Pluralism and the Decade of

Evangelism
ALISTER E. MCGRATH

Pluralism has become of major importance to the English churches. It is not

simply a fact of life; it is a major consideration which must be addressed by
all who are concerned with the maintenance of Christian integrity and the
responsible proclamation of the gospel in the Decade of Evangelism. The
present paper aims to outline the problems, and suggest some approaches
by which they may be seen in their proper context. My particular concern is
to address the criticism that evangelism is arrogant and imperalist, and
totally inappropriate in a pluralist society. While this criticism has the
advantage of political correctness, it is intellectually shallow, and, as I hope
to show in what follows, is potentially self-destructive. In the course of the
discussion, I shall deal with several of the objections to evangelism which are
particularly encountered in academic circles, given the importance that
these have for university and college Christian chaplains, leaders and
evangelists.
The Decade of Evangelism has captured the imagination of Christians
throughout the world. My American colleagues often comment on the
vision of a church which sets itself the joyful task of sharing the good news
of the gospel with such seriousness over a sustained period of time. Natu-
rally, there has been no shortage of criticisms and misrepresentations of the
Decade, often from a secular press unable (and perhaps unwilling?) to make
the simple, yet vital, distinction between fundamentalist indoctrination and
the sharing of convictions. Rightly understood, evangelism is an act of
generosity, in which those who have joyfully received share the gift of the
gospel with others, in order that they too might rejoice. But what are the
implications of sharing the good news of Christ in a pluralist situation?
Commenting on his theme, 'the gospel in a pluralist society', Lesslie
Newbigin remarks:
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 cher-
ished.1
Newbigin here makes a distinction between pluralism as a fact oflife, 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

1 Lesslie Newbigin, The Gospel in a Pluralist Society, SPCK, London 1989, p 1.

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Anvil Vol. 9, No. 2, 1992
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 theolo-
gians, not to mention ordinary Christian believers, have been aware that
there are alternatives to Christianity on offer.
It is quite possible that this insight may have been lost to most English
Christians of the late nineteenth or early twentieth centuries, trapped in a
contented and lazy English parochialism. For such people, 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. Yet
immigration from the Indian subcontinent has 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 North African colonies. As a result, western
theologians (who still seem to dominate global discussion of such issues)
have at long last become aware of and begun to address issues which are
routine facts of everyday life for Christians in many parts of the world. Yet
often, as we shall see, this belated awakening to the issue of religious
pluralism is often formulated and discussed on the basis of a set of western
liberal, rather than Christian, assumptions.
The basic fact of pluralism, then, is nothing new. What is new is the
western response to this phenomenon: the suggestion that plurality of
beliefs is not merely a matter of observable fact, but is theoretically justified
- iri intellectual and cultural life in general, and in particularly in relation
to the religions. Claims by anyone group or individual to have any exclusive
hold on 'truth' are thus treated as the intellectual equivalent of fascism.
Significantly, the first casualty of the pluralist agenda is truth.
The discussion of this issue is often focussed on the specific phenomenon
of religious pluralism. While this has the merit of simplicity, it overlooks the
vital fact that recent trends towards pluralism, especially in North America,
are grounded in and nourished by an underlying ideology of pluralism. This
ideology, which is usually designated 'postmodernism', is the essential
starting point for any discussion of pluralism.

Intellectual pluralism
The intellectual foundations of pluralism are associated with the movement
known as postmodernism, which is generally taken to be something of a
cultural sensibility without absolutes, fixed certainties or foundations, and
which takes delight in pluralism and divergence. One aspect of
postmodernism which illustrates this trend particularly well, while also
indicating its obsession with texts and language, is deconstruction - the
critical method which virtually declares that the identity and intentions of

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 AUSTER E. MCGRATH Pluralism and the Decade of Evangelism
the author of a text are an irrelevance to the interpretation of the text, prior
to insisting that, in any case, no meaning can be found in it. All interpreta-
tions are equally valid, or equally meaningless (depending upon your point
of view). As Paul de Man, one of the leadin~ American proponents of this
approach, declared, the very idea of 'mearung' smacked of Fascism. This
approach, which blossomed in post-Vietnam America, was given intellec-
tual respectability by academics such as de Man, Geoffrey Hartman, Harold
Bloom, and J. Hillis Miller. 2

