Chapter 1: The Problem Set

Just a hundred years ago, in 1860, the first really representative missionary conference of modern times was held at Liverpool. Full records were kept, and reading the lectures and the discussions to-day one is almost in the position of a listener at those proceedings of long ago. Much of what passed strikes a curiously modern note. The vocabulary has changed — we no longer speak of native Churches — but many of the concerns are exactly the same as those discussed at the most recent meetings of the International Missionary Council. There is, however, one notable difference. Hardly a word was said about the non-Christian religions with which the missionary has to do in his daily practical work; we could hardly imagine such a
lacuna in the proceedings of a missionary conference to-day.

A good many reasons could be given for this apparent indifference. Those present at the Conference were concerned principally with their own problems as preachers of the Gospel in strange lands,¹ and with the developments in the Churches that were growing up under their guidance. Many of them were dealing with primitive peoples whose religious ideas may not have seemed to them very important. But perhaps the main reason was that, even in 1860, the great religions of the East were still very imperfectly known. Max Müller’s great series of The Sacred Books of the East still lay in the future — the first volume was published only in 1875. Carlyle, in his enthusiastic but uncritical study of Muhammad in Heroes and Hero-Worship (1841), had broken through the traditional Christian attitude of reserve, if not of hostility, in relation to ‘the false prophet’, but in a style which was not likely to commend his work to pious missionaries. In 1860 Sir William Muir had not yet completed his great work of producing the first critical biography of Muhammad to appear in English.²

The situation we face to-day is as different as could well be imagined. All the religions of the world have been minutely studied, some of the best work having been produced where Western science has worked together with the intuitions and inner apprehensions of the Eastern mind. All the greatest works have been translated into all the main languages of Europe. Selections have appeared in paperback form and are easily available. More than we perhaps realize, something of Eastern, and particularly of Indian, thought has become part of the unconscious furniture of our minds.

Hard upon comparative philology, the study and classification of languages, followed what is often called ‘comparative religion’ but should more correctly be called ‘the comparative study of religions’. One of the first tasks was to classify religions according to the main recognizable types. Here Nathan Söderblom (1866-1931), famous in other fields as one of the great leaders in the ecumenical movement, made a notable contribution in the clear distinction that he drew between the prophetic and the mystical types of religious approach. Inevitably and rightly from their own point of view, those engaged in such comparative studies included Christianity as one of the phenomena to be studied, classified and compared, no less than the other forms of the religious experience of mankind. Thus, for instance, in his Orpheus (1909), a book very well known fifty years ago, Salomon Reinach ended his work with a combined study of Judaism and Christianity, which he regarded as only slightly variant forms of one of the principal types of religion.

Christian reactions to this approach were on the whole favourable. Ideas of evolution were in the air, and had been transplanted without due thought from the sphere of biology in which they belong to many other aspects of human life, where they are perhaps less appropriate. It chimed well with new ideas of tolerance to think of Christianity as playing its part in man’s age-long search for God; Christians would naturally hold that it was the highest manifestation of the divine that had yet been accorded to the human race, but need not necessarily exclude the thought that it might be a resting-place on the endless pilgrimage of man rather than his permanent home. A great many points of similarity between the Gospels and other faiths — the wisdom of the Rabbis no less than the wisdom of the East — had emerged. The Gospel claim to uniqueness seemed to be less firmly founded than had earlier been supposed by Christians, and philosophical arguments in favour of its absoluteness appeared inconclusive.³

It was at this stage of the argument that Hendrik Kraemer launched on the world his first great book, The Christian Message in a non-Christian World, written in preparation for the International Missionary Conference held at Tambaram in 1938. Here he took up a position as different as possible from that of all the supporters of the comparative method. Speaking of the Gospel in terms of biblical realism’, he argued that this story of the divine action in Christ is of its nature entirely different from anything to be found in any other religion. The comparative method had taken it for granted that all religions are commensurables-the possibility of comparison between them is self-evident. It was precisely this claim that Kraemer denied. The Gospel is in fact incommensurable with everything else; to attempt to bring it into such comparison with other faiths is at once to falsify it. It is not necessary here to expound all Kraemer’s views at length, or to go into the controversy provoked by his rather harsh and challenging way of putting them forth. Three points, however, may conveniently be made:

1.

