 When we examine the claims that different religious traditions make about the nature of
Ultimate Reality, the origin and destiny of humans, and historical events, we find that many of these claims are incompatible. How should we interpret these conflicting accounts?
No one comes to the Father but by me.
Mark Pursley

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Extra ecclesiam nulla salus. (Outside The Church
there is no salvation.)
Epistemological problem: How can one know that a particular religion is the one and only correct path to God or Ultimate Reality?
Moral problem: It seems unfair for Ultimate Reality to single out a particular culture as specially favored while condemning the mass of humanity to perdition or ignorance.
Mark Pursley

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Inclusivism: One religion is fully correct, others are partially correct. Anonymous Christians
(Rahner).
The “seeds of truth” present and active in the various religious traditions are a reflection of the unique Word of God, who
“enlightens every man coming into the world” (cf. Jn 1:9) …They are together an “effect of the
Spirit of truth operating outside the visible confines of the
Mystical Body” and which
“blows where it wills” (Jn 3:8)
Helps resolve the moral, but not the epistemological problem.
Mark Pursley
 Those who, through no fault of their own, do not know the Gospel of Christ or his Church, but who nevertheless seek God with a sincere heart, and, moved by grace, try in their actions to do his will as they know it through the dictates of their conscience — those too may achieve eternal salvation" (Second Vatican
Council, Lumen Gentium,
16).

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Subjectivism: Each religion is correct for the individuals who adhere to it.
The meaning of religious language can only be understood by observing how it functions in a religious community.
(Noncognitivism)
D.Z. Phillips Mark Pursley
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Relativism: The correctness of a religion is relative to the world view of its adherents. Claims about reality are relative to particular societies.
There are mutually incompatible yet individually adequate sets of conceptual-schema-
relative truths. J. Runzo

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Each of the major religions is correct insofar as it provides an authentic context for salvation. The different sets of religious ideas and practices taught by the great world traditions constitute different but in each case valid ways of conceiving, experiencing,
and responding to the ultimately Real. (John Hick)
God or Ultimate Reality as infinite, is unknowable by finite human minds . An infinite transcendent reality is being differently conceived, differently experienced, and differently responded to from within our different religio-cultural ways of being human.
(John Hick)
Mark Pursley

 Salvation = the transformation of individuals from selfcenteredness to
Reality-centeredness, from selfish egoists to compassionate golden rule followers.
 Each tradition conceptualizes the wrongness of human existence: as fallenness from paradisal virtue, or as a condition of moral weakness and alienation from God, or as the fragmentation of the infinite one into false individualities, or as a self-centeredness which poisons our involvement in the world process , making it an experience of anxious unhappy unfulfillment.
Mark Pursley

 Ordinary human existence is unsatisfactory. (yetzer
ha-ra- Judaism; fallen-
Christianity; ghafala-
Islam, avidya-
Hinduism; dukkha-
Buddhism).
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Salvation as a transformation from self-centeredness to
Reality centeredness.
When all love of the I and the
Mine is dead, then the work of the
Lord is done. (Kabir)
Thinking on there being no self, he wins to the state wherein the conceit “I am” has been uprooted,
to nirvana, even in this life. (The
Buddha)
…[W]e must give up our particular will, die to our ego, by surrendering its whole nature …to
the divine. (Radhakrishnan)
Mark Pursley

 Naturalists claim that the supernaturalistic explanations of the origin and destiny of the universe found in religion are remnants of a prescientific culture. The empirical methods of scientific inquiry find no evidence for the reality of supernatural forces. Naturalistic explanations (e.g. evolution, big bang) provide more adequate descriptions of material and biological phenomena.
Therefore, the naturalist suspects that all religions are mistaken.
Mark Pursley

 Geocentrism to heliocentrism- end of the three story universe.
Naturalistic explanations of natural phenomena
(weather, historical development, consciousness, origins of life, and the origins of the universe) eliminated the role of an interventionist deity.
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But if the universe is really completely self-contained, having no boundaries or edge, it would be neither created nor destroyed. It would simply be.
What place, then, for a creator?
(Stephen W. Hawking)
The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.
(Richard Dawkins)
Mark Pursley

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There are no facts, only interpretations. Nietzsche.
Postmodern thinkers distinguish three main eras in the history of western religion. The age of faith- characterized by belief in a supernatural God who intervened in nature and history and revealed himself in scripture. The age of reasonbeginning in the enlightenment period when scientific explanations of nature and history replaced supernaturalist accounts, and the methodology of literary criticism was applied to scriptural texts, revealing their human origins.
Leading finally to the age of interpretation.
Mark Pursley

 Postmodern thinkers deny the metaphysical notion of objective truth, in science and theology. They emphasize that all concepts and theories are conditioned by historical and cultural circumstances. Reality is reduced to message.
In a world where God is dead- where the metanarratives have been dissolved and all authority has …been demythologized, including that of objective knowledge- our only chance of
survival rests in the Christian commandment of charity. Gianni
Vattimo
Mark Pursley

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Armstrong, Karen. ( 2007). The great transformation.
New York: Anchor
Gundry, S.N., Okholm D.L. & Phillips, T.R.
(Eds.). (1995). Four views on salvation in a
Pluralistic world. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan.
Hawking, Stephen. (1998). A brief history of time.
New York: Bantam.
Hick, John. (1980). God has many names. Philadelphia:
Westminster.
Mark Pursley

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Hick, John. (1989). An interpretation of religion. New
Haven: Yale University Press.
Hick, John. (1993). Disputed questions.
New Haven: Yale University Press.
Hick, John. (1993). God and the universe of faiths.
Oxford: One World.
Hick, John. (1995). A Christian theology of religions.
Louisville, Kentucky: Westminster
Mark Pursley

 Hick, John, & Hebblewaithe, B. (Eds.). (2001)
Christianity and other religions. Oxford: One World
Livingston, J.C. (1989). Anatomy of the sacred.
New York: Macmillan.
Otto, Rudolf. (1923). The idea of the holy. Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
Ramm, Bernard. (1953). Protestant Christian evidences.
Chicago: Moody Press
Rorty, R. & Vattimo, G. (2004). The future of religion.
New York: Columbia University Press.
Mark Pursley