MysteriousFaith

Competing Truth Claims

As we mature intellectually and spiritually, one of the questions that begins to take on additional form is what we mean by our use of the word “salvation” and the closely related question of what we think happens to those outside our particular faith tradition who do not hold, or even deny, what we hold to be exclusively true and necessary for salvation. Hidden within this question is much of the motivation for missionary work, one of the sincerely selfless acts a human can dedicate himself to (notwithstanding de Tocqueville’s comment that he was “always surprised to meet a missionary, and thinking I was to meet a preacher, instead met a politician”). Missionary work has historically done much to help the marginalized of the world; even now it is inevitable that some of the most war-torn and famine-ridden parts of the world would go even more overlooked were it not for the work and dedication of numerous Christian, Jewish and Muslim missionaries.

The personal dimension to the questions concerning salvation become more acute when we interact with someone from another faith whose outward manifestations and inward transformation seem strikingly similar to those we claim as being unique to the outworking of salvation as experienced from within our own faith. The Christian who engages a Mormon and finds that his politics, worldview, ethics, sense of morality and inner peace are essentially the same as his is forced to disavow the evidence in plain sight and immerse himself in a conversation of apologetic significance.

Why do such encounters degenerate into debate over exclusive truth claims instead of dialogue over mutually shared spiritual experiences? Were we to look inside, we would find our responses in these moments owe much to the fear that those ideas we have invested meaning into may be less significant than what the beliefs have begun in our minds, hearts and souls. Such an admission would in no way de-legitimize our beliefs, but would change their role from being dogmatic and literally true to being tools we learned to use to carve a more beautiful inner being. If someone who does not believe in Jesus being Divine, or in Moses being a prophet who split the Red Sea, or Mohamed being Allah’s last prophet, or in Aurobindo being an authentic avatar, but can be completely at peace with their life and their view (or lack thereof) of God, what are we to make of this? Into these gaps religion steps up, arguing any number of responses ranging from such peace being a deceit wrought by Satan, to self-delusion, to said people being “anonymous Christians”, or to the now popular ambiguous response that somehow, in some unexplained way, holding to specific ideas has some unique outworking, perhaps not an outworking visible in this life.

One good example of this argument can be found in S. Mark Heim’s book The Depth of the Riches: a Trinitarian Theology of Religious Ends. In his book, Heim uses Dante’s Paradiso and its picture of higher levels of ascendancy in heaven that bring one closer to God, arguing that the higher levels of relation to God are reserved for those who come to know God through Christianity. This analogy, quite common at the moment, resorts to a watered down version of what fundamentalisms themselves advocate, namely, that if your doctrine is not “just right” your eternal destiny will suffer. Flexible as such a postulation as Heim’s is in its ability to seemingly circumvent the problems with exclusivism, it inevitably defends the position that what some may not understand, have been revealed to them, or disagreed with for very reasonable reasons becomes that which determines their eternal destiny. Heim’s graduated heaven and hell coupled with Lewis’ allegorical eternal punishment make this conclusion more palatable, but do not resolve the underlying complication that belief, not transformation, ultimately determines eternal destination.

Candor begs we acknowledge our fear in admitting that various truth statements we hold to, and through which we experienced real transformative grace, may be less important than the process itself. This is a complication to organized religion as it forces the focus from up-front belief to back-end transformation. It is inevitable that such a shift also becomes increasingly caustic towards the supernatural beliefs each faith tradition has nested within its dogma. Religion then asks itself a number of questions, none more essential than can it survive if it de-emphasizes that which makes it itself? What would Christianity be without a literal divine Christ? What would Judaism be without a literal Exodus led by God in a pillar of fire? What would Islam be without a literal theophany for Mohammed? The short answer is that they will be that which within their faiths is essential, and they will not be that which within their faith is non-essential. And here we have our rub; for it is here that we see what is truly essential in too many faith traditions is belief in the supernatural, and not belief in inner transformation. Religion is sufficiently self-aware as to understand certain things can not be taken away from it without it suffering the loss of that which is easiest (outward confession of certain beliefs), and being forced to elevate its discussion to that which is most difficult (inward transformation to specific spiritual ideals).

Can religion survive in the next century? Certainly, and such survival may owe nothing to the type of pluralism I advocate and everything to entrenched statements of belief that are held to more strongly than ever. Can creedal statements become something other than literal statements of belief and figurative expressions of transcendence? In some cases the answer to this would be yes. If Christians could back away from the literalistic definition of the Holy Spirit (its being a literal third person of the Trinity) and just for a moment entertain the possibility that when Paul wrote these words he was looking less to define an ontological reality of God’s personhood that had previously gone undefined, and more to articulate the ineffable reality of his own experience with God, then Christianity could continue to use much of its own language and elevate that language to something of transcendent value. As long as dialogue on the Holy Spirit is rooted in some semblance of literalism – which even the work of helpful theologians such as Clark Pinnock is – it is inevitable that Christianity will be forced to defend the literalism of the idea’s construct and not focus on the much more important reality of opening one’s inner-self up to such a point where we can be moved by those inner workings that are best explained by quite vague words like “ghost” and “spirit.”

In Ken Wilber’s The Marriage of Sense and Soul: Integrating Science and Religion he says that: “Mythology is true enough in its own world-space; it’s just that perspectival reason is ‘more true’: more developed, more differentiated-and-integrated, and more sophisticated in its capacity to disclose verifiable knowledge.” (Page 164) The supernatural beliefs that have constituted religious dogma for the last several thousand years have served an important purpose; however, now that the developed world has increased in knowledge and is bumping into contrasting statements of exclusive truth that can only lead to conflict, it is more important than ever for faith to become secondary to inner transformation leading to outward growth. The world can not sustain its diminishing borders with intolerant truth claims; the world can grow exponentially into new areas where international law, cooperative poverty eradication and meaningful sustained technologies can take root, but this will only happen when the soil these ideas are planted in is void of improvable dogma.

previous post: The Unexamined Life
next post: Questions for Faith: Are We the Center of God’s Universe?

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• July 13, 2005

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