This Weekend, Scholars Will Debate Whether Christianity Is the Only True Religion at N.O. Baptist Seminary

Is Christianity the only true religion, or does God’s transcendence mean that no religion can make an exclusive claim to him?

Is Jesus Christ the only path to an afterlife, or are there others? Even if he is, does he mysteriously save even those of good heart who happened never to have heard of him?

These and other questions lie at the heart of the idea of religious pluralism, the topic of debate at this year’s Greer-Heard Point-Counterpoint Forum, set for Friday and Saturday at New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary in Gentilly.

The conference is the annual face-off — civil, but direct — between a leading evangelical scholar and a non-evangelical counterpart on a pressing question in religion.

This year: “Is Christianity the Only True Religion?” features exchanges between Paul Knitter, a leading religious pluralist from Union Theological Seminary in New York, and Harold Netland, a traditional evangelical scholar from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in Deerfield, Ill.

“Pluralism” in this sense does not mean the “live and let live” sense of mutual tolerance that the word carries in secular culture, said Robert Stewart, a philosophy professor and forum organizer.

Rather, it challenges the idea that any religion can claim to be exclusively “true.”

On the one hand, said Stewart, are scholars like Knitter, who say no.

Their take is that “God is of such a nature that nobody really ‘gets’ God — that all the religions are partially true and valid responses to God. And that all religions are partially false,” said Stewart.

The favored analogy is that humans experiencing God are like blind men trying to describe an elephant by feel — each one grasping some truthful element, but unable to grasp the whole.

But that view is rejected by most Christians, especially evangelical Christians, who assert that only Christianity contains the fullness of God’s message to the world; that Jesus Christ is the sole source of salvation for men and women, and that he is accessible only through exposure to the Gospel.

The last part of that proposition is a matter of some difference even among Christians, Stewart said.

The traditional evangelical viewpoint, expressed in the fourth chapter of the Acts of the Apostles, is that belief in Jesus Christ is necessary: “Salvation is found in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given to men by which we must be saved” — thus the single-minded energy behind evangelical missionary work.

By contrast, some Christians, including those hewing to the official teaching of the Catholic church, hold that Jesus in some hidden way may save even those who lived virtuously but who have not heard of him. According to the Catechism of the Catholic Church: “Every man who is ignorant of the Gospel of Christ and of his Church, but seeks the truth and does the will of God in accordance with his understanding of it, can be saved.”

The conference format allows Knitter and Netland to present their respective positions and respond to each other in a session Friday at 7 p.m. in the seminary’s Leavell Chapel.

In a separate all-day session Saturday, Knitter and Netland will respond to presentations by six other invited scholars presenting papers exploring dimensions of the same question.

The conference is the last in an initial series of five founded by a grant from insurance executive William L. Heard Jr. and his wife, Carolyn Greer Heard, in honor of their parents, Stewart said. Earlier meetings explored the reality of the resurrection, intelligent design and the future of atheism.

The conference is open to the public. Registration and fee details are available at www.greer-heard.com

Source: NOLA