CHAPTER 1

ONE GOD, ONE CHRIST, ONE PLAN

The Meaning of Pluralism

What is pluralism? We hear the word often today: what does it signify? Pluralism is an ideology, a modern first-world, Western ideology. And what is an ideology? It is an idea turned into a programme, or, if you prefer, a programme based on an idea; a plan with a clear theoretical, value-laden basis that calls for deliberate acceptance and active furtherance. It is an idea that has now, so to speak, been given legs and wants to walk. As Marxist Communism, with its commitment to economic centralisation and uniform, classless community was an ideology, so Western pluralism is an ideology, with its own value-system, about which we need to be clear.

Pluralism, as an ideology of the modern or, rather, postmodern world, grew out of the established plurality of Western society, where parallel positions compete for leadership in politics, in social attitudes, standards and norms, in morals and in religion, while practising tolerance of each other as a basic duty. The pluralist ideology is driven by the idea of the sacrosanctity of each individual as thinker and decision-maker. Analysis reveals the following propositional planks as forming the pluralist platform.

1. There is ultimately only one absolute value, namely freedom. All other values presuppose this one and are relative to it, in the sense that they lose their value by being forced on people against their will. For each individual there should be as little constraint and as wide a range of choice as is compatible with public order. Pluralism is an ideology of personal rights, guaranteeing personal freedoms.

Freedom in every department of life is a Janus-faced reality, for the word covers both freedom from and freedom for. Freedom from, that is, from inhibiting and restrictive evils, is illustrated by the first two of the four freedoms for which President Roosevelt declared we were fighting in the second World War, namely freedom from want and from fear. Christians know, however, that the more important aspect of freedom is freedom for – for what? – for what we call happiness, namely the conscious condition of being contented and fulfilled, the state of life that one would not change or forfeit for all the tea in China, or all the gold in Fort Knox. That is a happiness that Christians enjoy here and now, through their fellowship with the Father and the Son. That is the freedom for which Christ sets us free – freedom, that is, from the treadmill of labouring to commend and upgrade ourselves before God by things we do; freedom too from the tyranny of totalitarian thought control and regimentation in all its many forms; freedom, rather, to bask in the knowledge of present safety and future glory through the redeeming love of our Lord Jesus Christ, and to spend our days thanking him, adoring him, and seeking to honour him by the way we now live, which is what as new creatures in him we most want to do. Unhappily, secular visions of freedom do not get so far; they start with deliverance from unwelcome constraints, but then either stop short or divert into socio-economic and political abstracts, whereby tyrannies that were officially kicked out often creep in again through the back door. The difference between the secular notions of freedom which inform pluralism and the Christian understanding of this precious word must never be lost sight of.

2. The proper task of those in power is to maximize and maintain freedom for all. They are to sponsor patterns of association and cooperation that will have this effect, and are only to impose restraints where freedom for one might threaten the rights and freedoms of others. A new Irish immigrant to America, so it is said, was shouting and singing about being in the land of the free, waving his arms the while, and hit a policeman on the nose; prompting the admonition: “Sir, you must learn that your freedom stops where my nose starts.” The principle is that in a pluralist society everybody’s rights and freedoms are to be safeguarded.

3. Those in power should be neutral about truth. The business of governments is to keep people harmoniously together, by teaching and modelling tolerance of every tolerable point of view. The social ideal is that all people, rich and poor, wise and foolish, men, women and children alike, be given space to make up their own minds about everything, in the realms of both belief and action. Laissez-faire should be the order of the day, and the government’s business is to hold the ring for that, not to force convictional cards upon the governed in the paternalist manner of earlier centuries. The state must defend people’s right to believe what they like.

4. Individualism is ultimately desirable. Here we need to be careful. Christians know that the gospel message individualizes – that is, it leads each of us to detach ourselves mentally from the crowd and face God individually. It calls us to realise that his love is extended to us personally, despite our personal sin and waywardness, and requires us to believe, repent, worship and follow Christ for ourselves. No one can do this for another. Thus the gospel heightens our individuality, deepens our sense of responsibility, first to God and then to others, regarding the life we live, and so leads us into paths of gratitude, love, care, humility, obedience and service that we were strangers to before. Nor is this change in our ways merely a dutiful, take-a-deep-breath attempt to do what we now see we should; it is, rather, as was hinted a moment ago, the outward expression of a truly supernatural change of heart, wrought with and through the biblical gospel by the Holy Spirit. The change is effected through our union with the person of our risen Lord, and is in fact the beginning of our renewal in Christ’s image, and it makes us want to honour and praise and please God, and enjoy Christian community, and share our new life with others, more than we want anything else in the world, even when it means being marginalized, suffering loss, and becoming speckled birds among our peers. In this way, through the gospel and the new birth, God matures us as individuals, and Christianity vindicates its claim to be, after all, the only real humanism, bringing human nature to its real fulfilment, that the world has ever seen. Desirable individuality? Yes, indeed.

But the individualism that the pluralist ideology sponsors is something quite different. That individualism expresses egocentricity, that is, self-centred and self-serving pride and its purpose of always looking after number one (as we all used to put it, and as some of us still do). And pluralism treats the individualism thus described as life’s chief value. The freedoms and the rights that pluralist society seeks to guarantee to all, men and women, adults and teens, straights and gays, and minorities along with majorities across the board, are for the individual’s self-discovery and self-expression. Inevitably in some cases this will mean self-absorbed alienation and isolation from others, because that is how some people are; but freedom to be what you are is, as we saw, pluralism’s supreme value, and any encouragement to change would thus be improper. Pluralism sees this individualism, set in a frame of maximized permissiveness, as the only path of personal fulfilment, and promotes it accordingly.

Such, in broad outline, stripped down to its essentials, is the ideological pluralism of today’s Western world. It is thoroughly secular, and reduces religion in all its forms from a formative community commitment and cultural bond to a private hobby. It is consciously post-Christian, offsetting itself from what it sees as the stifling state of things when Christian faith and morals reigned supreme. And it is largely post-modern, in that it mistrusts all claims to discern public truth, that is, truth that is true for everybody; it looks on all viewpoints as relative and provisional, never final or definitive; and it rates all persons who claim to know what is intrinsically good, right and true as bigoted hinderers of the progress of society. Pluralism sees itself as superior wisdom. It is increasingly influential in philosophy, education, politics and social theory throughout the English-speaking world, and it makes steady headway among the conservative British, who move more slowly in ideological realms than do Canada or the United States or Australasia.

Pluralism, then, rides high among us, and liberal Protestants, who long ago abandoned all notions of truth revealed by God, are showing themselves quick to jump onto this very popular band wagon: as appears from the renewed energy with which many of them currently advocate two late-nineteenth century perspectival principles, as follows.

A general view about religion is principle number one. All the world’s religions are said to be friends, never mind the aggressive exclusiveness of, for instance, Hinduism in India and Islam in Africa at the present time. They are all said to be paths up the same mountain that will meet at the top, and that can help each other in the climb. Some form of syncretism, combining the best insights of each (an Irish Stew religion, you might call it) is therefore to be desired, and erudite liberals labour constantly to produce syncretized Christianities that will fill the bill. (Bahai religion is, of course, in the field already, but it does not look sufficiently like enriched Christianity to please all customers, and liberals mostly pass it by.) Seeking to convert people of other faiths to Christianity has, meantime, become a decided no-no in liberal circles.

