There is not one, but a number of spheres of saving contact between God and man. (John Hick). What is religious pluralism and how does it challenge Christian mission in Malaysia?
Introduction
Malaysia takes pride in being a culturally diverse and multiethnic nation which has been spared from violent conflicts that have beset neighboring Indonesia and Thailand. Like the local delicacy called ‘rojak’, our religious context is a potent mix of various ingredients that rivals that of Athens during the days of Apostle Paul. However it does not mean that our national psyche is completely free from dark memories of May 13 riots and uneasy tensions about our status as an ‘Islamic state’. On the contrary, these repressed memories have a habit of returning to haunt us whenever ‘sensitive’ religious issues enter public discourse. On such rare occasions, citizens are dutifully reminded, under threat of the Internal Security Act, how easy it is for the religious ‘rojak’ to degenerate into something less tasteful.
What Is Pluralism?
In such a delicate scenario, the Malaysian church needs to carefully consider how to relate with other religious communities and consequently, her task of mission. While we are obviously living in a world with diverse religious perspectives, religious pluralism is a particular view that these religions are equally valid in terms of access to truth and effectiveness in salvation. This view is illustrated beautifully by the ancient story of ten blind men trying to describe an elephant after touching different parts of its body for the first time. As they announced their conflicting discoveries, a heated argument ensued. Awakened by the quarrel, the king corrected all of them by saying, “The elephant is a huge animal and each of you touched a part. In order to know the whole truth about what the elephant looks like, you must put together all the parts!” The moral of the story is that no religion has privileged access to the whole truth. Each religious view is a partial experience of the same Reality from its own culturally-conditioned perspective.
This view is popular because tolerance towards all religions is needed to ward off violent fundamentalism in the wake of post-911 ‘war on terror’. However, pluralism is not as religiously ‘neutral’ as it may appear to be. At face-value, it has been historically the view of particular religions like Buddhism, Hinduism and Bahai faith. In contrast, Islam and Christianity historically held to the finality of divine revelation in Koran and Jesus respectively. More recently, though, John Hick is a prominent Christian theologian who called for a Copernican revolution in which the universe of faiths are seen as centered on God, instead of Christ, whose Light is reflected in all major world religions. He unpacked the pluralistic hypothesis that “the great world faiths embody different perceptions and concepts of, and correspondingly different responses to, the Real from within the major variant ways of being human, and that within each of them the transformation of human existence from self-centeredness to Reality-centredness is taking place. These traditions are accordingly to be regarded as alternative soteriological ‘spaces’ within, or ‘ways’ along which, men and women can find salvation/liberation /ultimate fulfillment.”
Christian apologists have rightly pointed out that popular-level pluralism is self-defeating since the pluralist has unwittingly assumed a ‘privileged position’ even while he denied others the same access. Isn’t it ironic that the pluralist took on the role of the all-seeing king after admitting his own limited perception as one of the blind men? However, Hick would insist that pluralist hypothesis is not an a priori presupposition from cosmic standpoint, but a hypothesis built up inductively from ground level. Starting from our own tradition, we observe that our religious experience is not purely projection but also a response to transcendent divine reality. The demonstrable fruits of love, joy, patience and peace can be detected in some degree in adherents of other faiths. Ideological pluralism is therefore the best hypothesis to account for the fact of plurality. After all, it is no longer politically correct to claim to have the truth while contrary views are wrong or to claim that one is saved while others end up in final condemnation.
Furthermore, the doctrine of Incarnation had been singled out as the cause of anti-Semitism, exploitation of Third World and enmity against other faiths. Here, we see in effect the ‘ethical criterion’ for evaluating religions on the basis of ‘compassionate’ social implications. We can see the vision of pluralism on the shape of Christian mission embodied in Hick’s own personal testimony. From an insular exclusivist who had little contact with non-Christians, he now had a more embracing attitude towards other faiths. Actively involved in “All Faiths for One Race” (AFFOR) in Birmingham, he engaged others in interfaith dialogues, revised an exclusively Christian syllabus for religious education to a multi-faith curriculum and opposed violence from neo-Nazi National Front. Unsurprisingly, evangelism is nowhere on the radar.