The inconsistencies of postmodernism

The lunacy of this position only became publicly apparent with the sensa-
tional publication of some wartime articles of de Man. On 1 December 1989,
the New York Times reported the discovery of anti-semitic and pro-Nazi
articles, written by de Man for the Belgian Nazi newspaper, Le Soir. A
scandal resulted. Was de Man's deconstructionalism an attempt to deny his
own past? Was de Man himself really a Fascist, trying to escape from his own
guilt? And, given the axiomatic status of the 'fallacy of authorial intention'
within postmodernism, nobody could argue that de Man had actually
meant something different from the impression created by those articles;
after all, the author's views were, according to deconstruction, an irrel-
evance. No attempt could be made to excuse le Man by an appeal to his
historical circumstances; for le Man himself had written that' considerations
of the actual and historical existence of writers are a waste of time from a
critical viewpoint.' Deconstruction thus seemed to sink into the mire of
internal inconsistency.

'Truth' and political correctness

Postmodemism has an endemic aversion to questions of truth, regarding
this as the equivalent of intellectual fascism. Political correctness suggests
that the idea of 'truth' has strongly authoritarian overtones. As Allan Bloom
summarizes this outlook in The Closing of the American Mind:
The danger... is not error but intolerance. Relativism is necessary to
openness; and this is the virtue, the only virtue, which all primary
education for more than fifty years has dedicated itself to inculcating.
Openness-and the relativism that makes it the only plausible stance
in the face of various claims to truth and the various ways of life and
kinds of human beings - is the great insight of our times. The true
believer is the real danger. The study of history and of culture teaches
that all the world was mad in the past; men always thought they were
right, and that led to wars, persecutions, slavery, xenophobia, racism
and chauvinism. The point is not to correct the mistakes and really be
right; rather it is not to think that you are right at all. 3

2 For an excellent analysis, see David Lehman, Signs of the Times, Andre Deutsch,
London 1991.
3 Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind, Simon & Schuster, New York 1987, pp
25f.
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Anvil Vol. 9, No. 2, 1992
Yet we have already noted that pretensions to be 'right' litter the pluralist
agenda. John Hick clearly believes that he is correct in his perception of the
world's religions, whereas that of the 1960 Congress on World Mission is
'ridiculous' and wrong. But the real challenge of pluralism lies in the
position outlined by Bloom - that claims to 'be right' constitute an intoler-
ant intellectual fascism.
But the need to have the truth question on the agenda is relatively easily
argued. One method of approach might be the following. To the postmodem
suggestion that something can be 'true-for-me' but not 'true', tne following
reply might be made. Is Fascism as equally true as democratic libertarian-
ism? Consider the person who believes, passionately and sincerely, that it is
an excellent thing to bum widows alive on Hindu funeral pyres:' Others
might argue that it is justifiable to place millions of Jews in gas chambers. But
can such beliefs really be allowed to pass unchallenged, as postmodernism
seems to allow?
The moral seriousness of such questions often acts as the intellectual
equivalent of a battering ram, bringing out the fact that certain views just
cannot be allowed to be true. There must be some criteria, some standards
of judgement, which allow one to exclude certain viewpoints as unaccept-
able. Otherwise, postmodemism will be seen to be uncritical and naive, a
breeding ground of the political and moral complacency which allowed the
rise of the Third Reich back in the 1930s. Even postmodernism has difficul-
ties in allowing that Nazism is a good thing. Yet precisely that danger lies
there, as evidenced by the celebrated remark of Jean-Paul Sartre: 'tomorrow,
after my death, certain people may decide to establish fascism, and the
others may be cowardly or miserable enough to let them get away with it.
At that moment, fascism will be the truth of man.'
This is an important point, perhaps the point at which postmodernism is
at its most vulnerable. To lend extra weight to it, we may consider the
consequences of the ethical views of Michel Foucault, generally regarded as
one of the intellectual pillars of postmodem thought.

A case study: Michel Foucault

Foucault argues passionately, in a series of highly original and creative
works, that the very idea of 'truth' grows out of the interests of the powerful.
'Truth' can support systems of re~ression, by identifying standards to which
people can be forced to conform. Thus what is 'mad' or 'criminal' does not

