God Among the Idols
by David Elliot
Part One — The Old Testament to the Middle Ages
The Victorian poet Charles Swinburne decried with atheistic languor the domestication of pagan antiquity's Dionysian vitality at the hands of Christ the conqueror:
Thou hast triumphed, O pale Galilean,
The whole world is grey with thy breath.
Like Nietzche, he saw Christianity as a pallid, bloodless, anemic thing, an ascetic asphyxiation of primal instinct, tyrannical rule, and the lusty affirmation of life's amoral naturalness and bestial beauty. Thus the thing chiefly to be guarded against is the spreading of the Christian virus through the missionary enterprise, and the great evil to be feared is that the Church's "sins and sons through sinless lands will disperse". This is a sentiment that has not died out. We can hear it at a great many cocktail parties or interfaith dialogues where the mere suggestion of converting natives from their own religious traditions to confessional Christianity would be lambasted as unutterably imperialistic and monolithically self-righteous. Often the ghost of Spanish Conquistadors or some Jesuit phalanx looms like a nefarious cloud in the minds of those for whom the word "missionary" invariably appears in ironic quotation marks. Here we see the dominance of the postmodern model in the religious assumptions of the secular West: one's tradition, whether it be that of hallowing God, praying to the ancestors, conjuring the totem pole, or worshipping a crocodile, is raucously trumpeted by the cultural elite, not because it tells me anything about reality or touches the transcendent, but simply because it pleases me; is the thing I happen to prefer. The Commandment is still "Thou shalt have no other gods before me", but the question of whether the "me" in question refers to God or to the individual speaker must be left undecided in a culture where the monstrance held up for our adoration too seldom features a Host, too often a mirror. This may seem a somewhat curmudgeonly and uncharitable note to sound, but it is only the necessary conclusion of the endemic notion that the preferences of the individual, and not what is objectively owed to God, should determine one's spiritual fealty. "And it harm me none, do what thou wilt" is repeated with jingoistic glee by postmodern purveyors eager to replace an immutable God owed unconditional obedience with One — whether He, She, or It — pieced together by the individual's own inviolable fiat. Cardinal Newman's dictum that we are not simply imperfect people in need of improvement, but rebels who must lay down our arms, is quite reversed in this vision dubbed by "progressives" as broad-minded and "traditionalists" as sophistical. In such a schema there is no room for another St. Francis Xavier — or, for that matter, St. Paul — to blanket the globe with Christian particularities at the expense of native piety's lush traditions. We might even without glibness go so far as to say that the great commission of postmodern religiosity is to permanently retire the former commission "Go out into all the world and make disciples of all nations" since that is a species of spiritual colonialism chafing at cultural diversity. Thus Christians stand now at a hardly navigable crossroads: we may continue to evangelize, but with the heightened risk of ecumenical capsize and the likely relegation to academic obscurantism; or we can make obeisance to postmodernity, with the sure loss of Christian distinctiveness and the possible fate of becoming just one more voice added to the chorus of secularism.
Before capitulating to sensationalism, I think we need to understand that the problem of religious pluralism is hardly the unforeseen disaster or "Trojan Horse in the City of God" that some cantankerous critics and Tridentine nostalgiacs have dubbed it. No indeed. The church was born into the original era of religious diversity, when the Roman Empire, having grown tired of prosy old Jove, was willing to give ear to any crank vending a panacea and was eager to transplant all the mystery cults of Egypt, Greece, and Persia onto its own aboriginal mythology of deified lechers. The whole Mediterranean at that time was a vast melting pot of religious syncretism, and the brotherhood of all religions was an axiomatic fact. We don't usually associate an Empire built on martial belligerence with one of the cherished values of modern liberal democracies, but notwithstanding its swords and siege-engines, Rome was a paragon of religious inclusivity. At least, until there occurred the rather apocalyptic episode which scholars insist on calling "The Jesus Movement". Something in that company of fishermen, slaves, peasants, and women came across as so frenetically antiestablishment that the normally sanguine laws surrounding religion presently ceased to apply to the Christian provincials. Soon Caesars eulogized for their tolerance (who even had the greatness of heart to overlook the excesses of the scandalously monotheistic Jews) were issuing decrees calling for the arrest, torture, and execution of Christians who demurred in the matter of Emperor-worship and mulishly clung to the criminal Galilean. If anything should strike us as novel, then, it should not be the phenomenon of Christianity encountering a myriad of religions in a pluralistic world. Despite the colourful zoology of unexpected gods brought to Western shores in the past generation or so, the "problem of many religions" was originally the first — not the twenty first — century's pioneer territory. What should really beguile us is the fact that in a place as religiously pluralistic and tolerant as the Roman Empire, Christians were from the earliest days persecuted with a rancour bordering on mania. It should never be forgotten that when the first Christians were offered a place at the table of interfaith jamboree, and were invited to place a statue of Christ beside the statues of Zeus and Adonis in one great revel of reconciliation, how it was that they answered, and what were the consequences of their refusal. This may not give us any definitive theological conclusion, but it does give us some perspective, and makes clear two particular things: i) that the encounter between Christianity and the melting pot of religions is nothing new and nothing which of itself need annex the Christian identity, and ii) that the original Christian response to a pluralistic society was not to measure the Faith by the standards of the world, but to measure the world by the standards of the Faith. The confessors and martyrs all took the side of Plato's Socrates against that of the Sophist Protagoras in the first and most important of all theological debates: God, and not man, is the measure of all things.