The Case for Truth
Could religious pluralism really deliver its promises of peace and tolerance? On closer inspection, it could only do so if adherents of all faiths relativize their conflicting truth claims in favor of pluralism. In the end, the only way humanity could attain unity is when they exclusively agree on a ‘faith’ different than their own. In response, Newbigin wrote that it is precisely because we want unity that we seek the truth by which alone humankind can become one. He went on to add, “That truth is not a doctrine or a worldview or even a religious experience; it is certainly not to be found by repeating abstract nouns like justice and love; it is the man Jesus Christ in whom God was reconciling the world. The Truth is personal, concrete, historical.”
Peace could be attained not at the cost of truth or dismissal of genuine differences. In fact, tolerance itself implies disagreement. We do not ‘tolerate’ people who agree with us. They are on our side! If every religious person is a pluralist, what room is there for tolerance? Instead, genuine tolerance recognizes conflicting truth claims and does not press for artificial constructs to find some minimal denominator. Despite our differences, we respect and honor one another as persons who have the God-given right to believe, practice and propagate our faiths. We should avoid what Alister McGrath called ‘a repressive enforcement of a predetermined notion of what something or someone should be, rather than a willingness to accept them for what they actually are’.
Although it claims to be inductive, pluralism did not satisfactorily address the ‘problem of conflicting truth claims’. Hick discussed it in ‘Interpretation of Religions’ and categorized the problem into ‘historical truth claims’ and ‘trans-historical truth claims’. There was not much of an “attempt to explicate the different concepts of God in all religions and come up with a common denominator that satisfies the essence of all.” Is God a personal-infinite Being or an impersonal Force? Is Satanism a valid expression of encounter with the ineffable Real? Hick seemed to dismiss them as irrelevant to ‘soteriology’ or reinterpret them as true myths - “different conceptions and perceptions of, and responses to, the Real from within the different cultural ways of being human”. The irony, however, is its implication that all religions are mistaken in supposing their basic beliefs are true. Harold Netland wrote, “To be sure, the pluralist is quick to add that, despite their mistaken beliefs, they are all in some way responding to the religious ultimate; it is just that they are not doing so in the manner in which the believers themselves think they are. But it is hard to see why this way of rejecting their beliefs as mistaken is any more tolerant than the exclusivist or inclusivist.”
The fact of religious plurality, existent even in the days of Christ, does not necessarily argue for religious pluralism as an ideology. Surely, there are equally viable alternatives for explaining the phenomenon of ethical and spiritual non-Christians around us. We should not be surprised since they are also in possession of the moral law written in their conscience and with access to general revelation through nature. Calvin’s theology certainly allows for non-Christians to be equipped with an innate ‘sense of the divine’, which provide them with the motivation to pursue the transcendent yet all have suppressed the knowledge of God. Missionary Martin Goldsmith wrote, “Sin and the remnant image of God interact both in cultures and religions. We dare not dismiss them as merely demonic, evil or totally false.” Therefore, the insistence that pluralist hypothesis is built inductively (‘by personal experience and observation’) without a priori category seems to lack the virtue of critical self-examination.
Despite its veneer of tolerance, pluralism has an inherent bias against the Christian doctrine of Incarnation or divine inspiration of Koran. Religious leaders like Muhammad, Gandhi, Confucius and Buddha never claimed to be God or Allah. However, the historicity of Jesus’ claims posed a serious challenge to the pluralist hypothesis. Hick appeared to be rather condescending when he implied that only fundamentalists still believed that the historical Jesus had an awareness of His deity. Hastily, he claimed that ‘modern New Testament scholarship’ had all but concluded that the high Christology found in John’s Gospel could not be seen as anything less than blasphemy by a pious first-century Jew. The New Testament documents are deemed as ‘documents of faith’ containing ‘both flashbacks to the human Jesus of history and anticipations of the divine Christ of later official church doctrine.’