4 Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind, p 26. For an account of the British decision
to abolish the practice of sati (the preferred transcription of the Sanskrit; the alterna-
tive suttee is often encountered in the older literature), see Stephen Neill, A History of
Christianity in India, 1707-1858, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1985, pp
157f. Regulation XVII of the Bengal Code (1829) declared that 'the practice of suttee,
or of burning or burying alive the widows of Hindus, is hereby illegal, and punishable
by the criminal courts'.
5 The most important writings are his Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human
Sciences, Vintage Books, New York 1973; Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and
Other Writings, 1972-1977, Pantheon Books, New York 1980; Histoirede la fo/ied /'age
classique, Gallimard, Paris 1972.
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 AUSTER E. MCGRATH Pluralism and the Decade of Evangelism
depend upon some objective criterion, but upon the standards and interests
of those in authority. Each society has its 'general politics of truth', which
serves its vested interests. 'Truth' thus serves the interests of society, by
perpetuating its ideology, and providing a rational justification for the
imprisonment or elimination of those who happen to contradict its general
outlook. And philosophy can too easily become an accomplice in this
repression, by providing the oppressors with rational arguments to justify
their practices. Philosophers have allowed society to believe that it was
persecuting its marginal elements on the basis of 'truth' or 'morality' -
universal and objective standards of morality, of what is right and wrong-
rather than on the basis of its own vested interests.
For such reasons, Foucault believes that the very idea of objective truth
or morality must be challenged. This belief has passed into the structure of
much of postmodernism. But is it right? Is not the truth that Foucault's
criticism actually rests upon a set of quite definite beliefs about what is right
and what is wrong? To give an illustration: throughout Foucault' s writings,
we find a passionate belief that repression is wrong. Foucault himself is
committed to an objective moral value - that freedom is to be preferred to
repression. It is necessary to point out that Foucault's critique of morality
actually presupposes certain moral values. Beneath his critique of conven-
tional ethics lies a hidden set of moral values, and an unacknowledged
commitment to them. Foucault's critique of the moral values of society
seems to leave him without any moral values of his own -yet his critique
of social values rests upon his own intuitively accer,ted (rather than explic-
itly acknowledged and theoretically justified) mora values, which he clearly
expects his readers to share. Yet why is struggle preferable to submission?
Why is freedom to be chosen, rather than repression? These normative
questions demand answers, if Foucault's position can be justified - yet
Foucault has vigorously rejected an appeal to general normative principles
as an integral part of his method. In effect, he makes an appeal to sentimen-
tality, rather than reason, to pathos rather than to principles.6 That many
shared his intuitive dislike of repression ensured he was well received - but
the fundamental question remains unanswered. Why is repression wrong?
And that same question remains unanswered within postmodemism, which
is vulnerable precisely where Foucault is vulnerable.
As Richard Rorty, perhaps the most distinguished American philosopher
to develop Foucault's dislike of general principles and normative standards,
remarks, a consequence of this approach must be the recognition that
There is nothing deep down inside us except what we have put there
ourselves, no criterion that we have not created in the course of
creating a practice, no standard of rationality that is not an appeal to
such a criterion, no rigorous argumentation that is not obedience to
our own conventions.'1

6 Stanley Rosen, Hermeneutics as Politics, Oxford University Press, Oxford 1987, pp 189-
90.
7 Richard Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism, University of Minneapolis Press,
Minneapolis 1982, p xiii.

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Anvil Vol. 9, No. 2, 1992
But if this approach is right, what justification could be given for oppos-
ing Nazism? Or Stalinism? Rorty cannot give a justification for the moral or
political rejection of totalitarianism, as he himself concedes. If he is right,
Rorty admits, then he has to acknowledge
... that when the secret police come, when the torturers violate the
innocent, there is nothing to be said to them of the form 'There is
something within you which you are betraying. Though you embody
the practices of a totalitarian society, which will endure forever, there
is something beyond those practices which condemns you.' 8
It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that, for Rorty, the truth of moral
values depends simply upon their existence. And it is at this point that many
postmodernists feel deeply uneasy. Something seems to be wrong here.And
this sense of unease is an important point of entry for the Christian insistence
that, in the first place, truth matters, and in the second, that it is accessible.
And that is why it continues to be important to insist, not just that truth
matters, but that Christianity is true. Stanley Hauerwas wrote that 'the only
reason for being a Christian ... is because Christian convictions are true'. 9
Princeton philosopher Diogenes Allen tells the story of the person who
asked him why he should go to church when he had no religious needs.
'Because Christianity's true', was Allen's riposte.10 Gordon Lewis' book
Testing Christianity's Truth Claims11 is important, not simply on account of its
documentation of recent developments in apologetics, but because it firmly
declares that truth claims are being made, that they are capable of being
tested, and that, as a matter of principle, they ought to be tested. And if
pluralism is resistant to having its truth claims tested, it can hardly expect to
be taken seriously, save by those who - for the culturally-conditioned
moment-share its prejudices. It will be a sad day when a claim to be telling
the ~ruth is met with the riposte that there is no truth to tell.

