World Religions Bibliography
In the past hundred and fifty years,
the world has moved from Eurocentric imperialism to a democratization of
cultures with an accepted plurality of religions. While Christians have always had to reckon with other faiths, European colonialism left an indelible mark on religious
life as the world entered into a new phase of globalization.
Throughout this
process, Western religious academics have attempted to rationalize the cultural dominance
by Social Darwinist theories. Post-colonialism, they attempted to counteract their
ethnocentrism by adopting pluralism, which is also based on the premise that
religions come from cultural evolution. Both lead to a turning away for the
truth claims of the salvific uniqueness of Jesus Christ for all nations.
However,
the Majority World cultures have also been maturing beyond colonialism. Those
cultures that have been released from culturally oppressive bonds and have been
equipped with the Scripture in their own languages, have been awakened by waves
of revivals, creating unparalleled expansions of indigenous forms of faith that
bring as many questions as answers to missiology.
Because of both influences of pluralism and World
Christianity can now be found in modern missiology, Christians must set their
presuppositions on biblical realities when interacting with World Religions. The
focus books of this bibliographic essay are predominantly of two natures. The
first, are collections of essays on the various topics, primarily focused on
theory of religions such as Christianity
and the Religions, Four Views of
Salvation, and The Unique Christ.
The second type are monographs on World Religions and issues of World
Christianity such as: Whose Religion is
Christianity?, and the various dissertations. This bibliographic essay attempts
to give a literary review highlighting the themes of:
1) the conservative evangelical
response to Social Darwinist theories in soteriology;
2) issues revealed by
studies on World Christianity and World Religions that confirm biblical views
of salvation;
3) and, the implications for cross-cultural witnessing among
World Regions.
World Christianity &
Soteriological Pluralism
In Dissonant Voices, Netland approaches the issues of religious
pluralism as, primarily, an epistemological issue of conflicting truth claims. Netland,
writes a particularist response to John Hick’s writings promoting religious
pluralism, specially his “Copernican revolution,” which took Christ out of the
center of salvation, making him equal to all other “saviors.”[1] While acknowledging
the contributions of John Hick’s work in epistemology, Netland disagrees with
his conclusion that God extends salvation to those who place their faith on
anyone other than Jesus Christ. He points out this problem of belief: if Christ is not
the center of the religious universe, how can people know God? Netland is
joined by the writing of Lesslie Newbigin and Christopher Wright concluding
that this model of religions is self-defeating and overly abstract.
Christopher J. H. Wright, an Anglican
theologian, writes in The Unique Christ, “Clearly ‘he’ cannot be identified
or named in terms of any specific deity known within the different world
faiths, for they are only partial responses to theos.”[2] Don N. Howell, Jr. in Christianity
and the Religions agrees, “If theos is everything, it is nothing.
But in the New Testament . . . theos is the term of significance for
God, the Father (pater) of the Lord Jesus Christ.”
So, biblically, Christ must the way of knowing God.
Wright and Netland also agree that Raimundo
Panikkar and Paul Knitter’s pluralism is parasitic. “It Presupposes and feeds
on the very tradition it undermines,” but leaves Christian faith and witness impotent.
Also in The Unique Christ, Kim-Sai Tan, a Korean professor of theology,
acknowledges that pluralists show commendable sensitivity to non-Christian
beliefs, but renounces their use of “myth” to refer to the gospel, pointing out
that, as Christians, they are failing to bring people to salvation, and confuse
Christians and seekers of truth.
This terminology portrays the bible as an equal “myth” to other faiths, pointing
to the evolutionary presupposition that many missiologists have taken in their study
of religions.
This is the case of classic liberalism, as explained
in Okholm and Phillips’s introduction to Four Views of Salvation. Starting
as a form of optimistic inclusivism, Schleiermacher supposed God was,
“salvifically available in some degree in all religions, but the gospel of
Jesus Christ is the fulfillment and the highest manifestation of this universal
religious awareness. That is, Christianity is the all-inclusive and final
religion.”