Although this is not the place for an extended discussion, we may benefit from a summary of N.T. Wright’s research on the historical Jesus. It would indeed be absurd to suppose that Jesus understood himself to be ‘the Real’- an abstract, unknowable Deity forever isolated in the noumenal realms. However, if we locate Jesus within first-century Judaism, the Jews believed that God is intimately in touch with history – who ‘had made the world, and who had called Israel to be His people; that this one God had promised to be with his people and guide them to their destiny, their new exodus; that his presence, guidance and ultimately salvation were symbolized, brought into reality, in and through the Temple, Torah, Wisdom and Spirit.’ Wright would argue that Jesus also believed that the Kingdom of God and the return of YHWH to Zion were coming true in and through himself. He enacted this theology in terms of his own vocation, life, healings and teaching ministry as seen in the temple cleansing, subversive parables, fellowship meals and others. As the ‘son of God’, he would ‘do and be, for Israel and the world, that which according to scripture only YHWH himself could do and be.’ Therefore, the doctrine of Incarnation is not the Church’s deification of a human person, but the Church’s attempts to articulate in philosophical terms the portrait of Jesus as depicted even in the Synoptic Gospels. Why should we doubt the historicity of the Gospels simply because they were written with theological intent since the Jewish worldview presupposed the acts of God within history? Closer to the modern age, the historical accounts of the Holocaust were mostly documented by Jewish scholars who had a singular, ideological passion to expose past Nazi atrocities. But the accuracy of their accounts was not in doubt. They took the utmost care to preserve history precisely because they wanted others to also believe. The same can be said of the Gospels.
Implications on Mission in Malaysia
One of the inevitable consequences of pluralism on mission would be the proposal for a more ‘truth-seeking’ mode of interfaith dialogue as a substitute for evangelism. Generally some evangelical leaders in Malaysia have an aversion towards interfaith dialogue because it seems to imply that the gospel is co-equal with other religions. Recently, ‘dakwah’ activities were conducted in campuses under the guise of dialogues without ‘level playing field’. An elder once shared how Christian representatives were usually ill-equipped to commend the gospel in an informed, tactful and winsome manner. Therefore we tend to shun away from such invitations even though the Prime Minister Datuk Seri Abdullah Badawi explicitly called for interfaith dialogues to promote social harmony at a World Council of Churches conference.
Nevertheless, there is urgent need for evangelical Christians to shun ‘arrogant dogmatism’ by learning to engage constructively with other faiths without losing a critical edge. Interfaith dialogue is one avenue for the church to understand other faiths and emerge from isolated comfort zones. According to missiologist David Bosch, dialogue and evangelism should not be seen as mutually exclusive. He quoted a statement from the San Antonio CWME Meeting as follows, “We affirm that witness does not preclude dialogue but invites it, and that dialogue does not preclude witness but extends and deepens it”. Although the purpose of dialogue would have been fulfilled if it only promotes mutual understanding, there is a sense of fair play in ‘interfaith forums’ that continue to draw crowds who otherwise would not have stepped into a one-sided evangelistic meeting.
There is also widespread confusion of associating ‘narrow-mindedness’ with holding a particular view with strong conviction. Gregory Boyd clarified the difference when he wrote, “Narrow-mindedness does not attach to what you believe, but how you believe it. If I refused to consider any perspective, any religious book, and any philosophy which disagreed with my own, that would be narrow-minded. But just because I hold to a belief that disagrees with other perspectives, other religious books and other philosophies doesn’t itself make me narrow.”
