You are viewing a free preview of this lesson.
Subscribe to unlock all 10 lessons in this course and every other course on LearningBro.
The theology of religions is the branch of theology that asks how a tradition should understand and evaluate other religions: Do they contain genuine revelation? Can their adherents be saved? Is the very fact of religious diversity something God wills, or merely something to be overcome? For most of the last forty years the field has been organised by a single map — the threefold typology of exclusivism, inclusivism and pluralism (set out in detail in the first three lessons of this course). This lesson steps back to examine the typology itself: how it has been criticised, above all by Gavin D'Costa, who argues that it collapses; the postliberal alternative offered by George Lindbeck's "cultural-linguistic" theory of religion, which reframes the whole question; D'Costa's own trinitarian theology of religions; and the rival method of comparative theology developed by Francis X. Clooney, which proposes abandoning grand typologies for the close reading of particular texts. The aim is not to relearn the three positions but to ask whether the map we have been using is the right one.
Key term: Theology of religions — the theological discipline that assesses the truth-claims and salvific status of other religions from within a particular faith. Its standard framework is the exclusivism / inclusivism / pluralism typology, whose adequacy is the central question of this lesson.
The familiar map was given its classic form by Alan Race in Christians and Religious Pluralism (1983), who sorted Christian responses to other faiths by their soteriology — their account of who can be saved.
| Position | Core claim about salvation | Representative figures |
|---|---|---|
| Exclusivism | Salvation comes only through explicit faith in Christ | Karl Barth; Hendrik Kraemer |
| Inclusivism | Christ is the one saviour, but his grace can reach those who do not explicitly know him | Karl Rahner; Vatican II |
| Pluralism | The major religions are equally valid responses to one ultimate reality | John Hick; Paul Knitter |
The typology has obvious virtues: it is clear, teachable, and maps real differences. But its very neatness has provoked the suspicion that it distorts as much as it reveals — and the most influential critic is a theologian who once helped popularise it.
It is worth noticing, before turning to the critics, how much internal variety each box conceals — itself a first clue that the map is rougher than it looks. Exclusivism ranges from the strict "restrictivism" that consigns all who never hear the gospel to perdition, to a "wider hope" that leaves their fate to God's mercy while still holding Christ to be the sole saviour; the two are worlds apart pastorally yet share a box. Inclusivism stretches from the older fulfilment theology — which sees other faiths as a genuine but incomplete searching that is completed in Christ, as in J. N. Farquhar's The Crown of Hinduism (1913) and the patristic idea of the logos spermatikos (the "seeds of the Word" scattered among the nations, a theme drawn from Justin Martyr) — to Rahner's bolder claim that the devout non-Christian is already an "anonymous Christian." Pluralism embraces both Hick's single "Real" behind all the traditions and Raimon Panikkar's insistence that the religions are irreducibly different, complementary windows that must not be merged into one. A scheme whose three categories each contain such range is a scheme already under strain.
Gavin D'Costa (b. 1958), Professor of Catholic Theology at the University of Bristol, has done more than anyone to unsettle the threefold map. In The Meeting of Religions and the Trinity (2000) and Christianity and World Religions (2009) he argues that the typology is not the neutral grid it pretends to be, and that on inspection its three boxes do not hold.
D'Costa's sharpest claim is that pluralism collapses into exclusivism. Hick's pluralism presents itself as the generous, open position that refuses to privilege any one faith — but it does so by asserting that no religion possesses the unique, final truth it claims for itself, and that all are culturally-conditioned responses to a Real that none can describe as it is. That assertion is itself a substantial, contestable truth-claim about the nature of ultimate reality and of all the religions — a claim that flatly contradicts the self-understanding of orthodox Christians, Muslims and others. So pluralism does not transcend the exclusive truth-claim; it makes one of its own, and excludes every tradition that disagrees with it. The "neutral" standpoint above the religions turns out to be another particular standpoint, with its own (broadly Western, liberal, Enlightenment) commitments — a point Lesslie Newbigin pressed in the same period.
D'Costa argues that the other boundaries are equally porous. A serious exclusivist who allows, as most do, that God's grace might reach the unevangelised in ways known only to God has already conceded the inclusivist's central point. An inclusivist who insists that this grace is always and only the grace of Christ, normatively revealed in him, is making a claim every bit as "exclusive" as the exclusivist's. The labels, pressed hard, slide into one another.
Key term: The typology collapses — D'Costa's thesis that the three positions are not stable, mutually-exclusive alternatives: pluralism turns out to be a disguised exclusivism (it excludes those who deny pluralism), while exclusivism and inclusivism shade into each other once the fate of the unevangelised is considered. What looks like a threefold choice is really a single question — is any tradition normatively true? — to which all serious answers are, in his sense, "exclusive."
