Are all religions really "paths to God"?

Why I respectfully differ from Pope Francis

Some, no doubt, will be delighted by His Holiness’ recent display of off-the-cuff liberality:

“All religions are paths to God. I will use an analogy, they are like different languages that express the divine. But God is for everyone, and therefore, we are all God’s children. ‘But my God is more important than yours!’ Is this true? There is only one God, and religions are like languages, paths to reach God. Some Sikh, some Muslim, some Hindu, some Christian.”

How wonderful, I imagine them saying, that the leader of that old bastion of intolerance and exceptionalism is finally opening up to the obvious truth: that Christian uniqueness is a myth, just one possible way among many of speaking about the unknowable One we call God. That Christianity is no better or truer than any of the others, and to pretend that it is, even to suppose that it is, is dangerous: for as the Pope said, “to think one religion is superior to another is a recipe for disaster.”

Certain other members of Pope Francis’ Jesuit order have expressed this view before, and been censured for it, not least by the Pope’s immediate successor. They have not always been well-treated. It is said that the death of Fr Jacques Dupuis SJ was expedited by the backlash against his work on comparative religion. The situation is easily presentable as a war between goodies and baddies, with such progressives as the late Fr Hans Küng railing against a cruel, conservative hierarchy. I am not a Roman Catholic, but friends who are confirm that the accusations of cruelty are not unfounded; others, however, have shown that not all the cruelty comes from one quarter. Liberal bishops are quite capable of crushing conservative underlings and sidelining their organisations. Some see the Pope’s treatment of the burgeoning Latin Mass movement and the Anglican Ordinariates as a case in point.

I do not see communion with Rome as requisite for salvation or validity as a church, and I have no dog in the race of Vatican politics. The rhetorical appeal to goodies and baddies, however, with the implicit appeal to youthful tolerance as the prime virtue, runs far beyond the narrow course of Rome’s corridors of power. While remaining mindful of the cost to some liberal theologians of the abuses of that power against them, those of a more conservative bent must not shy from challenging that power when it is used to spread sugared falsehoods which undermine not only Rome, but the whole Christian Church.

The Pope’s words are sweet indeed to those schooled in modern common sense. In my mid-twenties, when I first became a Christian, I would have been among those who salivated at them. Having come to faith in Japan, through contact with Buddhism and Shinto, I imagined that these, too, were merely different paths up the same mountain. A year of study under Professor Gavin D’Costa, Professor of Catholic Theology at Bristol, challenged my ideas.

Professor D’Costa introduced me to the common threefold typology of religions taught by the Anglican priest-theologian Canon Alan Race in the 1980s. Religious attitudes towards other religions, Race taught, fall into one of these categories:

1. Exclusivism: the view that only one (typically one’s own) religion is true and affords salvation.

2. Inclusivism: the view that only one (typically one’s own) religion is true, but that other religions share to some extent in that truth, and so offer salvation to some degree in their own right.

3. Pluralism: the view that all religions are equally valid paths towards the same ultimate destination, and that none has any exclusive claim on the truth or on salvation.

This threefold typology is still taught in school Religious Studies classes in the UK. I suspect that as with many elements of the curriculum, it is taught more for the convenience of the teacher than the pupils: it is easily grasped, and the grasp of it easily assessed. It also fits neatly with modernity’s goodie-baddie binary: the exclusivists are easily portrayed as intolerant bigots, the inclusivists as intellectual colonialists, the pluralists as peace-loving hippies who just want us all to get along. But as with so many easy ideas, while it is not without its usefulness, Race’s typology is flawed. It was Professor D’Costa who showed me those flaws.

Take the usual textbook exemplar of exclusivism, Karl Barth. Karl Barth, as a Reformed theologian, taught that salvation is through Christ alone, and that religions, especially those like True Pure Land Buddhism which seem cosmetically similar to Christian teaching, are not only false but doubly and dangerously misleading. Cue the Star Wars Vader theme: Barth is the baddy in this typology. Except, however, that he also taught universal salvation, which might just number him among the “nice.” All, he maintained, would ultimately be saved through Christ: none is predestined for Hell. Adherents of other religions would be saved despite their religion, not because of it, but they would nonetheless be saved. So, Barth does not sit quite as neatly in the exclusivist paradigm as one might at first think.

Karl Rahner, one of the Pope’s fellow Jesuits, is the textbook example of the inclusivist paradigm. His doctrine of “anonymous Christians” allowed him to see other religionists as crypto-Christians, their religions as participating by degree in the fulness of Christian truth. One might complain that it is actually rather patronising to tell someone of another religion that what they really believe, deep down, is the same as what I believe in. After all, how would a Christian like being called an “anonymous Buddhist?” To his credit, Rahner answered this criticism, saying that he would be honoured and delighted. The regal generosity of the Obi Wan Kenobi theme might suit Rahner.

