Rethinking the Trinity, Religious Pluralism, and Augustine 0 (By Keith Johnson)

Post Series 
0—Preface 
1—Introduction 
2—Augustine’s Trinitarianism 
3—Mark Heim’s Trinitarian Theology of Religious Ends
4—Amos Yong’s Pneumatological Theology of Religions
5—Jaquees Dupuis’s Christian Theology of Religious Ends
6—Raimundo Panikkar’s Theandric Spirituality
7—Conclusions and Reflections

A few weeks ago I received from IVP for review one of the most significant books on Christian theology I’ve seen in a long time. I know that’s a big statement, one I don’t think is hyperbolical. The book is Rethinking the Trinity and Religious Pluralism: An Augustinian Assessment by Keith Johnson and is part of a new(er) series from IVP called Strategic Initiatives in Evangelical Theology.

This book comes at a pivot time in the life of the Church because somehow (!) it is becoming increasingly difficult to hold to any distinctively Christian understanding of God and salvation (thanks to books like Desmund Tutu’s and Mirslov Volf’s latestest books)—God in the sense that Jesus is the only one true God; salvation in the sense that there is no other name under heaven by which a person can be saved.

It’s called religious pluralism, and it’s invading the Western Church as much as it has already invaded the West. Admittedly I have been ignorant to this newest stream of religious pluralism within the Church, but the first page of the introduction of this very important book clued me in to contemporary trends to tie the permissibility of a religious pluralistic outlook within the Church directly to the doctrine of the Trinity itself:

Recently a number of Christian theologians have suggested that the doctrine of the Trinity holds the keys to new understandings of religious diversity. Although at one time this doctrine may have been viewed as a stumbling block to inter religious dialogue, the situation has dramatically changed. A number of Christian theologians have attempted to pave the way for a positive understanding of non-Christian religions within redemptive history by appealing to the Trinity…Although substantial differences exist among these proposals, they share an important feature in common—namely, a conviction that the doctrine of the Trinity provides the basis for a positive appraisal of non-Christian religions. (17)

I must say I was astounded to read such a movement within (mostly) academic circles to co-opt one of the most pivotal foundations to the historic Christian faith for use in advocating a form of religious pluralism and salvation apart from Jesus Christ and his Church exclusively. What this book seeks to do is to critically asses four key proponents of such theological innovation regarding the doctrine of the Trinity in Christian theology of religions. The four people he critically assesses are Mark Heim, Amos Yong, Jaques Dupuis, and Raimundo Panikkar. And he does so in conversation with the late  fourth-century bishop Augustine of Hippo.

And I’m glad he does, because somehow we are loosing our way in the midst of a religiously pluralistic society—which is the nice, democratic way of saying a polytheistic society, as my friend pointed out the other day. Consider this quotation from Desmund Tutu’s latest book, God Is Not a Christian, the Archbishop of Cape Town, the highest position in the Anglican Church in South Africa:

We should in humility and joyfulness acknowledge that the supernatural and divine reality we all worship in some form or  other transcends all our particular categories of thought and imaginating, and that because the divine—however named, however apprehended or conceived—is infinite and we are forever finite, we shall never comprehend divine completely…To claim God exclusively for Christians is to make God too small and in a real sense is blasphemous. God is bigger than Christianity and cares for more than Christians. God Is Not a Christian (6, 14)

And for this reason I am incredibly thankful for the careful assessment by Johnson of these Christian thinkers because of the bald-faced attempts, like the one above, to accommodate the notion of God—yes even the Christian notion of God—to religious pluralism. Because this issues of religious pluralistic accommodation is becoming a seismic issue within the Church nowadays, even within evangelical circles, I’d like to spend the next few weeks in a few posts walking through this book. I hope you’ll join me.

Beforehand, though, consider this: why this big movement in the Church to accommodate to the religious pluralism of our time? And without fully understanding the arguments regarding the use of the Trinity to do so, why might using the Trinity to accommodate such cultural persuasions damage this central doctrine to the Church?