In order to avoid banal generalizations in the matter of what Christians have historically thought and how they have reacted to the pagan arabesque; I propose a short outline of the major positions and thinkers from Scripture to the present followed by a brief riposte to modern latitudinarian assumptions. To tie up loose ends and move beyond what this or that man has opined to a surer footing, I take the ecclesiastical verdicts — and especially those of Vatican II — as my theological court of final appeal while avoiding a slavish officiousness that would only thwart licit creativity. This, I hope, will prove somewhat useful despite admittedly impressionistic assessments calculated not to definitively exhaust, but only fruitfully probe, the multicultural West's great theological question mark.
Old Testament
Beginning with Scripture itself, then, we must admit that the raw letter does not tend to furnish us with anything like ecumenical utopianism. True that in the Old Testament the oriental patriarch Job is paraded as God's superlative boast, the reluctant prophet Jonah is sent to garb heathen Nineveh in penitent's rags, and the Gentile "queen of the South" is prophesied as eschatological judge for unfaithful Jews — all implying that God is solicitous for, and quite capable of, salvation for those without Abrahamic pedigree. But these are all exceptions. The general tenor of the Old Testament is iconoclastic. We see it in the fierce red glint in all the prophets' eyes at bedeviled cults and blood imbibed by idols; we hear it in the call to war upon the ancient order of the gods and their wayward pagan votaries. The sacred groves are felled, the idols are smashed, and when Israel itself begins hankering for demonic patrons; God, we are given to understand, permits the Babylonians or Assyrians to deal out a fierce drubbing that leads in the end to tearful repentance. It is no accident that the First Commandment is "You shall have no other gods before me", nor was it so taken by the ancient Jews whose monotheistic zeal arced to violence with what looked to pagan eyes like the barbarous frenzy of a desert horde. And although there is the eschatological promise that Israel will be the ultimate source of salvation and sanctification for the demonically hoodwinked nations, the idea of missionary goodwill tends to be relegated by the Israelites — quite comfortably — to the mists of futurity. The overall impression the Old Testament leaves us with is that any encounter between Almighty God, His angels, and Chosen People on one side; and the benighted pagans in thrall to dark gods on the other, almost always takes place on black and white chequered squares, with innumerable saber scars being left behind.
New Testament
Nor, at first reading, does the New Testament appear to be more sanguine on the subject of unbelievers. It will be remembered that it is there — from the lips of Christ Himself — that the fierce monosyllable "Hell" first appears with threats so incendiary as to make all the thirst, grit, dust, and itch of the Old Testament underworld look like rivers of honey in comparison. This is not to undermine the moral beauty and divine amorousness of the Christ whose clemency and goodness ravish believers and unbelievers alike, and whose admonitions about Hell are really love's precautions against choosing final lovelessness. But we must avoid the rosy naïveté of attributing to Christ an unscriptural universalism that bowdlerizes His "hard sayings" about faith's necessity and the narrowness of the way.
There are, for example, the sayings that seem to imply that an individual's eternal felicity is contingent upon a professed faith and sacramental baptism. "He who has believed and is baptized will be saved; but he who does not believe will be condemned." (Mark 16:16). And: "Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God." (John 3:5). When Paul is asked by his prison guard: "What must I do to be saved?" he replies "Believe in the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved . . . and he was baptized at once, with all his family." (Acts 16:30-33). Peter's epistolary conclusion on the subject is unmistakably clear: "Baptism now saves you" (3:21). And yet there are clear exceptions to this seeming absolute. The Old Testament saints, for example, who knew no baptism but concerning whose salvation we can hardly be in doubt; or the penitent thief crucified beside Christ and gently assured a room in the house of many mansions. The old formula "God has bound salvation to the sacraments, but God himself is not bound by his sacraments" therefore finds New Testament warrant. But while noting that a few instances of extraordinary incorporation into the saving mystery of Christ are to be found, Scripture's unrelenting stentorian summons (from the lips of Jesus Himself) to explicit faith and baptism cannot to be sandpapered away to permit a laissez-faire soteriology. That would be like saying (in the words of St. Augustine) "Let so-and-so be wounded worse, for he is not dead yet". And surely Christ would not prescribe a medicine for which His patients were not in need.
Somewhat in the vein of Old Testament Yahwistic triumphalism we find assorted passages concerning Christ's harrowing of Hell that unquestionably tell against the old gods. Christ is "far above all principality, and power, and might, and dominion", all things are put "under his feet" (Ephesians 1:21-2), "having spoiled principalities and powers, he made a show of them openly, triumphing over them in it (Colossians 2:15)" etc. It need hardly be said that the above royal titles (principalities, powers, dominions etc.) in Jewish and Christian parlance denote the fallen angels who lead gentile nations astray, the pagan gods whom St. Paul chillingly equates with "demons" (1 Corinthians 10:20). Such language is most certainly meant in Scripture to reprobate the Canaanite Baals, Olympian despots, and Babylonian hierarchies; the only question is whether it could also be applied, say, to the three million gods of the Hindu pantheon, or to the oft-invoked luminaries of Mahayana Buddhism. If so, the crusader animus and fey iconoclasm it would engender in Christianity's view of "foreign gods" would be unilateral in scope and terminal to ecumenism.