In the Malaysian context, we need to get beyond a confrontational mode of dialogue as ‘debate’. While there is certainly legitimacy for worldview encounter and persuasion, there are also other themes which deserve our attention like dialogues in promoting social harmony, joint action in overcoming racism, AIDS and poverty. The church has yet to draw from the rich resources for social programs that spring from a common theistic outlook with Islam, the national religion, as opposed to naturalistic secularism. At the same time, dialogue-in-life should permeate the rank and file in the office, classroom, cafeteria, factory and ‘rumah terbuka’ during festivities. That is, Christians should abandon a ‘ghetto’ mentality and actively pursue to be with the other, collaborate with them in action and discourse to understand and be understood.
While there has been dialogue-in-print characterized by tit-for-tat polemics, perhaps we could move beyond ‘entrenched impasse’ with joint publications that feature respected leaders from different communities. Instead of formal dialogues on the stage, the added personal dimension of participants staying, praying and living together would add non-intellectual dimensions to live-in encounters. In all such endeavors, Newbigin described interfaith dialogue as follows, “The Christian who participates in dialogue with people of other faiths will do so on the basis of his faith. The presuppositions which shape his thinking will be those which he draws from the Gospel… He cannot agree that the position of final authority can be taken by anything other than the Gospel – either by a philosophical system, or by mystical experience, or by the requirements of national and global unity. Confessing Christ – incarnate, crucified and risen – as true light and true life, he cannot accept any other’s alleged authority as having right of way over this.” By doing so, we present an alternative model of dialogue more faithful to Scripture than religious pluralism.
Conclusion
In summary, mission-as-dialogue would not be effective if the Malaysian grassroots were not trained to develop a Christian mind or basic knowledge about what and why they believed. Not only that leaders have a responsibility not to isolate the church from what others believe or misrepresent their views with caricatures. Indeed, censorship is becoming meaningless in the age of digital information. The church needs to ‘inoculate’ people by accurately teaching the religious views of others also. It may even be an invitation to an ustaz to give a talk at an adult Bible study or a visit to the local temple. However, we must decide to embrace unpopularity or persecution, if need be, as the cost of following Christ “who never once tailored his teaching to what he judged the popular reception would be”.
Closer contact with non-Christians would provide the stimulus for the Malaysian church to continually rethink and reform. Engaging religious pluralism and multiple religious claims would serve as a deterrent against complacency and ‘spiritual smugness’ as we reflect theologically in an Asian context. Although we do not have the space to interact with ideas like Rahner’s “anonymous Christians”, it may be worth noting that much debate centers on trans-historical salvation - “Will they go to heaven or hell?” Perhaps in our context, there is an urgent need to demonstrate how the gospel speaks relevantly to here-and-now issues like the politicization of religion, AIDS prevention, good governance and economic equity also. If we fail the ‘ethical criterion’, our best intellectual arguments may resemble what Os Guinness described as “privately engaging, publicly irrelevant”.
Bibliography
1. Bosch, D. Transforming Mission: Paradigm Shifts in Theology of Mission, New York: Orbis, 1992
2. Carson, D.A. The Gagging of God: Christianity Confronts Pluralism, Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1996
3. Fernando, A. The Supremacy of Christ, Illinois: Crossway, 1995
4. Goldsmith, M. What About Other Faiths? Is Jesus Christ the only way to God? London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1989
5. Hick, J. An Interpretation of Religion, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989
6. Hick, J. God Has Many Names, London: The Macmillan Press, 1980
7. Hick, J. The Fifth Dimension: An Exploration of the Spiritual Realm, Oxford: Oneworld Publications, 1999
8. Netland, H. Encountering Religious Pluralism: The Challenge to Christian Faith & Mission, Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2001.
9. Newbigin, L. The Gospel in a Pluralistic Society, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans Publishing, 1989.
10. Ng, K. W. Perfect Revelation & the Finality of Christ, Petaling Jaya: Pustaka SUFES, 1995.
11. Okholm, D. L. and Philips, T. R. general editors. Four Views on Salvation in a Pluralistic World, Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1995.