If we speak of ‘religions’, we imply at once that there is some general concept ‘religion’, under which all the particular forms of religion may be subsumed. But, in fact, every attempt to arrive at a satisfactory and agreed definition has proved fruitless. We all know roughly what we mean when we speak about religion; otherwise there would be no purpose in writing such a book as this; but, when we try to be precise, there is something that eludes us. This need not unduly disturb us. Do we not fall into almost precisely the same dilemma, when we try to say exactly what we mean by art?

2.

Comparison can only be of ideas. We can work out more or less accurately the Christian idea of God, and compare this with the idea of God as it is found in Islam. If we are to put different religious traditions side by side at all, it is almost inevitable that we shall find ourselves doing something of this kind. But we must never forget that, when we do this, we are dealing with abstractions. In order to make comparison possible, we have detached certain ideas or theories or doctrines from the living experience which has given rise to them. In doing so we rob them of their life. Such study has the same value as the dissection of a specimen in the laboratory, and this must not be underestimated. But we must not be surprised if it tells us little about the living fabric of the religion from which the idea has been somewhat violently dissevered.

3.

More and more we are coming to realize that faith is experienced as a whole, and cannot be experienced in any other way.

This has come home to us forcibly in recent years in ecumenical debate between adherents of different forms of the Christian creed. Even when we appear to agree on a doctrine or a certain form of words, our agreement is conditioned and limited by the rest of the system to which we adhere. The result is that emphases are different, perspectives are not the same, and even the apparent agreement is encompassed by the net of disagreement about other things. If this is true even within the varieties of Christian faith, how much more must it be true when we try to compare Christian faith in God with that which in some way comes near to it, the Muslim faith in God.

It has to be recognized that those things which are experienced as wholes are in fact not commensurable with one another, any more than one scent is really comparable with any other. Genetic or historical connexions may be traced; it is just the fact that a certain knowledge of the Bible and of Christian faith underlies certain parts of the Qur’an. An understanding of such connexions is useful in the study of religion as it is in the study of music. But, when we have said that the young Beethoven was at certain points influenced by Mozart, we have not really said anything very important about either of them; the music of each has to be felt and appreciated in terms of itself and of nothing else. Even when, as can happen, one musician has actually stolen a phrase or a melody from another, what he does with it is so idiosyncratic that the connexion has little more importance than that of a historic accident. The greater the composer, the less is it possible to think or speak of him in terms other than those of his own achievement.

The musical parallel is perhaps that which will help us most to understand the shift that has taken place in the modern approach to the study of religions. The only method which promises results is that of self-exposure, as complete as possible, to the impact of a religion as a whole. The attitude is not that of theoria, the dispassionate contemplation which was the ideal of the Greek, and which leads to nothing more fruitful than intellectual analysis. The new approach is that of engagement, personal involvement in something which is of deep concern to us because it is of deep concern to millions of our fellow human beings. This is an exacting, indeed almost a terrifying, approach. Can one launch oneself into the heart and spirit of another religion without disloyalty to one’s own? Does not such an approach involve such a measure of detachment as is incompatible with deep adherence to any system of religious belief at all? Oddly enough, experience seems to show that the last anxiety is groundless. It is those who have the deepest and most confident faith themselves who have the courage to launch out on this adventure of the human spirit; and their own commitment renders them more, not less, sensitive to the commitment of others whose faith finds a different object and a different form of expression. This way does call for sympathy and discrimination. It does demand patience and a willingness to suspend judgement. It does not involve indifference to truth or the abandonment of all objective criteria of judgement.

These criteria, however, will not be found lying ready to hand. Each religion, as we study it, will be found to be one expression of man’s reaction to the total human situation within which he has to live. Our question concerning each will relate to its adequacy in the context of that total situation. Does it take account of everything, literally everything, in the human situation? Or are there certain areas that are disregarded and ignored? What needs of the human spirit does this system meet ? Are there legitimate needs of the human spirit that it disregards or denies? To what extent does it serve man in the fullest development of what he has it in him to be? Is it related to the concept of community, of the city in which man can dwell at peace and in harmony with all his neighbours? Does it point to a fulfillment beyond the limits of time and space?