A general view about salvation is principle number two. All the world’s religions are said to have in view the same goal, namely deliverance from the evils of this world. Verbally, that might seem plausible at first glance, but the actual conceptions of both the nature and the means of deliverance, and of the delivered state, are so diverse as to falsify this claim totally, as students of world religions well know. Despite that, however, liberal Protestants generally, and some liberal Catholics with them, treat the claim as a certainty, and part company with the Bible yet again by insisting that universal salvation for all humankind, past, present and to come, through their own religions in the first instance, will in fact be the final triumph of the saving grace of God in Jesus Christ. In light of what we have said already about the denial of universal truth globally and in all particular constituencies, it is not hard to see why the plurality of religions issues no call for evangelistic action to liberal Christian pluralists.

Two deep-seated assumptions function as tap roots for this pluralist phase of liberal Christian thought, and we should note them before we move on.

The first assumption is that the wisdom which fixes the frame and the focus for each generation’s Christianity comes from the world rather than from the church. It is regularly assumed that the world has the wisdom, and the church must play catch-up, epistemologically, convictionally, ethically and sociologically. What as Christians we do must always be determined by what as Christians we know (right so far), and what as Christians we know must be determined by the view of reality to which human intelligence in each era is thought to direct us. To keep current, the church must constantly take into its system what secular thought leaders are saying, and critique its own heritage by that light. Doctrinal relativism is thus inevitable and salutary, and the ongoing Christian dialogue with secular thought in its various forms should be less a matter of challenging it than of learning to accept it, and to echo it in a discerning way.

The second assumption is that in every religion the essence of spirituality, that is, of the adherent’s inner life, is self-exploration in God, that is, a process of discovering God in the depths of one’s own personal being. The key thought here is that we all live in God, whether we acknowledge him or not, and that he, the personal or semi-personal or non-personal transcendent as he is sometimes called, pervades all the world and permeates every human heart. Paul at Athens, having affirmed the immanence of the transcendent Creator in comparable though simpler terms, went on to speak of God’s call for universal repentance, his fixing a day of judgment, and his resurrecting of Jesus the judge. But liberals regularly regard the recommended self-exploration as the therapeutic discovery, complex and multi-faceted, of being already at home in the benevolent God whom (so it is said) Jesus revealed. The realities of ruin, redemption and regeneration, the three great R’s of Christianity, and of the life of conversion, are thus bypassed rather than engaged with, and dialogue with other faiths becomes a matter of learning from them what they already know of the inner life rather than of laying before them the claims of Jesus Christ.

The religious pluralism that results from taking these two assumptions as guidelines is something to which we shall in due course return. But for the moment we turn our gaze elsewhere.

The Meaning of Christianity

In discussions with both religious and secular pluralists, we Christians – classic, historic, mainstream, orthodox evangelical believers as we take ourselves to be – often make it hard for ourselves by not saying enough. For Christianity is more than a believer’s enjoyment of personal salvation from sin through faith in the crucified and risen Lord Jesus Christ; it is a view of God, of the world, of history, of everything and everybody, and we need to realise that bearing witness to this is part of our task as messengers of the gospel. We evangelicals have behind us well over a century of doctrinal minimalism, whereby we habitually narrow the gospel down to a few simple truths about Jesus and the difference he makes to life. Certainly, the truths of the “old, old story” that we have been telling are the heart of the matter, and Western culture used to be so impregnated with Christianity that one could rely on the theistic context of gospel truths being present already in just about everybody’s mind; but today, if we fail to put these truths into their proper context others will relativize them by putting them into an alien context that they themselves supply, and that will falsify the truth about Jesus Christ at the deepest level. We have all heard, surely, of missionaries presenting Jesus and salvation in polytheistic cultures and finding that their hearers were simply adding Jesus to their existing pantheon – so that now, instead of believing in, say, just three million gods, they were believing in three million and one. My present purpose is so to define Christianity that such falsification becomes impossible; and I take as my resource for doing this Paul’s letter to the Colossians.

Colossians is a magnificent letter, called forth from Paul’s heart by news of professed believers in Colossae thinking they needed to add worship of angels and observance, apparently, of Old Testament ceremonies to faith in Christ in order to be “filled” and gain “fullness.” (These were the buzzwords.) Paul counters this misbelief by highlighting the universal pre-eminence and entire sufficiency of the divine Saviour, Jesus Christ the Son of God, and it is amazing how much profound theology he squeezes into his four chapters. Colossians and Ephesians, we know, belong together as in some sense a pair, and by far the most natural view is that when Paul finished Colossians he realised he would like to repeat much of his message, more generally angled, to all the Asia Minor churches; so he wrote what we know as Ephesians as a circular letter to them, and I have never forgotten the happy pair of headings that I learned as an undergraduate for linking the two letters, with their complementary emphases: Colossians, A Head for the Body; Ephesians, A Body for the Head. Colossians, however, is the letter on which we draw here.

Now to our defining account of Christianity. It is a responsive knowledge of God, the world, and ourselves, that rests on two great claims.

The first claim is that Christians have access to truth in all three senses of the word – reality as such; reality as known through being rightly reported and described; and the descriptive report itself, through which the knowledge comes. God the Creator has revealed himself by word (he has spoken in space-time history); by event (he has acted, and acts still, within the created order in providence and in grace); and by record (he has brought into being the Bible, his own witness to himself in the form of over forty writers’ witness to him). Bible teaching is God’s own teaching through his chosen penmen, and proper interpretation of the Bible, by exegesis and synthesis from our side and by the illuminating ministry of the Holy Spirit from the divine side, gives us the truth about himself, from himself, that God wants us to have. This is truth that is true for everybody, and is to be made known everywhere.

Canonical is the modern term for this kind of interpretation, for it respects the status of the Bible as a God-given rule for faith and life. (‘Canon’ is a Greek word that simply means ‘rule’ or ‘standard’.) Canonical interpretation follows the method formerly called the analogy of Scripture: that is, it interprets the text from within, in terms of its own faith-nourishing didactic purpose, letting one passage of Scripture throw light on another within the unity of the whole, and positing that everything in the Bible coheres with everything else, just because it all flows from a single mind – the mind of God. Hence the canonical caveat of Anglican Article XX: ‘it is not lawful for the Church to ordain any thing that is contrary to God’s Word written, neither may it so expound one place of Scripture, that it be repugnant to another.’ Nor, be it said, is it lawful for individual theologians to do that. Nor, be it also said, is it lawful to give credence to human thoughts about God that come heralded by such phrases as ‘I like to think’ – for the preferred fancies of the fallen human intellect are never fully in line with divinely revealed fact. It is through biblical teaching – instruction, that is, from the prophets, apostles, historians, poets and wise men whom God chose to mediate his word – that we have the truth: his truth, ‘true truth’ as Francis Schaeffer called it, truth that is absolute and eternal, and does not change with the times any more than God himself does.

