4

Defining Pluralism“Pluralism” is a surprisingly tricky wordin modern discussion. For some, it hasonly positive connotations; for others,only negative. Some use it in combinationwith various spheres: cultural pluralism,ideological pluralism, intellectual plural-ism, religious pluralism, and so forth. Forour purposes it will be useful to considernot the spheres in which pluralism isfound, but three kinds of phenomena towhich the word commonly refers: empiri-cal pluralism, cherished pluralism, andphilosophical or hermeneutical pluralism.

A. Empirical Pluralism

Empirical pluralism sums up the grow-ing diversity in our culture. Observableand largely measurable, it is what DavidTracy prefers to call “plurality.” “Plural-ity,” he writes, “is a fact.”

“Pluralism is one of the many possibleevaluations of that fact.”2 But although afew scholars have followed him in thisusage, most still use “pluralism,” in oneof its uses, to refer to the sheer diversityof race, value systems, heritage, language,culture, and religion in many Western andsome other nations. Paul Martinson pre-fers the rubric “factual pluralism”;3 in anycase, the rubric is less important than thephenomenon.

Consider, for example, the remarkableethnic diversity in America. The UnitedStates is the largest Jewish, Irish, and Swed-ish nation in the world; it is the second larg-est black nation, and soon it will becomethe third largest Hispanic nation. More-

over, these large proportions reveal noth-ing about the enormous diversity gener-ated by countless smaller ethnic and racialcommunities. Compiling equally remark-able statistics in almost every other planeof American culture is an easy matter.

It is possible to overstate the novelty ofthis diversity. Jon Butler vigorously argues,for his own ideological purposes, thatAmerican life and culture were extraordi-narily diverse in the eighteenth and nine-teenth centuries, and correspondinglydepreciates the degree of diversity reflectedin the nation today.4 Richard Pointer’s re-cent study of colonial New York reinforcesthe trend among modern historians to findsubstantial pluralism in this country at itsbirth.5 But although such work is a usefulfoil for those who picture colonial Americaas culturally monolithic, or who exagger-ate modern empirical pluralism, it must beinsisted that the range of contemporarydiversity is, on any scale, vastly greaterthan has ever been experienced in the Re-public before.

In the religious arena, the statistics arefascinating and sometimes differ from pollto poll.6 Statistics for the larger denomi-nations have floated a little, but not much.Protestants declined from about 67 per-cent to 57 percent between the years 1952and 1987. Roman Catholicism is now in-creasing in numbers, owing in part to theinflux of Hispanics, but the number ofRoman Catholic clergy is declining disas-trously, which at least suggests that boththe internal strength of Catholicism in thiscountry and its influence on the nation are

The Challenges ofContemporary Pluralism1

D. A. Carson

D. A. Carson is Research Professor

of New Testament at Trinity Evangelical

Divinity School in Deerfield, Illinois. His

writings include major commentaries on

Mat thew and John, the widely-used

Hermeneutics textbook Exegetical Fal-

lacies, and a volume addressing suffer-

ing entitled How Long, O Lord? Carson

is ranked among this country’s foremost

New Testament scholars. This ar ticle is

taken from The Gagging of God, and is

used by permission of Zondervan Press.

5

on the wane. Most demographers insistthat if present trends continue, WASPs(White, Anglo-Saxon Protestants) will bein a minority (about 47 percent) by theyear A.D. 2000.7

But some statistics do not tell the wholestory. They have to be augmented by otherobservations. Frequently large-scale stud-ies on what America believes focus littleattention on the small but multiplying andgrowing movements on the fringes. Thereare substantial numbers of Hindus andBuddhists who have emigrated to theWest, and who are now slowly winningconverts. The familiar cults are holdingtheir own; some of them, like the Mor-mons, are growing fairly rapidly. Numer-ous studies document the rise of New Agereligions and the revitalization of variousforms of neo-paganism. Not long agowitches’ covens were virtually unknown;now they advertise in the newspapers.Current immigration patterns are bring-ing in more and more people with littleheritage in the Judeo-Christian tradition,and this fact doubles the impact of thenumber of people within the country whofor various reasons have lost or aban-doned the tradition. None of this was fore-seen by the Founding Fathers; little of itwas foreseen forty years ago.

