, along with a wholesale rejection and condemnation of traditional culture. The result has been ... a superficial Christianity with no deep roots and then--later--a reaction to an uncritical and sentimental attachment to everything in the discarded culture." Only much later when the new Christians have the Bible in their own language will they or their children or grandchildren be able to discern what of the missionary culture and what of the traditional culture is really consonant with a genuine living-out of the gospel in their own circumstances. Theirs will presumably no longer be a "superficial" Christianity.