The second great claim is at the heart of the truth that we have. It is that the divine Word, the Son of God who is God the Son and whose incarnate name is Jesus, was and is central to the plan of God in every particular, from start to finish. In all that God has done, is doing now, and will do in the future, in creation, providence and grace, and in the coming reconstruction of the universe when world history ends, the trinitarian pattern operates, and the Father acts through the agency of the Son, with the Holy Spirit. Moreover, God’s main work in history at present is the worldwide spreading of his redemptive kingdom in human lives; and in this kingdom, where believers foretaste the life of heaven already, the delegated sovereignty of the Son incarnate, our Mediator, Saviour and Lord, Jesus Christ, crucified, risen, reigning and returning, whom we hail as our prophet, priest and king, is the focal fact on which everything hinges and around which everything revolves. God the Father is honouring God the Son by giving him this role, and we are to honour him too. Faith’s acknowledgment of the Son’s centrality in all the doings of God, and faith’s trustful adoration of the Son for all that he is, and all that he has been and will be to us his people, is therefore integral to Christian devotion, and the call to practise such devotion is integral to the Christian gospel. This is the momentous perspective that Paul develops in Colossians.

Thus viewed, the content of the Christian gospel extends to the following affirmations, which I shall first state, positively and negatively, in memorandum form and then briefly confirm from Colossians. My contention is that we have not fully proclaimed the gospel, in any context or company, until we have set all this forth.

1. The truth about God. The one God who made and rules everything is revealed as three persons through his plan of salvation. The Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit love us and work together to save us from sin and make us holy. Jesus Christ, the Son incarnate, is Lord over all the powers of evil, just as he is over all other created powers. Any other view of God is idolatry.

2. The truth about ourselves. We were made for God, to bear his image and be like him in moral character. But sin controls and spoils us, so that we need to be brought back to God to be forgiven and remade. Jesus Christ, who brings us back, is our model of true godliness. Any other view of ourselves is deception.

3. The story of God’s kingdom. Step by step, as Scripture narrates, God exercised his kingship (that is, divine sovereignty) to establish his kingdom (that is, the realm of redemption for sinful human beings). Jesus Christ is now king, and believers’ lives are his kingdom: we are saved by him in order to serve him. King Jesus is also the judge that all must one day face, and those who do not bow to his kingship here will not share his joy hereafter. Trusting, honouring and loving Jesus Christ, and serving others for his sake, is the heart of true godliness. Any other form of religion is error.

4. The way of salvation. Jesus, our sin-bearer on the cross, now reaches out from his throne to rescue us who are sunk in the guilt, shame and self-centred folly of sin. He asks for faith, which means trust in him as Saviour, and for repentance, which means turning to him as Master. He sends his Spirit to awaken, stir and change us inwardly, so that we hear his call as addressed to us personally and respond to it wholeheartedly: whereupon we are forgiven and accepted (justification), we are adopted as God’s children and heirs, we are brought to rejoice at our peace with God (assurance), and we find in ourselves the reality of being new, God-centred persons (regeneration, which is co-resurrection in Christ with Christ). Any other view of salvation is deficient.

5. The life of fellowship. Christians belong in the church, the worldwide and local family of God, where they enjoy its brotherhood and share the worship, work, witness and warfare to which it is called. Any other view of Christian living is sectarian.

6. Walking home to heaven. Helped by the church’s ministry of word and sacrament, prayer and pastoral care, spiritual gifts and loving support, Christians pass through this constantly hostile world as travellers, heading for a glorious destination. Led and fed by their Saviour through the Holy Spirit, they seek as they travel to do all the good they can and battle all forms of evil that they meet. Any lesser view of the Christian calling is worldly.

Christianity in Colossians

Observe, now, how all of this is confirmed by Colossians. Facing the proposal from within the church of a “Christ-plus” Christianity, Paul sets forth a Christocentric coverage of the six themes of the gospel as follows.

1. The truth about God. Paul tags “the word of God” which he proclaims as “the mystery hidden for ages and generations but now revealed… which is Christ in you, the hope of glory;” and as “God’s mystery, which is Christ, in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge” (Col. 1:25-27; 2:2-3; 4:3). “Mystery” means God’s hitherto unrevealed plan and purpose, as in Daniel 2:28. Jesus Christ, the centre of the plan, is God the Father’s beloved Son (1:3, 13). Working prepositions overtime to convey momentous theology, Paul declares: “by him [instrumental en, meaning “by means of” as in ESV footnote] all things were created… through him [dia with genitive] and for him [eis with accusative]” – that is, all created things are meant to find their unity and perfection in a relationship to him through which he is glorified – “and he is before all things [being eternally existent] and in him [instrumental en again] all things hold together” – that is, continue in their present intricate regularities, rather than ceasing to be, or reverting to chaos. Furthermore, the Son, who has been the Father’s agent in producing and preserving the original creation, is also both starter and start of the new creation. “He is the head of the body, the church. He is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead [first in line, we would say], that in everything he might be preeminent” – which has always been the Father’s purpose. “For” – here Paul, the great explainer, adds the crowning, climactic fact – “in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell” – Paul is picking up on Colossian “fullness” talk – “and through him to reconcile to himself all things… making peace by the blood of his cross” (1:16-20). These are the key truths about God and his plan that are highlighted in Colossians.

2. The truth about ourselves. “Alienated and hostile in mind, doing evil deeds” was the natural state of Paul’s addressees; “sexual immorality, impurity, passion, evil desire, and covetousness” marked their lives (1:21, 3:57). These forthright generalisations about people Paul had never met match the view of the fallen human condition as such that he sets out most fully in Romans 1:18-3:20 and in Ephesians 2:1-3 and 4:17-5:12. All humans have vices since by nature we live under the power of sin (Rom. 3:9), sin being an allergic anti-God energy of self-asserting self-advancement that touches and disfigures every aspect of our existence. Central to Paul’s gospel is the need to face this unwelcome fact about ourselves. The image of God that humans were made to bear becomes reality only through regeneration and repentance by grace (Col. 3:9-10; cf. Eph. 4:20-24). Thus Colossians presents the key truths about who and what we really are.

3. The story of the kingdom. Paul is assuming knowledge of the story when he refers to the kingdom of God’s beloved Son into which God brings all who receive Christ Jesus as Lord (that is, as monarch) and in union with him whom they serve (cf. 3:22-24) enjoy redemption from sin’s power and remission of its penalty (1:13-14, 2:6). In 4:11 he calls colleagues “fellow workers for the kingdom of God,” which is precisely the kingdom of Christ.

4. The way of salvation. Paul in Colossians spells this out most vividly (though without using the word salvation at any point) in its relational, triumphal, and transformational aspects, with our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ as the focal centre throughout.

The relational aspect of salvation is receiving the reconciliation and forgiveness that God secured for us through his Son’s substitutionary suffering. The statement in 2:14 is unforgettable: “This (our track record of punishable demerit) he set aside, nailing it to the cross.” So when one looks at Christ crucified with the eye of faith, what one sees, as it were, on the placard announcing the reason for this judicial execution is not what Pilate wrote (“The king of the Jews,” identifying Jesus as a political revolutionary), but the wretched tally of one’s own moral and spiritual failings and transgressions. Penal substitution could not be presented more plainly, nor more poignantly.

The triumphal aspect of salvation is realising that on the cross Christ conquered the supposedly independent and actually hostile spiritual powers that the Colossians were being urged to worship (2:18). By resisting them to the end Christ defeated and disarmed them and (this is the picture) enslaved them for his own “triumph”, that is, in the imagery of the Graeco-Roman world, his honorific public procession as the victorious campaigner (2:15). So their creator (1:16) had now become their conqueror, and any claims, threats, rights or powers against Christians that misbelief might ascribe to them were thus publicly negated. What had looked like final defeat for Jesus was in truth decisive victory, knowledge of which banishes all fear of our ever being vulnerable to unknown spiritual forces. Christ’s triumph becomes ours to share.

