God wants all men to be saved (1Timothy2:4), but there is only one name in which we can be saved (Acts4:12). Not only does the Church teach that “God in ways known to himself can lead those inculpably ignorant of the Gospel to find that faith without which it is impossible to please Him (Hebrews 11:6)” (Ad gentes 7). It also teaches that non-Christian religions may occasionally, though God’s providence, act as a preparation for the Gospel (Ad gentes 3) and “rejects nothing of what is true and holy in these religions.” (Nostra aetate 2). Indeed, “it is the Spirit who sows the ‘seeds of the Word’ present in various customs and cultures, preparing them for full maturity in Christ.” (Redemptoris missio 28).
The theology of religions inquires into how God might bring to salvation those who, through no fault of their own, have not been incorporated into Christ, and his body, the Church, through baptism. However, some theologies of religion may end up treating any religion as an equally valid way to God, evangelization as redundant, and the mediation of Christ and his Church as neither universal nor necessary.
In this interview, Fr. Sameer Advani LC discusses the theology of religions
Fr. Sameer Advani, LC, is a Canadian priest of German and Indian background with degrees in theology, philosophy, and mathematics. He is professor of dogmatic theology at the Pontifical Atheneum Regina Apostolorum, where he is also director of the Christianity and Culture Program and research scholar in the Multiculturalism and Religion Project of the UNESCO Chair in Bioethics and Human Rights. He is the author ofRatzinger on Religious Pluralism.
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What is the theology of religions? It is a new branch of theology that investigates the value that other religions may have in God’s providential plan for history.
For a long time, the field was dedicated to soteriological questions: How can non-Christians be saved? What is the role of Christ and the Church in their salvation? Do the other religions play any role in that salvation?
Recently, however, the field has focussed more on postmodern questions, such as the historical-cultural value of the other religions in relation to our understanding and expression of the truth.
In short then, the theology of religions aims to reconcile the universality of God’s salvific plan for all mankind with the particularism of Christ and the Church, and explores whether the religions have any role within that plan.
What prompted your own interest in the theology of religions? The reasons were primarily personal. I grew up in a religiously mixed family. When my parents married, my mother was Catholic and my father was Hindu. He eventually converted to the faith, but it was a difficult and painful process. In addition, all this took place in Dubai in the United Arab Emirates, a Muslim country. Hence, before I joined the seminary, I probably had more Hindu and Muslim friends than I did Christian or Catholic ones!
Growing up, I was thus keenly aware that are very good people, even holy people, who belong to these other religions. But at the same time I knew that they lacked the fullness of faith in Christ.
And so, in a certain sense my search over the last thirty years has been to try and reconcile these two apparently irreconcilable aspects: on the one hand, the good, the true, the beautiful, the holy that exists in the other religions, and on the other, the fullness of Revelation and salvation in Jesus Christ.
Whereas religion, in the Catholic tradition, is the virtue whereby we render to God the worship due to him, the modern concept of religion is more sociological in nature and lumps together widely disparate and often heterogenous complex systems of religious belief, practice, and social organization. Moreover, the modern concept is often informed by Enlightenment assumptions about religion as a private matter that falls outside the public domain of reason. Is there a legitimate concept of religion? Someone who could answer that question definitively would become very famous! There is a great amount of debate on the topic and hundreds of books about it.
It is fascinating to trace the history of the concept of religion. During the Enlightenment, because of both rationalism and for political reasons, the holistic, objective, and anthropological concept of religion that had dominated the Christian Middle Ages, and that saw Christianity alone as a ‘religion,’ was increasingly abandoned. Instead, beginning with Schleiermacher, emphasis began to be placed on the subjective side of the question, on religious experience, however vaguely and ambiguously that was defined.
There is, of course, something legitimate in this attempt to value the experiential aspect of religion. However, there have also been large downsides. Religion today is almost entirely relegated to the private and personal sphere, to the realm of sentiment and feeling, divorced from science and ethics, and stripped of any public role.
There have also been reactions to this one-sidedness: liberation theology, for example, was an attempt to reclaim religion’s position in the public sphere. Nevertheless, this effort was marred by its Marxist tendencies.
