Review of Chung's Christ the One and Only

In a world rapidly moving to twin extremes, pluralism and athiesm, there are unfortunately fewer and fewer voices who bring intellectual dialogue to the religious roundtable. Whereas pluralism says there are many ways to God and whereas athiesm denies His existence, the Christian evangelical message is that there is a God and that there is only one way to know Him. If Christians are going to continue to share the Good News that Jesus saves the sinner from sin, they had better get used to speaking within these ever increasing conversations as well.

             Sung W. Chung’s Christ the One and Only: A Global Affirmation of the Uniqueness of Jesus Christ is a collection of essays by a variety of Christian writers from varying evangelical positions on the subject. Each writer draws attention to a different aspect of the advent of the Christ and how that relates to the major world religions. Beginning with Jesus’ birth and taking various facets of his life, teaching, and salvific work, the authors establish Christ’s uniqueness as a starting point for conversation with other faiths. The latter essays attempt to establish talking points for the major world religions and Christianity by invoking Christ’s uniqueness as the leverage for dialogue. Chung closes the book with his own essay related to the dialogue between Christianity and Buddhism, but he also provides a framework for productive interfaith dialogue.

The first essay highlights the uniqueness of Jesus’ incarnation.  Elias Dantas takes an historical approach to show how the Christian church has affirmed the reality and necessity of the virgin birth. He lists alternative views like Ebionism that has denied the deity of Christ and Docetism that denied his humanity. He shows how Gnosticism was dealt with during the Reformation period and how the great ecumenical church councils rejected Arianism, Apollinarianism, Nestorianism and Eutycheanism. What was finally affirmed was the church’s official position on Christ being fully man and fully God in one Person.

Clark Pinnock then attempts to establish the uniqueness of Christ’s teaching.  In short, Pinnock believes Jesus’ vocation was successful because his teaching was successful. Although he is personally against a literal interpretation of Scripture, Pinnock places a great emphasis on the didactic work of Christ. His teaching about God set him apart from other teachers of his day and throughout history.

The symbol of the cross, handled by Graham Tomlin, has been received in different ways throughout history. During the medieval times, it was seen as a sign of Christian aggression. However, Paul and the early church made it central to their teaching and identity. Martin Luther made it the crux of both his doctrine and spirituality. Pascal used it to unlock the mystery of understanding God. Christ’s crucifixion is unlike any other soteriological symbol.

Gabriel Fackre takes Jesus’ assertions of being the only way, truth and life to apply to a grand narrative. He sees God beginning his work in creation, man rejecting God and yet God accepting man. Through the cross Jesus’ offices of prophet, priest and king are defined. The church is the body of Christ by which mankind enters into communion with Christ. Then Fackre issues a call for hope in universal salvation through a post-mortem evangelism and possibility of temporary hellfire. All in all, Fackre sees Jesus’ resurrection as the guarantee for this salvation.

Mark Thompson takes two approaches to defining the uniqueness of Jesus’ revelation. Exegetically, God made himself “known at particular times to particular people” (92). In the Torah, he revealed himself in part through the ark of the covenant and the temple. In the New Testament, he revealed himself explicitly through the Person of Jesus Christ as the one and only who came from the Father. Thompson takes the claims of Christ’s exclusivity to answer the question of pluralism by stating that “those outside of Christ do not know the God who created them” (107).

Veli-Matti Karkkainen promotes the uniqueness of Christ’s role in the Trinity. Like Thompson he also deals with the challenge of pluralism, but he believes placing the Trinity in the dialogue is a great resource for the exclusivist. Only in the Trinity can the Christian God be defined in a historical context. Karkkainen surveys various positions, but he takes specific issue with Hick for his denial of the Trinity and with Knitter for his denial of absolute truth. In the end his “general dissatisfaction with pluralism includes critique of their either too general a view of salvation (the ‘self-realization’ of Hick) or the particularist (the eco-liberation of Knitter)” (129).

            These unique characteristics are then applied to various world religions. Ellen Charry

deals with what she calls an eternal crusade by looking at Christianity through Judaism’s eyes and Judaism through Christian eyes. The basic points of conflict revolve around the uniqueness of Christ in relation to what must be accepted soteriologically and thereby what constitutes the true people of God. Christians do not understand why Jews would not want to accept Jesus as their Messiah. However, Jews already seeing themselves as God’s people do not see a need for salvation. Moreover, to accept a man in God’s place would constitute blasphemy. Charry leaves these two religions incompatible, except for the notion that Jesus is still unique to Christians.