The transformational aspect of salvation is that persons previously dead to God in sin are made spiritually alive through life-giving, co-resurrectional union with the risen Lord. Hereby their hearts become responsive to God in a life in which Christlike righteousness is now their chief desire, goal, and source of satisfaction, and sharing Christ’s glory for ever is their highest hope (2:13, 3:14). As Paul puts it elsewhere, each is a new creation (2 Cor. 5:17; Gal. 6:15), enjoying in and through Christ newness of life (Rom. 6:4, 7:6). They find in themselves a longing that was not there before, a longing to love and thank and serve and please and honour and obey and exalt the Father and the Son, and that longing, which is, so to speak, the opening sentence of the inside story of the renewing of God’s image in those who are his, remains with them and drives them on for the rest of their days in this world, prompting the outward life-change to “good works” of which Paul often speaks (1:10; Eph. 2:10; 1 Tim. 6:18; Tit. 2:7).

Thus, savingly, believers are “filled” (made full, brought to fulfilment) in and through Christ (2:10).

5. The life of fellowship. The church is one universal, worldwide body of which Christ is the head (1:18, 24, 2:19, 3:15). From Christ the head comes all the body’s life (2:19). Christians meeting anywhere in the world to do what the church does, i.e. to practise church life, are the one church in miniature and microcosm, an outcrop, specimen and sample of the global body (4:15-16). Church life requires baptized believers, who know themselves as raised with Christ into newness of life (2:11-13, 3:1, 3), to accept, love, forgive, forbear and share truth with each other with patience and in peace, thankfully praising God together and acting, in C.S. Lewis’s phrase, as little Christs to each other (3:12-17). Family and service relationships are to be sanctified by being lived within this frame (3:18-4:1). In these terms Colossians delineates the fellowship to which all Christians are called: this is body-life in Christ, and 1:4, 8 indicate that it is true life in the Spirit.

6. Walking home to heaven. Here as elsewhere, “walk” (a picture of purposeful steady effort, aimed at getting somewhere) is Paul’s word for living one’s life, and the prospect of being glorified in Christ with Christ is viewed as revealed truth motivating active godliness (1:4, 27, 3:4-5). Western Christians today should make much more of this hope of glory – sure and certain, because guaranteed by God – than in fact we do.

Having thus verified from Colossians our proposed analysis of the Christian gospel message, we can now discern what the Christian response to contemporary pluralism must be.

The Meeting of Christianity and Pluralism

We have briefly profiled in parallel pluralism in both its secular and its liberal Protestant forms, and historic Christianity as set forth in one apostolic letter, looking at them as the going concerns that they actually are in their own circles. We have viewed them as two alternatives rather than three because from the standpoint of methodology and structure the liberal Protestant version of pluralism is in truth a cuckoo in the Christian nest, holding on to Christianity’s verbal trappings while reasoning about the human condition in a quite anti-biblical way, and its habit of retaining some sort of immanentist belief in God does not affect the essential secularism of its mindset. We have seen that pluralism is a man-centred socio-political ideology, glorifying personal freedom against any notion of universal truth, wisdom, or ultimate value apart from freedom itself. Pluralism is thus, as we saw, individualism extended as far as it can be in an ordered society, with intellectual individualism explicitly maximized alongside individualistic behavior patterns and styles of life. Pluralist religion is similarly individualistic: my faith is mine, and yours is yours, and safeguarding freedom for each of us to be ourselves is all that is important. We have also seen that Christianity is a universal offer of salvation from the past in the present and for the future, based on the claims of our Creator and the crown rights of our Redeemer, and our task, to echo some familiar words, is to go, tell it on the mountain, over the hills and everywhere, that Jesus Christ, the God-sent Saviour and the World’s coming Judge, is here and now Lord of all. In this good news is capsuled love from God, hope for man, and truth for everybody. Secular pluralism, as is now evident, is practical atheism; religious pluralism sees God simply as a dimension of good-will in this world; Christianity, by contrast, views this world as enemy occupied territory, but yet also a display-ground for God’s grace and a training-ground for a glorious life to come. These world-views constantly and inescapably clash: and what happens then?

Experience shows that for many professed Christians the first consequence is confusion. They see in pluralism some genuine Christian values (stress on the worth of each individual, concern for the rights and freedoms of others, insistence on toleration for opposed opinions and tolerance for their exponents). Liberals among them see pluralism as embodying their own doubts and protests about the “old paths” of biblical belief and morality, historic mainstream orthodoxy as in the creeds, the exclusive claims of the gospel, traditional teaching on human destiny, and so forth. Many churchpeople are much more deeply infected with modernist rationalism than they realise, and are in a state of what psychologists call “cognitive dissonance” as they try to hold on to historic Christianity while embracing pluralism in some form (usually, by applauding other faiths that contradict their own). But once these confusions are detected, it becomes clear that conflict must take their place. For pluralism negates Christianity in more or less direct terms. It is man-centred; it assumes everyone’s natural goodness; it disregards God and biblical revelation, and has no place for the universal claims of Jesus Christ and the kingdom of God. It is not, indeed, the task of the civil government to impose Christianity, and Christians fulfilling their civic and political responsibilities with understanding will not be found trying to make that happen. But the continued absolutizing among us of freedom of choice while moral standards are increasingly relativized and eroded must be resisted and if possible halted and reversed, for these anti-God trends are anti-human too. As a world-and-life view, pluralism expresses full-scale intellectual and moral individualism, tempered only by such restrictions and restraints as society may impose for pragmatic purposes. Within these limits, however, the ideal is that all should believe what they like and do what they like, on the basis that this makes for happiness all round. But that basis is false, and the direct result of pursuing this path is spoiled lives, and we owe it to God and our neighbours to say so.

Christians know that the secret of happiness is submitting to the authority of God in his Word and plunging wholeheartedly into the new life that believers enjoy in Christ. They know that this is true freedom on its positive side, something that secular ideas of freedom always miss. They know, indeed, that there must be toleration for misbelief, since everyone has a right to be wrong, but they know too that the utopian individualism of the pluralist vision must be challenged in the name of Christ, and that the Christ-centred world-and-life view of the Scriptures and the Christian tradition must be affirmed against it. The plan of God the Father is still that in all things God the Son should be preeminent, and that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord (Phil. 2:10-11), and as we find ourselves called to proclaim and contend for the gospel that states this, upholding its truth in society, at home, and in the wavering church itself, we may fitly sustain our souls with the knowledge that we are on the victory side. For God’s plan, and God’s Christ, will certainly triumph in the end.

Paul saw his and his colleagues’ ministry as, in one aspect at least, a kind of war – ideological warfare, we would call it – and writes of it: “The weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh but have divine power to destroy strongholds. We destroy arguments and every lofty opinion raised against the knowledge of God, and take every thought captive to obey Christ” (2 Cor. 10:4). To diagnose today’s Western pluralism as anti-Christian resistance to the kingdom of Christ, and to stand against it as such, is to place ourselves in a genuine apostolic succession of endeavour; and to do this surely belongs to our calling as children and servants of God.

