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Revelation, Salvation, the Uniqueness of Christ and Other Religions

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2008

Kenneth Surin
Kenneth Surin
Affiliation:
The College of St Paul and St Mary, Cheltenham
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Extract

Karl Barth is the foremost modern exponent of the view that Jesus Christ is the decisive, unrepeatable and unsurpassable ‘locus’ of divine revelation, and that consequently it is only by following the way of Christ that we can possibly hope for the ultimate salvation of mankind. This view of Barth's finds expression in the following passage:

Type
Articles
Information
Religious Studies , Volume 19 , Issue 3 , September 1983 , pp. 323 - 343
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1983

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References

page 323 note 1 ‘The Revelation of God as the Abolition of Religion’, in Hick, J. and Hebblethwaite, B. (eds), Christianity and Other Religions (London: Collins/Fount Paperbacks, 1980), p. 40.Google Scholar Henceforth this collection of essays will be referred to as COR. The italics are mine.

page 323 note 2 Offenbarung, Kirche, Theologie, p. 18. This passage is quoted from Mackintosh, H. R., Types of Modern Theology (London: Collins/Fontana, 1964), p. 264.Google Scholar

page 323 note 3 This is the gist of the argument advanced in Hick, John, ‘Whatever Path Men Choose is Mine’, COR, pp. 171–90. Cf.Google Scholar also his ‘Jesus and the World Religions’, in Hick, (ed.), The Myth of God Incarnate (London: SCM Press, 1977), pp. 167–85. Henceforth this collection of essays will be referred to as MGI.Google Scholar

page 324 note 1 For Rahner's, notion, cf. his Theological Investigations, V (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1966), ch. 6.Google Scholar Cf. also Theological Investigations, XIV (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1976), ch. 17.Google Scholar

page 324 note 2 ‘The World Religions in God's Plan of Salvation’, in Neuner, J. (ed.), Christian Revelation and World Religions (London: Burns & Oates, 1967), pp. 55–6.Google Scholar Küng's suggestion is hardly – it was anticipated in the second century A.D. by Justin Martyr who, in his Apologia (I, xlvi), argued that those men born before the time of Christ ‘who lived according to reason are Christians, even though they were classed as atheists. For example; among Greeks, Socrates, and Heraclitus; among non-Greeks, Abraham, Ananias, Azarius, and Misael, and Elias, and many others.’ Extract taken from Bettenson, H. (ed. and trans.), The Early Christian Fathers: A Selection from the writings of the Fathers from St. Clement of Rome to St Athanasius (Oxford: University Press, 1969), p. 60.Google Scholar

page 324 note 3 ‘Christianity and the World Religions’, COR, p. 196.Google Scholar I have made a minor stylistic alteration to one of Moltmann's sentences in adapting it for the purposes of this essay.

page 324 note 4 The Reality of God and Other Essays (London: SCM Press, 1967), p. 173.Google Scholar Italics as in original.

page 325 note 1 ‘The Uniqueness of Christ’, in Truth is Two-Eyed (London: SCM Press, 1979), p. 124.Google Scholar Henceforth referred to as TT-E.

page 325 note 2 Hick, John, ‘Whatever Path Men Choose is Mine’, COR, pp. 177–8.Google Scholar

page 326 note 1 ‘Christianity and the World Religions’, COR, p. 202.Google Scholar Moltmann derives the idea of Christianity as a ‘critical catalyst’ from Küng, Hans, On Being a Christian (London: Collins, 1976), pp. 110 ff.Google Scholar

page 326 note 2 For the suggestion that the truths of the different faiths may not be mutually exclusive, but complementary, cf. Hick, John, ‘The Outcome: Dialogue into Truth’, in Hick, (ed.), Truth and Dialogue: The Relationship between World Religions (London: Sheldon Press, 1974), pp. 152–3.Google Scholar Henceforth this collection of essays will be referred to as TD. The idea of seeing Islam and Christianity as two complementary religious traditions vis-à-vis the notion of the Incarnation is discussed in Cragg, Kenneth, ‘Islam and Incarnation’, TD, pp. 126–39.Google Scholar

page 326 note 3 The Sense of the Presence of God: Gifford Lectures 1961–2 (Oxford: University Press, 1962), p. 199.Google Scholar

page 326 note 4 Ibid. p. 200.

