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chapter_seven.docxChapter Seven
AN INTRODUCTION TO INCLUSIVISM
Inclusivists see their position as a middle ground between exclusivism and pluralism that preserves the most important insights of the other two views. Inclusivists agree with pluralists that God’s salvation is not restricted to the relatively few people who hear the gospel and believe in Jesus Christ. Inclusivists agree with exclusivists that God’s universally accessible salvation is nonetheless grounded on the person of Jesus Christ and his redemptive work.
Gavin D’Costa, a Roman Catholic inclusivist, states that his view “affirms the salvific presence of God in non-Christian religions while still maintaining that Christ is the definitive and authoritative revelation of God.” 1 Pluralist John Hick’s description of inclusivism presents it as the belief that “God’s forgiveness and acceptance of humanity have been made possible by Christ’s death, but…the benefits of this sacrifice are not confined to those who respond to it with an explicit act of faith.” 2 According to Alan Race, inclusivism “accepts the spiritual power and depth manifest in [other religions], so that they can properly be called a locus of divine presence. On the other hand, it rejects them as not being sufficient for salvation apart from Christ, for Christ alone is saviour.” 3
Part of inclusivism’s appeal is its response to the problem of dealing with the millions of people who die without ever hearing the gospel. Inclusivists insist that all people must have a chance to be saved. They teach “that God, in grace, grants every individual a genuine opportunity to participate in the redemptive work of the Lord Jesus, that no human being is excluded from the possibility of benefiting from salvific grace.” 4 As John Sanders explains,
[T]he unevangelized are saved or lost on the basis of their commitment, or lack thereof, to the God who saves through the work of Jesus. [Inclusivists] believe that appropriation of salvific grace is mediated through general revelation and God’s providential workings in human history. Briefly, inclusivists affirm the particularity and finality of salvation only in Christ but deny that knowledge of his work is necessary for salvation—[T]he work of Jesus is ontologically necessary for salvation (no one would be saved without it) but not epistemologically necessary (one need not be aware of the work in order to benefit from it). 5
While pluralists believe that sincere followers of non-Christian religions can experience salvation through those religions, inclusivists insist that devout believers in other religions will be saved, but only on the basis of Christ’s atoning work.
THE TWO AXIOMS OF INCLUSIVISM
Inclusivists speak often of two axioms, or presuppositions, that serve as starting points for their theory.
“The Particularity Axiom”
The particularity axiom focuses on Jesus Christ as the only mediator of salvation. Clark Pinnock affirms “the uniqueness and finality of Jesus Christ and [regards] as heretical any attempt to reduce or water down this conviction.” 6 According to Pinnock, the central Christian conviction about the lordship of Christ “is nonnegotiable for Christians and has to be seen as a basic rule of Christian speech.” 7 Christians cannot possibly regard the lordship of Christ “as a bargaining chip in an interreligious dialogue.” 8 Further, “Christians ought to confess that Jesus was and is the unique vehicle and means of God’s saving love in the world, and its definitive Savior—All religions make absolute claims at some point, and Christians ought to make them in the matter of the finality of Jesus Christ.” 9 This belief about the finality of Jesus must not be watered down, inclusivists insist.
“The Universality Axiom”
By the term “universality axiom,” inclusivists mean that God intends his salvation to be available to all humans (1 Tim. 2:4; Titus 2:11). Inclusivists sometimes treat two propositions as synonymous: (1) the claim that God wills the salvation of every human being, and (2) the claim that God gives every human a chance to accept his grace. It ought to be obvious, however, that even if (1) were true, it would not follow that (2) is true.