            Paul Chung believes that Buddhism shares some common elements with Christianity. Using the doctrine of justification, he compares Luther with Shinran. This interfaith dialogue might not bring the two world religions any closer together, but Chung believes that it focuses the adherent to his own beliefs in a newer way.

            Accordingly, Ng Kam Weng discusses the commonalities between Islam and Christianity. Muslim acceptance of Jesus as a lesser prophet to Mohammed offers a dialogical inquiry into what an Old Testament prophet really was. Admittedly with certain difficulties, presenting Jesus as an eschatological prophet who still has a work to complete could be a starting point for this discussion. Weng believes that when Muslims can see Jesus as God in Christ they may move beyond the fatal sin of shirk and begin to see Jesus’ soteriological role.

            In his essay, K.K. Yeo does not deal as much with the uniqueness of Christ as with agape love and the law as Confucian concepts of ren and li. Yeo says that “to be a full Confucianist is to be a Christian” (203). According to Yeo, Jesus’ teachings can be best understood through Confucianism’s teachings and vice versa.

            Finally, Sung Wook Chung also tackles a dialogue between Buddhism and Christianity by noting several points of contact. He promotes a missional model for interfaith dialogue that “allows Christians to explore the possible points of contact between Christianity and other religions and to employ these points of contact to share the gospel with those who are adherents of other religions” (225). By relating to Buddhism’s tenets of suffering, craving, cessation and moral cultivation, Christianity can find dialogical touch points for sharing a clear gospel message. 

My Take on Chung's Approach

Chung’s presentation of such a wide variety of evangelical positions in this book seems to stem from the fact that even evangelicals differ on main points, but the uniqueness of Christ still brings them together. It is for that reason that there is hope in anchoring the evangelical message on this one point and thereby finding the window for the evangelical community to interact with other world religions. Chung states early on that the essays he has gathered for this book are by writers who adhere to the “absolute uniqueness of Jesus Christ as the only Lord and Savior of humanity” (x). Moreover, a reaffirmation of this common tenet then becomes the sticking point in defining who will contribute to the discussion.

            Because of the varying authors, each chapter has its own unique style and flow. Some of the writers produce an essay that reads more like a survey, while others engage directly in a comparative study of religions. The writers also have varying backgrounds, theologically covering the spectrum of evangelical Christianity and geographically representing the globe. But the thing that unifies their contributions is the mainstream evangelical stance that Jesus is unique.

Furthermore, although the writers do vary in their stances, extreme positions are not represented. Karkkainen seems to lean somewhat in his Trinitarian stance toward a greater openness to pluralism, but the extreme ecumenical pluralist would not appreciate the book’s tendency toward recognizing the absolute truth found in Jesus Christ. Thompson seems to be more of an exclusivist in his questioning the very value of an interfaith dialogue, but the extreme separatist would not appreciate the books openness to find elements of Christian contact within other world religions.

            Chung’s main thesis is that Christianity can indeed find those points of contact with other religions by holding the advent of Jesus as a banner for comparison. Chung admits there are limitations to these contact points, but he encourages their exploration nonetheless. Still he holds Christ’s uniqueness in high regard, and that seems to be the strongest point for this book.

The book presents a theology of religions that is clearly Christocentric as opposed to bibliocentric or theocentric. The centrality of the cross is self-evident, but Chung goes further to promote a more comprehensive Christology from a much broader perspective than just the soteriology of the cross. The whole advent of the Christ, from his incarnation to his future eschatological role, is brought into play in this conversation. Tomlin promotes the cross as a symbol that can find value in other religions. Fackne suggests that Christ speaks through a range of religious interpretations. Karkkainen goes further to say that the Spirit of Christ is at work in other religions. 

Although this Christocentric approach informs Chung’s theology of religions, there are nonetheless some writers who seem to toy with pluralism. Clark Pinnock’s stance against bibliocentric Christology, for example, seems to hurt his own argument for Christ’s uniqueness. When he says that the Magi visits recorded in Scripture are not factual or that the church has placed an undo emphasis on the virgin birth of Christ, he unwittingly destroys whatever evidence he might have appealed to for the uniqueness of Christ’s teaching. Because it could be argued that a proper Christology must be founded in Scripture, Pinnock’s rejection of biblical historicity dances dangerously on the edge of the very tenets that fuel pluralism.

