Transcript
Well, there is a variety of ways in which Christians have understood the other religions. The first and simplest way is to say that Christianity is true and the other religions are false. This is the truth and they are lies. Well, I don't want to spend a lot of time on that because I think it is impossible. I would say it is impossible for two reasons. Firstly because when one has lived in close fellowship and deep friendship
with people of other religions, when one has shared to some extent, as far as one can, in their prayers, in their understandings, one cannot simply write it all off as lies. It is simply impossible. Secondly, for a more, perhaps a less subjective reason, I think this is a very interesting point. You know that the Bible has been translated into, or at least the New Testament has been translated into about 1,500 languages already. When you translate
the New Testament, you have to decide what is the word you use to translate God, Theos. And every language into which the Bible has been translated has already a word. Many of them have many words. And the Bible translators, in almost every case, there are a few exceptions which I'll come to, but in almost every case, the Bible translators choose one of these words and use that as the word to translate Theos. Now what is implied
in that choice? Let me take the Tamil language, where we have a word, kadavul, which is a word formed by uniting the root, which means transcendence, with the root, which means being, kadavul, that which transcends all being. That word, kadavul, is a word deeply rooted in the Tamil language, and even a man who has never had any contact with the Christian faith, whatever, a very, very primitive, hill tribes, people living up in the jungles and the
mountains of South India, I have talked to them and I say, who made you, and he says, kadavul. And whom will you have to answer to in the end, he says, kadavul. Here is something which is formed entirely outside of the Christian tradition. Now the Bible translators take this word, kadavul, and use it for Theos. By doing that, they are saying that there is some continuity between the experience which forms this word, kadavul, and the experience
which forms this word, god. Otherwise, they ought not to use that word. They are saying that, or to put it in another way, it means that when there are Tamil Christians who read the Bible and pray as Christians, they will be using for the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ the word which is used by that primitive hill tribesman who has never had any contact with Jesus. By doing that, you are affirming that there
is some continuity. Now I said there were a few exceptions. There are a few cases in which the Bible translators themselves were committed to a theology which says that all the other religions are false and therefore were unwilling to use any word from the pagan language and simply took the Greek word Theos and translated it into the letters of the receptor language. But this does not evade the problem because as soon as there are some Christians
in that community, the other people come and say, what does this funny word mean? We never heard of this word before and they can only answer, that means Kadavel or whatever you say. You cannot escape the problem. You cannot translate the Bible without in fact committing yourself to the belief that there is some continuity between the religious experience of men outside of the Christian faith and the Christian revelation. Secondly, there is the idea that the non
-Christian religions are the work of devils. Well, you may not think it's worth spending time on that, but let me spend a few moments on it. In the early apologist of the second century, Justin, there is a distinction drawn between the pagan philosophies and the pagan religions. Justin says that the pagan philosophers like Plato and Socrates were agents of the true logos, that the logos was truly speaking through them, but that the pagan religions were the
work of devils and in so far as they have any likeness to Christianity, this is the devil's parody to deceive men. Well, one may think that's a very strange idea and I'm not advocating it, but there is an element of truth in it, in this sense that there is no doubt that religion is the field of the demonic because it is the field in which men surrender their reason to a higher power. I have often noted
how, I wonder whether Joseph would agree with me here, but I have often who have been converted in recent times have a kind of horror of an idol, which I don't have at all. For me, an idol is nothing. It's an interesting object. I might even buy it and put it on a shelf as an ornament, but for some of my Indian friends who are recent converts from Hinduism, I have seen the horror and fear with
which they look at an idol because it represents to them some kind of demonic power. I don't know whether others have the same experience, but we could discuss that. There is a certain kind of element of truth here and surely one only has to look at Northern Ireland at the moment to recognise that religion can be the field of the demonic. There is a demonic element that can work through the religions, including Christianity. The third and
