World Peace was center stage during Madonna’s halftime performance at this year’s Super Bowl. For our Wondering Fair readers uninterested in American culture or sports, I will spare you the details of the well-choreographed and highly entertaining spectacle. This essay focuses less on the 
glitz and glamour of the Super Bowl than on the possibility of world peace in an age of religious pluralism. 2011 as we know was a year rife with protests, so is world peace in the way Madonna envisions possible? Can we all learn to “coexist,” as the trendy bumper stickers encourage us to do? Madonna’s halftime performance seems to suggest that we can achieve global shalom, but it’s hard to imagine such a world when our current economic, political, and religious differences are so severe.
On the religious front, one proposal to help establish world peace is to adopt a position called religious pluralism. Promulgated by academic theologians like Wilfred Cantwell Smith and John Hick, religious pluralism is the idea that all religions are essentially equal paths up the same divine mountain. Each simply recognizes Truth in a different way, though all roads lead to God. In Hick’s own words, “pluralism is the view that the great world faiths embody different perceptions and conceptions of, and correspondingly different responses to, the Real or the Ultimate from within the major variant cultural ways of being human….”[1] Here, in his desire to remain religiously neutral, Hick substitutes the word “Real” for God, a term which has a clear Abrahamic bias. The benefits of religious pluralism, it is thought, are that people may stop trying to convert or coerce others into their way of thinking and thereby live together in harmony.
Despite good intentions, there are several problems with religious pluralism. First, it is methodologically flawed. In an attempt to find what is common to all faiths, the pluralist is forced to ignore seriously important elements of each religion. The things that make religions unique—such as the Trinity for Christians or the prophecy of Muhammad for Muslims—are routinely trivialized and viewed as unnecessary additions. To suggest that Christians or Muslims willingly give up their core doctrines in favor of a far more ambiguous pluralist picture of the divine seems ill-conceived.
Second, pluralism is morally problematic. If the Real does not reveal Itself to people in history, then
the religious practices of faithful Hindus, Jews, Christians, and Muslims are based on misunderstandings. Since the Real hides Itself from everyone (except for Hick and other pluralists!) and remains fundamentally mysterious to us, we are in the dark morally and cannot live in a way that pleases the Real. This deep agnosticism which runs through religious pluralism makes it especially difficult to discern right from wrong.
Third, pluralism is logically impossible. As many scholars have pointed out, the idea that all religions are true in their own way flies in the face of common sense.[2] All religions make exclusive truth-claims and prioritize their understanding of reality over against others. Religious pluralism, with its nuanced and sophisticated understanding of the Real, is no different. Ironically, the desire to create a universal religion for everyone only leads to the denial of all other truth-claims made by religious believers. How can Hinduism, with its claim to 330 million gods, be just as true as Theravada Buddhism, which has zero gods, or Judaism, which has only one?
Finally, from a Christian perspective, religious pluralism fails to acknowledge Jesus as Lord. To be sure, this is unproblematic for persons of other faiths, but for Christians who want to be true to their historic beliefs, Jesus must be seen not merely as one manifestation of an unknown higher deity we call the Real. Rather, Jesus made known his identity in history by walking among people and saying things like, “I am the way, the truth, and the life” and “I and the Father are one.”[3] His exclusive truth-claims, as we know, not only caused consternation and led to his crucifixion, but they were and continue to be fundamental to the Christian story. Despite its lack of Super Bowl glitz and glamour, it is this story, I would argue, that promises to end all protests and ultimately usher in real world peace.
Paul McClure
[1] John Hick, “Religious Pluralism.” Reprinted in Philosophy of Religion: Selected Readings. Ed by Michael Peterson, William Hasker, et al. (New York: Oxford UP, 2001), 565.
[2] For more resources, see Harold Netland’s Encountering Religious Pluralism, Stephen Prothero’s God Is Not One, Vinoth Ramachandra’s Faiths in Conflict, John Stackhouse’s No Other Gods Before Me, and Ravi Zacharias’ Jesus Among Other Gods.
[3] Italics added. John 14:6, 10:30 (NIV)
*Thanks also to Professor Ivan Satyavrata for his helpful lecture on religious pluralism.
“That’s a strange question!” your average university student might reply. “When you die, you die. The plug’s pulled out, and the lights go out, that’s it: the eternal void. If there was something more, we would have discovered it by now. There would be proof, right?”
Even for Amortals, death is hard to ignore. Every second roughly two people around the world die—that’s 150,000 per day, 55 million per year. And contrary to popular opinion, they don’t disappear, pass away, fall asleep, or retire. They die. It’s not someone else’s problem. I will die. You will die. We could party hard and desperately grasp onto what life is left, but our last words may be tragic like whiskey merchant Jack Daniels. As he died from a blood infection, all he could say was “One last drink, please.”
But let’s get real. Apple will continue on with or without his vision. Jobs won’t be there to appreciate it, and within a couple of generations his name will be a footnote in a design textbook. I have to agree with Woody Allen, who quipped, “I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve immortality through not dying. I don’t want to live on in the hearts of my countrymen. I would rather live on in my apartment.”
Philosophers and luminaries across history have spoken about hope in the face of death. But only one pointed to himself as the source of this hope. Jesus of Nazareth claimed “I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in me will live, even though they die” (John 11:25). His last words came with confidence from a crucifix: “It is finished.”
Recently I was jogging through Noosa National Park with a Canadian friend, pointing out the great diversity and character in the surrounding trees. In place of uniform stands of pines were paperbarks and gnarled gumtrees. Nanna quickly came to mind. Trees like these were features in many of her paintings, and her poems. Nanna loved nature. She used to tell tales of fairies in the garden, replete with intricate details of what each would wear and how they would move. The banksia bush had a larger-than-life personality in her imagination. At the least opportune time—like when picking me up from a friend’s place—Nanna would quietly slip out of the conversation, leaving us all wondering where she’d gone. After looking around, we would find Nanna on her knees, crawling through the garden bed. She was scraping off bits of bark from the base of a gumtree—“It’s for my bark paintings,” she explained. For Nanna, this was normal.
Of all the books that Nell had read, it’s no secret that her favourite was the Bible. In this “book of books” we find a recurring theme growing to a climax in the person of Christ, like the lapping of waves on a beach as they reach toward full tide. It is the pattern of grace, fall, and new grace.
d, who was able to take the worst suffering, and the greatest injustice, and turn it into new grace and hope for all humanity. At the Bible’s climax we see God Himself in the person of Jesus, left high and dry as He opened His arms to embrace a world gone awry. Love is cruciform. And love is passionate, where passion literally means to “suffer with.” So Nanna had faith in the God with scars. When Nanna looked through tear stained eyes at the resurrected Christ, she knew all her sad stories would one day come untrue. And the result was art fuelled by hope.
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