In response to this tension between pluralists and exclusivists within the evangelical camp, Chung proposes a “missional model” (225) for dialogue with other religions. The weakness of this model, however, is that it is still somewhat ambiguous in its application. Chung attempts to apply the model in a dialogue between Christianity and Buddhism in his final chapter, but it still falls short of communicating the “solid and clear” (238) salvific truth that he desires. He acknowledges that limitation by disclaiming his missional model as the final conversation, but he nevertheless promotes it as a starting point in the dialogue.

Chung’s attempt to synthesize a Christological perspective across the evangelical spectrum is important. Although some have complained that his essay collection omitted crucial conversation partners like Western secularists, folk religions or Hinduism, it is sufficient to test his theory that a high Christology can be useful in interfaith dialogue. In a day when pluralism and tolerance are being promoted as the only means for a round table discussion, Chung sets a chair for the intelligent evangelical who cannot deny the strong claims of Christ as the only way, truth and life. Chung admits that mutual love and concern must be the atmosphere for exchanging ideas, but his book shows where exclusive truth claims can find conversation partners with other world religions.    

Review of Paul Knitter's No Other Name

No Other Name? A Critical Survey of Christian Attitudes toward the World Religions is a case for religious pluralism. I will give a brief survey of Paul F. Knitter's argument and then give my own evaluation of his logic (if theological mumbo-jumbo bores you, just skip down to the critical evaluation section). 

            The basic premise of his book is that “a nonnormative, theocentric Christology does not contradict the New Testament proclamation of Jesus and therefore is a valid interpretation of that proclamation” (172). Knitter’s argument is structured around popular attitudes that exist on the spectrum of pluralistic dialogue as well as varying degrees of acceptance of pluralism by Christians. His ultimate statement requires a redefinition of Jesus’ particularity, so his final chapters are devoted to how pluralists of different backgrounds have devoted themselves to engaging an interreligious dialogue. Flowing from his thesis, Knitter’s most stinging proposal is that Christianity should be redefined in order to enter the pluralistic dialogue to which the religious world is evolving.

            Knitter cites Ernst Troeltsch as the father of historical relativism. According to Troeltsch, no religion has any advantage over another. In fact, all religions are cultural expositions and expressions of utility. Christianity may be the best for the West, Troeltsch would argue, but the evolution of religious understanding moved the world religions from a classicist to a historical culture. This, therefore, creates a problem with concepts like incarnation and superiority.

             He references Arnold Toynbee's belief “that all religions are basically the same”(49). He sees a common essence in all religions, so he encourages a discarding of anything considered nonessential. This being a subjective call, he prefers an “esoteric faith” (49) to the uniqueness of traditional Christianity.  

             Knitter calls upon Carl Jung to support his religious common source theory. By laying the foundation of religion in the psyche, Knitter promotes a view of God that is part of the unconscious and can be decoded as symbol or myth. Jesus becomes a symbol of the Christ concept that can exist in many religions. Thus the clarifying moment for religion is a utilitarian call of whether that religion actually helps people psychologically.

            In order to show how far religion has evolved, Knitter moves from modern psychology to a contrasting conservative evangelical model. Karl Barth, representing neo-Orthodoxy, is cited to show how the evangelical movement has evolved from early fundamentalists to conservative evangelicals to more ecumenical evangelicals. Even so, Knitter claims that holding to the Bible as authority or Christ as the sole source of salvation is arrogant irrelevance for today’s dialogue.

            Protestants are painted in the same light as conservative evangelicals, but Knitter does allow a minute amount of grace for their kinder spirit and “a more open attitude toward other religions” (97). As Barth was a champion for conservative evangelicalism, Wolfhart Pannenberg is the poster child for mainline Protestantism. Barth saw Christ alone as the source of revelation and salvation, but Pannenberg would allow for revelation within all religions. Paul Tillich also holds to salvific revelation in other religions, but this revelation is somehow only partial. Knitter affirms mainline Protestants for their openness to dialogue, but he still thinks their position is inadequate to properly address a science of religions or a theology of religions.

