I have written before in this dispatch on what I take my reasons for continuing to identify as a Christian to be as well as what I take to be bad reasons to identify as a Christian. I have also written a bit on my personal journey in the wider Christian fold, and how my experiences as a Christian have shaped my understanding of Christianity generally, as well as how they, together with my education and engagement with the non-Christian world, have shaped my understanding of non-Christian religions. In this symbolum, it is my hope to articulate something of a specifically Christian take on pluralism both within the Christian fold (that is, how to navigate differences between Christians, historical and contemporary) and beyond the Christian pale (with, for our purposes, indigenous practitioners, Hindus, Jains, Buddhists, Jews, and Muslims). I offer this for two reasons: first, by way of laying out, in a somewhat more systematic way, the principles that guide the way that I think and write A Perennial Digression for those intrigued but perhaps concerned by my method, and second, to offer something of an introduction to the series that will mostly dominate the newsletter over the Fall and Winter seasons. (Nota Bene: there are still something like one to three articles forthcoming to conclude the spiritual ecology series; I have simply hit upon topics that require more labor than I often have time for to finish. The next one will be on providence and fate, the one after on Jesus’ particularity in an enchanted cosmos, and the last on cosmology as the divine play of the Trinity.)
The basis for Christian pluralism is simple: Christianity is not now and never has been a singular community or tradition with a uniform set of beliefs or behaviors. Jesus and his apostles were part of a wider phenomenon of first-century Jewish apocalypticists functioning in Judea and Galilee under Roman rule, including factions like that of John the Baptizer and his disciples, who held the respect of Jesus’ followers but also triggered, apparently, some anxiety about rivalry in the decades after Jesus’ death (as evidenced in the way that the Gospels and Acts seem to feel the need to repeatedly clarify the nature of the relationship between John and Jesus). Jesus’ own following was stratified into that of his disciples and emissaries, among whom we learn there were also differing degrees of intimacy in the Gospels, friends and contacts who were not part of his itinerant entourage but who did show him hospitality (like Lazarus, Martha, and Mary, or John the Elder), local cities, towns, and villages where individual synagogues received and implemented his halakhic teaching, and crowds of interested, bemused, believing, fervent, perhaps even fanatical Judean peasants. Jesus apparently enjoyed a kind of collegiality, rivalry, and following that stretched across socioeconomic, geographical, and sectarian lines in Early Judaism: neither an Essene nor a Pharisee, he is more similar to the latter, and in Luke-Acts draws many friends and followers from their ranks, as well as, we are told, a fair number of priests after his pascha and the leadership of the movement under James, his brother (Greek: adelphos), and functionally indeed the caliph of his movement. To earnestly believe that each of these people who looked to Jesus had either the same understanding of his significance, even when they shared language about his identity or work, now or in the future, or that they all shared the same cosmology or eschatological scenario into which Jesus fit, is simply to misunderstand the character of Early Judaism and therefore of the people in question. Jesus himself in the Gospels appears to evolve in his self-understanding and his eschatological timetable from the urgency of the Galilean ministry and the ambiguity of the Son of Man to the open declaration of the Petrine confession and the eschatological delay of the Passion predictions and the Olivet Discourse; the Evangelists do not share a singular understanding of Jesus’ significance or the end he inaugurates, and do not all collectively value exactly the same things about Jesus. Paul’s messianic Jesus, who comes to defeat the errant gods, deify his followers, and whisk them up to rule in heaven is difficult to square with the Jesus either of, say, Matthew 19:28 (who will reign over Israel in the cosmic “rebirth” with the apostles) or of the Johannine Apocalypse, both of whom enjoy various stages of terrestrial rule; neither is exactly the messiah of the various texts that inspired these authors or that were composed contemporaneously with them (like those of 2 Baruch and 4 Ezra), who went on to inspire later Christian eschatologies (such as that of Papias and Irenaeus of Lyons). Jewish followers of Jesus in the first century experienced their diversity from one another alongside their distinctions to the non-Jewish followers of Jesus, who tended to value and emphasize different aspects of their common tradition and to interpret Jesus in a distinct framework. Jews, Greeks, and Romans shared a common Hellenistic and Imperial culture—this should not be misunderstood as some ontological separation between the “Hebraic” and “Hellenic” mindsets—but they did have distinct customary, ethnic, and cultic points of