The “universality axiom” does entail the inclusivist’s belief that “There is a wonderful broadness in the apparent narrowness of the Christian confession.” 10 Sanders spells this out: “the salvation God so magnanimously gives is, and has been, available in every age and culture and spot on the globe apart from any specific knowledge of God’s historical activity in Israel and in his son Jesus.” 11
Summary
Inclusivists believe their two axioms complement each other. The “universality axiom” expresses their belief that God must make salvation available to all human beings, including everyone who lived before Christ outside the sphere of Jewish influence and everyone since Christ who has lived without hearing about the gospel. This humanwide emphasis is then focused in the “particularity axiom” on the one and only Mediator whose person and redemptive work is the ground for salvation.
INCLUSIVISM AND EVANGELICALISM
Evangelicals are Christian believers whose theology is traditional or orthodox as defined by the historic Christian creeds. They also take the Bible as their ultimate authority in matters of faith and practice, have had a religious conversion, and are interested in leading others to the same kind of conversion experience. 12 Clark Pinnock and John Sanders are inclusivists as well as evangelicals.
Part of the initial distrust many evangelicals feel on their first encounter with inclusivism results no doubt from their inability to sort out differences with clearly nonevangelical positions such as universalism and pluralism. After all, evangelicals take Christ’s Great Commission seriously and they are likely to be confused when they hear other evangelicals telling them that large numbers of unevangelized people will be saved.
The number of evangelicals who are sympathetic to inclusivism may be larger than many think. John Sanders, for example, cites statistics from a 1975 InterVarsity conference at the University of Illinois at Urbana that suggests that as many as 25 percent of people active in Christian service at that time held to some variant of inclusivism. 13 Sanders is persuaded that the percentage of inclusivists today would be much larger. My own observation of evangelical leaders in places of denominational or missions leadership along with professors at mainstream evangelical colleges and seminaries points to a number higher than 50 percent. Among college and seminary professors in my own denomination, the Southern Baptist Convention, the number would be even higher. 14
Although the number of evangelical laypeople sympathetic to inclusivism is probably much smaller, it would not surprise me if a third or more of nonprofessionals in evangelical churches expressed support for inclusivist convictions. It is difficult to know what conclusions to draw from this. Until inclusivists like Pinnock and Sanders published their books in the early 1990s, few evangelicals had any opportunity to think through the significant biblical and theological issues at stake. Now that the inclusivists have expressed their views publicly, the critical evaluations of their thinking that are bound to appear may help to sharpen the debate and inform evangelicals who may be attracted to inclusivism initially with their hearts rather than their minds.
If the issue is framed solely or primarily in terms of the plight of the unevangelized, we might expect to find theologically untrained Christians offering opinions that appear to support inclusivism. But it remains to be seen how their response might differ should they realize the consequences of inclusivism for Scripture and Christian theology.
John Sanders points to a number of twentieth-century evangelicals as likely adherents of inclusivism. His list includes G. Campbell Morgan, Edward John Carnell, C. S. Lewis, Bernard Ramm, D. Bruce Lockerbie, George E. Ladd, William Dyrness, J. Herbert Kane, and J. N. D. Anderson among others. 15 Including some of these people might be misleading, however, because they expressed apparently inclusivist opinions only in passing and in a context that was more theologically ambiguous than now. But there is nothing ambiguous about this statement by evangelical author, Stuart Hackett, who taught for many years at Wheaton College and at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School:
If every human being in all times and ages has been objectively provided for through the unique redemption in Jesus, and if this provision is in fact intended by God for every such human being, then it must be possible for every human individual to become personally eligible to receive that provision—regardless of his historical, cultural, or personal circumstances and situation, and quite apart from any particular historical information or even historically formulated theological conceptualisation—since a universally intended redemptive provision is not genuinely universal unless it is also and for that reason universally accessible. 16
Putting aside for now any discussion of Hackett’s last statement, we find in this paragraph dramatic testimony to the influence inclusivism has today in centers of evangelical higher education. Yet we should note that just because some evangelical leaders claim that their movement is compatible with inclusivism, it does not follow that those leaders are necessarily correct. The search for an answer to this issue is a major task of this book.