In other words, in the evolution of religions, Christianity is the pinnacle. James
F. Lewis recounts that at the same time,
the darker side of this thought was revealed in the writing of Edward Burnett
Tylor in his Primitive Cultures. Tylor, like Sigmund Freud, speculated
that the idea of God was developed by the misinterpretation of dreams by
“primitive peoples.”[7] So, secularism used social
evolution to make religion nothing more than bad dreams. Once anthropology
debunked much of the Social Darwinism that was used to justify dominating and
“civilizing the natives,” Lewis explains that liberal thought shifted to the
pluralism of Ernst Troeltsch, who believed that Christianity was powerful and
true, but “only for us.”[8] The logical conclusion was
to believe that Christianity was an illusion, but “our” illusion.
Another influence in the thought of these
pluralists is the Eastern thought, described in Christianity and the
Religions as upaya. This Buddhist idea allows for contradictory
truth claims to coexist as layers of truth which are revealed according to an
almost gnostic, or evolutionary assumption, that Buddha teaches people
according to “their readiness to understand.”
Conservative Christians would have difficulty using classical Western logical with
anyone who believes in non-logical belief systems, which are common outside of
Western thought. And such is the case in dialogue with many pluralists.
Conservatives, can also be misled by this same
such false teaching, or at least be affected by it. According to Christopher
Wright, this happens is when soteriology becomes ecclesiocentric rather than
Christocentric. Charles VanEngen agrees and warns against ecclesiocentism in Christianity
and the Religions, explaining this happens when the institution or
denomination becomes the “ark of salvation.”
This cultural trap views the church’s culture as more advanced, but uses
terminology of “religious maturity” when the issue actually cultural, not
spiritual. Ecclesiocentrism seeks to pluck people from their culture and into a
church with a ethnocentristic worldview. This was the case of many early
missionaries depicted in Sanneh’s work concerning work in Africa and in Gerald
Allen Duncan’s historical review of missions among Australian aborigines in his
dissertation. This kind of approach is
heartbreakingly disastrous to tribal cultures, but has proven to be entirely
ineffective against other World Religions.
Rather, World Christianity has proven the
importance of nationals leading nationals to Christ and establishing an
expression of the church appropriate to their own cultural context. Hyung Jin
Park, in his dissertation, “Journey of the Gospel,” believes that indigenous
Christians will increasingly gain a world audience in telling their people’s
versions of experiencing and embracing Christianity in their own histories,
particularly in places like China where the house churches have successfully
recorded much of their recent history.
The indigenous perspective also improves understanding of the spread of
Christianity, allowing for better analysis of interactions with World Religions.
For example, Park points out that indigenous research better revealed that cultural
elements, such as the existence of government sanctioned religions, like as
those in China, Persia, and India, slowed the growth of Christianity.
World Christianity & World Religions
The Manila Declaration of the World Evangelical Fellowship (WEF) clarifies
that pluralism in theological soteriology is different from sociological
pluralism, which they acknowledge as a positive God ordained reality.
This is the direct opposite with the views of Pluralism based on religious
evolution which puts some cultural and religious expressions as more advanced,
but sees all faiths as equal.
As the West became aware and comfortable with other
cultures, they naturally reassessed how to deal with World Religions in
evangelism. One interesting line of this issue is mentioned by James Lewis in Christianity and the Religions in his
historic view of the Christian response to World Religions. He states that the
earliest apologists such as Justin, Origen, and Tertullian thought that all peoples
were twisted, disallowing them from salvation. Any good that was in any
non-Christian faith was the remnants of God’s good Creation, or perhaps learned
by the Hebrews, and passed down orally to all nations.