view, different literary traditions and immediately relevant cultural allusions, that might also be common to the educated (someone like Philo or Josephus) but not always to peasants (most people) and the illiterati (again, most people). The construction of Jesus as a Mediterranean god, a divine and deified being with parallels to the gods, demigods, heroes, and other important spirits of the ancient Mediterranean world, was already going on in Jesus’ Jewish following, insofar as such things belonged to the common culture of the time, but as the movement became more thoroughly gentile and Jesus’ followers began to do most of their thinking about Jesus in Greek language and cultural settings, this sort of discourse about Jesus became much more prevalent. Often, all of the different cultural sources of Jesus’ presentation can be found in the same texts. Stories about Jesus’ birth, for example, in Matthew and Luke would have suggested to a Jewish reader that Jesus was like ancient Jewish heroes popularly believed, and sometimes textually described, as having a divine, angelic, or otherwise miraculous conception and birth; Luke’s infancy narrative, in particular, would have suggested to the astute reader the parallelism between the “overshadowing” Spirit of God, Mary overshadowed, and Jesus as the result, on the one hand, and the memory of the Ark of the Covenant, on the other, which Luke 1 frequently evokes. But non-Jewish readers would simply have seen Jesus’ pneumatic conception and virginal birth as ranking him among other famous heroes and demigods of the distant past and, indeed, some pagan criticisms of Christianity focused not on disputing the circumstances of Jesus’ birth (though some did) but on the disproportionately special character assigned to it by Christians, as though something similar had not happened to Asklepios, Herakles, or Romulus.
Moving from the first century into the second, then, Christians were not really even a unified “movement,” so much as an overlapping series of networks with greater or lesser degrees of intimacy, agreement, collegiality, peerage, and shared point of view, but all generally agreeing on the apostolic kerygma of Jesus as Messiah, Son of God, and Lord. It is for this reason that almost immediately in the second century it is Christian diversity that is obvious and Christian unity that is obscure: while they are now regarded by most Christians as heterodox, the fact is that in their own day figures like Marcion, Valentinus, Basilides, Montanus, Mani, and Arius could all feasibly claim to be orthodox, “right-believing” Christians, functioning in a context where there was neither a fully defined dogma nor a universally acknowledged source of authority in the Christian assemblies, who were scattered throughout ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern cities, spoke a variety of languages, had unequal access to scriptural texts and good teachers to interpret them, and found themselves in varying settings of social and political (dis)comfort. Not even the imposed uniformity or unity of imperial Christianity in the fourth century could fully resolve or settle this local, regional, and universal pluralism, as evidenced both by the ongoing nature of the conciliar process as well as the fact that after Nicaea and Constantinople the Church of the East existed in a more or less entirely distinct world under Persian rule, consenting to Western ecclesiastical affairs when they agreed with them (as they did at the Council of Chalcedon) and dissenting from them when they did not (as they did at the Council of Ephesus). Indeed, imperial efforts to unify Christianity have often been the very source of further Christian schisms. The Jacobite/Non-Chalcedonian/Monophysite/Miaphysite/“Oriental Orthodox” churches (dependent on the nomenclature one prefers) witness that, but so too do the various ruptures in communion between Old and New Rome, both in the first millennium and, more famously, in the second, as well as the archipelago of Christian confessions that continue to emerge and mutate from the Protestant Reformation in the former Holy Roman Empire, England, and the New World. The pluralism is not always strictly the result of theological disagreement or ecclesial rebellion: there are simply Christians who exist in contexts so novel or so distant from the ancient centers of authority that the feasibility of putting themselves under the regulatory powers of such authorities becomes less and less reasonable over time to them. Sometimes this results in the creation of independent churches, as it did, for example, for the Episcopal Church in the United States, a member of what would later be described as the Anglican Communion; but sometimes this can also mean that different Churches even within the same communion take different approaches to doctrinal and moral issues based on their own contexts, as the Episcopal Church did in the 21st century on LGBTQ issues, and as was a major point of dissension in the 2008 Lambeth Conference and all along the leadup to the 2022 conference. Indeed, even attempts to rectify this pluralism within Anglicanism have only created more pluralism: GAFCON came into existence as a result of the disagreement over sexual issues with Canterbury and the United