Even when the standard polls provideuseful and interesting data,8 a depth di-mension is often missing. One of thebest-known devices, the Princeton Reli-gious Index, used by the Gallup organi-zation, serves as a benchmark based onseven religious beliefs and practices: be-lief in God, religious preference, atten-dance at worship, confidence in thechurch, confidence in the clergy, the im-portance of religion, and religion’s abilityto answer current problems. In 1994, thisindex for the U.S. stands at 656 (on a scale

with a maximum of 1000)— a little higherthan the late 1980s, considerably lowerthan 1960. The percentage of those whosay they attend worship services at leastonce a month has been remarkably stablefor the last century. But such figures donot make sufficient allowance for severalother factors. Some studies have sug-gested that the percentage of those whosay they attend worship once a week oronce a month may be double the percent-age of those who do what they say. Moreimportantly, the pressures of seculariza-tion ensure that formal religious obser-vance may happily coexist with themarginalization of religion.

One hundred years ago, the New York

Times had the sermons of Spurgeon tele-graphed across the Atlantic so they couldbe printed in the Monday morning edi-tion. Today the New York Times is moreinterested in chronicling the devices someneighborhoods are using to keep churchesout or at least small— petitions, manipu-lated zoning laws, even litigation (March24, 1994). Moreover, if the studies ofWuthnow are correct,9 individualism andpersonal choice in religion have largelydisplaced loyalty to denominational struc-tures and to inherited doctrinal bastions.This makes it easier for individuals to besyncretistic, or, worse, confusedly plural-istic— i.e., people without strong doctri-nal commitments may take on highlydiverse and even incompatible ideas andfuse them in some way (syncretism), orthey may take on highly diverse and evencontradictory ideas without fusing them,simply letting them stand, unaware thatthe elementary demands of consistencyare being violated.

In short, the rise in empirical pluralismcan scarcely be denied. Experts may de-bate the significance of this or that com-

6

ponent,10 but the trends are so unmistak-able that they should not be ignored.11

Moreover, although most of the statis-tics just provided, along with many of thearguments in this book, have the UnitedStates in view, empirical pluralism is char-acteristic of most countries in the West-ern world. In Canada, regular attendanceat public worship is only a fraction of whatit is in the U.S., but the percentage of Ca-nadians who say they hold religious, andspecifically Christian, beliefs is not too farout of step with figures south of the 49thparallel: 67 percent of Canadians believeJesus rose from the dead, 78 percent claimsome sort of affiliation with a Christiandenomination, 53 percent of adults rejectthe theory of evolution, 9 percent say Godis “just an old superstition.”12 But again,the real advances in empirical pluralismin Canada are detected as much in othermeasurements as in the religion statistics:substantial immigration (from Haiti, theIndian subcontinent, the Pacific Rim, es-pecially Hong Kong), changing levels oftolerance, rising biblical illiteracy, chang-ing tolerances in the moral arena, the pres-ence of minarets and Buddhist temples.Like Canadians, Australians score fairlyhigh on personal belief in God, and verylow in any ability to articulate the gospelor to become actively involved with a lo-cal church. It, too, has witnessed a floodof immigrants.

Many European countries are experi-encing their own forms of empirical plu-ralism, forms that are sometimes muchlike those of their American counterparts,and sometimes very different (e.g., “guestworkers” in France and Germany). A ma-jor study (nicely summarized in the Chris-

tian Science Monitor of November 22, 1991)demonstrates, not unexpectedly, theAmerican bias both toward liberal indi-

vidualism and toward some form of reli-gious expression, over against a numberof European countries.

In many countries, the growing empiri-cal diversity of religions and ideologies istied in part to fresh immigration patterns(often from their former colonies), and toa general decline in the hold ofJudeo-Christian biases in outlook and val-ues. As usual, the significance of almostevery datum is disputed. For example, inhis recent book Robin Gill argues that theperception in England that the churchesare empty is not to be laid at the door of“secularization” and other cultural fac-tors. The blame, rather, lies with churchleaders who ignored the declining num-bers at the turn of the century, and con-tinued to build more buildings than wereneeded.13 But even if he has uncoveredsome remarkable ecclesiastical bumbling,most observers think his analysis extraor-dinarily reductionistic, and his proposalsfor reversing the decline— essentiallyvariations of good management tech-niques— extraordinarily optimistic. Thepluralisms that now characterize Englandgo far deeper than how many churchbuildings are empty, and turn on morethan the mosque in Regents Park or theprevalence of Urdu in Leicester or the factthat the Cockney lilt is now less commonin Metropolitan London than the WestIndian lilt, though all of these realities areimportant indices. What is gaining is di-versity; what is declining is relative cul-tural homogeneity. In short, in almost allWestern nations (and some others), thereis a marked rise in empirical pluralism.