CHAPTER 2

CHRISTIAN FAITH AND OTHER FAITHS

Transition
Our first chapter surveyed pluralism as what, centrally and essentially, it is today, namely a socio-political ideology, an aggressive viewpoint that holds forth guidelines and parameters, a trajectory and sense of direction, and a definite goal and purpose, for the entire human community of which we are part. The viewpoint is that personal freedom is the supreme value; the goal is that freedom be maximized up to the limit; and the guidelines are that those who govern, manage, educate and control others should not impose any one view of reality, but should let all views coexist as options in life’s smorgasbord display, so that we each may choose what appeals without any convictional cards being forced upon us. What is expected is that this freedom, plus the material prosperity and bodily well-being that today’s technology provides, will ensure everyone’s happiness. Though rarely displayed in its pure form, pluralism is a miasma that infects governmental, social and educational policies constantly, and no modern Westerner escapes its influence.

Clearly postChristian, postliberal, postMarxist and postmodern, and reflecting scepticism about every world-and-life view from the past, whether religious, philosophical, scientific or romantic, pluralism directs that public policy be based not on public acknowledgment of universal truth and standards, but on a purpose of enabling everyone to pursue personal options. Pluralism knows that the global village which we call the world is full of metanarratives, that is, accounts of reality that claim to make sense of the human story and to declare the meaning of human life; every religion has one, and anti-religious viewpoints like Marxism and evolutionism have them too. Pluralism professes to tolerate and, other things being equal, to protect all these views, but it throws a dark canopy of uncommittedness over them, and thus reduces them to private interests that must not be allowed to rock, let alone steer, the community boat. This is a huge break with how things have been everywhere up to now, or at least up to a generation ago, and what will come of it still remains to be seen.

How long publicly established pluralism can last is a serious question. Medieval Christendom saw God as guaranteeing the world’s ongoing stability; Reformation Christendom saw him as executing an ecclesiastical and political spring-clean; Victorian Christendom saw him as generating universal progress; all had good hope for the future, because it was in God’s beneficent hands. Pluralism, however, has no such hope. Shaped by revolt against all forms of what it sees as totalitarianism, including Christian civilisation, and functioning in society as a form of practical atheism, it produces short-term optimism as triumphant technology keeps widening our range of options, but the optimism is framed by long-term pessimism about how things will finally turn out. Cognitive dissonance as to how our ongoing rape of the planet and destabilizing of the climate can square with a universal advancement of human welfare abounds. It is almost a case of “let us eat and drink, for we don’t know how soon all mankind may die.” Pop culture, when not alienated, is absorbed in, and euphoric about, the present; meanwhile, intellectuals wring their hands in despair about the future. Welcome to our modern Western world!

Christians cannot but be saddened at these developments in our culture, but we should not be surprised at them. We know, or at least we should know, that fallen human nature on its own is incapable of choosing a path that leads to real happiness; all paths that sinful humans, left to themselves, actually choose lead to disillusionment, more or less. We know that when people are encouraged to be egocentric, and to live their own lives and do their own thing their own way, the result is a compound of pride and misery and cosmic resentment that may well find expression in anti-social behaviour. Though pluralism itself is blind to this, I think we can already see that today’s pluralistic culture is actually producing more misery, alienation, social instability and personal hurt, than were there before. We know too that this is itself the beginning of divine judgment on us, and that more catastrophic disasters await us if there is not community repentance and return to God. But we cannot pursue that theme now.

Our present task is to look more closely at what we may call the “in-church” version of pluralism which we meet, as was said in our first chapter, among the theological liberals, most of whom at this time are Protestants and many of whom are Anglicans. Not all liberals are pluralists, but all pluralists are liberals, for they are at odds with biblical revelation and religion, as we have already seen and will see more fully in a moment. Liberalism as a flow of thought in the church is in my view really bankrupt, but it constantly refinances itself by taking into itself what is uppermost in the culture, according to its principle, stated earlier, that the world under God has the wisdom and the church must always be playing catch-up; and this is a case in point. As we said earlier, during the past century liberal theologians have developed a pluralistic account of world religions, which sees them as quests for the same goal, ways up the same mountain, partners in countering hedonism and materialism, resources to enrich and encourage each other in a common task, and avenues leading finally to the same eternal happiness. This is the academic version of the world’s idea that “religions are all the same really…” But the thesis is vulnerable to three major criticisms.

Pluralism Critiqued

First, it embodies a false modesty. Forswearing all modes of religious imperialism, Christian pluralism presents itself as humble: humble in insisting, as all liberals do, that no formulation of the faith is final, nor is any question of faith every finally resolved; humble, therefore, in insisting that discussion must go on, and that it is spiritually obtuse to treat creedal definitions as fixed points for thought; humble, too, in now elevating non-Christian faiths to the same level as Christianity. All liberals see the positions they hold at present as provisional, being relative to other proposals today and whatever ideas may appear tomorrow, and liberal pluralists extend this to cover what other significant religions may have to say. But in thus seeing religious thought as an ongoing exploration rather than following an established track, and in being open to augmentation and redirection from non-Christian sources, cultural and religious, pluralism expresses arrogance rather than modesty and pride rather than humility, for its method excludes treating clear and unambiguous Bible teaching as the abiding word and unchanging truth of God. That is bad; and if it is compounded, as it frequently is, by assuming an attitude of superiority, intellectual, theological and spiritual, toward those who treat Bible doctrine as divine and definitive, bad becomes worse. And should this arrogance of heart prompt aggressive response when it is pointed out that the pluralist position is unfaithful to Christ, to the gospel, and to the church’s world mission, bad becomes worse still; it is then not far from sin against the Holy Spirit. There is no true humility or modesty here; just the reverse.

Second, the pluralist thesis expresses a false charity. It is well known that, understandably, since Christianity is so directly salvation-oriented, discussions of non-Christian religions have kept revolving round the question, whether they mediate the same salvation that Christians receive in and through the historical death and resurrection of Christ and the action of the Holy Spirit leading us to faith in him and fellowship with him. Three answers have been given to that question. The exclusivist answer is that in this life there must be conscious faith in a known Christ for salvation to be ours hereafter. The inclusivist answer is that this is not the whole truth; additionally, some who lived and died ignorant of Christ, but who sought God as they conceived him and strove for what they thought was good, will find in a future life that they have been saved by grace through Christ nonetheless. And the universalist answer is that that is not the whole truth either; for whatever our view of reality, whatever we may affirm or deny about God, and whatever our behaviour or misbehaviour in this life, God’s grace in Christ will triumph by finally bringing us all without exception to the same happy heaven. Expositors of pluralism divide as to whether they give answers two or three, while the New Testament seems clearly to give answer one. But in that case answers two and three, with their affirmation of non-Christian religions as so many ways of salvation, over and above Christianity, express a false charity, since their zeal to extend the sphere of saving grace and the number of the saved leads them to part company with the apostolic Scriptures. The apostolic account of non-Christian religions, as we shall see in a moment, is that though they are shot through with true inklings about God alongside many distortions, they neither present a true concept of salvation nor mediate the reality of it, and their ideas about God are idolatrous to a degree. Pluralists, however, turn their backs on this teaching, and insinuate, if they do not actually declare, that those who hold to it thereby show a lack of charity towards most of the world’s inhabitants. A sight gag used twice in Buster Keaton movies is a lifebelt that sinks the moment it hits the water; Bible-believers have reason to regard all Christ-less faiths in similar terms. Pluralism’s unhappy move at this point leads us on to our final criticism.