The Pope’s recent words seem closer to the third paradigm, to which teenagers formed by modernity are naturally drawn, but Pontiffs of Rome hitherto generally less so: that of pluralism. The textbook exemplar is John Hick, the British Presbyterian pastor and theologian whose orthodox soteriology was challenged by his interaction with Hindus, whom he found at least as saintly as any Christian. Hick called for a “Copernican revolution” in Christian theology. As Copernicus showed that the centre of the universe was not the earth but the sun, Hick wanted Christians to recognise that Christ is just one of many satellites, along with Muhammed and the Buddha, around the central Real whom Christians call God. This, by modernity’s criterion of tolerance, is the “goodie” option. Star Wars music might be too militaristic for Hick: perhaps we need to invoke the shade of Ravi Shankar for his theme tune.

The problem Gavin D’Costa identified with this threefold typology is that in the end, despite all the goodie-baddy rhetoric, all three positions boil down to one: exclusivism. Exclusivism is what its name suggests in regard to truth claims. Inclusivism is exclusivist in regard to ultimate truth claims and to salvation. But pluralism is also a kind of exclusivism. It excludes anyone who is not willing to abandon the orthodoxy of their own religion and sit at Hick’s great round table of liberal consensus. Hick’s Copernican revolution requires Christians to abandon traditional Christology and Trinitarian theology. Muslims, likewise, would need at least to modify their foundational creed that Allah is one and Muhammad is His ultimate messenger. Buddhists would need to reconfigure their ideas around something rather more theistic than they had been used to.

Pluralism also rests on the contentious claim that all religions seek “salvation” in some mutually comprehensible way. In practice, it is hard to see how nirvana, if defined as the ending of suffering by the ending of the cycle of death and rebirth, is “the same thing” as salvation understood in any of the many possible definitions of that word that different Christian theological positions might afford: bodily resurrection? Beatific vision? By faith alone or cooperation? After death, or before? If Christian theologians cannot agree on a single definition, it is unlikely that Buddhists are going to. The very assumption that salvation is the motivating factor of religious practice is itself a Christian one.

The Pope’s sugared words suggest a position of tolerance and respect. I must object that they are quite the opposite. What they amount to, in fact, is a masked exclusivism. To say that all religions are “paths to God” is to say that ultimately, other people’s religions do not really matter, because they are all heading in the same direction anyway. It is to claim a particular vantage point on that pathway, as though somehow miraculously hovering above it from a vantage point that others lack, looking down on all the stolid marchers making their ascent, and insisting that one’s own vantage point is the only objective one.

There is, in the end, nothing less exclusivist in His Holiness’ words than the Church’s historical claim, extra ecclesia, nulla salus: “outside the Church there is no salvation.” The latter claim, however, has the considerable advantages over the former of being built on the firm foundations of divine revelation and being internally consistent. One does not need to go down the route of Fr Leonard Feeney, excommunicated in 1953 for insisting, against the teaching of the Magisterium, that the Church is entirely commensurate with the visible institution of the Roman Catholic Church, and that anyone out of communion with her, such as any “Jew dog, Protestant brute or 33rd degree Freemason” (he had a subtle turn of phrase, that Fr Feeney) is inevitably damned. To proclaim the universality of Christian truth claims does not mean we have to descend into bigotry and nastiness. There are plenty of other theologically arguable ways of parsing the word “Church.” Maximus the Confessor, for instance, sees the entire cosmos as the seed which God means ultimately to blossom into the fullness of the Church, that all things may be all in Christ. The earthly Church is the vehicle for the sanctification of the cosmos. What that will look like the other side of the eschaton, God alone knows. But suffice it to say that exclusivism does not necessarily make one a baddie; nor do the crypto-exclusivisms that go by other names necessarily make one a goodie.

As a sometime comparative theologian, I agree with Pope Francis that inter-religious dialogue and comparative theology are very valuable. But this is so only insofar as they are conducted in honesty, listening to others’ truth claims on their own grounds, rather than imposing one’s own presuppositions about what they think.

Pluralist presuppositions are basically liberal modern presuppositions hidden in a vaguely Christ-shaped Trojan horse. It is not “respectful” to claim that all religions are secretly the same as liberalised Christianity; far more respectful, surely, to take their truth claims seriously, in their particularity, assessing them one by one in the light of Christian revelation, as they will assess our truth claims in their own ways. This makes for dialogue rather than blandishment. Such genuine and attentive dialogue can yield great fruit, a deepening of one’s own faith, as one finds thinkers and adherents of other traditions grappling with analogous issues to those of one’s own and join them in thinking things through.

Further, is is pastorally disheartening, to say the least, to suggest that the missionary and evangelistic efforts of Christians now and throughout the ages, even unto loss of life, have ultimately been of no import, as the souls we seek to win to Christ were perfectly served by their own religion, whatever religion that might have been: “all religions” covers a lot of bases, from sacrificing children to Dagon, all the way to Scientology or the Moonies. While we are indeed, as the Pope says, “all God’s children,” we become His sons and heirs only through adoption by Baptism into the Body of His Son, Jesus Christ, who is not only a way or truth or life, but the Way, the Truth and the Life. The faithful need the successors of the Apostles, St Peter’s included, to reinforce this.