Western scholars, even modern conservative writers including
Lewis, down play this explanation as speculative because they offer no proofs.[15]
However, during the development of missiology, the creation studies of those
like Wilhelm Schmidt, who desired to disprove the Darwinist evolutionary
theories, revealed that many “primitive” animistic people remembered their name
for the Most High God, even if they did not worship him. They also shared many
ancient stories with the Hebrews.[16] Later,
with the rise of World Christianity, writers like Sanneh point to the work of
Schmidt and the many peoples have been brought to faith in Christ through Scripture
translations that used the most ancient names for God in their language.[17] Ph.D.
dissertation writers like Park, Nehrbass,
and Duncan agree with this phenomenon in missions among animists, who
all record connections between missionaries using the oldest stories and
ancient names of God to bridge to Bible Storying and Bible translation as
method that leads to indigenous evangelism and discipleship.
Sanneh claims that ancient paganism, rather than
competing with Christianity – as Islam and other World Religions that set
themselves against Christ – actually predisposed some African peoples to
Christ. This is most evident where the people still knew the name and some
attributes of the Most High God, and where the Bible translators used those
names to proclaim the gospel.
Park agrees
with Sanneh and Kwame Bedianko, (who writes in Christianity and the
Religions) that in Africa, Christianity allows for a continuation of the
African worldview.[19]
Christian Missions & World Religions
Missionary practices are dramatically affected by the presuppositions
brought with them. This section will examine some examples of Christian
communication of the Gospel with World Religions from the selected literature. Because
of the rise of World Christianity out of animistic religions, emphasis has been
given to this category of religion that exists throughout the world.
In the case study of animists in The Unique Christ, Joshua K.
Daimoi suggests how to work among animist in his own people group in Papa New
Guinea. He is principle of the Christian Leaders College there. He calls for a the need to “dig-out” the
people’s worldview assumptions through conversation. Then believers should exegete
the scriptures in a way that “relate to our heritage and to proclaim the
uniqueness of Christ to our people.”
This practice is also pointed out in Nehrbass’s dissertation that compares four
basic ways the that Christians have dealt with an African people group’s pagan
worldview, dividing the ways of dealing with their pagan culture into: mixing,
separating, transplanting, and finally contextualizing.[21]
Australian Ph.D. student Gerald Duncan does a deeper study of the
cultural history of Christians with animistic pasts in his dissertation on the
First Peoples of his country. Deeply affected by Sanneh’s Whose Religion,
Duncan examines the incomplete phenomenon of a burgeoning indigenous people
movement that is revealed by the fact that nearly 70% of Aboriginals consider
themselves Christian after centuries of being abused and ignored by European colonists.
After a century of assuming that these peoples were “children of Ham,”
by ecclesiocentric conservatives, and “Stone Age survivors” by evolutionists, missionaries gradually
started treating them as people. One thing of note, well into the Twentieth
Century, with only a few exceptions, few Australian missionaries even attempted
to translate the Bible into the language of the people. “Either the process of
evolution would see them die out – becoming extinct, replaced by a ‘superior’
civilization – or they would assimilate into the now dominant culture,
resulting in their cultural destruction.”
Because of such attitudes, he points out the benefits of times when, after
initial exposure to the gospel, national leaders were left in control during
gaps in missionary presence, allowing for swells of evangelism.[24]
According to Duncan, “Aboriginal people [had] shown little interest in
Christian religions. This was because Christianity in Australia was, until the
1980s, so culture-bound.”
However, in recent years, Australians have begun to realize that there can be
no national Australian church without the partnership of indigenous peoples
within the church. In this, the Uniting Church’s preamble of 1977 includes,
“The same love and grace that was finally and fully revealed in Jesus Christ
sustained the First Peoples and gave them particular insights into God’s ways.”
The response, as the statistics show, speak for themselves.
In Duncan’s dissertation, he draws that parallel between Sanneh’s
explanation of this element of World Christianity in his study of Australian
Christianity. In Victorian times, missionaries began to collect names of God
among Aborigine who they regarded as the same “supernatural anthropomorphic
being” with many names, but most particularly, the creator God with the
describer “our father.”
He too finds that among the First People, those whose ancient names were used
in Scripture have come to Christ more readily.