D'Costa does not merely demolish; he rebuilds, defending a trinitarian inclusivism (he would resist the bare label, but it locates him). The doctrine of the Trinity, he argues, is the proper Christian framework for thinking about other faiths, because it lets one hold together two things the typology forces apart — the universality of God's saving work and the particularity of its revelation in Christ.
| Person of the Trinity | Bearing on other religions |
|---|---|
| The Father | Creator of all peoples, whose saving will reaches the whole human race |
| The Son | The definitive, normative revelation of God; the criterion by which all is finally judged |
| The Holy Spirit | Universally active beyond the visible Church — present wherever there is truth, goodness and beauty, including in other religions, preparing the way for Christ |
The pneumatological move — locating God's presence in other faiths in the unbounded work of the Spirit rather than in a label like "anonymous Christian" — is the heart of it. It lets D'Costa affirm that God is genuinely at work in Hinduism or Islam (through the Spirit) while maintaining that Christ remains the norm and the Church the place of the fullness of grace. Critics ask whether this is really an advance on Rahner or a more sophisticated restatement of the same inclusivist instinct; and whether tying the Spirit so tightly to Christ and Church does not, after all, leave the trinitarian proposal as "exclusive" as the positions it claims to surpass — which, on D'Costa's own analysis, every honest Christian position must be.
It helps to see the proposal at work. Confronted with, say, the depth of contemplative prayer in a Hindu bhakti saint, the trinitarian theologian need not choose between two unhappy options — denying that anything of God is present (strict exclusivism) or declaring the saint a secret Christian (Rahner). Instead they can say: here is the Spirit of God, who "blows where it wills" (John 3:8), genuinely at work, producing real holiness — and this work is not foreign to Christ but oriented toward him, since it is the Spirit of Christ. The other tradition is thus neither emptied of grace nor quietly annexed; its difference is left standing, while the Christian still confesses Christ as the criterion by which that grace is finally understood. Whether this elegant balance is stable — or whether the "always oriented toward Christ" clause pulls it back into ordinary inclusivism — is exactly the question D'Costa's critics keep pressing, and a strong evaluation will press it too rather than simply admiring the architecture.
If D'Costa works within the theology of religions to reform it, George Lindbeck (1923–2018), a Lutheran theologian at Yale, reframes the entire question of what a religion is. His short, influential book The Nature of Doctrine: Religion and Theology in a Postliberal Age (1984) is the founding text of the "postliberal" movement, and its account of religion has large consequences for how we think about diversity.
Lindbeck distinguishes three ways of understanding what religious doctrines are.
| Model | What doctrines are | Status of experience | Tendency |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cognitive-propositional | Truth-claims about objective reality | Secondary; experience confirms doctrine | Toward exclusivism — if doctrines are simply true or false, at most one religion is right |
| Experiential-expressive | Outward expressions of a common inner religious experience | Primary; the same core experience underlies all religions | Toward pluralism — but cannot explain why doctrines genuinely conflict |
| Cultural-linguistic (Lindbeck's own) | "Grammar" — rules that regulate how a community speaks, thinks and lives | There is no "raw," pre-linguistic experience; experience is shaped by the tradition | Neither of the above; takes each tradition's distinctiveness seriously |
It is worth knowing the motivation, because it explains the model's surprising shape. Lindbeck was a Lutheran ecumenist who had been an observer at the Second Vatican Council, and his puzzle came from ecumenical dialogue: how could Catholics and Lutherans, who had once anathematised each other over (say) justification, now find themselves able to agree without either side feeling it had betrayed its past? On the cognitive-propositional view this is baffling — if the old doctrines were straightforward truth-claims, then either one side was simply wrong then, or one side is simply caving now. Lindbeck's answer was that doctrines work more like rules than like propositions: a rule that was rightly binding in one situation ("say this, not that, to guard the gospel here") can be reformulated when the situation changes, without the underlying commitment altering. The cultural-linguistic model was thus born not from the study of world religions but from the practical experience of intra-Christian reconciliation — and it was only afterwards extended, by Lindbeck and others, to the question of how different religions relate. This origin is also why the model is the founding text of "postliberal" theology, alongside the work of his Yale colleague Hans Frei on reading the Bible as a world-absorbing narrative.
Lindbeck's proposal is that a religion is less like a set of propositions, or an expression of feeling, than like a language or a culture — a comprehensive framework that shapes how its adherents perceive, feel, judge and live. Just as one's native language forms the very categories in which one thinks, so being formed in a religious tradition forms how one experiences the sacred and makes sense of birth, suffering and death. On this view a doctrine such as the Trinity is not primarily a description of God's inner life (as a scientific hypothesis describes a phenomenon) nor the report of an experience, but a rule of Christian discourse — it governs how Christians are to speak of God, Christ and Spirit so as to remain Christian.
Key term: Cultural-linguistic model — Lindbeck's theory that religions function like languages or cultures: comprehensive, world-shaping frameworks whose doctrines are "grammar rules" regulating the community's speech and practice, rather than either literal descriptions of reality or expressions of a universal inner experience.
Lindbeck's model reshapes the diversity question in three ways.
Subscribe to continue reading
Get full access to this lesson and all 10 lessons in this course.