Religious pluralism
Alongside the postmodern celebration of pluralism in general we now
encounter a new concern for religious pluralism. The rise of religious plural-
ism can be related directly to the collapse of the Enlightenment idea of
universal knowledge, rather than any difficulties within Christianity itself.
Often, there is a crude attempt to divert attention from the collapse of the
Enlightenment vision by implying that religious pluralism represents a new
and unanswerable challenge to Christianity itself. The Princeton philoso-
pher Diogenes Allen rightly dismisses this as a spurious claim:
Many have been driven to relativism by the collapse of the Enlighten-
ment's confidence in the power of reason to provide foundations for
our truth-claims and to achieve finality in our search for truth in the
8 Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism, p xiii.
9 StanleyHauerwas,ACommunityofCharacter,UniversityofNotreDamePress,Notre
Dame 1981, p 1.
10 Diogenes Allen, Christian Belief in a Postmodern World, Westminster /John Knox Press,
Louisville 1989, p 1.
11 GordonR Lewis, TestingChristianity's Truth Claims: Approaches to Christian Apologetics,
University Press of America, New York 1990.
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 AUSTER E. MCGRATH Pluralism and the Decade of Evangelism
various disciplines. Much of the distress concerning pluralism and
relativism which is voiced today springs from a crisis in the secular
mentality of modern western culture, not from a crisis in Christianity
itself.12
Yet these relativistic assumptions have become deeply ingrained within
secular society, often with the assumption that they are to the detriment of
Christian faith.
So, given that there are so many religions in the marketplace, how can
Christianity claim to be true? It is important to appreciate that a cultural
issue is often linked with this debate: to defend Christianity is to be seen to
belittle non-Christian religions, which is unacceptable in a multicultural
society. Especially to those of liberal political convictions, the multicultural
agenda demands that religions should not be permitted to make truth-
claims, to avoid triumphalism or imperialism. Indeed, there seems to be a
widespread perception that the rejection of religious pluralism entails
intolerance, or unacceptable claims to exclusivity. In effect, the liberal
political agenda dictates that all religions should be treated on an equal
footing. It is but a small step from this political judgement to the theological
declaration that all religions are the same. But is there any reason for
progressing from the entirely laudable and acceptable demand that we
should respect religions other than our own, to the more radical demand that
we regard them all as the same, or as equally valid manifestations of some
eternal dimension of life?

All religions lead to God?

In one of its more extreme forms, this view might be stated as follows: all
religions lead to God. But this cannot be taken seriously, when some world
religions are avowedly non-theistic (although some western writers, irri-
tated by non-theistic religions, have argued that they really are theistic,
despite what their adherents believe - thus neatly forcing all religions into
the same mould). A religion can hardly lead to God if it explicitly denies the
existence of a god or any gods. We therefore need to restate the question in
terms of 'ultimate reality', or 'truth'. Thus refined, this position might be
stated as follows: religion is often determined by the circumstances of one's
birth; an Indian is likely to be a Hindu; an Arab is likely to be a Moslem. On
account of this observation, it is argued, all religions must be equal paths to
the truth.
This makes truth a function of birth. If I were to be born into Nazi
Germany, I would be likely to be a Nazi - and this makes Nazism true? If
I had been born in ancient Rome, I would probably have shared its polythe-
ism; if I had been born in modern Arabia, I would be a monotheist. So they
are both true? This shockingly naive view of truth would not be taken
seriously anywhere else. No other intellectual discipline would accept such
a superficial approach to truth. Why accept it here? It seems to rest upon an
entirely laudable wish to allow that everyone is right, which ends up

12 Allen, Christian Belief in a Postmodern World, p 9.

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Anvil Vol. 9, No. 2, 1992
destroying the notion of truth itself. Consider the two propositions:
A Different people have different religious views;
B Therefore all religious views are equally valid.
Is proposition (B) in any way implied by proposition (A)? For the form of
liberalism committed to this approach, mere existence of a religious idea
appears to be a guarantor of its truth! No-one seems prepared to fight for the
truth-content of defunct religions, such as classical polytheism - perhaps
because there is no-one alive committed to them, whose views need to be
respected in a multicultural situation?