more serious suggestion is that the other religions represent the seeking of that which is to be found only in Christianity. The most impressive example of this view that I know is the famous book written in the beginning of this century by J.N. Farquhar called The Crown of Hinduism. Farquhar was a great scholar. And in this book he illustrates with an enormous wealth of illustration from different areas of Hinduism his view that the gospel is the
crown of Hinduism, that the gospel completes, F-A-R-Q-U-H-A-R, the crown of Hinduism, that the gospel completes what Hinduism seeks. And this type of thinking dominated the Great World Missionary Conference of 1910. If you look at the volume of that conference dealing with the Christian message, there is an immense amount of scholarly material designed to show that the gospel answers the questions that the great world religions ask or completes that which
they have in an incomplete form. Now I think that that position, which was very vigorously explored and developed in the first years of this century, does not bear final, it cannot finally be accepted. I think it was destroyed by the work of men like Rudolf Otto and in India by A.G. Hogg, who showed, I think, that simply it is not true, that Hinduism is asking questions which Christianity does not answer. And that Christianity is answering
questions that Hinduism does not ask. That they are, as Otto said, they turn on different axes. One is not a continuation of the other. For example, one would take a very simple illustration. I think I mentioned it the other day. You go into a village street in India and repeat John 3:16, that whosoever believes in him should not perish but have everlasting life. Everlasting life is exactly what a Hindu is trying to escape from. His
whole picture is dominated by that wheel and the thing that above all he wants is to be delivered from everlastingness, which is for him a terrible threat, a burden, an intolerable burden of everlasting life. And so one could illustrate it in many other ways. The two turn on different axes. A fourth way of answering the question, which is rather similar to that, was very popular in the Jerusalem Conference of 1928, namely the idea that there are
certain values in each of the religions, which are valuable in themselves but are only brought together in Christianity. In the Jerusalem Report, for example, they speak of the sense of the majesty of God in Islam, the deep compassion of the Buddha, the longing for salvation of the Hindu, and so forth, as being values that one can see in the non-Christian religions, but the claim was that only in Christianity are all these values together. But again,
this cannot really stand serious examination because each of these values has its meaning within the total structure of that religion. Take it out and it means something else. I remember talking to a Muslim convert, a very distinguished Pakistani poet, Dawood Rahba, who became a Christian some years ago, and I was saying to him, surely there is in Islam, for example, in the phrase, Allah, the All-Merciful, here surely there is something that a Christian can simply
accept. And he said, you are reading that through Christian spectacles. It means something different for you than what it means to a Muslim. You cannot just take that over and think that that can be part of Christianity. It cannot be. It has a different meaning within the whole framework of meaning of Islam. And I think this could be illustrated from other points. A fifth way is one that has been set out very officially, so to speak,
in some of the Roman Catholic documents, in some of the Second Vatican Council stuff, and in the papal encyclical Ecclesiastica, which is dated about 1960 something. I just don't remember the exact date. According to that, the relation of Christianity to the other religions is to be seen as a series of concentric circles. You have the central circle where the Roman Catholic Church is. Then you have an outer circle where the separated brethren are. Possibly there are
some small circles within then, and some of us might be at different distances from the center. Then you have the circle which includes the Jews, the Jewish people. Then you have the circle which includes other monotheists like Muslims and Hindu monotheists and Sikhs who are monotheists. Then you have another circle which includes the other religions like Buddhism and pantheistic and polytheistic Hinduism and so forth. And finally you have an outer space which is inhabited by atheists,
Marxists, humanists, and other people who have no belief in God or whatever. This is deliberately set out in that encyclical Ecclesiam Seum. 1964 is the date of it. But that also, this picture of concentric circles, that will not, I think, stand beside the New Testament. If you take the parable of the Good Samaritan, the priest and the Levite undoubtedly belong to one of the inner circles. The semi-pagan Samaritan belongs in one of the outer circles.