But the evidence for this position is certainly not irresistible. There is, for example, Paul's exhortation to the pagan intelligentsia of Athens where he praises their altar to "an unknown God" whom he equates with the Creator; quoting in approval also, in reference to God, a text lauding Zeus from the Greek poet Aratos: "In him we live and move and have our being, for we are his offspring" (Acts 17:28). Irenic ecumenist that he is, Paul allows the Athenians some very princely concessions: they are said to be: i) "very religious", ii) worshipping the "Lord of heaven" (but only as an "unknown God"), and iii) as sons of Adam, they "seek God, in the hope that they might feel after him and find him" (Acts 17:27). So they are not simply described as cynical brutes meant to die on pikes or the deranged slaves of capricious idols. They have piety, wisdom, wit, and a dignity borne of their descent from Adam. However, Paul is not content — now that the torch of truth is present to burn away the cobwebs of past error — to have them go on building bronze statues of Zeus and worshipping the genius of the Emperor. The overall impression of the Athenian détente is that the gentiles have a sense of the true God, but that their idolatry has left whatever antediluvian impression of Him remains thoroughly befogged and in need of Christian Revelation as a corrective to their errors and the consummation of their piety. (One is reminded here of Chesterton's saying that "What we are in need of isn't a religion that is right where we are right, but a religion that is right where we are wrong").
This dovetails nicely with Paul's view in Romans that Creation testifies to its Maker (Romans 1:20) and that the heathen are therefore culpable when they decline the adoration of the invisible deity to worship the nearest crocodile. Beyond this, he explicitly grants that those who lacked the law of God written on tablets of stone will be judged on the basis of whether they followed the moral law written on the tablets of human hearts (Romans 2:13-16). This suggests that virtuous pagans whose ignorance of Christ is inculpable may yet be saved by their adherence to the pre-Incarnate Logos who enlightens every man coming into the world (John 1:9). Thus, the Enlightenment picture of the Christian God as a tyrannical child who plays with some toys and pulls to pieces others is rubbished, and frantic palpitations about the fate of far-off natives and forgotten savages are allayed. For, as St. Paul says, God wills "all to be saved, and be led to recognize the truth"; and He has provided the means for both.
Church Fathers and Doctors
The idea that the ruck of Christian theologians from the early Church Fathers past the twilight of medieval scholastics could say nothing about non-Christian religions without endlessly glutting hapless readers on venomous, reactionary, and specious bombast; is (I hope to show) merely a stock example of secular hysterics. For example, St. Irenaeus held that the Son, from the very beginning and in every part of the world, gives a more or less obscure revelation of the Father to every creature, and that He can be the "Salvation of those who are born outside the Way." St. Justin Martyr held that the logos spermatikos ("seed-bearing word) was discernible by the intelligible light of reason to all peoples and that traces of Christian truth could be found fruitfully scattered in the vagaries of pagan myth and the brilliance of its philosophy. St. Cyprian, St. Hilary, and St. Ambrose held that "the divine Sun of Justice shines on all and for all"; Origen, St. Jerome, and St. Cyril of Alexandria refused to assert "that any man is born without Christ"; and St. John Chrysostom proclaimed: "grace is diffused everywhere and there is no soul that cannot feel its attraction". St. Augustine, though widely regarded as the patristic canon's severest doctrinaire, is prepared to grant that the pagans have always had their "hidden saints" and prophets, and that someone born into error is blameless before God "provided he does not with obstinate self-assurance shut out all better knowledge, but seeks the truth simply and loyally". And finally, we have it from the pen of St. Thomas Aquinas that God can be known in part by the heathen, but only "by a few, over much time, with many errors" (a reverent nod to the Plato's and Aristotle's of the world), for which reason man's natural lights need to be augmented by divine revelation.
Such rumbustious ecumenism is not to say that the pioneering geniuses of the Christian patrimony were naive in their assessment of the myths, rites, dramas, philosophies, idolatries and debaucheries of the old-world pagan morass; or that they were chary or timorous in flogging devotion to anachronistic deities when all things had been made new in Christ. They could overturn idols with the volcanic fury of a Moses or Elijah in their more apocalyptic moments. But they were also penetrating masters in the art of separating the wheat from the chaff when it came to the pagan inheritance; else St. Augustine would never have come to Christianity through neo-Platonism, and St. Thomas Aquinas would never have built the cathedral of his theology on an Aristotelian foundation. Grace builds on nature rather than abolishing it, and though the Fathers and the Doctors knew that man's nature — and therefore pagan invention — was fallen; they also knew that the fire of God, descending upon impure altars, need not destroy those that it can purify. I, for one, therefore see no reason to think that if the accidents of history were such that the Fathers had lived to see, say, Buddhism and Hinduism rather than Greek and Roman paganism, that their martyr's passion combined to their towering intellects would have resulted in any less faithful, or any more perspicacious, a Christian assessment of the proverbial "other".