States, largely, and created the parallel, quasi-Donatist body of the ACNA; but it also now threatens to do the same even in local provinces that it would largely deem Orthodox, like the Anglican Church in Australia. Similarly, in the Catholic world, American theologians tend to be more conservative, German theologians more liberal or leftist, and the current Pope more of a center-left sort of figure, creating the intriguing and often sad struggle for doctrinal and moral authority in a Church that tends to bill itself to other Christians as a solid, stable, unquestionable source of unity on such things as opposed to the pious chaos of other Christian confessions. The same principle is also visible in the Orthodox “diasporae” in the Western world, who live in overlapping canonical jurisdictions and regularly engage in theological battles over different issues in the absence of a clearly defined and agreed source of ecclesial authority for regularizing the American situation and in the tug-of-war between academic scholars and clergy with the more reactionary and fideistic crop of parish clergy and laity that American Orthodoxy is now more or less defined by. In all of these contemporary examples, what is clear is that Christianity will not be tamed into a single thing, for individual Christians, attempting to live according to the demands of their own consciences, and diverse Christian groups, are necessarily, unavoidably going to disagree with one another about what Christianity fully means, especially in such idiosyncratic contexts, and increasingly, in our age, surrendering one’s moral agency and intellectual responsibility to an outside authority quite distant from the messiness of one’s own experience not only feels inauthentic but actually, demonstrably can prove to be a live moral danger to one’s self and to others. It is exactly that sort of clericalist and institutionalist mindset that enabled the clerical sex abuse crisis in both the Catholic Church and the Southern Baptist Convention, for instance; it is exactly that kind of mentality which provides religious justification in Moscow for the positively damnable Russian invasion of Ukraine.
So from their beginnings until now, Christians have never been a single thing; they have at most agreed from time to time on the verbal and ritual tokens of their Christianity, and perhaps on some interpretive strategies for understanding those tokens, only to descend into new controversies over corollaries and practices soon after. Christian pluralism is therefore the most realistic attitude towards Christian diversity: that is, an intentionally broad-minded, widely-appealing, and open-sourced understanding of Christian Faith which takes into account all of its manifestations, looks for the good before condemning the bad, and intentionally attempts to synthesize or syncretize across Christian traditions. Officially, this already happens in joint theological dialogues, receptive ecumenism, and the multiple influences shaping Christian theologians who, confessing particular communities and their perspectives, nevertheless learn with and from other Christians as well. It is also happening on the ground all the time, from the most banal plurality of Christians in any local city to the “ecumenism of blood” when Christians of multiple confessions die together in witness to their faith. But Christian pluralism is also more intellectually honest, recognizing as it does that Christianity has never been a single thing and privileging some single perspective on Christianity as final or ultimate is apocalyptically premature. It is possible to confess faith in the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church only, finally, as an eschatological reality, not an intrahistorical one, at least not an intrahistorical one that is fully realized; ecclesiological systems which deal in the language of ultimacy or fullness end up acknowledging that implicitly when they also allow for the reality of other Christian bodies and would do better to simply do so explicitly too.
But pluralism within the broader Christian canopy forces also a pluralism that is outward-looking, too. As is already evident in the diversity of Jesus’ context, influences, and followers within Judaism, and his reception in the wider Greco-Roman world, Christianity is not an insulated, pristine thing untouched by the world in which it was born. It began as a sect of apocalyptic and messianic Judaism, with distinct teachings and rituals but also which attracted a wide variety of Jews from different backgrounds and with different beliefs and assumptions, and it came to be attractive also to non-Jews with some beliefs shared and others differing from those of their elder brethren. Christians, as I have written on before, largely absorbed Greco-Roman philosophy and paganism to great degrees, albeit while Christianizing them, such that the medieval Christianity in both East and West which resulted was an obvious synthesis of influences, in which Jesus, the Jewish messiah by Christian reckoning, could easily appear sub specie Iovis, Serapionis, Dionysii, etc., and Mary, his Jewish Mother, could easily assume into herself the goddess cults of the ancient Mediterranean, as Nymphe and Magna Mater all at once. It is frankly impossible