But according to Jesus, it is the semi-pagan Samaritan who is nearer to the kingdom of God than the priest and the Levite. How do you decide who is nearer to the kingdom of God as between a Hindu sannyasi who has abandoned everything for the sake of the salvation of his own soul and is living a life of pure contemplation and prayer, letting the world go by, or a Marxist agitator, of whom I know many, who
has surrendered the whole of his fortune, the whole of his family and everything, and adopted the life of a poor peasant in order to uplift the life of a village? According to the picture, the Marxists should be out in outer space and the sannyasi should be fairly near the center. How do you relate the Pharisees and the publicans and sinners? The Pharisees, according to that picture, are close to the center, the publicans and sinners are outside,
and yet it is the publicans and sinners who are the nearest to the kingdom. So I just simply cannot relate that picture to the New Testament as I read it. A more modern Roman Catholic picture, which I know is familiar to you, is the famous picture of Karl Rahner, which one could illustrate in this way. Karl Rahner and other modern Roman Catholics say that the non-Christian religions represent a sort of anonymous Christianity. It's rather like
a mountain of which only part appears above the water level. This is the visible part, the Christian church, but the rest of it is really still the same, but it is, so to speak, anonymous. It is hidden from sight. The point, according to Rahner, is that God wills the salvation of all men. Salvation can only be a social corporate happening. The religions are the salvific forms for those who have not yet heard the Gospel, but that
when they do hear the Gospel, then that anonymous religion will become an explicit religion. Now again, without spending a lot of time on this, I think that this is really, in a strange way, it's a Christian form of the thing that I was talking about here. What the Hindu is saying to me with this picture is that I am really an anonymous Hindu. I am from a Hindu point of view. I am an anonymous Hindu, and
what he wants to do is to try to make me into a conscious Hindu by showing the relativity of my position. Now similarly, if I say to a Hindu, you are really an anonymous Christian, he will be quite justified if he says you are not taking me seriously, you are not listening to me. You are simply looking at me from the point of view of your commitment, and you are not seriously recognizing the fact that I
have a different commitment, that I am looking in a different direction. To call me an anonymous Christian is not to take me seriously, and I think that I would be bound to accept that criticism. Well, these are a whole series of models, as it were, that have been used to try to interpret the relation, to try from a Christian point of view to state how we are to look at the other religions. And now you will
obviously want me to say something constructive, having been destructive for the last 50 minutes. I find, if we are going to use pictures, I find that the nicest picture that I can draw is one that was found on the blackboard of a little Bible school in Java, by my friend Walter Freitag of Hamburg, when he was visiting Indonesia, and he went into a classroom where, in a catechist training class, he found on the blackboard a picture
like this. And he said to the teacher, what does that represent? He said, oh, that's the Gospel, and they are the religions. And then Freitag looked at this, and the more he looked at it, the more he thought that it had to say. You see, let me try to interpret that picture this way. Here are these staircases, which do, in fact, take us up. There are stairways of ethical, religious, spiritual teaching and discipline which do lead
men up towards personal and social righteousness, to a real knowledge of God, a real communion with God, and this is what I was emphasizing earlier when I spoke about the fact that we cannot deny a certain continuity between the non-Christian experience of God and that which we know through Jesus Christ. But then, in the middle, you have this cross which symbolizes a unique historic event, a happening, which cuts right down between these staircases. And the
point of the picture is, you see, that you meet Jesus and you meet the people on the other staircases by coming down to the bottom of the staircase and not by standing at the top. I came not to call the righteous but sinners, not the Pharisees, but the publicans and the sinners go into the kingdom of God. And I would want to emphasize the point that Christianity is also one of those staircases. Christianity as a historical
religion which is seeking to realize in human history what God has revealed through Jesus Christ. So that while there are indeed these staircases that do lead upwards and we must not and cannot deny them, we cannot and must not deny the real ethical and religious and spiritual fruits that are given through the great world religions. Nevertheless, there is this unique fact which is, so to speak, the crisis of them all and which requires us to meet
