The Challenge Of Pluralism For The Contemporary Christian Church -- By: Alister E. McGrath

Journal: Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society
Volume: JETS 35:3 (Sep 1992)
Article: The Challenge Of Pluralism For The Contemporary Christian Church
Author: Alister E. McGrath


The Challenge Of Pluralism
For The Contemporary Christian Church

Alister E. McGrath*

One of the most perceptive analysts of the consequences of pluralism for Christian churches is Lesslie Newbigin, who is able to draw on his substantial firsthand experience of Christian life in India as he reflects on what pluralism means—and does not mean—for contemporary Christianity:

It has become a commonplace to say that we live in a pluralist society—not merely a society which is in fact plural in the variety of cultures, religions and lifestyles which it embraces, but pluralist in the sense that this plurality is celebrated as things to be approved and cherished.1

Newbigin here makes a distinction between pluralism as a fact of life and pluralism as an ideology—that is, the belief that pluralism is to be encouraged and desired and that normative claims to truth are to be censured as imperialist and divisive. With the former there can be no arguing. The Christian proclamation has always taken place in a pluralist world, in competition with rival religious and intellectual convictions. The emergence of the gospel within the matrix of Judaism, the expansion of the gospel in a Hellenistic milieu, the early Christian expansion in pagan Rome, the establishment of the Mar Thoma church in southeastern India—all of these are examples of situations in which Christian apologists and theologians, not to mention ordinary Christian believers, have been aware that there are alternatives to Christianity on offer. Equally, it is perfectly obvious that cultural pluralism exists. Yet this poses no decisive difficulties for Christianity, in theory or in practice.2 The ability of the gospel to transcend cultural barriers is one of its chief glories.

It is quite possible that this insight may have been lost to English or American writers of the late nineteenth or early twentieth centuries. For such writers pluralism might have meant little more than a variety of forms of Protestantism, while “different religions” would probably have been understood to refer simply to the age-old tension between Protestantism and Roman Catholicism. Pluralism was situated and contained within a Christian context. But immigration from the Indian subcontinent has

*Alister McGrath is lecturer in Christian doctrine and ethics at Oxford University in Oxford, England OX2 6PW.

changed things in England, with Hinduism and Islam becoming foci of identity for ethnic minorities, just as France has been shaken by the new presence of Islam through emigration from its former...

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