In a different, World Religion case in Answering Islam, Geisler
and Saleeb explain that Allah is the name of the ancient, Most High God of the
Arabs. However, Muhammad took the name and assigned a new theology, starkly
separating the people from their ancient paganism.[28]
Coleman, in his dissertation on Insider Movements, says that Arab Christians
were also already using Allah as the name of God when Islam took the name.
Geisler and Saleeb’s depictions of Muhammad’s Allah agree with Coleman’s thought
that Muhammad’s Allah does not align with Scripture. Whether the name can properly
be used for the God of the Bible, therefore, should be decided according to the
local people’s understanding and usage in their own mother tongue.
Conclusion
This bibliographic essay gave some highlights to
a few issues of missiology into the Twenty-first Century. Much depends on
Christians’ ability to obey Scripture and be wise in dealing with other
religions. While
religious pluralism sounds humble in its Western setting, when looked at
through the lens of those who would be Christians from other backgrounds, religious
pluralism is nothing more than a Darwinist or gnostic mentality of cultural exclusivity. In the end, they are self-defeating, declaring
that there is no conversion at all. So, rather than being hopeful or loving,
they leave all humanity damned.
In Christian dealings with World Religions, writers
in this theme deal with the idea of God’s revelation existent within all
peoples, which may make an impact on evangelism among unreached people groups. The
context of World Christianity helps to break through the paternalistic bonds
that are a danger within cross-cultural missions. Perhaps now better studies of
people’s origins and linguistics should be more deeply considered in studying worldviews.
More specifically, there is much evidence that preserving the names and
attributes of God as he revealed himself to each people may encourage further
indigenous discoveries of Christ that seem to lead to people movements in the
future. Sanneh mentions the work of Wilhelm Schmidt
and Hermann Baumann, but a deeper study of these insightful early missiologists
is needed to gain further insight.
Focus Sources
Duncan, Gerald Allan. “Now I know That Jesus Can Speak Nunggubuyu’ The Missio Dei for the Australian Church:
Imagining God from an Indigenous Perspective.” Diss., University of Dubuque
Theological Seminary, 2011.
Geisler,
Norman L., and Abdul Saleeb. Answering Islam: The Crescent in Light of the
Cross. 2nd ed. Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2002.
Hick, John,
Dennis L. Okholm, and Timothy R. Phillips, eds. Four Views on Salvation in a
Pluralistic World. Grand Rapids: Zondervan Pub. House, 1996.
Kim, Hansung,
“The Internationalization of Three Korean mission Agencies.”Diss., School of
Intercultural Studies, Biola University, 2011.
Nehrbass,
Kenneth Robert. “Christianity and Animism in a South Pacific Society: Four
Ecclesiastical Approaches Toward “Kastom.”
Diss., School of Intercultural Studies, Biola University, 2010.
Netland,
Harold A. Dissonant Voices: Religious Pluralism and the Question of Truth.
Grand Rapids: W.B. Eerdmans, 1991.
Nicholls, Bruce,
ed. The Unique Christ in Our Pluralist World. Grand Rapids: Baker Book
House, 1994.
Park, Hyung
Jin. “Journey of the Gospel: A Study in the Emergence of World Christianity and
the Shift of Christian Historiography in the Last Half of the Twentieth
Century.” Diss., Princeton Theological Seminary, 2009.
Rommen, Edward
and Harold Netland, eds. Christianity and the Religions: A Biblical Theology
of World Religions. Pasadena, CA: William Carey Library, 1995.
Sanneh, Lamin
O. Whose Religion Is Christianity? The Gospel Beyond the West. Grand
Rapids: W.B. Eerdmans, 2003.
Biography Sources
Cramer,
David C. “John Hick (1922-2012)” Internet
Encyclopedia of Philosophy [online]; accessed 25 March 2013; available from
http://www.iep.utm.edu/hick/; internet.