at the bottom rather than at the top of the staircase. It is the people at the bottom of the ladder who are ready to listen to Jesus, the prostitute, the dying thief, the outcasts of India. It is the people at the top of the ladder, the Pharisees, the Brahmins, the samurai, the religious and spiritual elites of every culture for whom the preaching of the gospel is a profound offense who are compelled to reject it. And you
see from their point of view, from the people at the top of the staircase, Jesus is a saboteur. For Saul, the Pharisee, Jesus is a saboteur, one who is destroying the law and who must therefore be fought with all his power. But for Paul, the Christian, looking back, he can see that Jesus is not the saboteur but the fulfiler, that the true fulfilment of the law is in Jesus. Paul, looking back on his life as a
Pharisee and at his experience in Christ, can say that in fact in Jesus the law which he was serving as a Pharisee has been fulfilled, not destroyed. And yet, from the point of view of Saul the Pharisee, Jesus can only appear as a saboteur, as one who is destroying the law. Now, or again, if one may take what I suppose is the simplest and most central gospel illustration, it is the story of the two sons. Contrary
to all the expectations of ordinary folk religion, it is not the good boy who finishes up in the father's house. It is the bad boy who finishes up in the father's house and the good boy finishes up outside in the dark. This radical sabotage of the normal wisdom of human religion is at the very heart of the gospel. Now, that I've only put in the form of a picture. Again, forgive me, but I'm sorry, Heidi, I'll
have to ask you to come back for a few minutes. Can you bear to? What was your real name, not Heidi? My name is Leanne. Sorry, excuse me. What was your name then? Leanne. Leanne. I think Heidi is too cheap. I think we'd better... What I'm trying to say is this, that when we look at the relationship of the gospel with the other religions, with the religions, let me put it that way, we cannot do otherwise
than recognize that we start from where we stand, and that is as witnesses of what God has done in Jesus Christ. We cannot pretend to start from some kind of axiom or principle or universal concept that would provide the essence of all religions, so to speak. We have, I think, simply to take what is really a humbler standpoint and say, I am a witness, a messenger. I have to bear witness to a fact. Maybe I don't
fully understand that fact. Maybe you can help me to understand that fact. Maybe I have to listen to you to understand it, but this is where I stand. I find Paul's words in 1 Corinthians 9, the right words, so to speak, for this situation. Paul says, if I preach the gospel, that gives me no ground for boasting. Necessity is laid upon me. Woe to me if I do not preach the gospel. If I do it of
my own will, I have a reward. But if it is not of my will, I am entrusted with a commission. I am entrusted with a commission. I get into trouble as to know whether to say post or mail, but I am the postman or the mailman. I am simply the person entrusted with this commission. And that commission is to witness to a fact. Something has been done. Something which is not our own conceiving, which is beyond
anything we can imagine. Something which measures up to the depths and heights of the human situation. And I am the witness of that not by my choice, but because in a way which is mysterious to me, God has put me in a position where I am a witness to that fact. Not of my own choice, not my own decision. But God, in his own mysterious leading of me, has put me into that situation. Now that being
so, it is from this situation that I have to try to understand the rest of human experience. What does that fact say to me? What clues does it give me to understand the phenomena of religion as part of the whole human experience of life? The first thing it entitles me to say is that there can be no limit to the love of God if God spared not his own son. What limit can we put to the
love of God? We must expect to find, and we do find, evidences of the love of God throughout the whole range of human experience. Not only in man's religion, but also in man's whole life. Perhaps especially in the ordinary human experiences which are common to all men everywhere. The experiences of love, of friendship, of loyalty, of ethical standards expressed in many different ways. And from the place where I stand as a witness to what God has
done in Jesus Christ, I am bound to see and to rejoice in the evidences of that love of God reaching out into the whole life of man. And when I find these evidences, I do not try to query them, to qualify them, to say yes, but, rather, I rejoice in them, I thank God for them. I come again to this basic text in John Prologue, John chapter 1, where Jesus is spoken of as the light that
lightens every man. That text, I think, has often been misinterpreted as though the writer was saying that Jesus is the light that lightens every religion. Now, it does not say that. It says the light that lightens every man. And, therefore, I think we are on a wrong clue when we think that we have to look primarily to the religious life of man to find the shining of the light. This is where I think Karl Rahner and