It may be objected that this is a man-centred way of looking at things, that many of the terms we use need closer definition, and so on. These are valid criticisms. The only answer that we can give at this stage of our study is that we must start somewhere, and, if there is to be any study of the whole field of what man calls his religions, we must establish certain areas of common concern by means of which we shall relate the study of one system to that of another. But we are postponing for the moment the central question of truth. Provisionally, we may be permitted to hold that the correspondence of a system to what we know of man’s situation may be at least useful as a thermometer for the measurement of its objective truth. But it may prove that, when we have reached the ultimate question, we have to turn back to reconsider and perhaps to reject a number of earlier judgements.

We are engaging in this study frankly as Christians. We do not pretend to stand on any Olympian height of detachment from which we can survey all forms of human religion with splendid impartiality. We know now that that cannot be done. In all investigation-even in the most austere researches of the nuclear physicist — the personal equation is involved. In the study of religion the personal equation is at its highest, and it would be unscientific to pretend that this is not so. We shall speak and question as those who live within one particular system, one particular understanding of the world. But this does not necessarily mean that our approach will be prejudiced, and that we shall distort everything we see by looking at it through our own spectacles, though this is a danger that must be borne in mind. It does mean that our study can be carried on only by way of dialogue. We shall question others as to their beliefs. But this means that we must expose ourselves, honestly and without protection, to the questions that they may ask of us.

The willingness to take this attitude corresponds to one reality of the present situation. To go back again for a moment to the report of the Liverpool Conference of 1860, we can read there the passionate plea that ‘native agents’ of the Church should be kept away from the English language! A vain hope; it was already much too late, and the Churches could no more turn back the unrestrained eagerness of the Asian and African peoples for Western knowledge than Mrs. Partington could turn back the waves of the sea with her broom. Except for one chapter of this book, we shall be encountering in our studies those who are perfectly prepared to meet us on our own level. In earlier times dialogue was difficult, because the Westerner and the Christian usually had the advantage in knowledge and prestige. Now this is no longer so. Leading representatives of the ancient religions have deeply studied the Christian faith and have rejected it. We may at certain points find that we wish to ask them to think again; but we are not speaking to those who do not know. We have further to reckon with this new factor in the situation — that several of the ancient religions of the world have entered into a missionary phase of their existence. They will have their questions to ask of us, and some of these may prove highly embarrassing. The comparative study of religions today is not for those who have timid spirits and queasy stomachs. It is a stern and relentless business. But, if it is our incomparable privilege to stand within the truth, we shall have everything to gain and nothing to lose by exposing ourselves to questioning. The questions should help to elucidate our faith, to open up aspects of it that were previously hidden from us, perhaps to rid us of some illusions, and in the end to strengthen our hold on that which, or rather him whom, we have believed. It is time to set forth, in brief outline, the ground from which we make our approach to the other faiths of the world. This is not the place for a treatise on Christian theology. We must, however, begin with certain agreements among ourselves as to the kind of way in which Christians think, as to the kind of questions they believe must be raised if we are to talk of religion at all, and as to the area within which they believe that the answers are to be found. To start with, then, we may lay down three categories, within which Christians find themselves thinking all the time, and without the use of which they cannot think as Christians at all. These are not yet beliefs or doctrines; they lie behind all doctrines and make possible the formulation of doctrines, when the time for that comes.

1.

The first is the principle of contingency, or contingent being. Human thought has swayed over the centuries between the extreme of realism, the belief that the visible world is all that exists, and the extreme of idealism, the belief that the visible world does not really exist at all except in so fat as our minds give it a certain brief and illusory reality. Christian thought rejects both these extremes. The world, and man within it, has reality, has existence. But this is a wholly dependent reality and existence. Nothing in the world, and least of all man himself, can be explained in terms of forces and principles solely within this world. There is a beyond, in dependence on which the world exists and man can find his freedom. If we wish to go a step further and put the matter theologically, we cannot think as Christians at all without the concept of creation; we take our stand on the first verse of the Bible: ‘In the beginning God
created the heavens and the earth.’

2.