INCLUSIVISM AND THE CONTEMPORARY ROMAN CATHOLIC CHURCH
Although inclusivism is at best a minority position within the whole of the Protestant evangelical movement, it is the view of a majority of Roman Catholic thinkers. Indeed, a movement toward inclusivism is one of the major legacies of Vatican Council II (1962 – 65), which issued a statement declaring that “They also can attain to everlasting salvation who through no fault of their own do not know the gospel of Christ or his church, yet sincerely seek God, and moved by grace, strive by their deeds to do his will as it is known to them through the dictates of conscience.” 17 If our examination uncovers reasons to question Protestant inclusivism, they should apply to Roman Catholic inclusivism as well.
The best-known and most influential Catholic inclusivist is Karl Rahner (1904 – 1984), a German theologian. In his own way, Rahner embraced both the particular and universal axioms. In his words, “God desires the salvation of everyone [the universality axiom] and this salvation willed by God is the salvation won by Christ [the particularity axiom].” 18
Rahner believed that human nature includes an openness to the divine that lies beyond us. Grace is not something to be added to our human nature; instead, it defines our nature. Human knowing and loving are but two ways of reaching beyond ourselves toward the Infinite Mystery that is God. 19 Michael Barnes explains Rahner’s thinking this way: “Every time we reach out beyond ourselves to the True and the Good we are experiencing and responding to grace; we are therefore in some sense knowing God even if such a knowledge must be described as…implicit rather than explicit.” 20
While a non-Christian religion may possess validity prior to its encounter with the gospel, Rahner states, that validity is subject to a specific time limit. Once the Christian gospel confronts a non-Christian religion, enters into the culture of the people who once adhered to the religion, and becomes embodied in community, that other religion ceases to be valid. Rahner believed that God’s offer of grace is mediated through the non-Christian religions. 21 “Christianity,” Rahner argues, “does not simply confront the member of an extra-Christian religion as a mere non-Christian but as someone who can and must already be regarded in this or that respect as an anonymous Christian. It would be wrong to regard the pagan as someone who has not yet been touched in any way by God’s grace and truth.” 22
Even before such non-Christians have been affected externally through missionary activity, they have already received something of God’s revelation internally, according to Rahner. “[T]he proclamation of the Gospel,” he writes, “does not simply turn someone absolutely abandoned by God and Christ into a Christian, but turns an anonymous Christian into someone who now also knows about his Christian belief in the depths of his grace-endowed being by objective reflection and in the profession of faith which is given a social form in the Church.” 23
What occurs in the transformation of non-Christians described by Rahner is quite unlike the evangelical understanding of conversion. Gavin D’Costa explains, “It is not simply a matter of making explicit what was only implicit before, but being transformed, moulded and nourished by the social and historical particulars of the liturgy, worship, and sacramental structures of the [Roman Catholic] Church.” 24
hner denied that his inclusivism compromises the Christian church’s historical understanding of itself “as the absolute religion, intended for all men, which cannot recognize any religion besides itself as of equal right.” 25 At the same time, he refused to deny the lawful character of non-Christian religions that can be and, indeed, are used by God in preparing anonymous Christians for his grace. The errors of the religions are still there, but God mediates his offer of grace through these non-Christian faiths. Yet Rahner failed to suggest specific ways as to how this divine mediation of grace actually happens.