Hans Küng are wrong, I think, because I do not see what logical necessity there is to say that it is the religions of man which are the saving element in man's life. Rahner argues, as you remember, since God loves all men and since God desires the salvation of all men and since salvation must be a corporate experience and since the religions are the corporate expression of man's search for God, therefore, the religions must have a saving
role in God's economy. Now, I cannot see the logic of that. I do not see why it should be the religions rather than, for example, the political life or the ordinary family life or the professional ethics that govern men's lives, the tribal loyalties, the many, many other aspects of human life which are equally part of human life. And I do not see the logic that leads men like Rahner to identify the saving work of God with
the religions. I would simply stick to what this text seems to say, namely that the light, that Jesus is the light that lightens every man. But, of course, we have to go on to say that the light shines in the darkness. This is also true and cannot be denied. We have to take John's prologue as a whole. If we accept the metaphor of light, I think it does help us in the sense that it assures us,
on the one hand, that where there is no blockage, then the light will shine out to the limits of space. Even a candle lit on the earth, I suppose, communicates some light even to the moon. There is no point at which you can say light stops and darkness begins unless you put something there which is an obstacle to the light. The character of light is that it shines to the limits. This is what light is. And
there are not different kinds of light. There is only one light. There are not different kinds of truth. There are not different kinds of goodness. There is only one truth, goodness. It is the light that shines in Jesus Christ. But it does shine to the ends of the universe. And here we have to say the negative thing. Even the purest religion, the highest ethical standards, come to a crisis when they come to deal with this event,
this cross and resurrection of Jesus Christ. This is the point at which human wisdom and human righteousness face their crisis, as Paul saw. As Paul says, the cross is for the Jew a stumbling block, a scandal. It seems to contradict everything the law has promised because it seems to say that the accursed one is the messiah. For the Greek, it is folly. It is nonsense. How can a particular historical event, and very specially such a shocking
event, as the execution of an excommunicated criminal, how can one particular historic event reveal the ultimate truth of all things? For the Muslim, the cross simply has to be denied. The Qur'an denies that Jesus died. The doctrine of Muslims is that Jesus did not die, that he swooned and recovered in the tomb. It cannot be that a messenger of Allah should be destroyed. It is a kind of cosmic impossibility, and therefore the official Muslim teaching
is that the Christians have falsified the record. Because Jesus is a messenger of Allah, he cannot have been destroyed in this way, and therefore it did not happen. For the Hindu, the cross can be interpreted as an example of ahimsa, of nonviolence, of the passive acceptance of suffering. But the resurrection makes no sense at all. For the Hindu, the resurrection is simply nonsense, except as a story. So, the cross and resurrection of Jesus Christ, these facts
do constitute a crisis for all human religion. If it is true that God did indeed become part of human history, give himself to the point of death, that God did actually do this. If that is true, then everything else in the field of human religion and ethics is relativized. This becomes the only possible center for understanding the phenomena of human existence. And what I said earlier about this twist by which we take what God has done
and make it into the claim against God, has also its application here. It is very vividly seen in the reaction of the Pharisees to Jesus, the Pharisees who represent the highest religion that the world has known in many respects, who are the true heirs of Moses, who are the godly, who are seeking to apply the law of God to the whole of human life. Because this is where the Pharisees were distinguished from the Sadducees, who were
much more what you might call liberal, much more ready to compromise with the culture of their time. It is precisely the Pharisees for whom the coming of Jesus is the scandal, which they cannot accept, for whom Jesus appears as the saboteur, the one who is overturning the law. And it is the same with Hinduism. It is the most spiritual, most deeply spiritual Hindus, like Gandhi himself, for whom the preaching of the gospel is the most intolerable
scandal, whereas it is the people on the margins of Hinduism, the outcasts, the poor, for whom the gospel comes as good news. So that I think we, I would say that we have to, I would conclude with this, that if one tries to speak in a systematic way, and again I repeat, I'm talking from the point of view of the Christian commitment, one would have to say that there are two distinctions to be made. The first