Part Two — Three Contemporary Camps
Reminding the Reader of the Question at Hand
Last issue's article was a brief excursus into the biblical and historical understandings of non-Christian religions and the questions they raise for the believing Christian. The conundrum may be summed up in this way: If God has revealed Himself and His plan of salvation to us, and if He wants all of us to come to the knowledge of this truth, then what are we to make of so many seemingly contradictory religions out there, competing with our reception of that truth? Are religions that appear to contradict Christianity deep down really complementary, or are they mythological in nature, or possibly even diabolical in origin? Can their adherents even attain to salvation? If they can, then do we really need to make them Christian? And if not, then is not the universal saving will of God undermined?" And so on. These are matters that concern us all, since we all have friends, family, neighbours, fellow-citizens etc. who are not Christians and who do not seem to be gamboling into the sheepfold with much facility. And since solicitude for our neighbour's welfare is woven into our nature (every man is his brother's keeper), we cannot help thinking about these things. This is not to try to outdo God in managerial maintenance of the Universe. Very possibly these questions exist, not to be exhaustively answered, but largely to function as a spur to a more militant charity and to missionary effoliation. But any question, even if left a mystery, must still be asked to function as a stimulant. So while we acknowledge that God is of the very stones able to raise up children to Abraham, we must also admit to the sting that haunts the Christian in the quiet hours of the night about the spiritual lot not only of our loved ones, but of the vast majority of the human race who historically have mostly been non-Christian. That is the first point of concern arising from a multiplicity of religions. We experience solicitude for people's salvation, but not content with that alone, we desire complete happiness and knowledge of the truth, both for us and for them. So the question moves beyond that of whether people can be saved without being Christian to that of whether, even if they theoretically could, full beatitude could still be theirs without their being Christian. It is as if we were to ask that even if tigers could meagerly subsist on vegetables, whether they should have to do so when meat was readily available.
Apart from questions concerning where other religions stand in the scheme of salvation, there are also those relating to what their role might possibly be on the stage of history. In other words, we are like actors in an Elizabethan play wondering what to make of the Chinese dragons and Turkish minarets that we didn't know were scripted and which don't seem to suit the setting. "What is Shakespeare doing with all these out-of-place props?" The actors might ask. And we, looking upon a Universe uttered into being by the Word who is God, wonder upon seeing what appear to be contrary utterances, "What is God doing with all these strange religions?" For, given that Scripture states that Divine Providence extends even to the minute details of counting the very hairs on our head and noticing sparrows falling to the ground, then we cannot help but wonder how all the world religions that have shaped billions of people's hearts and which seem to contradict Christian Revelation fit into the picture. Surely that fine detail cannot have been overlooked. Once you grant that Providence extends even to hair enumeration, the idea that the "Universe of Faiths" could have just popped up like mushrooms overnight while God was sleeping is absurd.
The Philosophical Meat of the Issue
Scandalously to oversimplify the problem, we may reduce the proposed solutions to the pluralist delirium to three main contenders: "particularism", "pluralism", and "inclusivism". The first, originally known as religious "exclusivism" (but recently softened to "particularism" in light of the devilry now attributed to all things "exclusive") holds that only those who hear and respond to the Christian gospel are heirs to the truth and recipients of salvation. At a rather low level , it is expressed in Saint-Cyran's "Not one single drop of grace falls on the pagans", in the Jansenist motto that "the grace of God would be degraded if it were used too lavishly", and in the volleyed anathemas of sundry Pentecostal and Evangelical sects. With greater probity of thought, it is championed by rigorist exegetes of St. Augustine, by the frightful exigencies of Calvinistic logic, and by such theological worthies as Karl Barth, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Lesslie Newbigin, and Alvin Plantinga. It is characterized by a decided emphasis upon definite article truth as well as a pugnacious aversion to interfaith movements decried as mesmeric banalities at best and golden calf reprises at worst. "Religion" (meaning all that is not revelation, meaning everything outside the Bible) is scathingly denounced as "little more than a Tower of Babel — a purely human construction, erected in defiance of God". Particularism thus opines "a radical discontinuity between God's self-revelation to humanity, which leads to faith, and humanity's search for God, which leads to religion". To derive one's beliefs from beyond the biblical pale, is, on this view, merely a sordid exercise in hubris. Hence combative phrases like that of Barth's "The Revelation of God as the Abolition of Religion" or Bonhoeffer's much touted "religionless Christianity" purged of cultural accretions and ritual abberations. God's work of revelation is therefore trumpeted as the necessarily rude eruption of the infinitely Other come to extirpate our human mythos with His divine logos. And though such talk is palpably wicked from the viewpoint of ecumenical savants; it cannot be dismissed cavalierly as just another mask of Christian imperialism, since it tilts the lance equally at religion (in the above mentioned sense of the word) in all its forms, whether non-Christian or, indeed, Christian. Even as an equal opportunity iconoclast, though, the particularist position is likely to be seen by the ecumenically correct as just another occasion for the gendarmes of orthodoxy to vent their spleens against perceived usurpers of their religious monopoly. It is the sort of theology to which the vilifying adjective "fundamentalist" is prodigiously applied, and which the liberal media is wont to associate with certain unutterably evil backwaters of Texas. And while accommodating to that well-hidden portion of a man's heart in which we are all secretly crusaders, there is a fatal flaw to particularism that leaves it an ideological deadweight: it forgets or omits to mention that a large portion of what is acknowledged as Christian revelation is either received from or anticipated by the heathen religions. As Cardinal Newman wrote: "The doctrine of the Divine Word is Platonic; the doctrine of the Incarnation is Indian; of a divine kingdom is Judaic; of Angels and demons is Magian; the connection of sin with the body is Gnostic; celibacy is known to Bonze and Talapoin; a sacerdotal order is Egyptian; the idea of a new birth is Chinese and Eleusinian; belief in sacramental virtue is Pythagorean." Not content, of course, to just turn Christianity into a Judaically embellished pagan reliquary, Newman then insists that "from the beginning the Moral Governor of the world has scattered the seeds of truth far and wide over its extent; that these have variously taken root, and grown up as in the wilderness, wild plants indeed but living." Thus "We are not distressed to be told that the doctrine of the angelic host came from Babylon, while we know that they did sing at the Nativity; nor that the vision of a Mediator is in Philo, if in very deed He died for us on Calvary." Now if non-Christian religions were indeed just the trafficking of demons, then a great deal of what is accepted as Christian revelation would have to be rejected on account of its partial heathen anticipation or derivation; a Bible-tearing procedure which no theological particularist would be willing to countenance. Consequently, the position proves too simple to account for Christian and non-Christian religiosity.
