The Christian Church’s Response To Pluralism -- By: Alister E. McGrath

Journal: Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society
Volume: JETS 35:4 (Dec 1992)
Article: The Christian Church’s Response To Pluralism
Author: Alister E. McGrath


The Christian Church’s Response To Pluralism

Alister E. McGrath*

In an earlier paper1 I outlined the difficulties that are raised for Christian thought and practice by the rise of a pluralist ideology. In this second contribution I propose to address some of those difficulties. I begin, however, by making a point that needs to be heard, especially in relation to religious pluralism.

The pluralist agenda has certain important theological consequences. It is a simple matter of fact that traditional Christian theology does not lend itself particularly well to the homogenizing agenda of religious pluralists. The suggestion that all religions are more or less talking about vaguely the same thing finds itself in difficulty in relation to certain essentially Christian ideas—most notably, the doctrines of the incarnation and the Trinity. Such distinctive doctrines are embarrassing to those who wish to debunk what they term the “myth of Christian uniqueness.” We are invited, on the weak and lazy grounds of pragmatism, to abandon those doctrines in order that the pluralist agenda might be advanced.

In response to this pressure a number of major Christological and theological developments may be observed. Let me note two of them briefly before exploring them in more detail. (1) Doctrines such as the incarnation, which imply a high profile of identification between Jesus Christ and God, are discarded in favor of various degree Christologies, which are more amenable to the reductionist program of liberalism. (2) The idea that God is in any sense disclosed or defined Christologically is set to one side on account of its theologically momentous implications for the identity and significance of Jesus Christ, which liberal pluralism finds an embarrassment. Let us turn to consider these two points.

First, the idea of the incarnation is rejected, often dismissively, as a myth.2 Thus John Hick and his collaborators reject the incarnation on various logical and common-sense counts and yet fail to deal with the question of why Christians should have developed this doctrine in the first place.3 There is an underlying agenda to this dismissal of the incarnation, and a central part of that agenda is the elimination of the sheer distinc-

* Alister McGrath is lecturer in Christian doctrine and ethics at Oxford University in Oxford, England 0X2 6PW.

tiveness of Christianity. A sharp distinction is thus drawn between the historical person of Jesus Christ and the principles that he is alleged to repr...

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