is the distinction between a historical religion and a non-historical religion. The divide that separates those religions that have their roots in the Bible, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and I would add Marxism as a development, a secularized form. For all of these, the actual story of the world is central to our religious understanding. And against that, the Eastern religions, Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism, Jainism, all protest. For them, it is impossible that actual historical events should have a central
place in the revelation of the truth, because salvation must be something which takes us out of history into the eternal order where the soul is at one with God. So that is your first division between the religions which take their stand on some event in history, and on the other hand those which take their stand on the timeless experience of the human soul. But then there is a second divide. The first one might call the scandal
of history, the stumbling block of history. But then within the historic religions, there is the further divide that comes with what one might call the scandal of the cross. Because you see, if you understand revelation as being an event in history, if you understand salvation as being something which concerns history as a whole and not just my own soul, then the natural understanding would be that the story of revelation must be, so to speak, the successful
cause in history. If you are a Jew, the Messiah must come and reign from Mount Zion. If you are a Muslim, the faith of Islam must embrace the whole earth. If you are a Marxist, the dictatorship of the proletariat must liquidate all forms of oppression until there is a classless society. But the Christian with his starting point in the cross has a different picture of history in which the Christian church is not promised that it will
be the successful movement in history. It is promised only that it will be the witness through history of a power of God which is manifested in weakness, of a victory of God which is manifested in suffering. Well, all that I am saying here rests upon what I have tried to say in the earlier part of this week about election. And it will be clear that I am trying to understand the religions from within this point of
view. I speak as one who confesses an event which I am compelled to recognize as the clue for the understanding of all human experience and all human history. But that does not mean that I have the full knowledge of the truth myself and that my only relation to the Hindu or the Muslim or the Marxist is that I have to communicate the truth. It does not mean that I have the answers to the questions that he
is asking or that I have the completion of that which he has in part or that I am an explicit believer in what he believes anonymously. It does not mean any of those things. It means something different. Namely, that as one who is commissioned to be a witness of Jesus Christ, I must bear that witness. But in doing so, I am open to listen to what another man of another faith can teach me which will enable
me to understand better who Jesus Christ is and what his cross and resurrection mean for the life of the world. So that the story of the Christian church going through history, and here I come to my Trinitarian doctrine again, is not just the story of this institution enlarging itself by a kind of unilateral action. It is not a picture of sort of imperial expansion by which the church which has all the truth simply communicates itself to
the rest of the world so that mission equals church extension. The New Testament gives us a different picture where Jesus says to his disciples that he cannot give them the whole truth now and that it will be the work of the Holy Spirit to lead them into all the truth. And that work of the Holy Spirit is the heart of the Christian mission. The Christian goes to meet the man of another faith, knowing that the Holy
Spirit will take out of the experience of that other man new things which he, the Christian, will learn. So that what the Christian church is itself is changed so that, as we saw in the case of Cornelius and Peter, you do not just have Peter capturing Cornelius for his own understanding. On the contrary, you have an action of the Holy Spirit who uses Cornelius to bring Peter to a fuller understanding of what it means to be
the people of God. Now that is a sort of paradigm of something which is going on all through history when the church is true to its mission. The church itself is being changed so that it becomes more fully a witness to God's purpose for the whole of the human race. Well that then opens up the whole question of dialogue, which is what I want to talk about on Monday. Evangelism, conversion, dialogue, the relationship of these things
to each other. And I'll stop this one there and we'll take that issue up on Monday and meanwhile we'll have discussion.