Sincere belief is true

The fatal weakness of this approach usually leads to its being abandoned,
and bein~re~laced with a modified version, which could be stated thus: 'any
view which ts held with sincerity may be regarded as true'. I might thus be
a Nazi, a Satanist, or a passionate believer in the flatness of the earth. My
sincerity is a guarantee of the truth. On this view, it would follow that if
someone sincerely believes that modern Europe would be a better place if six
million Jews were to be placed in gas chambers, the sincerity of those
convictions allow that view to be accepted as true. The British philosopher
of religion John Hick summarizes the contempt with which this view is held:
'to say that whatever is sincerely believed and practised is, by definition,
true, would be the end of all critical discrimination, both intellectual and
moral.' 13
It is therefore more than a little ironic that the most significant advocate
of the pluralist 'truth-in-all-religions' approach is this same John Hick, who
argues that the same basic infinite divine reality lies at the experiential roots
of all religions. However, he maintains, they experience and express this
reality in different ways. Why? 'Their differing experiences of that reality,
interacting over the centuries with the different thought-forms of different
cultures, have led to an increasing differentiation and contrasting elabora-
tion.'14 This approach thus suggests that the various religions must be
understood to complement one another. In other words, truth does not lie in
an 'either-or' but in a 'both-and' approach. On the basis of Hick's homog-
enizing approach, no genuine conflicting truth-claims can occur. They are
ruled out of order, on a priori grounds. By definition, religions can only
complement, not contradict, each other. In practice, Hick appears to contra-
dict himself here, frequently declaring that 'exclusive' approaches to reli-
gions are wrong. For example, he styles the traditional 'salvation through
Christ alone' statements of the 1960 Congress on World Mission as 'ridicu-
lous' - where, by his own criteria, the most stinging criticism that could be
directed at them is that they represent a 'difference in perception'. The
inherent absurdity of Hick's refusal to take an evaluative position in relation
to other religions is totally compromised by his eagerness to adopt such a
position in relation to versions of Christianity which threaten his outlook,
both on account of their numerical strength and non-inclusive theologies.

13 John Hick, Truth and Dialogue, Sheldon Press, London 1974, p 148.
14 John Hick, God and the Universe of Faiths, Collins, London 1977, p 146.
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 AUSTER E. MCGRATH Pluralism and the Decade of Evangelism
When all is said and done, and when all differences in expression arising
from cultural and intellectual development are taken into account, Hick
must be· challenged forcefully concerning his crudely homogenizing ap-
proach to the world religions. It is absurd to say that a religion which says
that there is a God complements a religion which declares, with equal vigour,
that there is not a God (and both types of religion exist).15 If the religious
believer actually believes something, then disagreement is inevitable - and
proper. As the distinguished American philosopher Richard Rortyremarked,
nobody 'except the occasional cooperative freshman' really believes that
'two incompatible opinions on an important topic are equally good.' 16

Liberal imperialism and the religions

One of the most serious difficulties which arises here relates to the fact that,
on the basis of Hick's model, it is not individual religions which have access
to truth; it is the western liberal pluralist, who insists that each religion must
be seen in the context of others, before it can be evaluated. As many have
pointed out, this means that the western liberal doctrine of religious plural-
ism is defined as the only valid standpoint for evaluating individual
religions. Hick has set at the centre of his system of religions a vague and
undefined idea of 'the Eternal One', which seems to be little more than a
vague liberal idea of divinity, carefully defined - or, more accurately,
deliberately not defined, to avoid the damage that precision entails - to
include at least something from all of the major world religions Hick feels it
is worth including.
To develop this important point, let us consider a well-worn analogy
concerning the relation of the religions. Let us allow Lesslie Newbigin to
describe it, and make a vitally important observation:
In the famous story of the blind men and the elephant ... the real point
of the story is constantly overlooked. The story is told from the point
of view of the king and his courtiers, who are not blind but can see that
the blind men are unable to grasp the full reality of the elephant and
are only able to get hold of part of it. The story is constantly told in
order to neutralize the affirmations of the great religions, to suggest
that they learn humility and recognize that none of them can have
more than one aspect of the truth. But, of course, the real point of the
story is exactly the opposite. If the king were also blind, there would
be no story. The story is told by the king, and it is the immensely
arrogant claim of one who sees the full truth, which all the world's
religions are only groping after. It embodies the claim to know the full
reality which relativizes all the claims of the religions. 17
Newbigin brings out with clarity the arrogance of the liberal claim to be
able to see all the religions from the standpoint of one who sees the full truth.
The liberal pluralist is the king; the unfortunate evangelical is the blind-