"Pluralism" is the ideological nemesis of particularism and the proud laurel-bearer of postmodern academe. Holding that all the religious traditions of the world are equally valid paths to the same inner sanctum of transcendent reality; it is not, of course, to be confused with the use of the word "pluralism" that merely denotes the situational reality of the West's multicultural pastiche. Drawing sharp lines between doctrine and experience, dogma and mysticism, tradition and individualism (the latter lustily applauded, the former wearily endured), it holds that all religions — from Babylonian fertility rites to the Catholic High Mass — are one in spirit if not in the letter, and that behind the conceptual latticework of cultural particularities the same experience of "Ultimate Reality" beatifically lies. Included in its embrace is cant both old and new: "Truth is one: the wise call it by many names", "Every religion is a path leading up the same mountain", "All the gods are one God" etc. It follows that on such a model Christ simply becomes a way, a truth, and a life: the definite article being definitely dropped. Though ubiquitous wherever moderns, postmoderns, easterners, romantics, neo-pagans, and lovers of all things tolerant enjoy free commerce, pluralism's most academically sterling and popularly diffused proponent is undoubtedly John Hick, of God and the Universe of Faiths fame. Beneath the philosophical obtuseness of its language, an unabashed jubilance of tone characterizes this work, of the confident utopian sort found in books that make pluralism and multiculturalism into cure-alls for mankind riven by warring creeds. Hick's thesis is that man has been evolving spiritually from antediluvian times, from Aztec-style human sacrifice and slavish simpering before animalistic idols, to later, more felicitous periods of transcendence, when moments of divine self-revelation and prophetic personas graced the Earth. Around 800-300 B.C. came what he calls "the golden age of religious creativity" when sages like Buddha, Zoroaster, Confucius, Lao-Tzu, Pythagoras, Socrates, and sundry Old Testament prophets taught and wrote. He sees the religious ferment wrought by these movements as examples of "pluriform divine revelation", all of which were necessary due to the lack of today's mass communications. None are better than the others, rather, they are all custom-fitted for a particular geography, culture, time, and temperament by the anonymous ethereal beneficence ordering everything and christened (rather prosaically) by Hick "Ultimate Reality". Each "religio-cultural complex" evolves separately, but gradually they begin to touch and intermingle until we reach the present state of hundreds of gods, cults, sects, and prophets uneasily eyeing each other across an increasingly shortening cultural divide. But Hick is insistent that the pluralist situation is still superlatively good, not simply because the Ultimate Reality is in its Heaven, and all's well with the world, but because the contradictory claims of various religions need not, in fact, set them at odds with each other. "The ultimate divine reality is infinite" he says, "and as such transcends the grasp of the human mind." Thus he concludes that our intellect's capacity to comprehend only "a finite and partial image of the divine" accounts for the seeming disparity between the various religious systems.