This is neither intrinsically good norintrinsically bad. Those who prefer thatculture be variegated, racially mixed, re-ligiously pluriform, and culturally di-verse, will judge these developments

7

good. The developments themselves mayachieve some real good if they serve tobreak down cultural prejudice, racial ar-rogance, and religious bigotry. Christiansmay find the diversity an ideal setting forthoughtful articulation of the faith and forrenewed evangelism. Alternatively, thosewho prefer the stability of recognized cul-tural norms may find the new pluralitiesnot only discomfiting but vaguely threat-ening. And it would be naive to fail to ac-knowledge that these new realities mayactually serve to fan the flames of hostil-ity and tribalism. In order to maintain sta-bility, governments may be tempted toarrogate more and more authority tothemselves (since there are fewer andfewer shared values and norms). The endof this is hard to foresee, but it probablyaugurs little good. Christians may betempted so to bemoan the dilution of cen-turies of Western culture that they per-ceive only threat and no opportunity.

But however the rise of empirical plu-ralism is perceived, the brute reality can-not seriously be doubted. This is empiricalpluralism.

B. Cherished Pluralism

By “cherished pluralism” I mean to addan additional ingredient to empirical plu-ralism— approval. While some writersand thinkers (though certainly not all) onthe New Right view empirical pluralismas a threat to stability, order, good gov-ernment, and perhaps also to biblicalChristianity, it is important to rememberthat many citizens want to retain the di-versity. In other words, for them empiri-cal pluralism is not only a raw datum, itis a good thing. In the words of LesslieNewbigin, “It has become a commonplaceto say that we live in a pluralist society—not merely a society which is in fact plu-

ral in the variety of cultures, religions andlifestyles which it embraces, but pluralistin the sense that this plurality is celebratedas things to be approved and cherished.”14

[This pluralism] holds that varietyand diversity are a positive good,and the denial of variety and diver-sity is bad. In its extreme form, plu-ralism opposes syncretism, i.e., thecombining of various traditions.Rather, it so affirms the integrity ofa given approach to life that any at-tempt to change it is considered amoral violation.15

Os Guinness defines pluralization as“the process by which the number of op-tions in the private sphere of modern so-ciety rapidly multiplies at all levels,especially at the level of world view, faiths,and ideologies.”16 This state of affairs canbe so widely accepted as normal that it issaluted and approved. He comments:

We have reached the stage in plural-ization where choice is not just a stateof affairs, it is a state of mind. Choicehas become a value in itself, even apriority. To be modern is to be ad-dicted to choice and change. Changebecomes the very essence of life.17

In other words, the reality, empiricalpluralism, has become “a value in itself,even a priority”: it is cherished.

That this is not a universally held valueis precisely what generates “culturewars,” to use Hunter’s expression.18 Evenif he sometimes exaggerates the differ-ences that divide groups in our culture,and too easily deploys purple prose,19

Hunter is right to point out that in the faceof diversity some groups circle the wag-ons and fight off every other group. Thebattles are not just religious, of course. YetHunter rightly says that the culture warsare profoundly religious: they concernfundamentally opposing conceptions of

8

authority, morality, truth, the good, rev-elation, and so forth.

By and large, the media and the intel-lectuals of the West cherish pluralism. Onthe long haul, this has its effects both insociety and in the church-- effects to beexplored in later chapters.

C. Philosophical or Hermeneutical Pluralism

This is, by far, the most serious devel-opment. Philosophical pluralism has gen-erated many approaches20 in support ofone stance: namely, that any notion that aparticular ideological or religious claim isintrinsically superior to another is neces-sarily wrong. The only absolute creed isthe creed of pluralism. No religion has theright to pronounce itself right or true, andthe others false, or even (in the majorityview) relatively inferior.

This state of affairs is not the fruit ofsophomoric relativism, or of the urgentneed to redefine one’s morals to justifyone’s sleeping arrangements. It is tied tosome of the most complex intellectualdevelopments in Western thought in thelast twenty-five years. In particular it isbound up with the new hermeneutic andwith its stepchild, deconstruction. The out-look that it spawns is often labeledpostmodernism. I shall probe all three inthe next two chapters. At the moment, afew clarifying explanations will suffice.

