Unity is crucial. It’s best just not to deal with differences. We should make religion a private matter, not appropriate for the public sphere.
Or if we do bring it into the public sphere, we have to be very careful to make sure everyone feels validated and affirmed. Everyone gets a trophy.
In the words of Christopher Duraisingh, Secretary of the Council for World Missions, “It is not through our a priori doctrinal formulations on God or Christ, but rather through our collective human search for meaning and sacredness, that the ‘universe of faiths’ could be adequately understood.”[i]
In other words, it’s not about Christ; it’s not about theology; it’s about soteriology, the search for salvation.
Newbigin says that this kind of thinking is wrong.[ii]
First of all, Christianity and Buddhism aren’t the AL and the NL. They aren’t just two different leagues.
They’re not even playing the same game.
VS.
It’s futbol vs. football.
Salvation for the Buddhist isn’t salvation for the Christian. Salvation may sound similar for different religions, but they are radically different at their core.
Second, we’re not playing tee ball. As our boy Chris D. said, we may very well all be searching for salvation—vaguely defined as total happiness and welfare—but the way that Mr. D. wants to go about searching is quite frankly silly.
He basically says, “Let’s all join up in a big posse and look for some burried treasure. But… yeah, we’re not going to follow any maps because that would cause tension. And… um… actually we’re not going to use or even look for clues. We’re just going to sort of wander around and hope we can find something. Oh, and if you atheists don’t want to look, that’s cool too. You just chill.”
That’s not a very smart way to search for buried treasure.
[i] International Review of Mission, Jully 1988, p. 315
[ii] Newbigin, Lesslie, The Gospel in a Pluralist Society. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1989, p. 159.