12. Wright, N. T., Jesus and the Victory of God. London: SPCK, 2001.
Introduction
Malaysia takes pride in being a culturally diverse and multiethnic nation which has been spared from violent conflicts that have beset neighboring Indonesia and Thailand. Like the local delicacy called ‘rojak’, our religious context is a potent mix of various ingredients that rivals that of Athens during the days of Apostle Paul. However it does not mean that our national psyche is completely free from dark memories of May 13 riots and uneasy tensions about our status as an ‘Islamic state’. On the contrary, these repressed memories have a habit of returning to haunt us whenever ‘sensitive’ religious issues enter public discourse. On such rare occasions, citizens are dutifully reminded, under threat of the Internal Security Act, how easy it is for the religious ‘rojak’ to degenerate into something less tasteful.
What Is Pluralism?
In such a delicate scenario, the Malaysian church needs to carefully consider how to relate with other religious communities and consequently, her task of mission. While we are obviously living in a world with diverse religious perspectives, religious pluralism is a particular view that these religions are equally valid in terms of access to truth and effectiveness in salvation. This view is illustrated beautifully by the ancient story of ten blind men trying to describe an elephant after touching different parts of its body for the first time. As they announced their conflicting discoveries, a heated argument ensued. Awakened by the quarrel, the king corrected all of them by saying, “The elephant is a huge animal and each of you touched a part. In order to know the whole truth about what the elephant looks like, you must put together all the parts!” The moral of the story is that no religion has privileged access to the whole truth. Each religious view is a partial experience of the same Reality from its own culturally-conditioned perspective.
This view is popular because tolerance towards all religions is needed to ward off violent fundamentalism in the wake of post-911 ‘war on terror’. However, pluralism is not as religiously ‘neutral’ as it may appear to be. At face-value, it has been historically the view of particular religions like Buddhism, Hinduism and Bahai faith. In contrast, Islam and Christianity historically held to the finality of divine revelation in Koran and Jesus respectively. More recently, though, John Hick is a prominent Christian theologian who called for a Copernican revolution in which the universe of faiths are seen as centered on God, instead of Christ, whose Light is reflected in all major world religions. He unpacked the pluralistic hypothesis that “the great world faiths embody different perceptions and concepts of, and correspondingly different responses to, the Real from within the major variant ways of being human, and that within each of them the transformation of human existence from self-centeredness to Reality-centredness is taking place. These traditions are accordingly to be regarded as alternative soteriological ‘spaces’ within, or ‘ways’ along which, men and women can find salvation/liberation /ultimate fulfillment.”
Christian apologists have rightly pointed out that popular-level pluralism is self-defeating since the pluralist has unwittingly assumed a ‘privileged position’ even while he denied others the same access. Isn’t it ironic that the pluralist took on the role of the all-seeing king after admitting his own limited perception as one of the blind men? However, Hick would insist that pluralist hypothesis is not an a priori presupposition from cosmic standpoint, but a hypothesis built up inductively from ground level. Starting from our own tradition, we observe that our religious experience is not purely projection but also a response to transcendent divine reality. The demonstrable fruits of love, joy, patience and peace can be detected in some degree in adherents of other faiths. Ideological pluralism is therefore the best hypothesis to account for the fact of plurality. After all, it is no longer politically correct to claim to have the truth while contrary views are wrong or to claim that one is saved while others end up in final condemnation.
Furthermore, the doctrine of Incarnation had been singled out as the cause of anti-Semitism, exploitation of Third World and enmity against other faiths. Here, we see in effect the ‘ethical criterion’ for evaluating religions on the basis of ‘compassionate’ social implications. We can see the vision of pluralism on the shape of Christian mission embodied in Hick’s own personal testimony. From an insular exclusivist who had little contact with non-Christians, he now had a more embracing attitude towards other faiths. Actively involved in “All Faiths for One Race” (AFFOR) in Birmingham, he engaged others in interfaith dialogues, revised an exclusively Christian syllabus for religious education to a multi-faith curriculum and opposed violence from neo-Nazi National Front. Unsurprisingly, evangelism is nowhere on the radar.