page 327 note 1 Cf. ‘World Religions and Christian Theology’, in Ernst's collection of essays, Multiple Echo: Explorations in Theology (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1979), pp. 28–40.Google Scholar

page 328 note 1 In COR, pp. 36–7.Google Scholar

page 328 note 2 This, of course, is the ‘positivism of revelation’ that Bonhoeffer complained about. Cf. his Letters and Papers from Prison (New York: Macmillan, enlarged ed, 1972), pp. 286, 328.Google Scholar A valuable discussion of Bonhoeffer's criticism of Barth's ‘positivism of revelation’ is to be found in Regin Prenter, ‘Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Barth's, Karl ‘Positivism of Revelation’, in Smith, R. Gregor (ed.), World Come of Age (London: Collins, 1967), pp. 93–130.Google Scholar

page 329 note 1 Prenter, , op. cit. p. 98.Google Scholar Prenter is here interpreting Bonhoeffer's criticism of Barth's failure to exclude ‘any unrelatedness between revelation and the world’.

page 329 note 2 MGI, p. 82.Google Scholar

page 330 note 1 MacKinnon, Donald, ‘Subjective and Objective Conceptions of Atonement’, in Healey, F. G. (ed.), Prospect for Theology: Essays in Honour of H. H. Farmer (London: Nisbet, 1966), p. 181.Google Scholar Our ‘model’ is a ‘construction’ – indeed it cannot be anything else. However, as a ‘model’ it purports to depict what we crudely call ‘reality’ (in this case the reality of the salvation that God brings to mankind); and it is also validated (or invalidated) by this ‘reality’.

page 330 note 2 This ‘anthropological concentration’ is intended purely as a heuristic device, designed to ascertain, from an anthropological standpoint, the viability of the soteriologies of the various world religions. It does not in any way imply that the theology of God’s saving activity has to be deduced from an anthropological statement of man's needs – to do this would be to make theology subservient to anthropology.

page 331 note 1 Thus Sebastian Moore defines sin, in part, as the expression of fear in the form of hate. Cf. The Crucified is No Stranger (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1977), p. 12.Google Scholar

page 332 note 1 The Wound of Knowledge (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1979), p. 10.Google Scholar Williams, of course, makes this point in connection with a specifically Christian soteriology.

page 333 note 1 Thus one such critic, Geoffrey Lampe, argues that God's identification with man in and through Jesus Christ is better construed in an inspirational, and not an ontological sense. Cf. his Bampton Lectures, God as Spirit (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977).Google Scholar

page 333 note 2 Cf., e.g., the various essays in MGI.

page 333 note 3 This problem is traditionally referred to as ‘the soteriological test’ of christology. John Knox provides what is perhaps the most succinct formulation of this problem: ‘How could Christ have saved us if he were not a human being like us? How could a human being like us have saved us?’ Cf. The Humanity and Divinity of Christ (Cambridge: University Press, 1967), p. 52.Google Scholar Cf. also Moule, Charles, ‘Three Points of Conflict in the Christological Debate’, IM, pp. 139–40.Google Scholar

page 333 note 4 There is no necessary connection between exemplarism and reductionist christologies. Thus it seems possible to adopt a reductionist christology and to be able still to assert that Christ is more than just an exemplary figure – as Peter Baelz rightly points out, it is possible to say that the man Jesus is the supreme and unsurpassable instance of the divine self-giving, which would commit us to a reductionist christology but seemingly not to exemplarism.

