Salvation By Grace

http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2003/september/2.50.html

What do you believe to be some of the most critical issues needing to be addressed by the working groups preparing for the 2004 forum?

I focus on what to me is the most critical issue, and that is the challenge of pluralism. Pluralism is not just recognition that there is a plurality of faiths in the world today. That is an obvious fact. No, pluralism is itself an ideology. It affirms the independent validity of all faiths. It therefore rejects as arrogant and wholly unacceptable every attempt to convert anybody (let alone everybody) to our opinions.

In 1977 Professor John Hick’s symposium The Myth of God Incarnate was published, and in 1987, ten years later, The Myth of Christian Uniqueness. All the contributors confessed that they had “crossed the Rubicon” from “exclusivism” and “inclusivism” to “pluralism.”

The reason we must reject this increasingly popular position is that we are committed to the uniqueness of Jesus (he has no competitors) and his finality (he has no successors). It is not the uniqueness of “Christianity” as a system that we defend, but the uniqueness of Christ. He is unique in his incarnation (which is quite different from the ahistorical and plural “avatars” of Hinduism); in his atonement (dying once for all for our sins); in his resurrection (breaking the power of death); and in his gift of the Spirit (to indwell and transform us). So, because in no other person but Jesus of Nazareth did God first become human (in his birth), then bear our sins (in his death), then conquer death (in his resurrection) and then enter his people (by his Spirit), he is uniquely able to save sinners. Nobody else has his qualifications.

But our critics accuse us of intolerance and proselytism (the act of persuading or attempting to persuade).

Much of our debate is conducted in what might be called “conditions of low visibility,” because we do not always pause to define our terms. This is evidently so in relation to these two words.

Tolerance is one of today’s most coveted virtues. But there are at least three different kinds of tolerance.

First, there is legal tolerance: fighting for the equal rights before the law of all ethnic and religious minorities.
Christians should be in the forefront of this campaign.

Second, there is social tolerance, going out of our way to make friends with adherents of other faiths, since they are God’s creation who bear his image.

Third, there is intellectual tolerance.
This is to cultivate a mind so broad and open as to accommodate all views and reject none.
This is to forget G. K. Chesterton’s bon mot that “the purpose of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid.”
To open the mind so wide as to keep nothing in it or out of it is not a virtue; it is the vice of the feebleminded.

The other word we need to define is proselytism.
To proselytize and to evangelize are not synonymous.
The best way to distinguish them is to understand proselytism as “unworthy witness.”
The World Council of Churches and the Roman Catholic Church produced a helpful study document in 1970 titled Common Witness and Proselytism.
It identified three aspects of proselytism. Proselytism takes place:
(1) whenever our motives are unworthy (when our concern is for our glory rather than God’s)
(2) whenever our methods are unworthy (when we resort to any kind of “physical coercion, moral constraint, or psychological pressure”)
(3) whenever our message is unworthy (whenever we deliberately misrepresent other people’s beliefs).
In contrast, to evangelize is (in the words of the Manila Manifesto) “to make an open and honest statement of the gospel, which leaves the hearers entirely free to make up their own minds about it.
We wish to be sensitive to those of other faiths, and we reject any approach that seeks to force conversion on them.”