Third, the pluralist thesis involves false belief: mistaken notions, that is, about how world religions relate to each other. The closer one gets to them, the more obvious become the specific differences between them, as well as the differences between them all and Christianity, and the less plausible becomes the idea that they are “all the same really.” Two things must be noted about how they all differ from the Christian faith. To start with, there is a huge contrast between the way of salvation from evil, however that evil is understood, in all non-Christian faiths as compared with biblical Christianity. They point to daily life and say, “do;” biblical Christianity points to Calvary and says, “done.” They say, “work, and gain salvation by your own effort;” the Christian gospel says, “receive salvation for free, by grace, through faith in Christ.” Then, too, the Christian concept of salvation, first to last, and supremely at its destination-point, is Jesus-centred. The essence of it is fellowship with, and worship of, Christ in his glory; and at the heart of our adoring vision of God in heaven will be our adoring vision of Jesus, the divine Son, our Saviour, the slain Lamb now exalted to share his Father’s throne. Glorified believers will be loving and serving him, and he will be loving and enriching them, to all eternity. Heaven will be a world of love; mutual outpourings of love between the Lord and his people will be at its centre. And though inclusivists and pluralists offer guesses as to how knowledge of Christ will come after death to those who lacked it when alive, it remains untrue to claim that non-Christian faiths as such, some of which (Judaism and Islam most notably) explicitly deny Jesus’ divinity and saviourhood, have in view anything like the love-relationship, the ongoing doxology and the endless joy of final salvation according to the gospel. To say that all world religions are climbing the same mountain is simply false, both to the self-understanding of each and to the biblical revelation of reality. The assimilation of world faiths to each other at which academic pluralists like John Hick aim is impossible intellectually and disastrous pastorally. Any who doubt this should read Harold Netland’s learned book Dissonant Voices (Leicester: Apollos, 1991), which is very cogent indeed on this matter.

Paul and First-century Pluralism: Polytheism at Athens

To confirm what has just been said, we shall now look at the way in which the apostle Paul responded to the pluralism that he found at Athens on his pioneer missionary visit to Europe. Luke records this for us in Acts 17:16-34. Acts, as we know, is Luke’s second volume on Christian beginnings: Jesus’ ascension is the dividing-point between them, and while this book is canonically titled Acts of the Apostles, it could equally well be called Acts of the Holy Spirit, or (even better) Acts of the Enthroned Lord. It tracks the gospel from Jerusalem to Rome, and en route gives samples of the various kinds of evangelistic communication that the apostles addressed to various audiences. First-century Athens, though long bereft of its former glory, still was thought of (and thought of itself) in Oxford-and-Cambridge, Harvard-and-Yale terms as the cream of the cream brain-wise, the intellectual capital of the world, and Athenian religion was a quite distinctive and highly sophisticated compound of manipulative polytheism in a frame of argumentative philosophizing about life’s true values. In Luke’s day, as in ours, interest could not but attach to knowing how Paul engaged this set-up, and Luke’s telling of the story, though very compressed, is detailed enough to show us this with total clarity. So let us examine it.

From verses 16-21 we learn the make-up of the Areopagus, the senate-style assembly of top Athenian intellectuals that Paul in due course addressed. He was “provoked,” Luke tells us – moved, that is, to grief and indignation on God’s behalf – by the polytheism to which multiple shrines bore witness. The civic religion at Athens, a free city within the Roman empire, was worship of the goddess Athena, who set Athens going, and of the god Apollo, the city’s patron, and with them Athenians worshipped at their discretion a range of what were in essence nature-gods – Poseidon the sea-god, Demeter the harvest-goddess, Bacchus, god of wine and energy, and so on. In all polytheistic systems each deity has some aspect of the natural order under his or her control, and one must do homage to the proper god or gods in order to get the help one needs in life’s various involvements. Slavish attempts to manipulate the gods, wheedling favours from them by special efforts to please them, is the spirit of all polytheism everywhere. Here, then, was the religious substratum of Athenian life.

But there were philosophers too: Epicureans and Stoics, the former committed to a withdrawn lifestyle, tranquil, unattached and free as far as possible from all forms of business and trouble, the latter embracing a stern elitist moralism in which reason and fate, pantheistically conceived, were the ultimate realities and fortitude the ultimate virtue. Athenians welcomed travelling teachers and loved novelties, so Paul easily got into discussion with philosophers of both sorts. Some (Epicureans?) dismissed him as a “babbler” (that is, a picker-up of ill-considered trifles, an intellectual charlatan). Others (Stoics?) thought he was wanting to add two foreign deities, a god named Jesus and a goddess named Anastasis (“resurrection”), to Athens’ already overcrowded pantheon. Foreignness would be a reason for rejecting these additions, so there was coolness towards Paul. But curiosity triumphed, and so he found himself summoned to Athens’ most prestigious debating chamber to answer the question, “May we know what this new teaching is that you are presenting?” (v. 19). Luke now summarizes the points Paul made in reply, casting them into direct-speech form as ancient historians reporting the substance of spoken discourses regularly did.

A time-honoured mistake is to suppose that in his Areopagus address Paul was trying to show off as a philosopher among the philosophers, and that the relatively small number of converts at the end of the day was God’s way of indicating that he should not have done so, and that his declaration that when he moved on from Athens to Corinth “I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified” (1 Cor. 2:2) was a renouncing of his Athenian style and method. This is totally wrong, as all modern commentaries acknowledge. Paul began where he had to begin with the mixed bag of polytheists and philosophers that he was talking to. First he gave them a lesson in basic theism, introducing them to the one real God who will break into history to judge the world. Next, he laid before them the truth about man, displaying to them their own present plight under God’s judgment. In the foregoing chapter I summarized the gospel under six heads, for which the keywords are God, man, history, salvation, fellowship, and heaven; we may, I think, be sure that having spoken of God and of man Paul would have gone on to complete his account of saving history by speaking of Christ’s atoning work on the cross, and would then have explained the way of salvation in precise terms, as he did elsewhere (Acts 13:38-39, 16:31; Rom. 3:23-26, 10:9-13). But before he could do that he was howled down (that is what “mocked” really means); when his hearers realised that he was seriously affirming that a man had been raised from death by the power of God, cries (in Greek) that were the equivalent of the English “Boo,” “Yah,” “Rubbish,” “Nonsense,” “Poppycock,” “Stop it,” “Sit down and shut up,” broke out; the noise was such that Paul could not go on speaking; and the meeting broke up in confusion. Some however met with Paul again to hear more, and the small church that he left behind him included at least one Areopagite of standing. Luke seems to be telling us as the chapter closes that even in Athens, the toughest nut to crack evangelistically in all Greece, the gospel achieved real if qualified success.

