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Four Views on Salvation in a Pluralistic World (05)
Paul Jang  2008-12-03 14:42:17, hit : 3,109



(9) If there is only one God, maker of heaven and earth, two or three obvious possibilities and present themselves:

1) that God as known within one particular religion, namely one's own, is the real God and that all the others are unreal.

2) that God as known to Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, and others represent manifestations in relation to humanity, different "face" or "mask" or personae of God, the Ultimate Reality.

3) that God as known within Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, and Sikhism are partial or distorted glimpses of the real God, who is fully known within Christianity (by the majority of mainline theologians).

(10) Criticism on the Pluralism (Normative Pluralism)

1) On the moral parity of the religions (Christian Morality vs other religions).

¨ç How do we know that other faiths transform sinners as effectively as Jesus Christ? What exactly is saintliness anyway?


¨è How do they have the equity of transformative power? Undoubtedly moral change is not the same as spiritual one (born again).

¨é They say that it doesn't matter what you think as long as you act morally, as if beliefs and behavior were not more closely linked than that.
It makes a big difference if one believes that salvation is release from the karmic cycle, or if the poor are getting what they deserve for previous lives, or if evil is an illusion, or if the material world is of no importance.

2) On the unknown real (all religions are human responses to the Ultimate).

¨ç While claiming to be a view of God that transcends all the culturally generated models of God in the world's religions, it is in fact a truth claim familiar to the Eastern monistic traditions.

¨è How do they know that the Real exists and that it is unknowable? Has this been revealed to them?

¨é Even if there exists a Real, we have no idea what it might be like. Does it love us or hate us, or is it sleeping as if Elijah said to Baal?

¨ê A better solution would be keep the truth question open rather than to fall into agnosticism.

3) On the Christology (Jesus is nothing more than the embodiment of the ideal of a human life lived in faithful response to God and in which God was active. Therefore, the incarnation of Jesus is a metaphor. It says that this would better serve the cause of world peace and inter-religious dialogue).

¨ç Although it claims that the incarnation of God is not historical but metaphorical, this is contradict to the doctrine of Christianity.

¨è In fact, Jesus taught the doctrine of the Incarnation. The claim of Jesus underlies and authenticates what later came to be known as the doctrine of Incarnation,


¨é The incarnation is not logical as the rationalism but mystical because it belongs to the mystery of God. Therefore we do not expect it to be made rational without remainder. It must be depended upon faith.

¨ê Although it is that the Anselmian soteriology built around the Incarnation in Western theology add up, it does not. Hick is an intelligent critic of historic Christology. His unitive pluralism is backed up by impressive attempts to demolish traditional beliefs.


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