            Insisting that concepts like salvation and sin would have to be redefined before they can be found relevant in the contemporary dialogue, Knitter turns to Karl Rahner for what he considers real progress. He posits that the early church did not believe in salvation through Jesus alone, that this was a development of biblical writers and the church in the third century. Instead, the Catholic Church became more institutionalized and grew more particular in its teachings of “outside the church, no salvation” (123). Rahner’s contribution, based on God’s desire to save, was to promote a move from Christocentrism or even ecclesiocentrism to a theocentrism void of any major emphasis on Jesus. This development seeks to explain the shift from the protestant view of religions “as a negative preparation for the gospel” to a Catholic perspective as “a positive preparation” (135).

Knitter argues that we must recognize revelation and salvation in other religions if we are to have a true dialogue. He cites John Hick, Raimunda Punikkar and Stanley Samartha as the vanguards for theocentricism. Hick’s understanding of Jesus’ incarnation as just an embodiment of love places interreligious salvation within view. Punikkar’s “cosmotheandric” (154) unity principle requires that any representation of salvation is “not be restricted to the merely historical figure of Jesus of Nazareth” (156). Ironically, Samartha says that only relativists might truly be saved (158).

            In order to deal then with the uniqueness of Jesus, Knitter spends the last two chapters denouncing the Christian faith models and proposing new definitions for Christian terminology that make a dialogue more palatable to other religions. Knitter believes traditional Christians are “insufficiently sensitive to the way they contradict contemporary awareness of historical relativity” (171). So in order to not “impede authentic dialogue with believers of other faiths” (171), Knitter proposes a redefinition of Jesus’ incarnation as a myth with personal value, a redefinition of Jesus’ message as a minor prophet, a redefinition of Jesus’ resurrection as figurative “survival language” (184) employed by a minority group who were seeking their way to God. If done so, religion can evolve to a new world order, and world peace can be achieved.

Critical Evaluation

There are several elements that stood out as barriers to Knitter’s success in proving his thesis.

His method for razing the basic particularity of traditional Christianity is not applied universally for all religions. His quest for some common denominator among religious adherents forms a reductionism that borders on pseudo-anthropology. Knitter makes himself a prisoner of his own bias as he scratches at the walls of twentieth century classicist culture. These inadequacies lessen the force of his argument and serve to misdirect any call for mutual understanding.

Limited Method

Although Paul Knitter paints a picturesque fantasy of all world religions somehow able to speak in relativity as per their own identities and live in peaceful harmony, his demands for interreligious dialogue are in reality a brutal militant approach to hack out the heart of Christianity. At best, he presents a case for a Christ-less Christianity, a comical but vampiric approach to studying a religion. At worst, he redefines the particulars of Christianity in such a way that they have absolutely no real meaning. Knitter feels that his theocentric model “holds the greatest promise of the future of interreligious dialogue and for the continued evolution of the meaning of Jesus Christ for the world” (166-67). The ultimate end of this evolutionary process is an outer religious shell void of even the remembrance of the filling.

Knitter does not shy away from the fact that Jesus Christ made some particular claims as to his own uniqueness, but he claims that Christ's statements have been misunderstood or misrepresented. Knitter makes a case against Jesus Christ as the one and only savior, thus opening the door for all world religions to have the same salvific footing. He claims that this constricted Christian view of personal salvation is in fact standing in the way of religion’s salvation. Read my lips: Knitter thinks that it is religion that needs to be saved.

It is interesting that he performs no acts of theological surgery upon any other religions, only Christianity. Perhaps such a broader application is beyond the scope of his book, but his narrow assault on Christ’s particular claims make his method suspect. It could be concluded from this approach that it is only Christianity that is standing in the way of world peace. Knitter stands as the proverbial Elmer Fudd holding a gun over that wascally wabbit called Christianity.

Knitter’s reductionism

 Knitter’s approach can be classified as oversimplification, as if digesting the tenets of any major world religion were an easy thing. He attempts to throw the ingredients of all religions into one soup and then write the recipe. His reductionist perspective simply does not advance the dialogue he proposes. On the contrary, his attempts to reduce religious dialogue to a common denominator of relativism removes anything of value that any religion would attempt to offer during a roundtable discussion. If all revelation is reduced to salvation, then it is questionable as to the need for salvation at all. If any religion’s tenets for salvation are reduced to its own personal applications of any form of revelation, then there is no such thing as a sin problem or suffering or mistakes. Therefore, there is no need for the religion beyond an expression of conflated egoism.

