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Newbigin: Exclusivist, Inclusivist, Pluralist
It has become customary to classify views on the relation of Christianity to the world religions as either pluralist, exclusivist, or inclusivist … [My] position is exclusivist in the sense that it affirms the unique truth of the revelation in Jesus Christ, but it is not exclusivist in the sense of denying the possibility of the salvation of the non-Christian. It is inclusivist in the sense that it refuses to limit the saving grace of God to the members of the Christian church, but it rejects the inclusivism which regards the non-Christian religions as vehicles of salvation. It is pluralist in the sense of acknowledging the gracious work of God in the lives of all human beings, but it rejects a pluralism which denies the uniqueness and decisiveness of what God has done in Jesus Christ.
—Lesslie Newbigin,
The Gospel in a Pluralist Society, 182-83
Comments
(1) Gavin D'Costa, The Meeting of Religions and the Trinity (2000). D'Costa deconstructs the typology, demonstrating, on the one hand, that it forces "diverse materials into easily controllable locations," and, on the other hand, that the dividing lines between the three types is "thin and blurred". Pluralists, for example, "present themselves as honest brokers"; in fact, however, they are (usually Kantian) exclusivists, "the category type which they constantly criticize."
(2) Michael Barnes, Theology and the Dialogue of Religions (2002). Barnes' major objection to the "paradigm approach" is that "it tends to serve the interests of the pluralist agenda only" - when, that is, it isn't just hopelessly totalising and inhibitive of real dialogue, of listening and hospitality.
(3) Rowan Williams, "The Finality of Christ" in On Christian Theology (2000). Williams thinks that the "text book options" over-easily deal with real inter-faith perplexities and inhibit recognising "the real otherness of other faiths."
The discussion seems to be moving on.
I couldn't sign my name to Newbigin's statement. Or to this statement :)
That's what I mean about the unworkability of the paradigm! But forgetting the typology, I have some sympathy with what Anonymous says. After all, if we allow that the Spirit may be active in people's lives, and these are the lives of real people, people who may, for example, be Muslims, then we cannot suddenly cordon off their religious practices and say the Spirit is not active in this part of their lives. After all, religions are not just, not mainly, belief systems, they are "forms of life" (Wittgenstein).
However, this is not to say that (in this case) Islam qua Islam mediates God - but anymore than Christianity qua Christianity mediates God! And here I am being a good Barthian, am I not? (Indeed a theologian friend of mine involved in "formal" inter-faith dialogue told me that he once met one of Barth's grandchildren, who told him that he (she?) thought his (her) grandfather would surprise a lot of people on this subject were he still alive today.)
But I would go even further. Whatever a person's form of life, there the Spirit, who is free, may blow. Of course, eo ipso, the Spirit will not be blowing in, say, a Nazi form of life, but may not atheists be "saints"? Why privilege "religious" forms of life? As the Taizé chant puts it, "Ubi caritas et amor, Deus ibi est."
What I'm saying is that God is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and the solus Christus stands, but then God can be "known" where God is not named, nor does simply naming God "Jesus" guarantee his presence. The Religious Right: I rest my case!
While they are most often clear in the negative implications this has for Christianity qua religion, they are less enthusiastic for the obvious positive implications this has for the status of other "religions" vis a vis "Christianity". Or other arenas of life as you, Kim, have pointed out.
That said, God promises that where two or three are gathered in the name of Christ, but this only reinforces the connection between Word and Spirit. The Spirit of God, we can say, is present along with the Word of God. If the Spirit is present elsewhere, we certainly cannot know this is the case. So even if the Spirit is at work in Islam or Mormonism or in the social club next door, we cannot state that such a presence is a matter of fact.
Anonymous is wrong for the opposite reason. Because Kim, following Barth, makes it clear that we cannot identify God with any particular religion, Anonymous seems to think this entails the notion that "religion is ... totally bereft of God." But this is just the inverse of saying that a particular religion is the locus of God's Spirit. We cannot say a definitive Yes and a definitive No; we can only say Yes and No.
The problem with pluralism is that it attempts to make a positive affirmation that God's Spirit is definitively present in all religious forms. The problem with exclusivism is that it says God's Spirit is present only in this form. We need to think dialectically about such matters.