Abstract
This essay deals with the relationship between Christianity and other religions. Part one looks briefly at the matter of religion itself. Part two provides a condensed historical survey of the attitude of Christianity toward the world outside itself: the approach of the church to other religions changed from initial appreciation through a long phase of rejection to an increasingly affirmative posture in recent times. This shift is explained by a number of causal factors that gave rise to new understandings regarding God’s work in the world and Christian mission, which in turn led to the emergence of various theologies of religion. The question confronting religious people today is how to foster the removal of interhuman divisions and the promotion of justice and peace. One potential means of achieving this goal is interreligious dialogue. In part three, the author delineates his concept of the four facets of dialogue: that of histories, of theologies, of spiritualities, and of life. Dialogue at all four of these levels is key to the establishment of interreligious convivance, which in our present world is prerequisite to the security and well-being of humanity.
Highlights
This essay deals with the relationship between Christianity and other religions
People today carry on this quest, posing the same essentially religious questions that their forbears did in times past: “How can I understand the hidden forces that play upon my life? How can I deal with the mysterious power which is sometimes so near...and at other times so far away...?” (Bach 1961:7)
According to the well-known Dutch missiologist J H Bavinck, all humans are provided with a “religious consciousness” which entails a deep awareness of a number of fundamental riddles, including the enigma of individual existence coupled with a sense of all-embracing cosmic cohesion or the all-inclusive “totality of heaven and earth”; the puzzle of the origin and impinging claims of morals and norms; the mystery of the conviction that things are not the way they ought to be and the concomitant universal longing for redemption; the question of the “invisible background” of all things visible; and the ambiguity of human life itself
Summary
That religion is passé and claim that it is on the way out, it will be quite clear to any objective observer that religion, far from being on the verge of extinction, is ubiquitous right throughout the contemporary world and continues to be vitally important to the vast majority of people on earth. In the end all of these riddles coalesce into one profoundly religious question to which people everywhere seek an answer: “Who am I, small mortal man, in the midst of all these powerful realities with which my life is most intimately related?” (Bavinck 1966:113)[2] Corollary to this “religious consciousness” and the questions and riddles it engenders, humans, wherever they live, engage in one or another form of worship or religious observance. This is only a possible explanation of the origin of religion and does not constitute a definition of it. John O’Grady and Peter Scherle define religion “as a form of communication of human beings in which a specific coherent meaning of the world as a whole is expressed through speech, acts and artifacts, and which assumes the participation of a divine reality in this human communication” (O’Grady & Scherle 2007:5, 6)[5]
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