to accurately understand any of the architects of the specifically Christian intellectual tradition—say, Irenaeus, Tertullian, Clement, Origen, Athanasius, the Cappadocians, Evagrios, Ambrose, Augustine, Ps-Dionysios, Maximus, Eriugena, John Damascene—without also firmly grasping the development of Greek philosophy from its earliest beginnings with the Presocratics, through the classical giants of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, on through their Hellenistic disputants and successors in Epicurus, Zeno, and their followers, the rebirth of the Platonic Academy under Antiochus of Ascalon and the so-called “Middle Platonists,” the Imperial and Late Antique Platonism of figures like Plutarch, Longinus, Alcinous, Ammonius Saccas, Plotinus, Porphyry, Iamblichus, Syrianus, and Proclus. Ammonius Saccas was, after all, probably the teacher not only of Plotinus but also of Origen of Alexandria; the Cappadocians were classically educated philosophers, rhetoricians, and lawyers before they became Christian bishops and theologians. The wealth of Greco-Roman antiquity was as deeply seated in their minds as the swirl of religions and languages surging back and forth across the Silk Roads were in the minds of Nestorians, or the Celtic, Germanic, and Nordic paganisms of far Western and Northern Europe were for Christians of those regions as the faith was brought there. Christianity also existed in a continual, never-ending dialogue with the emergent rabbinic Judaism and its medieval and early modern afterlives: the relationship was frequently adversarial and often resulted in unjustifiable persecution of Jews in Christian lands, but it testifies, at a minimum, to the lingering Christian sense that Christianity’s own legitimacy depended in some sense on Judaism. This sense only deepened through the anxieties of the Christian relationship to Islam. For those Christians who did not enjoy or benefit from the imperial Christianity of the Byzantines, Islam’s arrival was a welcome advent, from a fellow Abrahamic monotheism that was bringing just punishment on an errant Christian social order; for those Christians more aligned with the empire, the challenge of Islam was that the success of Muslim conquests implied divine favor and providential priority, which threatened to undermine Christian self-understanding. But here, too, the relationship was not wholly negative. No less a Christian thinker than Aquinas depended on both Jewish and Muslim philosophy in the West; in the East, Christians and Muslims on the ground frequently shared holy sites dedicated to biblical prophets and personages, and the qualities of the Christian saints were emulated by the Sufi wali and vice-versa, with figures sometimes enjoying joint veneration by ordinary laypeople, just as in earlier centuries gentile Christians had often freely frequented synagogues and attended Jewish festal celebrations of the high holy days (to the chagrin and bigoted rage of church leaders like John Chrysostom). Christian pluralism is partially a product of the ambiguities of the revelation of God in Christ itself, being gradually unfolded in Tradition and Scripture, but it is also partially a product of the cultural mosaic of Asia, Africa, and Europe in which Christianity in its first two millennia chiefly found itself. The same observations have obtained, however, as Christianity has come to what are now North and South America, where both ancient indigenous religious civilizations as well as new religious movements alike demand Christian attention, often negative historically (American Christians bear a tremendous sin in the treatment of indigenous peoples), but nevertheless, unavoidable.
The same has generally been true of Christians in the orbit of the dharmic religions, which in the 20th and 21st centuries includes Christians living and operating primarily in the West in ways that it did not previously. Christians in South, Southeast, and East Asia—those in Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Myanmar, Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam, Tibet, China, Mongolia, Taiwan, Korea, Japan—find that the primary cultural contexts they work out their Christian lives in are not those of their ancestors in faith or their peers in other parts of the world but those shaped by Hinduism, Jainism, Buddhism, Islam, and Sikhism, two of which admit of many varieties in local expression. That is to say, some Christians encounter Hindus of different philosophical schools and bhaktic cult, while others encounter Theravada Buddhists, and others still encounter Mahayanists or Zen practitioners. And as Asia has often preserved and integrated indigenous, traditional religious practices into the more dominant religious systems, it is also the case that animism, shamanism, ancestor worship, and other pieces of the tapestry of these regions (which are, to be clear, vast stretches of land admitting of many different cultures, peoples, ethnicities, and languages) force the question of Christian self-identification in relation to such things. And insofar as Asian religions and philosophies have filtered, albeit in watered-down form, inexorably Westward over the centuries, it is certainly the case also that Christians in the West must confront such things too.