15 Hugo Meynell, 'On the Idea of a World Theology', Modern Theology 1 (1985), pp 149-
63.
16 Rorty, The Consequences of Pragmatism, p 166.
17 Newbigin, The Gospel in a Pluralist Society, pp 9f.
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Anvil Vol. 9, No. 2, 1992
folded beggar. Or so the pluralist would have us believe. Perhaps a more
responsible - and considerably less arrogant - approach would be to
suggest that we are all, pluralists included, blind beggars, to whom God
graciously makes himself known.
Yet is not this approach shockingly imperialist? Hick's implication is that
it is only the educated western liberal academic who, like the king, can really
understand all the religions. Their adherents may naively believe that they
have access to the truth; in fact, only the western liberal academic has such
privileged access, which is denied to those who belong to and practice such
religion. Despite not being a Buddhist, Hick is able to tell the Buddhist what
he or she really believes (as opposed to what they think they believe).
Perhaps one of the most astonishing claims made by liberals in this respect
can be found in The Myth of Christian Uniqueness, in which a number of
contributors - such as Paul Knitter, Langdon Gilkey, Rosemary Radford
Ruether and Tom Driver - assert that all the religious traditions can share
a common outlook on justice and liberation. This arrogant imposition of
political correctness upon the world religions glosses over the patently
obvious fact that the world religions have differed - and continue to differ
- significantly over social and political matters, as much as over religious
ideas.
Let us hear one of Rosemary Radford Ruether's Olympian pronounce-
ments on the relation of the religions. She clearly does not intend to enter into
dialogue with her opponents when, like Zeus hurling a thunderbolt at those
far below him, she delivers her verdict that 'the idea that Christianity, or even
the Biblical faiths, have a monopoly on religious truth is an outrageous and
absurd religious chauvinism.' 1
Yet the assumption which underlies the thinking of most of the contribu-
tors to The Myth of Christian Uniqueness is that a liberal pluralism does, in
~ffect, have a monopoly on religious truth, by allowing religions to be seen
in their proper context. It alone provides the vantage point from which the
true relation of the religions can be seen. Is this not also an 'outrageous and
absurd' imperialism? Ruether effectively treats her own religious position as
privileged, detached, objective and correct; whereas thatofChristianity (or,
at least, those forms of Christianity which she dislikes) is treated with little
more than scorn and a sneer.
So why should we accept a liberal interpretative standpoint, which owes
little if anything to Christian beliefs, and is only 'objective' in the minds of
those who espouse it? All vantage points are committed, in some way or
another. There is no neutral Archimedean point. We need to expose 'the
myth of a pluralistic theology of religions', to quote the subtitle of a
significant recent publication in this field. 19
If a naive pluralism has gained the upper hand in the academic world, it
is partly because evangelicals have allowed it to do so, by failing to articulate
18 Rosemary Radford Ruether, 'Feminism and Jewish-Christian Dialogue', in J. Hick
and P. Knitter (eds.), The Myth of Christian Uniqueness, Orbis, Maryknoll, NY 1987,
p 141.
19 Gavin D'Costa (ed.), Christian Uniqueness Reconsidered: The Myth of a Pluralistic
Theology of Religions, Orbis, Maryknoll, NY 1990.
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 AUSTER E. MCGRATH Pluralism and the Decade of Evangelism
a credible, coherent and convincing and Christian interpretation of the place
of the world religions,20 and ensure that this is heard and noticed in the
public arena. Earlier, I stressed the importance of developing a framework
to make sense of, and evaluate, the place and ideas of other religions. Carl
E. Braaten makes this point as follows:
For Christian theology, the religions cannot establish their meaning in
a final way apart from the light that falls on them from the gospel: that
is, we know what we know about what God is doing in them in the
light of Christ; otherwise, we would not know what sense to make of
them. Some definite ferspective needs to guide our interpretations
and appropriations.2
There is an urgent need to develop a Christian theology of religions - a
distinctively and authentically Christian approach to this issue, which
avoids the imperialism of recent liberal approaches.

Liberalism deletes Christianity's distinctive features

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. These
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 noted.
First, the idea of the incarnation is rejected, often dismissively, as a
myth.22 Thus John Hick and his collaborators reject the incarnation on
various logical and common-sense counts - yet fail to deal with the
question of why Christians should have developed this doctrine in the first
place.23 There is an underlying agenda to this dismissal of the incarnation,
and a central part of that agenda is the elimination of the sheer distinctiveness
of Christianity. A sharp distinction is thus drawn between the historical
person of Jesus Christ, and the principles which he is alleged to represent.
Paul Knitter is but one of a small galaxy of pluralist writers concerned to
drive a wedge between the 'Jesus-event' (unique to Christianity) and the