We say all this in order to understand Rahner’s phrase “anonymous Christian,” by which he means “a non-Christian who gains salvation through faith, hope, and love by the grace of Christ, mediated however imperfectly through his or her own religion, which thereby points towards its historical fulfillment in Christ and his Church.” 26
John B. Cobb, Jr., sums up the heart of Rahner’s inclusivism. According to Rahner,
God works salvifically everywhere. People can be saved whether or not they are related to the Catholic church or consciously accept Jesus Christ. People saved in this way he calls anonymous Christians. The religions of the world are used by God in this salvific work. Thus they are positive vehicles of salvation. But they are not on a par with the Christian church. Once the Christian church is fully established in a community there is no longer any need for other religions there. Their function in the history of salvation is superseded by that of the Christian church. 27
Rahner’s term “anonymous Christian” has now become part of our contemporary theological vocabulary. But Rahner’s belief that sincere Hindus and Muslims may prove to be anonymous Christians has not endeared his work to noninclusivists in these other traditions. Pluralist John Hick dismisses Rahner’s position as simply another Christian epicycle, that is, “an attempt to accommodate growing knowledge of other faiths by drawing a more complicated, but still thoroughly Christianitycentered map.” 28 As Hick sees it, Rahner’s position lacks credibility: “When salvation is acknowledged to be taking place without any connection with the Christian Church or Gospel, in people who are living on the basis of quite other faiths, is it not a somewhat empty gesture to insist upon fixing a Christian label to them?” 29
So, while pluralists dismiss Rahner’s work as an offensive Christian paternalism that fails to give enough credit to non-Christian religions, conservatives fault Rahner for giving other religions too much credit. If Rahner were even close to being right, they argue, it ought to be possible to see large numbers of “righteous” non-Christians moving toward Christ. This is hardly what we do in fact observe. Exclusivists also fault Rahner as to the place of Christian missions and the role of the Christian church. Moreover, they maintain, Rahner’s view compromises preaching about Jesus Christ; Christian discipleship loses its distinctive character; the cross of Christ loses its centrality.
Evangelical theologian Clark Pinnock seeks to distance himself from what he regards as the “rosy-eyed optimism” that has “tended to lead Roman Catholic scholars down the path toward relativism.” Pinnock describes himself as wanting “to be more realistic about the good and evil in religions and not be naive when it comes to building bridges and engaging in dialogue.” 30 He also objects to Rahner’s notion of anonymous Christians as going much too far “in the direction of sanctifying non-Christian religions as vehicles of salvation in the lives of those who call out to God from within paganism.” 31 In Pinnock’s view, Rahner writes as if being a Buddhist is perfectly all right. We must not say anything, Pinnock contends, that would create the impression that some people do not need to repent and believe the gospel. 32
EVANGELICAL INCLUSIVISM AND NON-CHRISTIAN RELIGIONS
Pinnock’s words hold out the promise that the evangelical inclusivists will exhibit a more realistic attitude toward non-Christian religions than one finds among post-Vatican II Roman Catholics. Is that promise fulfilled?
On the one hand, Pinnock declares that “it is possible to appreciate positive elements in other faiths, recognizing that God has been at work among them.” 33 This leads Pinnock to observe that “If people in Ghana speak of the transcendent God as the shining one, as unchangeable as a rock, as all-wise and all-loving, how can anyone conclude otherwise than that they intend to acknowledge the true God as we do?” 34
Pinnock seems much too generous in this matter. It tends toward the “rosy-eyed optimism” that he finds distasteful in Roman Catholic inclusivism. One wonders how he can describe the Ghanian’s god in terms of “transcendence,” a complex theological concept, with roots in Aquinas and Augustine, that can be difficult to explain. Imputing transcendence to the object of a Ghanian’s religious devotion appears to be a case of wishful thinking, as is Pinnock’s confidence that a similarity here or there proves that the Ghanian’s god is identical with the sovereign, triune, and holy God of Scripture. Even people sympathetic to the inclusivists’ agenda are likely to be embarrassed by such zeal in the search for religious parallels.
Regarding Buddhism, Pinnock writes, “We must not conclude, just because we know a person to be a Buddhist, that his or her heart is not seeking God.” 35 Even as we grant this, the Bible does speak of people whose quest for the Ultimate leads them to seek after false gods. Pinnock anticipates this caveat in declaring, “What God really cares about is faith and not theology, trust and not orthodoxy.” 36
This is a crucial point for Pinnock that will require further analysis later on. He is working here with a commonly held distinction between the subjective and objective components of faith.