Another reaction has come in the form of postmodernism. According to several contemporary authors, religions are historical, cultural, comprehensive ways of life that structure man’s journey towards a particular vision of the ultimate good, happiness, or fulfilment. In my opinion, there is much value to this approach, in as much as it acknowledges the cultural and social aspect of religion and not just its interior, personal aspect. Anthropologically, it recognises that religions possess a certain vision of the ultimate good and that all of them aim, in one way or the other, and despite their differences, to structure man’s life towards that ultimate good. The danger in this attempt is historical-cultural relativism: the belief that these traditions are incommensurable and unable to enter into true dialogue and the search for a common truth.
The subjective and particular, in other words, both at the individual and community levels, needs to always be anchored in the objective and universal. Holding the two poles together in order to recognise the plurality that exists within the world of ‘religion’ is precisely the difficulty in coming up with a definition of term.
What is also clear is that ‘philosophy of religion,’ or understanding what ‘religion’ is, is a fascinating field in its own right, and absolutely key to developing a robust ‘theology of religions’ which examines their theological value in light of Christian faith.
There are major disagreements among the proponents of a theology of religions. What are the main theoretical divides between them? To put it another way, what are the main schools within the theology of religions? Broadly speaking, there are three divisions within the theology of religion debate.
The first position is exclusivism. In general terms, it holds that Christ alone saves us and that there is no salvation outside the Church. For a long time, this was—and continues to be, when phrased in these very general terms—the position of the Catholic Church. It has often, however, also been identified with the exaggerated position of Karl Barth and his dialectic between faith and religion, and in those terms it is far more problematic. According to Barth, in fact, faith is a gift from God that completely cancels out religion, which is nothing more than idolatry and unbelief. Barth, in other words, draws a stark contrast between faith and religion: faith is God reaching out to man which alone is efficacious; religion is man’s entirely futile attempt to reach out to God. Even worse, however, is that for him religion is often also an obstinate refusal to accept God, the excuse man uses to avoid faith and shield himself from its call to conversion. In this vision, then, other religions have absolutely no theological value and must simply be replaced by Christian faith.
The second major school is inclusivism. It was proposed by Karl Rahner. He argues that Christ is present in a hidden, anonymous way in the hearts of all men and, as a result, in their systems or structures, especially in their religions. The non-baptised are therefore nothing other than ‘anonymous Christians’ and the different religions forms of an ‘anonymous Christianity.’ For Rahner, religions are also the ordinary ways of salvation, even if they are directed toward the fullness of truth and the explicit knowledge of Christ in the Church.
Finally, the third major school, which has gained in popularity since the nineties, is pluralism. It exists in various forms, but the two leading proponents have been John Hick and Paul Knitter.
Hick proposes that we move beyond both the ecclesiocentric, exclusivist vision of Christianity, and Rahner’s Christ-centred ‘anonymous Christianity,’ to God-centeredness. The presence of non-theistic ‘religions’ like certain forms of Hinduism and Buddhism led him to eventually adapt this terminology and speak about Reality-centeredness, but the basic idea was that man should focus on his journey towards God/the Absolute, no matter which of the many different paths toward Him It he chose. Of course, this position is very problematic from a Christian perspective because it implies a strong epistemological relativism. In the end, for Hick man is only ever capable of possessing an image or fleeting reflection of God: no definitive, normative revelation of God is possible within history.
The second form pluralism is the Kingdom-centeredness of Paul Knitter, which is perhaps even more popular today than Hick’s God-Reality centredness. For Knitter, rather than speaking about the Church, Christ, or even God, Christianity and the other religions need to focus on the establishment of the Kingdom. His conception of that Kingdom is, however, almost entirely immanentist and socialist, and largely taken from Marxist theologies of religion. The Kingdom consists of social justice, the alleviation of poverty, and care for the environment, he claims, and a real unity of religions can be attained as long as they focus on building the Kingdom along these three lines.
These three paradigms—exclusivism, Rahnerian inclusivism, and pluralism— have dominated the field over the last decades.
Scholars also speak of a fulfilment theory. That fits into the exclusivist model. Who are the main contributors to fulfilment theory? Although I did not mention the fulfilment theory above, its major proponents have been Jean Daniélou, Henri de Lubac, and Hans Urs von Balthasar. In my recent book, I argue that Joseph Ratzinger has a unique take on the idea.