Here the honest thinker clearly ought to give pause. To begin with, no religion ever claimed that a man with a finite mind could comprehend a God infinite in Being, because no religion is so logically defunct as to not notice the reductio ad absurdam inherent in such a claim. Beyond this, Hick's transcendentalism merely circumvents the practical problems arising from competing religious claims. For example, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and Sikhism each hold that there is one lifetime for each person and then a general resurrection of the dead at the end of the world. Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, and Pythagoreanism all claim that the soul evolves spiritually over incalculable aeons through a near infinity of reincarnations until its cathartic dissolution into the general ether. Two more bracingly contradictory theories could scarcely be imagined. To wax still more specific: the all-determining question "Who is Jesus?" is often answered contrarily and with the utmost mutual exclusivity by votaries of the manifold faiths. From Judaism the question receives either brusque reticence or a reverent nod conceding that Christ is an exemplary moralist, perhaps, but certainly not the Messiah; Islam gives voice to an almost purple lyricism of Christ as the penultimate prophet (second only to Mohammed), and owns that He is indeed the Messiah, but, for Allah's sake, not the Son of God; Christianity professes that Christ is the long pined-for Messiah and the only-begotten Son of God, fully human and fully divine, and without hesitation the King of Kings and Lord of Lords; and Hinduism posits Christ as an avatar or one of the many-begotten sons of God, on a par with Rama or Krishna, but insists that He is solely divine, and not at all human. Eyebrows, therefore, should be raised at the arcadian pretense that the jury of world religions (on this and many other counts) is not manifestly hung. This is not to abominate ecumenism, or to deny the innumerable commonalities that do exist between the roll call of faiths; but we cannot be so daft as to not notice essential differences between them, or so prudish as to never admit them openly. But if we are to admit to this, then in deference to the logical law of non-contradiction (which states that two mutually exclusive propositions cannot both be true at the same time in the same sense), we must also admit that particularities such as the Resurrection and Reincarnation hypotheses, or the legion of contradictory theories as to Christ's identity, cannot simultaneously be true, any more than the statement that a given man is at the same time both married and a bachelor, or that a given woman is both pregnant and barren, could be true. To paper over this by holding that the differences between religious claims are only so per accidens is patently an illusion, since all are quite definite theories about real as versus metaphorical verities. Our destiny after death is either Resurrection; or not, Reincarnation, or not; but it cannot be both of them. Christ is either the Messiah; or not, God's Son; or not, fully human and fully divine; or not, but it cannot be all of them. If the pluralist claims that all of these dogmas are merely inspired poetic tropes of true, as yet undisclosed realities, then he has still not cut the Gordian knot; all that has happened is that a third claimant has entered the lists with their own rival theory of religious facts, which simply places them on a par with those whom they criticize and whom they would fain advise to hold their peace. However much the Golden Rule may run like a silk thread through all the world's religions, then, irreconcilable differences regarding who God is, what is the meaning of life, by what morality should we live, and what is our destiny after death, will always be found between the creeds on men's lips, giving fresh, and still fresh occasions for pluralists of a romantic cast to be reminded that the word "utopia" literally means "no place".
To give his schema some illustrative clout, Hick, holding forth on how the teachings of Buddha, Zoroaster, Lao-Tzu, the Upanishads, Christ etc. "were all moments of divine revelation", invokes the famous (some would contend, infamous) parable of the elephant. An idyllic tale claiming no less than the Buddha's pedigree, the parable states that religious "seekers" are like blind men cramped with a pachyderm at close quarters. Each man touches part of the elephant, but because of their blindness; no one can compass it wholly. Presently a row ensues between the "seekers" over the nature of elephant. The man with the trunk says the elephant is like a snake. The man with the ear says it is manifestly like a fan. The man with a leg swears it is like a pillar. And so on. Next follows the Buddha's homiletic postscript: "How can you be so sure of what you cannot see? We cannot see God. Each of you may be partly right, yet none completely so." From its genesis in the storied ashram to its terminus as fodder at cocktail parties, this parable has enjoyed a laudatory career amongst pluralists of every stripe, fueling movements as diverse as East Indian Yoga, Buddhism's roll call of sects, the Occult and Theosophical systems of Helena Blavatsky and Rudolph Steiner, and that singularly bohemian undulation, the New Age. But despite its colourful panache, the story has at its core a suppressed premise that the Christian can only view as sordid and ruinous: it assumes that man's knowledge of God depends upon his own natural skill in finding Him rather than upon God's graciousness in revealing Himself to us. In so doing, it asserts the very understanding of God and man that Christianity is most concerned to contradict: that of man's self-reliance versus God's gratuitous condescension. Right in so far as it acknowledges the insufficiency of knowledge of God achieved by man's own lights, it is wrong insofar as it precludes the possibility of knowledge of God vouchsafed by the power of grace. It is also a story blissfully ignorant of the central claim that Christianity makes (expressed by Revelation and the Incarnation) and upon which it stands or falls: namely, that the elephant of the story, unimpressed by the musing of the sightless and actually solicitous for their salvation, lifted up his mighty trunk and opened the eyes of the blind, so that they said with grateful awe: "The Word became Flesh, and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth; and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only-begotten Son of the Father" (John 1:14). Because it can neither account nor conceive of this, pluralism is not even in a position to dialogue with Christianity, let alone refute it, for it has not yet acknowledged Christianity's salient feature. And loath though I am to pour anything like odium upon as revered a sage as the Buddha, it must be admitted that his agnostic pronouncement "We cannot see God" sounds rather like what the Greeks said to St. Paul: "We have not so much as even heard whether there is a Holy Spirit." For a pagan living in 500 B.C. such a doleful relinquishment is, we hope, pardonable. But for a Christian living after the advent of Jesus Christ, it is a happily forgotten anachronism.