It should be acknowledged that pluralism is easy enough to advocate from a position of relative cultural protection and even majority status (though the latter of these is rapidly declining in the United States and Europe). Western Christians are perhaps more likely than Christians living in Kerala, for example, to value Advaita Vedanta or than Christians living in South Korea or Japan to value various iterations of Buddhism. The reason is simple: minority status in a culture means that one’s rhetoric is often doing the heavy lifting of carving out a place for one’s self and community in wider society, and the easiest and quickest way to do so is polemical. The Church Fathers themselves insisted that they were presenting something novel and superior to what was available in paganism or Judaism. But we would be mistaken to believe this rhetoric, then or now, as suggesting a genuine novelty or innovation, because almost always it arises from the anxiety of dependence and similarity rather than from an accurate portrayal of the situation. The Fathers were all but completely dependent on the Jewish heritage of Christianity and Hellenic philosophical education to articulate their distinctively Christian philosophy. So, too, Christians living in places like Asia, Africa, or South America are shaped in ways that are not always directly visible behind polemics but are no less real and influential by their parent cultures—and not just some idealized, abstractly “classical” account of those cultures, either, but by their real shape and activity in the present, molded in part by (usually negative) contacts with the West. And often, though not exclusively, polemics against such cultural contacts and connections is motivated more by imported colonial mentalities from Western Christian centers of authority than it is an organic response to one’s environment. It is not obvious that Christianity in Asia was destined to present itself as a competitor with other religious systems apart from the influence of Western missionaries on both indigenous Christian communities as well as new Christian converts; nor is it obvious that Christianity’s doctrinal and moral shape in the Global South would have organically come to assume its current form without the influence of colonial powers dictating the change of indigenous norms they found uncomfortable (often, to wrap back around to the ongoing Anglican debacle, surrounding issues of sex, gender, and marriage). The history of missions often betrays that contemporary Christians in the Global South have inherited many of their attitudes not from their direct ancestors but from the Europeans and Americans that came proselytizing them, suggesting again that Christianity does not and cannot exist in a cultural vacuum.
For this reason, Christian pluralism in an external, outward-looking sense becomes likewise appropriate, both as the most realistic way to evaluate Christian faith descriptively as well as the most charitable and dynamic way to engage Christian faith prescriptively. The Fathers depended on the cultures they were in dialogue with because they realized, fundamentally, that the Christian kerygma alone could not suffice to comprehensively explain Christianity’s significance to a world that was not already Christian and that there were many relevant topics to one’s worldview that apostolic and ecclesiastical preaching had no private resource for. Genesis, for example, says that God created the world, but does not offer a strictly metaphysical or cosmogonic account of that process that would have merited serious attention outside of Jewish or Christian circles; it is only through creative synthesis of Genesis, Timaeus, and Plato’s successors that the Fathers were able to craft a philosophically serious doctrine of creation. Scripture frequently speaks of spirits and souls, and the New Testament mentions otherworldly afterlife regions and a future resurrection; but in a culture that had for centuries deliberated about what the soul was and what became of it at death, the Fathers realized they would have to apply philosophy to the Bible to unpack how biblical teaching could be conceived as rational. This is not really very different from the liturgical realization by later antique and medieval Christians that the aesthetics of Christian worship would have to borrow both from the Hebrew Bible and Judaism—however poorly remembered or understood—as well as from normative forms of Hellenic religion. The evolution of the Christian clerical class may well have said that its precedents were owed mainly to the biblical Levites, but one would have to be almost wholly ignorant not to see that Christian hiereis emerge largely as a cooptation of a variety of Greco-Roman officia in the cursus honorum: that is, after all, the origin of things like episkopoi, presbyteroi, and diakonoi, and the reason that the Pope of Rome is, after all, pontifex maximus (and was for sometime popularly understood as Caesar in the wake of the Western Empire’s decline). Medieval Christians in what are now Ireland, Scotland, and England adopted a similar dualism about their famous monastic priests and evangelists, who resemble at one and the same time biblical prophets and Celtic druids in their various functions. Contemporary Christians are in no different a position, wherever they are: they will, unavoidably, have to make use of the wider non-Christian culture to answer new, compelling questions, raised by new contexts, and to adopt new forms of life that make sense in those contexts. Pantaenus’, Clement’s, and Origen’s catechetical academy is in this sense no different than the Christian ashram movement or the Jesus People or the New Monasticism or the communities envisioned by Querida Amazonia: individual Christians cannot abstract and idolize a particular moment of their past as normative without doing some violence to their own time and place. And this means that Christian pluralism within forces, in fact, Christian pluralism without: a willingness to learn from the diverse perspectives of other traditions and to take what seems both useful and appropriate to the mystery of God in Christ. This means that Christians actually need religious others: we should thank God that we have animists, Hindus, Jains, Buddhists, Jews, Muslims, new religious practitioners, agnostics, and atheists with whom to dialogue, for without this dialogue we could not really be ourselves. In some sense who we are depends on who they all are.