The Case for Truth
Could religious pluralism really deliver its promises of peace and tolerance? On closer inspection, it could only do so if adherents of all faiths relativize their conflicting truth claims in favor of pluralism. In the end, the only way humanity could attain unity is when they exclusively agree on a ‘faith’ different than their own. In response, Newbigin wrote that it is precisely because we want unity that we seek the truth by which alone humankind can become one. He went on to add, “That truth is not a doctrine or a worldview or even a religious experience; it is certainly not to be found by repeating abstract nouns like justice and love; it is the man Jesus Christ in whom God was reconciling the world. The Truth is personal, concrete, historical.”
Peace could be attained not at the cost of truth or dismissal of genuine differences. In fact, tolerance itself implies disagreement. We do not ‘tolerate’ people who agree with us. They are on our side! If every religious person is a pluralist, what room is there for tolerance? Instead, genuine tolerance recognizes conflicting truth claims and does not press for artificial constructs to find some minimal denominator. Despite our differences, we respect and honor one another as persons who have the God-given right to believe, practice and propagate our faiths. We should avoid what Alister McGrath called ‘a repressive enforcement of a predetermined notion of what something or someone should be, rather than a willingness to accept them for what they actually are’.
Although it claims to be inductive, pluralism did not satisfactorily address the ‘problem of conflicting truth claims’. Hick discussed it in ‘Interpretation of Religions’ and categorized the problem into ‘historical truth claims’ and ‘trans-historical truth claims’. There was not much of an “attempt to explicate the different concepts of God in all religions and come up with a common denominator that satisfies the essence of all.” Is God a personal-infinite Being or an impersonal Force? Is Satanism a valid expression of encounter with the ineffable Real? Hick seemed to dismiss them as irrelevant to ‘soteriology’ or reinterpret them as true myths - “different conceptions and perceptions of, and responses to, the Real from within the different cultural ways of being human”. The irony, however, is its implication that all religions are mistaken in supposing their basic beliefs are true. Harold Netland wrote, “To be sure, the pluralist is quick to add that, despite their mistaken beliefs, they are all in some way responding to the religious ultimate; it is just that they are not doing so in the manner in which the believers themselves think they are. But it is hard to see why this way of rejecting their beliefs as mistaken is any more tolerant than the exclusivist or inclusivist.”
The fact of religious plurality, existent even in the days of Christ, does not necessarily argue for religious pluralism as an ideology. Surely, there are equally viable alternatives for explaining the phenomenon of ethical and spiritual non-Christians around us. We should not be surprised since they are also in possession of the moral law written in their conscience and with access to general revelation through nature. Calvin’s theology certainly allows for non-Christians to be equipped with an innate ‘sense of the divine’, which provide them with the motivation to pursue the transcendent yet all have suppressed the knowledge of God. Missionary Martin Goldsmith wrote, “Sin and the remnant image of God interact both in cultures and religions. We dare not dismiss them as merely demonic, evil or totally false.” Therefore, the insistence that pluralist hypothesis is built inductively (‘by personal experience and observation’) without a priori category seems to lack the virtue of critical self-examination.
Despite its veneer of tolerance, pluralism has an inherent bias against the Christian doctrine of Incarnation or divine inspiration of Koran. Religious leaders like Muhammad, Gandhi, Confucius and Buddha never claimed to be God or Allah. However, the historicity of Jesus’ claims posed a serious challenge to the pluralist hypothesis. Hick appeared to be rather condescending when he implied that only fundamentalists still believed that the historical Jesus had an awareness of His deity. Hastily, he claimed that ‘modern New Testament scholarship’ had all but concluded that the high Christology found in John’s Gospel could not be seen as anything less than blasphemy by a pious first-century Jew. The New Testament documents are deemed as ‘documents of faith’ containing ‘both flashbacks to the human Jesus of history and anticipations of the divine Christ of later official church doctrine.’