Moreover, the Second Vatican Council adopted the fulfilment theory by teaching that religions, or at least the positive elements in the religions, are preparations for the Gospel (praeparatio evangelica).
In my opinion, fulfilment theory is the best approach within the theology of religions debate. It recognises the good that exists in the other religions, but sees them as seeds of truth calling out for their fullness and perfection in Christ, and thus as dynamic, instead of static realities, whose value lies precisely in their temporary, preparatory character.
I did not include the fulfillment theory as one of the three main positions in the theology of religions debate today because, unfortunately, it only has a limited number of followers. The pluralist paradigm has dominated the field, both in academia and popular culture. Moreover, the dividing line between Rahnerian inclusivism and pluralism is sometimes also very fine. To a large extent, therefore, the theology of religions is currently divided between exclusivists and inclusivists-pluralists. Fulfilment theory, which attempts to mediate between these two positions—by recognizing what is legitimate in each of them while also rejecting their exaggerations—has fallen by the wayside.
As a result, I am also convinced that one of the main tasks for theology of religions today is to re-propose and better understand fulfilment theory.
In the Document on Human Fraternity for World Peace and Living Together, signed with the Gran-Iman of Al-Azhar, Pope Francis declares that “The pluralism and the diversity of religions, colour, sex, race and language are willed by God in His wisdom, through which He created human beings.” If God wants all men to be part of Christ’s Church, how can he want there to be a diversity of religions? For obvious reasons, that document caused a great deal of debate and discussion among theologians. Pope Francis subsequently clarified that he was referring not to the positive but to the permissive will of God in the Abu Dhabi statement, and this helped address many of the concerns raised.
Seeing the religions as permitted rather than actively willed by God looks, however, at the other religions as wholes, as complete systems. And in that light, it is the only viable solution to the problem: because Catholic doctrine recognizes the presence of errors in addition to elements of truth in other religions. God cannot positively will that errors exist. As complete systems, the religions can only be the fruit of his permissive will.
That clarification also opens up another path toward interpreting Pope Francis’s phrase, one which is very helpful. The Second Vatican Council not only mentioned the errors contained in other religions, but also laid great emphasis on their positive elements. This was a truly revolutionary step: for the first time a Council spoke explicitly of truth, good, and holiness existing in the other religions. But this also means that we can ask whether, in a certain sense, God has actively willed, not the other religions in their entirety, but in their positive elements.
To complete the picture, however, we need to add that Vatican II also taught that these positive elements are a true preparation for the Gospel. They are meant to lead the followers of these religions, after a suitable purification from their errors, to the fullness of their own religion who is no one other than Christ. In that sense, and after making the necessary qualifications, we can perhaps talk about God wanting this plurality of paths towards Christ.
If we view history from this perspective we thus do not have a static plurality of religions. Rather, it is possible to see God’s plan for history as a converging unity toward Christ and the Church. Of course, this vision should not put into question the unique place that Israel plays in revelation history. And, above all, it cannot see the Church as simply one more religion among others, but as the point of arrival toward which the other religions are interiorly directed.
At the same time, the presence of positive elements in other religions is something to take very seriously. And they cannot be reduced to only the human, natural level. John Paul II made this clear in Redemptoris Missio 28 when he said: “The Spirit’s presence and activity affect not only the individuals but also society and history, peoples, cultures and religions. Indeed, the Spirit is at the origin of the noble ideals and undertakings which benefit humanity on its journey through history.”
In short, we cannot reduce religions to only their positive elements. They also contain negative elements and errors, and hence, it is highly problematic to claim that God wills them in their globality. But focusing on their positive elements can help make better sense of the Document on Human Fraternity for World Peace and Living Together.
1.
The first readings that you have selected are the Second Vatican Councils dogmatic constitution on the Church (Lumen gentium) and its declaration on the Church’s relation to non-Christian religions (Nostra aetate). The other books you have selected deal with the council’s teachings on this issue. Surely, however, the Church Fathers, theologians of the past, earlier councils and popes had addressed the theology of religions. Why start with documents from Vatican II?
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