This does not mean that Christians must logically believe in the equal truthfulness of all traditions (though some do and can), nor does it mean that one must so stretch the bhaktic boundaries of Christianity itself as to make it unrecognizable. It is possible both to be devoted to the Christian rite and to be generous enough of mind as to acknowledge the common gnosis or jnana (they emerge from the same Indo-European root) as to see God, perhaps even, through a Christian lens, the mystery of God in Christ, “everywhere present, filling all things,” as much present in the Eucharist as in the yajña or the homa or the zazen, though, it can still be qualified, not all in exactly the same way: to commune with God by eating the flesh and blood of Jesus Christ is not the same thing as to commune with God through Vedic ritual or to realize the emptiness of all contingent reality in Buddhist meditation. Each of these religious technologies may well be useful for different aspects of the spiritual life, just as different religious philosophies excel at answering different kinds of questions or communities at different moral qualities; indeed, for many people in Asia this is how religion generally functions, as a habit of drawing liberally on different kinds of spiritual technologies for different kinds of purposes, usually in a hierarchy as constructed by the individual or their community.
What did Christ come to change about the nations, on the Christian understanding? The normative answer, per the Early Jewish apocalyptic narratives that motivated people like Jesus and Paul, was to remove idolatry and immorality, and to enjoin the ethical monotheism that was already sometimes visible among non-Jews. Some Christians today would conclude from this both that pluralism in the outward-looking sense is impossible, as well as even that those forms of iconodouleia common to traditional Christianity are inappropriate. Christ, so this argument goes, died, was buried, descended, rose, and ascended to dethrone evil gods and dominate the kosmos with worship of the true God; and as far as it goes, that narrative is certainly right. But as I have written on elsewhere here, it is not the whole story: already within the first and second century a more realized eschatology of cosmic reconciliation begins to emerge in which Christ has in some sense already humbled the gods and subordinated them to himself, though there perhaps remain some divinities misaligned to his rule in the lower heavens and upper air which continue to subjugate humanity. Certainly, no ancient Christians found it appropriate to continue worshiping other gods or their images. But the iconographic and statuary tradition of Christianity, which includes veneration of the icon, as well as the assumption of pagan divinities’ attributes into traditional portraits of Christ, complicates the matter considerably. By the historical Jesus’ own standards, kneeling before a painted medieval statue of his Mother holding him on her knee surrounded by tapestry and candles as I pray None—which happened yesterday—would have been idolatry, though it was not by later Christian standards. Is there perhaps room, then—given the awareness of Christ’s having filled all things, including even the gods themselves, with himself, and of shifting Christian standards with respect to time and culture—to withhold hasty judgment? Christians are probably going to mainly feel for the foreseeable future that, for example, a Christian performing pooja to Ganesh has committed a grave sin against the ritual restrictions of Christian Faith, soluble only through penitence; but is it not possible for Christians to look upon the murti of Ganesh and understand both that a.) Ganesh is taken by most of his worshipers to simply be either a symbol or a contingent manifestation of the divine absolute, and b.) performs a function little different from that of many Christian icon cults? True: Hindus bathe, feed, and care for the murti as the god him or herself; this is the kind of thing Scripture finds unacceptable. But even here, there are exceptions: the patriarchs set up masseboth, stones consecrated to be bearers of the divine presence (vaguely reminiscent of Sivalinga); YHWH and Asherah likely had cult statues in the Temple prior to Josianic iconoclasm; and Christ, the Church, and individual humans are spoken of as icons of God no less material or physical than idols. Provided that Christians do not offend their own common standards of worship, “idolatry” is probably not a useful category for understanding other religions and philosophies the majority of the time: it is both too specific a practice and too prodigally applied. And after two millennia, Christians should reckon with the way that certain narratives of Christ’s theomachy have impacted their world. Had earlier Christians been more careful, for example, it is possible that the so-called “disenchantment” of the kosmos, spoken of as early as Athanasius’ On the Incarnation, may not have happened; and if, as biblical cosmology seems to insist, the gods are in fact real and free moral agents, one wonders if in 2,000 years some of those that continue to enjoy worship and communities might not be seen by Christians as those who have consented to Christ’s reign (acknowledging, of course, that such a narrative is bound to be a specifically Christian one). Christians need not fear communion with demons in consulting yoga or Vedanta or the Buddha’s dhamma or Rumi or Kabbalah or whatever: communion is about worship, and Christians, qua Christians, may continue to be choosy about their cult.