Hick also argues that "in some ninety-nine percent of the cases the religion which an individual professes . . . depends upon the accidents of birth. Someone born to Buddhist parents in Thailand is very likely to be a Buddhist, someone born to Muslim parents in Saudi Arabia to be a Muslim, someone born to Christian parents in Mexico to be a Christian, and so on." The conclusion is that it is nothing but religious imperialism, base xenophobia, crass racism, and pharasaical swagger to maintain that one's religion is intrinsically superior to that of another when religious fealty itself is largely determined by geography, culture, and history rather than by anything objective. The argument is perennial and commonsensical and has clearly carried the day in Western Europe and its more religiously moribund colonies (say, for example, Canada). The unspoken assumption is not only that creedal loyalty is the result largely of happenstance and so is from the classical canons of logic purely arbitrary; but also that religion is contingent upon culture, and so, with all cultures being assumed as equal, all religions must be considered so too. I am afraid that I must demur. Both assumptions, besides begging the question, seem to me prodigiously false. As to the first: Hick seems to think that one's birthplace is itself arbitrary, which at once puts him at loggerheads with all the religions he mentions (and which he would fain assimilate to pluralism) since they all profess belief in Divine Providence, and presumably would not believe that God was ignorant as to the soul's creation, or that the place and time into which it was born was an indifferent matter to Him. Also, Hick's argument that arbitrariness of belief undercuts objectivity of truth-claim is self-defeating. If what he says is true, then we can no more believe in pluralism than in any given religion, for if the pluralist were born outside the relativistic heartland, say, in medieval Spain or modern-day Egypt, then he probably would not have been a pluralist, and so his position, too, is arbitrary. But if it is arbitrary, then why assert it? At least the Christian or other shorn-of-credibility partisan believes their position to be true. Hick's argument, by making religious beliefs (including his own) purely arbitrary, would not even allow them to rise to the dignity of error. And as to his argument that religion is contingent upon culture, and that all cultures are equal, here too I must dissent. First of all, it seems evident to me that, as Teilard de Chardin (in a rare agony of orthodox precision) said "religion is the essence of culture and culture is the dress of religion", since questions about origin, meaning, morality, and destiny precede, shape, and breathe life into the intellectual and aesthetic practices of a people, far more so than vice-versa, so that the pluralist confounds the cause with the effect. Secondly, and at peril of awful litigation, I submit that it is manifest nonsense to believe that all cultures are equal, and that the manic drive to inculcate this belief amongst the rising generation is a poor apology for imperialisms past and a meretricious advertisement for multiculturalisms present. This may seem a rather monstrous position to unsheathe, especially without due forewarning or sheepish prelude, but I believe that it is nothing not almost bracingly obvious. After all, to speak of each culture as being equal, we must either posit a standard according to which, against astronomical odds, all of the many thousands just happened to yield the same measure of excellence (as if countless pupils in the same school just happened to all achieve a 93.76% grade average); or we must simply assume that culture, as such, is intrinsically good and that all, being so, are equal. As to the first possibility, I have never seen it argued at all, let alone argued successfully. It would mean saying that the intellectual, aesthetic, and moral life of every people at every time was equal in excellence, something that is not true even within a given culture when compared to itself at different times. Besides, to say that the science of Ptolemaic Egypt was equal to that of Newtonian England, that the art of Stone Age Australia was equal to that of Rennaisance Italy, or that the morality of Nazi Germany was equal to that of Chamberlain's Britain, has implications too absurd to countenance.
The second possibility ensures that all cultures will be considered "equal" by abolishing any intellectual, artistic, or moral standards of excellence by which they are to be measured and according to which some might excel the others. But if there is no standard, then there is no equality either, because there is nothing according to which cultures are to be measured, and consequently, no measure, equal or unequal, to be had. "Equal" turns out to mean "nonexistent". According to such a blithely philistine rubric, the motto "All cultures are equal" in Everyman's English really means "There is no recognizable culture", for if we abolish every standard of intelligence, art, or morality by which a culture is measured, then how can the statements "This is intelligent, this is artful, this is moral" be true statements about something that is actually there, since we have no standard according to which to judge their presence or absence? Not only, then, must one give wide berth to error to allow for the shibboleth of pluralism; one must also commit to solving cultural elitism by dissolving culture itself, which seems to me an extravagant folly, somewhat on the level of beheading everyone present so as to make all of equal height.