Although this is not the place for an extended discussion, we may benefit from a summary of N.T. Wright’s research on the historical Jesus. It would indeed be absurd to suppose that Jesus understood himself to be ‘the Real’- an abstract, unknowable Deity forever isolated in the noumenal realms. However, if we locate Jesus within first-century Judaism, the Jews believed that God is intimately in touch with history – who ‘had made the world, and who had called Israel to be His people; that this one God had promised to be with his people and guide them to their destiny, their new exodus; that his presence, guidance and ultimately salvation were symbolized, brought into reality, in and through the Temple, Torah, Wisdom and Spirit.’ Wright would argue that Jesus also believed that the Kingdom of God and the return of YHWH to Zion were coming true in and through himself. He enacted this theology in terms of his own vocation, life, healings and teaching ministry as seen in the temple cleansing, subversive parables, fellowship meals and others. As the ‘son of God’, he would ‘do and be, for Israel and the world, that which according to scripture only YHWH himself could do and be.’ Therefore, the doctrine of Incarnation is not the Church’s deification of a human person, but the Church’s attempts to articulate in philosophical terms the portrait of Jesus as depicted even in the Synoptic Gospels. Why should we doubt the historicity of the Gospels simply because they were written with theological intent since the Jewish worldview presupposed the acts of God within history? Closer to the modern age, the historical accounts of the Holocaust were mostly documented by Jewish scholars who had a singular, ideological passion to expose past Nazi atrocities. But the accuracy of their accounts was not in doubt. They took the utmost care to preserve history precisely because they wanted others to also believe. The same can be said of the Gospels.
Implications on Mission in Malaysia
One of the inevitable consequences of pluralism on mission would be the proposal for a more ‘truth-seeking’ mode of interfaith dialogue as a substitute for evangelism. Generally some evangelical leaders in Malaysia have an aversion towards interfaith dialogue because it seems to imply that the gospel is co-equal with other religions. Recently, ‘dakwah’ activities were conducted in campuses under the guise of dialogues without ‘level playing field’. An elder once shared how Christian representatives were usually ill-equipped to commend the gospel in an informed, tactful and winsome manner. Therefore we tend to shun away from such invitations even though the Prime Minister Datuk Seri Abdullah Badawi explicitly called for interfaith dialogues to promote social harmony at a World Council of Churches conference.
Nevertheless, there is urgent need for evangelical Christians to shun ‘arrogant dogmatism’ by learning to engage constructively with other faiths without losing a critical edge. Interfaith dialogue is one avenue for the church to understand other faiths and emerge from isolated comfort zones. According to missiologist David Bosch, dialogue and evangelism should not be seen as mutually exclusive. He quoted a statement from the San Antonio CWME Meeting as follows, “We affirm that witness does not preclude dialogue but invites it, and that dialogue does not preclude witness but extends and deepens it”. Although the purpose of dialogue would have been fulfilled if it only promotes mutual understanding, there is a sense of fair play in ‘interfaith forums’ that continue to draw crowds who otherwise would not have stepped into a one-sided evangelistic meeting.
There is also widespread confusion of associating ‘narrow-mindedness’ with holding a particular view with strong conviction. Gregory Boyd clarified the difference when he wrote, “Narrow-mindedness does not attach to what you believe, but how you believe it. If I refused to consider any perspective, any religious book, and any philosophy which disagreed with my own, that would be narrow-minded. But just because I hold to a belief that disagrees with other perspectives, other religious books and other philosophies doesn’t itself make me narrow.”
In the Malaysian context, we need to get beyond a confrontational mode of dialogue as ‘debate’. While there is certainly legitimacy for worldview encounter and persuasion, there are also other themes which deserve our attention like dialogues in promoting social harmony, joint action in overcoming racism, AIDS and poverty. The church has yet to draw from the rich resources for social programs that spring from a common theistic outlook with Islam, the national religion, as opposed to naturalistic secularism. At the same time, dialogue-in-life should permeate the rank and file in the office, classroom, cafeteria, factory and ‘rumah terbuka’ during festivities. That is, Christians should abandon a ‘ghetto’ mentality and actively pursue to be with the other, collaborate with them in action and discourse to understand and be understood.