Secondly, we can think only in terms of purpose. The most significant thing about human beings is that they are creatures which can form purposes. It is probably true that man alone among living beings has the capacity for conceptual thought — his universal use of articulate speech suggests it; but we know so little of the mental processes of animals that this is hard to prove. We do see traces of purpose even among the animals. But these are rudimentary, and seem to depend more on instinctive response than on conscious planning. Man has the faculty of forming purposes, such as the purpose of writing a book, which may involve years of effort, the coordination of innumerable subsidiary purposes, the cooperation of a great many other minds, which can be adhered to in the face of frustration, disappointment and partial failure, and in the carrying out of which a man feels that he is most truly living.

The purpose of God is one of the postulates of Christian thinking. This is very different from the old argument from design. That argument was too simple; it broke down in face of the all too evident fact that the universe considered as a machine does not work nearly so well as a machine designed by infinite intelligence and maintained by infinite power ought to do. It took far too little account of imperfection, failure and tragedy. Very different from this is the idea of purpose. We are accustomed to working out our own purposes slowly, patiently, and by the use of materials that are always more or less refractory. An observer might find it extremely difficult to guess what the purpose is, as he sees an author sitting surrounded by an apparently shapeless and hopeless chaos of notes. But, given the necessary resolution, conviction and patience, the shape of the purpose will eventually emerge. If, then, there is a divine purpose in the universe, and if it emerges only slowly, through many set-backs and apparent failures, if at times it is evident to faith rather than to sight, we shall be neither surprised nor disturbed. Such a method cannot be stigmatized as either irrational or unworthy of a God who is prepared to respect the freedom of the human creatures with whom he has to deal.

3.

The third conviction is that events really happen. History is the medium in which we have to operate and in which God is also prepared to operate. Now history is always the scene of the unpredictable and the unexpected. History and prophecy move in different worlds. The forces that make up history are so diverse and complex that action is always accompanied by hazard. Human decisions count and really affect the future. If there is a predetermined plan, as in the Marxist understanding of history, then nothing really new emerges — history is merely the unfolding of a pattern that was there from the beginning, and then it is no longer history. History is the field in which the genuinely new emerges. Furthermore, it is the field in which nothing ever happens twice. History never repeats itself, though it may manifest certain recurrent patterns. The Greeks thought in terms of the endless cycle, in which all things come back to that which they were in the beginning. Not so the Christian. To him the future is a world of glorious possibilities, influenced indeed but not predetermined by the past.

All this should prepare us to recognize that man is extremely important in the Christian scheme of things. It is an exaggeration, but perhaps a helpful exaggeration, to say that Christian doctrine can be reduced to a doctrine of man.⁴ But, of course, this means man in dependence on God, and no sense at all can be made of Christian thought unless full attention is paid to both poles of the ellipse. More than perhaps any other form of religion or philosophy Christian faith takes the human situation very seriously. It never
doubts for a moment that it is a great and glorious thing to be a man. It can find a place, though not without criticism, for all the wonderful achievements of man in society, in culture, in art, even in the somewhat tarnished glories of his technical civilization. But at the same time it looks with wide-open and dispassionate eyes on the squalor, the contradictions, the self-destroying absurdity of human existence. Man by his ingenuity has built up a brave new world of his own invention, and now, like a child tired of its toys, he seems to be set on destroying it, and with it the whole race of which he is a part. In vision and aspiration his head touches the heavens; but his feet still stand firmly in the ooze and slime of primeval chaos. As Pascal saw so clearly long ago, we cannot understand man unless we consider him in both his greatness and his misery. But, having made an exhaustive inventory of the misery, Christian faith still affirms that it is a good thing to be a man.

This being so, it should come as no surprise that Christianity is the religion of a Man. We shall encounter other religions which have historical founders; but in none of them is the relation between the adherent of that religion and its founder in the least like that which the Christian believer supposes to exist between himself and Christ. The old saying ‘Christianity is Christ’ is almost exactly true. The historical figure of Jesus of Nazareth is the criterion by which every Christian affirmation has to be judged, and in the light of which it stands or falls.

Jesus came to show what the life of a man really is. The characteristic dimension of human existence is freedom. On this narrow sand-bank between existence and non-existence, between coercion and chaos, God has withdrawn his hand so far as to make a space in which man can be really, though not unconditionally, free. In Jesus we see what a free man looks like. We could hardly have
guessed in advance that this is what the picture would be.

