50 Key Concepts in Theology

Pluralism
Religious pluralism asserts the theological value of more than one religious
belief or form of life.
The issue of pluralism goes right back to the discussions of the ancient
philosophers about the One and the Many. When we look at the world, it
appears as a jumble of many entities, yet we still speak in the singular about
‘the world’ and our ‘experience of the world’, as though the vast array of
different objects in our field of vision were also united into one thing called
‘the world’ or ‘the cosmos’. The monist assumes that the separate parts of our
experience are unified. The pluralist takes the view that the multiplicity of
separate things in the world is the true reality: the world is not singular, but
composed of many distinct entities.
The phrase ‘religious pluralism’ is not generally used to mean that there
is more than one god (that is ‘polytheism’), but that there are several true
understandings of God. So the pluralist might argue that the Muslim, the
Christian and the Jew are all worshipping God in their different ways, as John
Hick put it in the book of the same title: ‘God has many names.’
Religious pluralism is also not necessarily the same thing as religious
relativism. The relativist argues that there are no absolute truths. The pluralist
may argue that there is absolute truth, but that it is expressed in many
different ways.
The pluralist view may be contrasted with the ‘exclusivist’ view (which
takes one’s own religion to be the only true path to God) and the ‘inclusivist’
view (which allows for the possibility that other religions might be alternative
expressions of one’s own true religion). So the ‘exclusivist’ Christian would
say that Muslims are wrong; the ‘inclusivist’ Christian would say that
Muslims have found another way of expressing Christian truth; and the
‘pluralist’ Christian would say that Muslims have an equally valid but
different religion.
John Hick offers a ‘Kantian’ version of pluralism, arguing that God is
still one, even if we travel there by different paths. In this way, Hick did not
challenge the singular reality of God. Hick’s view also made the differences
between religions appear insignificant. David Ray Griffin has argued the
more radical view that the different religious paths actually lead to different
destinations, but that these plural destinations are equally valid. The Muslim
path takes you to one place, and the Christian path leads to another. So our
separate paths are not just alternative routes to God, but the only means of

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reaching our particular religious goal.
More radically still, the Catholic theologian Joseph O’Leary (Religious
Pluralism and Christian Truth, Edinburgh University Press, 1996) has argued
that authentic religion must abandon its claim to be absolute: ‘Release from
… absolutism requires the insight that neither individuals nor nations nor
creeds possess a stable identity unchanging throughout history. What they
have instead is a story, a trajectory, in which they are constantly reinventing
their identity.’
All pluralist views are anathema to conservative Roman Catholics, who
argue that ‘outside the Church there is no salvation’, and to conservative
Evangelicals, who argue that salvation only comes through a relationship with
Jesus Christ. Conservatives find it equally difficult to tolerate pluralism
within their own religion, insisting on an exclusivist understanding of
orthodoxy as rigid dogma from which there can be no deviation.
THINKERS
Wilfred Cantwell-Smith (1916–2000), in The Meaning and End of
Religion (1963), distinguished between ‘faith’ and ‘belief’. ‘Faith’ is a trust in
God that cuts across religious cultures, whereas ‘beliefs’ are specific to