Evangelicals typically argue that two things are required for saving faith: (1) Faith must be directed toward the right object, and (2) the proper object of faith must be approached with certain subjective attitudes, including sincerity and genuine commitment. Many church members can recite a set of creedal statements without exhibiting the slightest degree of sorrow over their sins or personal commitment to Jesus Christ. Such people embrace the objective component of faith right, but fall short on the subjective commitment. Pinnock seems to be saying that if people have the subjective side of faith right (sincerity, perhaps, or intensity or a truly seeking attitude), it is irrelevant that those subjective attitudes turn out to be directed toward a false god.
Pinnock draws attention to one Hindu sect that, he says, “celebrates a personal God of love.” The literature of this sect “expresses the belief that all God’s actions in the world are intended to express love for his creatures and to lead them into loving union with himself.” 37 One wishes that Pinnock had provided sufficient examples to demonstrate that he was not too quickly reading his own Christian beliefs into this literature.
Pinnock has equally positive thoughts about the Japanese sect known as Shin-Shu Amida, which includes an emphasis on grace and faith. Once again, one wonders whether Pinnock is not moving too quickly. The fact that a sect seems to say that “salvation” 38 is given to humans as a gift and not as a reward hardly bridges the gulf between it and the New Testament notion of grace, which is showered upon rebellious sinners who are utterly helpless to save themselves. Even Pinnock must admit that all-important differences exist.
It is not my intention to denigrate the non-Christian beliefs discussed or to offend people devoted to those faiths. Anyone, including Pinnock and me, would want to avoid distorting anyone’s beliefs in order to make a point. Many Christians will think that Pinnock is distorting important elements of their beliefs to make his case for inclusivism appear more plausible. But I believe that the parallels and analogies Pinnock offers do not really establish anything. When he asks, “how does one come away after encountering Buddhism and deny that it is in touch with God in its way?” 39 I am left wondering what he is talking about. Many Buddhists do not believe in any god at all, and others do not believe in a transcendent, personal God.
What about the inclusivist idea that other religions can and do exhibit some similarities with Christianity? We need to look carefully at the full context of those beliefs. The weighty differences are hardly irrelevant.
INCLUSIVISM AND UNIVERSALISM
To whatever degree evangelicals find inclusivism disappointing or problematic, they will at least appreciate the evangelical inclusivist’s clear disavowal of universalism, the belief that all humans will eventually be saved.
Inclusivist arguments against universalism stress two points. First, universalism lacks biblical support. The biblical texts that universalists cite as teaching God’s intent to save all humans turn out to affirm nothing more than the inclusivist’s belief in a universally accessible salvation. “[A]lthough Calvary was for all,” John Sanders writes, “salvation is only for believers.” 40
Second, universalism cannot do justice to the biblical teaching of hell. Clark Pinnock argues, “There are too many warnings about divine judgment falling on people to be ignored, warnings that suggest that rejection [of God] is possible.” 41 Even though his warning about hell is muted somewhat by his belief in the annihilation of the sinner, Pinnock does believe that many humans will reject God’s offer of salvation and suffer eternal loss. 42 He dismisses universalism as an example of wishful thinking that ignores the many judgment passages in Scripture referring to the destruction of the wicked.
All of this clarifies an important and reassuring point: Christian inclusivists are not universalists. 43
CONCLUSION
In this introduction to inclusivism we have learned that many Roman Catholics and some evangelical Protestants believe that sincere, God-fearing adherents of non-Christian religions will be saved, even though they may die without hearing the gospel. But inclusivists disagree with universalists, who teach that all human beings will eventually be saved. Inclusivists also disagree with pluralists, who teach that non-Christian religions offer genuine salvation. If non-Christians are saved, inclusivists insist, they can only be saved on the basis of the person and work of Jesus Christ, the only Savior.