Knitter’s Prison

Knitter defeats himself with his own standard of judgment. Clearly, Knitter is a product of the very culture he seeks to address. He is the prisoner attempting to imprison the rest. In fact, he even maintains that a religion can only truly be judged by an insider. He is ever the Cincinnati theology professor dressed in eastern garb. He is the man spouting feminist theology. He is the symbol of upper middle class advocating liberation. To those whom he addresses, he will never be an insider.

Knitter seeks to deflate any exclusivist concept related to Christianity either by redefinition or by a creative form of religious relativism. He redefines the resurrection of Christ as a myth having only personal significance, but in doing so he still utilizes western linearity both in linguistic expression and conceptual explanation. As such, he builds a cultural prison from which his own book cannot escape, doomed to be placed on the shelves with other works of science fiction and fantasy.

Knitter seeks to promote a Christology that can enter into conversation with pluralism and ecumenism, but the very exclusive claims of Christ that establish Christianity must first be negated or so watered down that anything can be salvific. Knitter claims we can have both exclusivity and inclusivity if we only redefine the terms. In doing so, he unwittingly makes the same error in logic that has consistently plagued western philosophy. In an attempt to create a both/and, Knitter argues it is EITHER both/and OR nothing, thereby locking the door to any openness that might have been achieved through a respect for exclusivity.

Review of Neill's A History of Christian Missions

One book that has become a staple in Missions History classes in seminaries and bible colleges is Stephen Neill's A History of Christian Missions. Stephen Neill is an ecumenist, so his book has to be understood as a historical account from an ecumenical perspective. It is a part of a trilogy on colonialism in missions. It brings out the historical fact that missions began as an overflow of the church’s activity but then quickly turned into an expansion of ideology across geographic boundaries. Neill’s book highlights those areas of expansion.

            Divided into two parts, the book traces missionary activity from the beginning of the second century AD up until the time of the revolution in Russia. The first part deals with the specific time periods for reaching Romans in AD 100–500, the Dark Ages in AD 500–1000, European missions in AD 1000–1500, the Age of Discovery in AD 1500– 1600, Roman Catholic missions in AD 1600–1787, and reaching out to the New World in AD 1600–1800. The second part deals with the ideologies of European and American discovery in AD 1792–1858, the colonialist spirit that dominated in AD 1858–1914, the expansion of the Orthodox church, the Roman Catholic church and Protestantism in AD 1815–1914, and the conclusions to be drawn since AD 1914. It is only in the very end of the book that any concept of God at work in missions or the fulfillment of Scripture comes into play.

            Perhaps Neill’s greatest contribution to missiology in this book is his highlighting the issues related to colonialist expansion, the compromise associated with political partnership and the underlying attitude of Western superiority. He adequately sums this up in his statement that “whether we like it or not, it is the historic fact that the great expansion of Christianity coincided in time with the world-wide and explosive expansion of Europe that followed on the Renaissance; that the colonizing powers were the Christian powers; that a whole variety of compromising relationships existed between missionaries and governments; and that in the main Christianity was carried forward on the wave of Western prestige and power” (p. 414). For whatever reason Neill makes this assessment, his book deals a painful blow to the missionary activity of the church that must be reconciled today.

            Related to colonialist expansion, it is true that 19^th century missions was largely concerned with extra-biblical requirements for cultures to become civilized prior to or at least concurrent with conversion. This is a blight on the history of missions. However, today missiologists are dealing with this historical blunder by employing a greater use of anthropology and sociology to draw distinctions between biblical and target cultures. They are attempting to place the sending culture in greater juxtaposition to the biblical message.

            In relation to compromise, missions agencies still wrestle with the issue of how much cooperation with national governments helps and how much hurts the endeavor. While too often western missionaries were accused of being agents of western governments because of their close interaction with federal humanitarian agencies, some areas might not have been reached without this partnership. Still, it leaves a big question as to how much is too much interrelation.

            Finally, his assessment that imperial attitudes have no place in missions is warranted. Although, as successfully shown, these attitudes abounded in all branches of Christianity, this should not be. And so much more could have been accomplished with an attitude of servanthood rather than superiority.