Now look in more detail at what Paul said before he had to stop talking.
What did he tell them about God? In verses 23-25 we learn that he told them the following: (1) By their own admission (the altar to the Unknown God), they do not know the one true God, whatever gestures of worship they may make in his direction. (2) This God is their Creator, to whom they owe their present and continued existence. (3) He is the sovereign Lord, God in charge of the world he has made. (4) He is infinite and omnipresent; not therefore localized, and not to be thought of as inhabiting buildings specially set apart for him. (5) He is eternally self-sufficient and self-sustaining, and does not depend on our gifts and sacrifices to keep him going, for he never runs out of vitality or energy. (The theologians’ term for this is aseity, which means the quality of drawing your life continually and endlessly from within yourself. It is a word worth learning.) (6) He is the source of every good thing we have or ever receive, so that (Paul implies) constant thanksgiving to him would be in order (cf. Acts 14:15-17), and any lack of thankfulness would be a disorder (cf. Rom. 1:21).

What did Paul then tell them about man? In verses 26-30 we learn that he laid before them the following truths: (1) The unity of the human race through a common ancestor is a fact. (2) The sovereignty of God in human history, geography, and all of everyone’s affairs, is a further fact. (3) The purpose of God in making man was that we should, through intentionally seeking God, find him; in other words, knowing God is the true purpose of human life. (4) The dignity of each human being lies in the fact that we live in and through God as his offspring. Being God’s image-bearer (this was Paul’s thought, whether or not he used that phrase) brings great dignity, though it brings responsibility too. (5) Since Greek poets, whom Greeks everywhere venerate as oracular wiseacres (they all did, and Paul builds on that), have testified to this relationship with God, it is inexcusable to imagine God in the form of an idol, a process that means, first, scaling him down to the level of his creatures, and then reducing him further to the level of our own image of this creature or that. (Mental as well as metal images come under the lash of Paul’s words here.) (6) God holds us all guilty for not worshipping and serving him according to the highest we know of him, and directs us to repent of – that is, to turn our back on – everything that has so far kept us from worthy worship.

And what, after all that, did Paul go on to tell them about history, before their booing and catcalling silenced him? From verse 31 we learn that he was able to set forth just four facts: (1) The era in which God shows forbearance toward our wilful disregard of him is coming to an end. (2) God has fixed the day on which he will stop the flow of space-time history in order to bring us all to judgment, and deal with us all as we deserve for our shortcomings towards both him and other people. (3) God’s executive agent in that judgment will be the man called Jesus, whom he has designated for that purpose. (4) God has given the world a public proof and pledge of this by resurrecting Jesus after he was put to death. As 1 Corinthians 15:3-8 also shows, Paul was ready to deploy testimony to the reality of Jesus’ bodily resurrection whenever there was need; Luke’s summary does not however enable us to know how much of that, if any, he did here.

How long had Paul been speaking before he was shouted down? This, too, is something we cannot tell. But we can safely guess that anger had been mounting steadily among the Areopagites since he began, so that his asserting of Jesus’ resurrection was for them the last straw. By affirming the unity of the human race he, a visiting Jew, had challenged the elitism and racism that, as we know, were built into the Athenians’ standard view of themselves compared with others. By declaring God’s sovereignty he had shown them that the true God cannot be manipulated, and that we have no independent standing before him – always an unsettling notion when a person first meets it. By what he said about idols he had in effect declared that Athenian religiosity, about which he had sounded affirmative at first (v.22, the word translated “religious” can have a positive meaning), was misguided from start to finish; the gods of the polytheistic system in which the Athenians generally, Epicureans and Stoics included, invested their hopes were no gods at all. By quoting their own poets to them (Epimenides and Aratus, for the record (v.28)), he had implied that Athenians were blameworthy for not worshipping the one true God. By speaking of final judgment he had torpedoed the common Greek view of world history as endless cycles of events repeating themselves. By relaying God’s call for repentance he had in effect directed his learned listeners, Athens’ brightest and best, to change their whole religion and lifestyle in a very radical and upsetting way. And now for him to say of a particular dead man, not that his soul was immortal, which most if not all of them believed already, but that as a matter, not of mythology or legend, but of space-time, this-world, real-life fact he had been reanimated and somehow refashioned in the process, so that embodied existence, which to Greeks was a lower form of existence anyway, would never end for him, and to speak of this as something wonderful – well, it was just too much, and they were not going to listen to any more of it! Paul was talking offensive nonsense, and it was high time they shut him up. So they did.

Pluralism Ancient and Modern

What relevance has all this to our present concern? Its relevance lies in the fact that the Athenians were religious pluralists, and Paul was responding to their pluralism. There were, to be sure, many differences between the polytheistic pluralism of Athens, typical as it was of the ancient world, and the monotheistic or, rather, postmonotheistic and postChristian, immanentist, cognitively sceptical pluralism that breaks surface among today’s liberal theologians. But the essential pluralist position, that all responsible religions and cults are on a par with each other, and that there is room for them all, and that they are all friends in that none contradicts either the theology or the promise of any other, was and is the same. Certainly, the theoretical grounds on which the position rests in the two cases are very different: Athenian pluralism, in the manner of polytheistic systems generally, rested on the idea of distinct spheres of power for a wide array of gods; today’s Western pluralism rests on the belief that the human mind, being finite, is fallible at a deeper level than it can know. Prone to misconceptions and misperceptions as we are, and lacking power to discern the fullness of ultimate truth, we must not wonder (so it is said) that different religions, and different experts within those religions, give different accounts of divine and/or transcendent things. We really are like the six blind men in the Hindu parable who touched different parts of the elephant and came back with six different and seemingly irreconcilable stories about it. Humble realism about ourselves, so it is argued, requires a high level of agnosticism about the ultimate, and the way to project the fundamental unity of religions is to practise that form of intellectual self-denial that refuses to treat one’s own present understanding as in any way definitive.

The attraction of this view is, of course, its openness and friendliness to other faiths. It is always a pleasure to proclaim peace and play host. The problem with it is, however, that no consistent form of it ever appears, since all its advocates prove on inspection to be commending, not consistent distrust of all human religious definitives as such, but only consistent distrust of all human religious definitives apart from the defined viewpoint of the teachers themselves (Blatavsky, Besant, Steiner, Campbell, Radhakrishnan, Coomaraswamy, Schuon, whoever); and logically it does not appear how it can ever be otherwise, for it is the nature of teachers to project, explicitly or implicitly, what they think they know, and this will come across, willy-nilly, as a positive option for learners to embrace. According to pluralist theory, for instance, the fact that one religion sees God as personal, another does not, and a third is atheistic; or that one religion anticipates a future of existence with God in love and joy, another foresees gloom and diminution for all, and a third hopes only for non-existence, pain ended because one is no longer there to feel it; should be explained somehow (there are different ways of doing this) in terms of the incompetence of human minds to discern and conceptualize ultimate realities. But teachers explaining this will have a personal view on both these matters, and will be unable to conceal or refrain from commending it, if only by the way they critique other opinions and options; and the very fact that they teach will seem to be saying that their views are likely to be wiser than those of others – certainly, than those of the persons under their instruction. The guru syndrome has historically been noticeably strong among advocates of religious pluralism, just as it has among liberal theologians generally, and the reason is obvious: having moved beyond both biblical and church authority, their only authority is now themselves.