20 Happily, there are promising developments on offer. See, for example, Paul Varo
Martinson, A TheoloS]I of World Religions, Augsburg, Minneapolis 1987; Diogenes
Allen, Christian Belief in a Postmodern World, Westminster /John Knox, Louisville, KY,
1989), pp 185-96; Carl E. Braaten, No Other Gospel! Christianity among the World's
Religions, Fortress Press, Minneapolis 1992, pp 83-102.
21 Braaten, No Other Gospel!, p 71.
22 Perhaps most notably in J. Hick, ed., The Myth of God Incarnate, SCM, London 1977.
23 See Alister E. McGrath, 'Resurrection and Incarnation: The Foundations of the
Christian Faith', in A. Walker, ed., Different Gospels, Hodder & Stoughton, London
1988, pp 79-96.
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Anvil Vol. 9, No. 2, 1992
'Christ-principle' (accessible to all religious traditions, and expressed in
their own distinctive, but equally valid, ways).
It is fair, and indeed necessary, to inquire concerning the pressure for such
developments, for a hidden pluralist agenda appears to govern the outcome
of this Christological assault- a point made in a highly perceptive critique
of Hick's incamational views from the pen of Wolfhart Pannenberg: 'Hick' s
proposal of religious pluralism as an option of authentically Christian
theology hinges on the condition of a prior demolition of the traditional
doctrine of the incarnation.' Hick, Pannenberg notes, assumes that this
demolition has already taken place, and chides him for his excessive
selectivity - not to mention his lack of familiarity with recent German
theology! - in drawing such a conclusion. 24
It is significant that the pluralist agenda forces its advocates to adopt
heretical views of Christ in order to meet its needs. In an effort to fit Jesus into
the mould of the 'great religious teachers of humanity' category, the Ebionite
heresy has been revived, and made politically correct. Jesus is one of the
religious options available by the great human teachers of religion.
Second, the idea that God is in some manner made known through Christ
has been dismissed. Captivated by the image of a 'Copernican Revolution'
(probably one of the most overworked and misleading phrases in recent
writings in this field), pluralists demand that Christians move away from a
discussion of Christ to a discussion of God - yet fail to recognize that the
'God of the Christians' (Tertullian) might be rather different from other
divinities, and that the doctrine of the Trinity spells out the nature of that
distinction. The loose and vague talk about 'God' or 'Reality' found in much
pluralist writing is not a result of theological sloppiness or confusion. It is a
considered response to the recognition that for Christians to talk about the
Trinity is to speak about a specific God (not just 'deity' in general), who has
cho~n to make himself known in and through Jesus Christ. It is a deliberate
rejection of authentically and distinctive Christian insights into God, in
order to suggest that Christianity, to rework a phrase of John Toland, is
simply the republication of the religion of nature.
Yet human religious history shows that natural human ideas of the
number, nature and character of the gods are notoriously vague and mud-
dled. The Christian emphasis is upon the need to worship, not gods in
general (Israel's strictures against Canaanite religion being especially im-
portant here), but a God who has chosen to make himself known. As Robert
Jenson has persuasively argued, the doctrine of the Trinity is an attempt to
spell out the identity of this God, and to avoid confusion with rival claimants
to this title. 25 The doctrine of the Trinity defines and defends the distinctive-
ness - no, more than that: the uniqueness - of the 'God of the Christians'.
The New Testament gives a further twist to this development through its
language about 'the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ', locating the
identity of God in the actions and passion of Jesus Christ. To put it bluntly:

24 Wolfhart Pannenberg, 'Religious Pluralism and Conflicting Truth Claims', in G.

D'Costa, ed., Christian Uniqueness Reconsidered, Orbis, Maryknoll, NY 1990, p 100.
25 Robert Jenson, The Triune Identity, Fortress Press, Philadelphia 1982, pp 1-20.
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 AUSTER E. MCGRATH Pluralism and the Decade of Evangelism
God is Christologically disclosed.
This point is important, given the obvious confusion within the pages of
The Myth of Christian Uniqueness concerning the nature and identity of the
god(s) or goddess(es) of the pluralists. Pluralism, it seems to be, possesses a
certain tendency to self-destruction, in that there is, if I could put it like this,
'a plurality of pluralisms'. For example, a vigorously polemical defence of
'pluralism' (a word used frequently throughout its pages) may be found in
The Myth of Christian Uniqueness. According to the authors of this volume,
Christianity has to be seen in a 'pluralistic context as one of the great world
faiths, one of the streams of religious life through which human beings can
be savingly related to that ultimate Reality Christians know as the heavenly
Father'. Yet having agreed that Christianity does not provide absolute or
superior knowledge of God, the pluralist contributors to this volume
proceed to display such divergence over the nature of god that it becomes far
Irom clear that they are talking about the same thing.
But there is a more important point here. Pluralism is fatally vulnerable
to the charge that it reaches an accommodation between Christianity and
other religious traditions by wilfully discarding every distinctive Christian
doctrine traditionally regarded as identity-giving and identity-preserving
(to say nothing of the reductionist liberties taken with the other religious
traditions). The 'Christianity' which is declared to be homogenous with all
other 'higher religions' would not be recognizable as such to most of its
adherents. It would be a theologically, Christologically and soteriologically
reduced version of the real thing. It is thus not Christianity which is being
related to other world faiths: it is little more than a parody and caricature of
this living faith, grounded in the presuppositions and agendas of western
liberalism rather than in the self-revelation of God, which is being related to
theologically-reduced and-homogenized versions of other livingreligions.26
Dialogue turns out to involve the sacrifice of integrity. The identity of
Christianity is inextricably linked with the uniqueness of Christ.

Dialogue with integrity

It is perfectly possible for the Christian to engage in dialogue with non-
Christians, whether of a religious persuasion or not, without in any way
being committed to the intellectually shallow and paternalist view that
'we're all saying the same thing' .27 As Paul Griffiths and Delmas Lewis put
it in an aptly entitled article, 'it is both logically and practically possible for
us, as Christians, to respect and revere worthy representatives of other
traditions while still believing - on rational grounds - that some aspects
of their world-view are simply mistaken' .28 Contrary to Hick's homogeniz-
ing approach, John V. Taylor remarked that dialogue is 'a sustained conver-

26 See John Milbank, 'The End of Dialogue', in G. D'Costa, ed., Christian Uniqueness
Reconsidered: The Myth of a Pluralistic Theology of Religions, Orbis, Maryknoll, NY 1990,
pp 174-91, especially pp 176f. Milbank's critique of the shallow assumption that
'religion' constitutes a well-defined genus should be noted (p 176).
27 See Amulf Camps, Partners in Dialogue, Orbis, Maryknoll, NY 1983, p 30.
28 Paul Griffiths and Delmas Lewis, 'On Grading Religions, Seeking Truth, and Being
Nice to People: A Reply to Professor Hick', Religious Studies 19 (1983), p 78.
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Anvil Vol. 9, No. 2, 1992
sation between parties who are not saying the same thing and who recognize
and respect the differences, the contradictions, and the mutual exclusions
between their various ways of thinking' ,'29
Dialogue thus implies respect, not agreement, between parties - and, at
best, a willingness to take the profound risk that the other person may be
right, and that recognition of this fact may lead to the changing of positions.
And that belief lies at the heart of responsible Christian evangelism - that
the inner truth of Christianity has a power to convert. Evangelism is in no
way inconsistent with respect for others. Some liberal critics accuse Chris-
tians of imperialism through their desire to evangelize; yet, as I have stressed
in this article, those critics are equally imperialist in their assumption that
they have privileged access to truth, which allows them to dismiss evange-
lism as an arrogant and unnecessary irrelevance.
This paper has explored some possible approaches to the challenge posed
to modern Christianity by the rise of pluralism. As will be clear, I have only
had time to identify some approaches, mapping out briefly what deserves
to be discussed at far greater length. But my basic contention is clear:
pluralism is inherently self-destructive, and owes its appeal more to the
rhetoric of political correctness than to its intellectual credentials. It corre-
sponds to the spirit of our age, and is thus appropriate to the committed
liberal outlook of so much of modern academia, which has, by a process of
osmosis, found its way into the churches. But I end with a comment by
William Inge, a former Dean of St Paul's Cathedral, who remarked: 'He who
marries the spirit of the age today will be a widower tomorrow'. Tomorrow
is not that far away; and responsible Christian theology, which I believe to
be represented in the readership of this journal, must speak today for that
tomorrow.

The Revd Dr Alister E. McGrath lectures in Christian doctrine at Wycliffe

Hall, Oxford. He delivered the Bampton Lectures at Oxford University in
1990. This article is an abbreviated form of the keynote Inch Lectures,
delivered at the Wheaton College Theological Conference on 'The Challenge
of Religious Pluralism' in March 1992.

29 John V. Taylor, 'The Theological Basis of Interfaith Dialogue', in J. Hick and B.

Hebblethwaite, eds, Christianity and Other Religions, Fortress Press, Philadelphia
1981, p 212.
114