But what they cannot afford to choose wrongly on is the necessity of engagement with the world in its diversity, beauty, and multi-perspectival character. We simply know too much about the world to be able to maintain ethical credibility without engaging charitably and openly with points of view other than our own, whether those are human or nonhuman. True: we do not desire to be taken in, by man or god; “Even if an angel from heaven preached another gospel,” and all of that. But we today find ourselves in much the same position as our patristic forbears: there are emerging certain points of philosophical and religious concern that our own tradition does not always have the resources or the precedent to weigh in on with authority, where others do, or at least have more of each. Exercising deep listening to them will both enrich our own perspective and enable us to listen better to other Christians generally.
Christian pluralism is, at the end of the day, an ethos of listening, study, and receptivity rather than one of speaking, teaching, and exclusivism. It does not need to mean that there are never hills Christians are willing to die on (an expression that, for us at least, is clearly keyed to Golgotha itself); but it can mean that Christians wisen considerably about when one is genuinely being asked to take a stand for something essential to Christian Faith and when not. Christians are uniquely bad at telling the difference a wild amount of the time, at least in the West, where the only ire they tend to express greater than that for the non-Christian world tends to be for other Christians. But Christ has descended and ascended “that he might fill all things with himself,” such that however much interference there might be between us, we can count on the voice of Christ to speak to us from anyone, anywhere, and anything if we will only slow to listen rather than hasten to judge. Christian pluralism is, then, a departure from the letter of the patristic law, the fact of their rhetorical practice, but it is attention to the patristic spirit, the subtext or intention (Greek: boulema), behind their project, just as they sought in Scripture and their pagan contemporaries sought in the deeper meaning of classical texts and authors. Plotinus was far more likely than Origen, perhaps, to advocate learning from Persian and South Asian wisdom, but it is far more Origenian to do so, ultimately, than it is not to, or even than to simply wile away one’s time and energy at the surviving texts of Origen himself (though, to be clear, that is an essential preparatory exercise to serious Christian theology). Again, this does not have to mean abandonment of principles that demonstrate perennial value: Neoplatonism remains the best Western philosophical model for understanding reality that Christians have yet adopted, even if Advaitin and Mahayanist systems also appear useful and clarificatory now in ways they could not have been for ancient Christians that did not know them. But it is the spirit of engagement that matters. Because, finally, Christian pluralism is to take up the apostolic and patristic task of dialogue in the present, rather than simply to reiterate that it was so done in the past, with an eye to the future apocalypse, hopefully, with the spiritual fruit of grace and charity which was not yet ripe in earlier ages and will hopefully be more abundant after our own. Christian pluralism, both internal and external, takes seriously the idea of revelation as unfolding, of the future as indeterminate, and of the wayfaring with Christ now as the only time and place in which we can be Christians. And ours is certainly an era in which love, love of the other and love of the kosmos, not in its fallenness but in its aboriginal beauty in God, is the trademark sign of religion’s credibility to any and all, without which all our talk of Christ and the Church will only be so many clanging cymbals dying on the wind.
Wonderful stuff.
One of the most persistent issues I’ve encountered in when trying to encourage a more receptive external pluralism has been christian skepticism towards traditions that are insufficiently theistic (Buddhism, Taoism) or explicitly non-theistic.
I’ve been toying with the idea of trying to take an exegetical approach to lessening the tension on the Christian side. Something like arguing that these traditions can still “touch the hem of Christ’s garment” while being somewhat oblivious towards his face (a somewhat parallel position to that of Moses who perceived the hind most parts of the divine but not the face of Christ prior to the transfiguration).
After all, Isaiah tells us that the train of his robes fills the celestial temple so who’s to say that these traditions are not well and truly perceiving that impersonal aspect of the divine. Whose to say they are not fully grasping the cosmic garment which covers the body of Christ.