And the unhappiness of the pluralist view is precisely that it is so decisively postChristian and subChristian, the fruit of falling back from the apostolic gospel that announces the sufficiency, finality, cosmic dominion and universal claim of Jesus Christ, our crucified Saviour and risen Lord. The humility of mind for which pluralists call is actually unbelief of the Bible and ignorance of the Holy Spirit, who spoke by the prophets, inspired the Scriptures, interprets them to us so that we know the truth about God and Jesus, and through that knowledge sets us in a vital, saving relationship with the Father, the Son and the Spirit himself. So, too, the openness to non-Christian religious wisdom for which pluralists plead is actually disregard of Bible truth about world religions, and thus is in effect unbelief once more. What therefore we must do today in relation to the pluralism we face matches what Paul did in relation to the pluralism he found at Athens: stand against strategies of assimilation, affirm the biblical view of God, man and Christ in its fulness, and set it, not in syncretist synthesis with, but in categorical contrast to, all other teachings, so that the insufficiency of non-Christian religions is clearly seen.

Relating to Other Faiths

What view then should we take of non-Christian religions today? And how should we relate to their adherents, with whom in these days of immigration we rub shoulders constantly?

First, let us learn to distinguish things that differ in our own back yard, starting with the liberals in the church who find pluralism so attractive. In 1924 the Presbyterian J. Gresham Machen, in his book Christianity and Liberalism, argued that here were two distinct religions side by side in the Protestant world. In 1998 the Canadian Anglican George Eves, in his book Two Religions One Church: Division and Destiny in the Anglican Church of Canada, argued similarly, within an Anglican frame. Clarity and truth forbid us to pretend that here are two minor variants on one theme. Five centuries of Western thought have shrunk the God of the Bible by discounting his sovereignty, his holiness, and his use of language to reveal himself to us; at the same time, they have inflated man by soft-pedalling original sin and seeing us as evolving towards intellectual and managerial omnicompetence in a world that is all ours, and they have robbed the church of vision and vigour by setting it, as we noted earlier, to play catch-up to the world. In the churches of the Reformation, of which the Anglican church is one, great confusion and uncertainty have resulted from all this, and it is no wonder that we now find it hard to think clearly about the cross-currents of belief and behaviour that flow from the presence among us of people of other faiths. The weight of generations of muddle, compromise, uncertainty and cultivated vagueness lies heavy upon us. Before we can relate Christianity to persons of other faiths, who are often more clear-headed about their religion than we are about ours, we need to sort ourselves out.

Our confusion is often made worse by the wide spectrum of ways in which Protestants use the Bible. Let it be said at once that there is only one right way to interpret “God’s Word written,” as Article 20 calls it: that is, first, to practise grammatical-historical, common-sense exegesis on each biblical book, treating it as written not to mystify but to be understood, and, second, to let Scripture illuminate Scripture by its own internal links and cross-references. The combination of these two procedures is nowadays called canonical interpretation; Christ-centred and life-centred, as all the Bible is, it yields results which in theological substance differ surprisingly little from what Christians found in the Bible from the start. Reformation exegesis and biblical criticism are often said to have transformed Bible study, and in terms of technique that is true, but in terms of content almost the whole story is that precision has been given to what men like Augustine and Chrysostom already knew. The selective impressionism and straining after novelty which mark so much liberal exegesis and leave ordinary Christians feeling that biblical interpretation is much too difficult for any save experts to attempt, is a modern aberration. Biblical authority means the direction given, and the limits set, by the Bible properly interpreted, and proper interpretation means canonical interpretation, and there is a heritage of canonical interpretation going right back to the apostolic age, a heritage whose essential correctness has been vindicated by critical examination time and time again. Canonical interpretation, clear and cogent in its fidelity to the whole Bible, yields the doctrines of the ecumenical creeds and Reformation confessions and classic catechisms and latter-day statements of evangelical faith. It dispels confusion and anchors Christian minds in a simple, straightforward grasp of the Christian faith; and thus it orients us for the relationships through which we are now to think our way.

Assuming, then, that we are clear in our minds as to the central realities of the historic biblical faith of which we are both beneficiaries and trustees, what principles (we ask) should guide us as we discuss religion with neighbours and friends of other faiths, and as we consider invitations to involve ourselves in inter-faith and multi-faith services and joint activities that bring the religions together? I suggest that three principles should guide us constantly: recognize what non-Christian faiths have; identify what they lack; and highlight the unique Saviour and salvation that Christians have, and that everyone needs. Let me develop that.

Recognize what non-Christian faiths have. The Bible view of non-Christian religions is that they are the product, first, of universal ongoing revelation – general revelation, scholars call it – whereby God generates in everyone some inklings of his own reality, of the reality of moral standards, and of retributive judgment to come, and then, second, of the distorting of these awarenesses by inroads of superstition (desiring gods man can manipulate and manage is the root of idolatry), and by various self-affirming techniques for getting one’s god or gods to meet present and future felt needs. The story differs with each religion, just as the religion itself does: each is distinct. But all religions have in them some awe and respect towards the transcendent powers, personal or impersonal, from whom or through which they hope to receive good, some real morality that commands the conscience, some pattern of prayer and/or meditation, and some heartfelt hopes for the future, and we should surely be interested in exploring all these aspects, looking throughout for streaks and flashes of undistorted God-light and trying to discern why and how the religion of our conversation partners came to its present shape. Out of such explorations can come not only understanding but also friendship, and in all informal evangelism, as we know, friendship is a major factor.

Identify what non-Christian faiths lack. A just appreciation of anything takes note of what is missing as well as of what is present, and that is as true in the realm of religion as anywhere. Comparison of the various non-Christian faiths with Christianity shows that the God who addresses us in his word and who fellowships with us on the basis of promises he has made, who loves redemptively and whose gift of his Son to die on the cross for our sins is the measure and pledge of his love, who adopts and re-creates us as his children and heirs, and who holds out to us a hope of supreme unending joy with him beyond this world, is a God with whom our non-Christian conversation partners are not acquainted. Our thoughts, and when appropriate our words too, should focus on this lack rather than fudge it. General revelation may convey some sense of the Creator’s everyday generosity (cf. Acts 14:16-17; Rom. 2:4), but gives no knowledge of him as the Redeemer of lost and guilty sinners. It is here that Christianity stands apart from all other world faiths, and in conversation we should keep this difference constantly in view.

Highlight the unique Saviour and salvation that Christians have, and that everyone needs. Addressing evangelicals as I am doing, I do not think I need elaborate on what that means; my readers know it already. But I would suggest here that the crunch-point, the crucial issue when we are asked to share in unitive inter-faith activities, services of worship and public meetings, is whether in principle we are left free to do this as we think fit or not. If the organisers want only gestures of unity and rule out anything more, non-participation may be the wisest as well as the most honest course. But if witness to the divine Christ and salvation in and through him, which is the constitutive core of Christianity, may be borne, alongside whatever witness to the constitutive core of other religions may also be given, then accepting involvement may be the proper thing to do. The Areopagus story shows that Paul, for one, were he in our shoes, would certainly think so. Every opportunity of highlighting the reality of God’s love, the reality of our personal Saviour, and the reality of the Christian hope of resurrection and joy, should be taken, and if the implication that there is really no place for faiths that are not faith in Jesus Christ gives offence, as it did at Athens, we like Paul must bear it. Pluralism is not the path; evangelism is; so let us maintain our witness with clarity and with a high heart, knowing what the outcome will finally be (I borrow this phrase from the title of a study course on the book of Revelation) – “the Lamb wins.” Take courage, friends; we are on the victory side.