“Get
Real: On Evangelism in the Late Modern World.” William Carey Library [online];
accessed on 22 March 2013; available from http://www.missionbooks.
org/williamcareylibrary/product.php?productid=692&cat=301&page=1;
internet.
“IVP
Books by Christopher J. H. Wright” InterVarsity Press [online]; accessed 22
March 2013; available from http://www.ivpress.com/cgi-ivpress/author.pl/
author_id=343; internet.
“Our
Pastors and Elders” Signal Mountain Bible Church [online]; accessed 25 March
2013; available from http://www.smbible.com/pastors&elders.htm; internet.
“School
of Theology: Dennis Okholm, Ph.D.” Azusa Pacific University [online]; accessed
22 March 2013; available from http://www.apu.edu/theology/faculty/
dokholm/; internet.
“Yale Divinity
School: Lamin Sanneh” Yale University [online]; accessed 22 March 2013;
available from http://divinity.yale.edu/sanneh; internet.
World Religion Sources
Other Works by Authors
Netland, Harold A. Encountering Religious Pluralism:
The Challenge to Christian Faith & Mission. Downers Grove: InterVarsity
Press, 2001.
_________, and Keith E. Yandell. Buddhism: A
Christian Exploration and Appraisal. Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2009.
Nicholls, Bruce. Contextualization: A Theology of
Gospel and Culture. Vancouver: Regent College, 1995.
Phillips, Gary Allen. Evangelicals and Religious
Pluralism a Perspective and Update in a Postmodern World. microform :.
1994.
Articles,
Dissertations, & Theses
Cramer, Jeffrey Randolph. “Equipping Ministers of
Youth to Prepare Christian High School Seniors to Face Religious and Secular Pluralism
on the College Campus.” D.Min. diss., Southwestern Baptist Theological
Seminary, 1993.
Mahaffey,
Patrick John. “Religious Pluralism and the Question of Truth: An Inquiry in the
Philosophy of Religious Worldviews.” Ph.D. diss., University of California,
Santa Barbara, 1988.
Books
D’Costa,
Gavin. Christian Uniqueness Reconsidered: The Myth of a Pluralistic Theology
of Religions. Maryknoll, N.: Orbis Books, 1990.
Hick, John. God Has Many Names: Britain's
New Religious Pluralism. London: Macmillan, 1980.
_________.
God and the Universe of Faiths : Essays in the Philosophy of Religion. London:
Macmillan, 1988.
_________.
Faith and Knowledge: A Modern Introduction to the Problem of Religious
Knowledge. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1957.
_________.
The Metaphor of God Incarnate: Christology in a Pluralistic Age.
Louisville, KY: John Knox Press, 1993.
Hick, John, and Paul F. Knitter. The Myth of
Christian Uniqueness, Faith Meets Faith Series: Toward a Pluralistic Theology
of Religions. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1987.
Newbigin, Lesslie. The Open Secret: Sketches for a
Missionary Theology. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1978.
Panikkar, Raimundo. The Trinity and the Religious
Experience of Man: Icon-Person-Mystery. New York: Orbis Books, 1973.
Race, Alan. Christians and Religious Pluralism:
Patterns in the Christian Theology of Religions. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis
Books, 1983.
Schmidt, Wilhelm. The Culture Historical Method of
Ethnology; the Scientific Approach to the Racial Question. New York:
Fortuny's, 1939.
_________. Der
Ursprung der Gottesidee: eine Historisch-kritische und Positive Studie. Münster:
Aschendorff, 1926.
_________. Die Uroffenbarung als Anfang der
Offenbarungen Gottes: Aus Religion; Christentum; Kirche, eine Apologetik Wissenschaftlich Gebildete. München: Josef
Kösel, 1900.
*Schmidt, Wilhelm, and H. J. Rose. The Origin and
Growth of Religion: Facts and Theories. New York: Dial Press, 1931.
Shaw, Mark. Global
Awakening: How 20th-Century Revivals Triggered a Christian Revolution. Downers
Grove: IVP Academic, 2010.