Let me at once say with every possible emphasis that criticisms of particularism and pluralism's manifest shortcomings, whether of the pharasaical hauteur of the former, or of the pantheistic illogic of the latter, are not meant to simply dismiss them with quixotic impudence or banish them to the intellectual rogues' gallery. Indeed, I think it is safe to say that every heresy (to intrude the impolite word) is a half-truth that emphasizes a part at the expense of the whole, putting the accent mark over only one syllable where it really belonged to two. That, I believe, accounts for nine tenths of the narcotic allure of heresy: it enshrines some storied truth in the manner of a tinselled novelty that suppresses the fullness of that truth just where our fallen nature would like it to be suppressed. Thus, for instance, the Arianism of Antioch, which was a kind of ancient humanism, rightly affirmed Christ's humanity, but emphasized it to the point of wrongly denying His divinity; and the Monophysitism of Alexandria, a kind of theocentric transcendentalism, rightly reasserted Christ's divinity, but wrongly liquidated His humanity. The temptation, perennial and titanic since the Fall, is to only accept truth by halves. Similarly, particularism rightly affirms the uniqueness of revelation, but emphasizes it to the point of wrongly denying the universality of grace. At the other side of the stream, pluralism rightly respects the genuine piety of non-Christian people, but wrongly minimizes Christ to erect a multicultural utopia. The one notices differences, and says there are no similarities; the other emphasizes similarities, and says there are no differences. To begin arriving at a tentative solution to this decided pandemonium a few prefatory remarks seem in order. First of all, it is obvious that the professing Christian need not (indeed, cannot) subscribe to the barbarous opinion that other religions are simply one hundred percent wrong, since there is ample biblical testimony that God is solicitous for and active among the Gentiles, and enough agreements between Christianity and other religions that to reject them wholesale would also be to reject much that is our own (say, for example, our shared monotheism with Islam and Judaism, or our shared belief in angels and demons with Hinduism and Buddhism). But given this latter fact, namely, that there are signal commonalities between Christian and non-Christian beliefs, we are left with only two possibilities: either heathen mythology, philosophy, and piety arrived at eternal verities merely by fortuitous mistake, or God's spirit was somehow at work among them, "brooding" and "hovering" over their works, ennobling their nature to prepare for the grace to come later in Christ. Now given what Christians profess about God's omnipotence, omnipresence, and omnibenevolence, it seems to me absurd to suggest that virtuous pagans famished for divine light and happening upon truths later confirmed by revelation, would be arriving at those truths merely by accident and wholly without divine succour. Rather, as St. Paul says to the Athenian philosophers, God willed that all the nations (goyim, that is, "gentiles") "should seek God, in the hope that they might feel after him and find him, for he is not far from each one of us". To maintain against this that the "finding" which the "feeling after" produced was fortuitous rather than meaningful, and purblind rather than providential, would be tantamount to saying that when the Prodigal Son cries out in the dark for his Father on the threshold of the Estate, that the Father, notwithstanding the robe, ring, and fatted calf he wishes to lavish on his son, is really indifferent to his cry. Rather, from St. Paul in tandem with St. John we are given a cumulative picture of the means by which the Father makes Himself known to those in darkness: from God's witness to the soul in the realm of moral conscience (Rom 2:13-16), in the witness of an intelligently designed Creation (Rom 1:19-20), and — we may surmise — through the Word which, if not known in the Flesh, may perhaps still be known in His Divinity, through the divinely aided reason (hence beneficent pagan philosophy) and imagination (hence myths reminiscent of Christ) by which He is called "the light which lighteneth every man coming into the world" (John 1:9). That seems to me to best explain why, on a Christian view, the higher religions would grasp the "shadows and images" of Christian thinking and morality even if they did not yet have that "truth and reality" for which they pined. As the Catholic Magna Carta on non-Christian religions, the Vatican II document Nostra Aetate, worded it: "The Catholic Church rejects nothing which is true and holy in these religions. She looks with sincere respect upon those ways of conduct and of life, those rules and teachings which, though differing in many respects from what she holds and sets forth, nevertheless often reflect a ray of that truth which enlightens all men." This position, which (having fallen prey to the infernal cant of philosophy) has been dubbed "inclusivism", is characterized by the almost preternaturally commonsensical notion that all truth is God's truth, and that as such it should be hallowed wherever it is to be found, whether from the pen of the celestially meditative Plato, or from the lips of a bow-backed Pontiff. Does this mean that we should say with the Dutch humanist Erasmus "St. Socrates, pray for us", or that we should applaud when that dean of mavericks, Notre Dame's Richard McBrien, arrogates to himself with unutterable fatuity the power of canonization, pencilling into Butler's Lives of the Saints his favourite pagans? Of course this is not at all what the position entails. To the extent that other religions are benign, they are preparations for Christ, and to the extent that they are preparations for Christ, they ought to give way to Him when He appears, as St. John the Baptist did when he proclaimed of His Master: "He must increase, and I must decrease". We have been told by Jesus that "No one comes to the Father except by me", and though virtuous pagans may proceed thus with only implicit rather than explicit knowledge of Christ (connaitre rather than savoir), this situation is not to be courted, on account of its lack of surety and the absence of sacramental and sundry other graces available only to the believing Christian. One might travel thousands of miles in a horse and buggy through rocky terrain in peril of wolves, scurvy, and starvation; but it is far wiser to take a plane when that has been made available.
Besides, what Christians require and believe we have been given is Divine Revelation: the self-disclosure of God and of His plan of salvation for us. Only this could make our religion more than just human ingenuity — "words, words, words". It performs this feat by subjecting "our" religion to a standard that is higher than the "we" who comprise it (as Chesterton said: "What we are in need of isn't a religion that is right where we are right; but a religion that is right where we are wrong"). That is the good news rustling through Scripture: God Himself has set straight all the sages. Revelation is like a message in a bottle washed up on our shores from the "undiscovered country" telling us of our rightful King and true patria. Beyond this we have the most thrilling intransigent ever conceived as the very centerpiece of our religion: the "light from light and true God from true God" has Himself walked among us. Since the Incarnation we don't need to resign ourselves to the great symbol of interfaith jamboree: that all religions are just so many paths up the same mountain that converge at the same summit. For God Himself (we are told) has descended from the mountain and beaten His own path down in order to search us out. "Man's search for God" (which C.S. Lewis described as "the mouse's search for the cat") is therefore not so much wrong as hopelessly behind the times. We are living in the era of "God's search for man", which, while frightening (does the mouse really want to be found?) is also encouraging, since I expect that God has much better odds at finding us than we do of finding Him.
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