The first paradox in this freedom is that it means complete acceptance of a situation as it is given without man’s own choice. Jesus was born a Jew and lived under the Roman oppression. At no point does he show any resentment against this situation or regard it as a hindrance to the fulfillment of his task.
These are the raw materials given him by God; with these materials and no others is he to work out the perfect pattern of human liberty. What is true of him is true also of us all. Within the limits of the given material a great variety of choices is open to us; but there are certain unalterable structures of our life; if we resent these or kick against them, we merely reduce our capacity to make the best of what may in
itself be a rather unpromising situation.

The second paradox is that this freedom can be lived out only in a state of total dependence upon God. This element in the life of Jesus is made plain in all the Gospels. At first sight surprisingly, it is more deeply stressed in the Fourth Gospel, the Gospel of the glory of Christ, than in the other three. Again and again in this Gospel Jesus affirms that of himself he can do nothing, that he does only what he sees the Father doing, that he speaks only the words that the Father has given him to speak. He cannot act until his hour has come — and this means always the kairos, the moment appointed by the Father. To the lusty spirit of independence which is characteristic of our highly independent age, such dependence might seem to resemble slavery rather than freedom. It is not immediately self-evident that the richest freedom is enjoyed in perfect cooperation, as when pianist and violinist finds each his perfect complement in the playing of the other.

It is plain that this freedom can be exercised only in suffering. The free man accepts his situation, but he cannot be conformed to it. He will always be the critic, judging all things by a standard external to the things themselves. This means that he will always draw down on himself the hatred of those who are pledged to the status quo, and of all those who through laziness or self-interest are unwilling to listen to a new voice. But, paradoxically, when they have taken away the last vestige of his liberty and nailed him to a cross, he still remains sovereign in his freedom; he, and not they, is master of the situation; he has affirmed his mastery across the ages. The purpose of this life of freedom was to restore to all men the possibility of true human life as from the beginning it was intended to be. Life as we know it is full of contradictions, and contradictions lead to frustration and weakness. Here is life without inner contradiction, and therefore peerless in its strength.

The miracles of Jesus are to serve as signs of the breaking in of the new order. Almost every one of them is concerned with the restoration of the being of man to its normal working-the withered hand is quickened with new life, the paralytic takes up his bed and walks, not without a reminder that the paralysis of sin is a graver matter than the paralysis of arms and legs. Even the saying that the poor have the Gospel preached to them is to be interpreted under this rubric of restoration. The ‘poor’ are not simply the poor in this world’s goods, though this is also included; they are those who in their helplessness have looked up to God in hope and expectation. To them the word is now given that their prayer has been heard — God himself is bringing in his own new order; “The world’s great age begins anew? But this renewal cannot be through regression to an imagined past of primitive innocence. Man has eaten of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and he cannot go back to the garden of Eden. He can only go forward to a new relatedness to God. Jesus is the last Adam; he too is tempted, in just the same way as the first Adam, to assert his independence of God and so to fall away from the true reality of human life. He is accepted, because the victory over temptation has been won, and human nature has been maintained in perfect fellowship with God up to the point of death and beyond it. No other man can be accepted in this way. For every other man the renewal of fellowship can take only the form of forgiveness, and for this reason the affirmation of the forgiveness of sins is the heart of the proclamation of the message of Christ. That is why the new order brought in by Christ is spoken of as the new creation. Forgiveness is always creative; it brings into being a new world, a totally new situation, in which division has been taken away and has been replaced by a new and firmer fellowship. This is true even of human forgiveness. Much more is it true of the forgiveness

Notes

1. Only one representative of a younger Church, an Indian clergyman, was present at the Conference of 1860.
2. A great deal of pioneer work, particularly in the study of the classical languages of the East, had, of course, been accomplished before 1860.
3. See, for instance, an extremely interesting discussion of the views of Ernst Troeltsch (Die Absolutheit des Christentums und die Religionsgeschichte, 1901) in H. Kraemer, Religion and the Christian Faith (1956), pp. 63-67. Troeltsch makes use of the remarkably self-contradictory phrase relativer Absolutismus.
4. As for instance, Rudolf Bultmann maintains that St. Paul’s anthropology is the centre of all his thinking, and that it is only in the light of this that his theology as a whole can be understood. Theologie des neuen Testament (ed. 3, 1958, p. 192; Eng. trans. p. 191).