page 334 note 1 God as Spirit, p. 116.Google Scholar

page 334 note 2 I would be doing Lampe a grave injustice if in raising this objection I imputed to him the belief that grace is an impersonal and mechanical force which ‘invades’ human beings. Lampe explicitly disowns this conception of grace. However, defining grace as the personal presence of God leaves him with the problem of accounting for those cases in which divine grace appears to be ineffective. Can we ever really say that the personal presence of God is not truly salvific? Lampe is mindful of this problem, and in addressing himself to it he says: ‘Grace cannot be without effect. In the short term, at least, its effect may be two-edged, according as it is rejected or embraced by faith: the retention or the remission of sin. In the last resort, however, the Christian hope…must be that grace prevails, by the power of attraction’ (‘The Saving Work of Christ’, Christ for Us Today (London: SCM Press, 1968), p. 149).Google Scholar But this only raises, but does not answer, the question: What is it that enables men to succumb to this power of attraction? And the answer, surely, is: salvation! So, again, it appears that the question of salvation is begged. I have discussed this and other related problems in my forthcoming article ‘Divine Grace and the Problem of Evil’.

page 335 note 2 It is a corollary of our argument that the ‘demythologized’ (i.e. non-incarnational) christology of the authors of The Myth of God Incarnate is not, and indeed cannot be, the basis of a soteriology that describes a genuine salvation.

page 336 note 1 Unless, of course, soteriology is, from the outset, totally saturated with Christocentric elements supplied by the doctrine of revelation. The stricture that Christocentrism must ultimately rest entirely on the doctrine of revelation is of course quite congenial to Barth and his school.

page 337 note 1 For our purposes the ‘moderate’ Christocentrist is the theologian who while maintaining that the incarnation of Christ is a unique and unsurpassable revelatory and salvific event, nevertheless allows that a measure of divine truth and salvation can be found in non-Christian faiths.

page 337 note 2 To use a term of Farmer, H. H.. Cf his Revelation and Reason (London: Nisbet, 1954), pp. 195–6.Google Scholar

page 337 note 3 ‘Evil and Incarnation’, IM, p. 81.Google Scholar

page 338 note 1 Thus John Robinson says: ‘Christos, the Christ figure, can stand also for the broader notion of the “visibility of the invisible”, the mystery of theos, of the ultimate reality of God, or Brahman, made manifest, embodied in history’. Cf. TT-E, p. 42.Google Scholar

page 339 note 1 Since syncretism lies at the heart of Hinduism's ‘openness’ to other faiths, any obstacles to the formulation of a coherent syncretism will obviously reduce the likelihood of a successful reconciliation between the avatar doctrine and the Christian doctrine of the Incarnation.

page 340 note 1 Cf. TT-E, p. 44Google Scholar, where Robinson borrows these images from Newbegin, Lesslie, The Finality of Christ (London: SCM Press, 1969), pp. 65 ff.Google Scholar

page 340 note 2 In fairness, it should be pointed out that there is only one avatar in the Bhagavad Gita (namely Krishna). However, the Mahabharata (the larger epic of which the Gita is a part) contains ten avatars, four of which are animal incarnations. After the Mahabharata, the principle of repetition enables the number of incarnations to increase, so that by the time of the Bhagavata Purana (ninth century A.D.) there are twenty-two avatars, including the Buddha. It should perhaps also be mentioned that although the avatar doctrine is present in the Gita, the word ‘avatar’ (avatara, ‘coming-down’) is not actually to be found in the Gita, though it occurs in other sections of the Mahabharata.

page 341 note 1 The Message of Christ (Bombay, 1940).Google Scholar Quoted in TT-E, p. 50.Google Scholar

page 341 note 2 Essays on the Gita (Pondicherry: Birth Centenary Library XIII, 1970), p. 12.Google Scholar Quoted in TT-E, p. 50.Google Scholar

page 341 note 3 Works, I (Calcutta: Mayavatis Memorial Edition, 1955–1962), 328.Google Scholar Quoted in TT-E, p. 50.Google Scholar

page 341 note 4 ‘Fragments of a Confession’, in The Philosophy of Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, ed. by Schlipp, P. A. (Cambridge: University Press, 1952), p. 79.Google Scholar Quoted in TT-E, pp. 50–1.Google Scholar

page 342 note 1 ‘The Misunderstanding of Hinduism’, TD, p. 106.Google Scholar