While there has been dialogue-in-print characterized by tit-for-tat polemics, perhaps we could move beyond ‘entrenched impasse’ with joint publications that feature respected leaders from different communities. Instead of formal dialogues on the stage, the added personal dimension of participants staying, praying and living together would add non-intellectual dimensions to live-in encounters. In all such endeavors, Newbigin described interfaith dialogue as follows, “The Christian who participates in dialogue with people of other faiths will do so on the basis of his faith. The presuppositions which shape his thinking will be those which he draws from the Gospel… He cannot agree that the position of final authority can be taken by anything other than the Gospel – either by a philosophical system, or by mystical experience, or by the requirements of national and global unity. Confessing Christ – incarnate, crucified and risen – as true light and true life, he cannot accept any other’s alleged authority as having right of way over this.” By doing so, we present an alternative model of dialogue more faithful to Scripture than religious pluralism.
Conclusion
In summary, mission-as-dialogue would not be effective if the Malaysian grassroots were not trained to develop a Christian mind or basic knowledge about what and why they believed. Not only that leaders have a responsibility not to isolate the church from what others believe or misrepresent their views with caricatures. Indeed, censorship is becoming meaningless in the age of digital information. The church needs to ‘inoculate’ people by accurately teaching the religious views of others also. It may even be an invitation to an ustaz to give a talk at an adult Bible study or a visit to the local temple. However, we must decide to embrace unpopularity or persecution, if need be, as the cost of following Christ “who never once tailored his teaching to what he judged the popular reception would be”.
Closer contact with non-Christians would provide the stimulus for the Malaysian church to continually rethink and reform. Engaging religious pluralism and multiple religious claims would serve as a deterrent against complacency and ‘spiritual smugness’ as we reflect theologically in an Asian context. Although we do not have the space to interact with ideas like Rahner’s “anonymous Christians”, it may be worth noting that much debate centers on trans-historical salvation - “Will they go to heaven or hell?” Perhaps in our context, there is an urgent need to demonstrate how the gospel speaks relevantly to here-and-now issues like the politicization of religion, AIDS prevention, good governance and economic equity also. If we fail the ‘ethical criterion’, our best intellectual arguments may resemble what Os Guinness described as “privately engaging, publicly irrelevant”.
Bibliography
1. Bosch, D. Transforming Mission: Paradigm Shifts in Theology of Mission, New York: Orbis, 1992
2. Carson, D.A. The Gagging of God: Christianity Confronts Pluralism, Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1996
3. Fernando, A. The Supremacy of Christ, Illinois: Crossway, 1995
4. Goldsmith, M. What About Other Faiths? Is Jesus Christ the only way to God? London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1989
5. Hick, J. An Interpretation of Religion, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989
6. Hick, J. God Has Many Names, London: The Macmillan Press, 1980
7. Hick, J. The Fifth Dimension: An Exploration of the Spiritual Realm, Oxford: Oneworld Publications, 1999
8. Netland, H. Encountering Religious Pluralism: The Challenge to Christian Faith & Mission, Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2001.
9. Newbigin, L. The Gospel in a Pluralistic Society, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans Publishing, 1989.
10. Ng, K. W. Perfect Revelation & the Finality of Christ, Petaling Jaya: Pustaka SUFES, 1995.
11. Okholm, D. L. and Philips, T. R. general editors. Four Views on Salvation in a Pluralistic World, Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1995.
12. Wright, N. T., Jesus and the Victory of God. London: SPCK, 2001.
Comments
was this an assignment? you're at MBS, right?
article.
I'll send the final proof to you before publishing it. Just a question,
how would you like to be introduced?
When the next issue of Berita CCM is out, I'll be sure to mail a copy to you.
Many thanks, bro. And hope you have a good break from work