At one time “hermeneutics” was un-derstood to be the art and science of bibli-cal interpretation. The term was graduallyextended to almost all kinds of interpre-tive acts, regardless of the object. At thesame time, developments in Western in-tellectual thought kept emphasizing justhow subjective all interpretation is. Even-tually the expression “new hermeneutic”was coined to emphasize the break fromthe older approach; this label has in turn

been displaced by “radical hermeneutics.”Old-fashioned hermeneutics belongs tothe “modern” era in which science, schol-arship, and serious study were thoughtcapable of resolving most problems, ofanswering most questions, of understand-ing all of reality. Radical hermeneutics, bycontrast, recognizes the subjectivity of in-terpretation, and how much of it is shapedby the cultures and subcultures to whichthe interpreter belongs.

But if old-fashioned hermeneutics be-longs to the “modern” era, and we havenow passed to radical hermeneutics, thenwe must be in the “postmodern” era. Theroots of modernity lie in the Renaissance,and in the scientific revolution of the six-teenth and early seventeenth centuries. Theworld was understood to be a rational place;truth was there to be discovered. As natu-ralism took hold, God was eithermarginalized (in the deist understanding)or abandoned (the atheist perspective).Progress was seen to be almost inevitable;entire worldviews, including both Marxismand capitalism, were judged to be histori-cally verifiable and believed to be develop-ing according to a sort of natural law.

But postmodernity is less certain thatthere is any objective truth to be discov-ered. If all interpretation is culturally con-ditioned, reason itself may be nothingmore than a tool of domination.21 A Marx-ist or a capitalist historiography is merelyone possible interpretation of the past. Butif one cannot talk about the objective truthof the matter, then the interpretations aremerely personal or at best culturally con-ditioned options. No interpretation can bedismissed, and no interpretation can beallowed the status of objective truth. Todismiss an interpretation presupposesyou have some criterion to allow you todo so-- and if an interpretation is merely

9

one among many possible interpretations,it is pointless to argue for its unique worthor against the equal validity (ornonvalidity!) of another’s interpretation.On the other hand, if you claim the crite-rion is the truth itself, you betray anold-fashioned bigotry, your enslavementto an eclipsed modernity. You have failedto recognize the subjectivity of all inter-pretations, the significance of the “turn tothe subject.”22 The limits of the tendencyare being recognized in some quarters, buta rationale for abandoning them seems,for many, hard to come by.23

David Tracy holds that all thinkers whoembrace certain “emancipatory values” are“incontestably heirs of the modern era,” ashe is himself.24 These “emancipatory val-ues” include the democratic ideals of lib-erty and equality, a frank acknowledgmentthat the modern scientific revolution is “notjust one more important event in Westernculture” but “the watershed event thatmakes even the Reformation and Renais-sance seem like family quarrels,”25 ethicalconcern over the realities of “social loca-tion” (gender, race, class), and the worldof nature and our place in it as the productof some evolutionary scheme. Not every-one defines “modernity” in quite this way,but this will do for the moment. Tracy’spoint, however, is that the “turn to the sub-ject” has shown that modernity itself, farfrom being the last word, must be viewedas only one more tradition. To recognizethis point does not mean that the modern-ists abandon the “emancipatory values”that constitute them modernists; it means,rather, that they become postmodernists—i.e., they retain personal commitment tomost of the values of modernity, while rec-ognizing that modernity itself is an inter-pretative framework as fraught withsubjectivism as all other frameworks.

Any postmodern thinker who believesthat she or he can now leave this ambigu-ous modern scene and begin anew in in-nocence is self-deluding. There is noinnocent tradition (including modernityand certainly including modern liberalChristianity ). There is no single innocentreading of any tradition, including thispostmodern reading of the positive andnegative realities, the profound ambigu-ities, of modernity.26

Of the many distinctions that have beenattempted between modernism andpostmodernism, perhaps this is the mostcommon: modernism still believed in theobjectivity of knowledge, and that the hu-man mind can uncover such knowledge.In its most optimistic form, modernismheld that ultimately knowledge wouldrevolutionize the world, squeeze God tothe periphery or perhaps abandon him tohis own devices, and build an edifice ofglorious knowledge to the great GodScience. But this stance has largely beenabandoned in the postmodernism thatcharacterizes most Western universities.Deconstructionists have been most vocif-erous in denouncing the modernist vision.They hold that language and meaning aresocially constructed, which is tantamountto saying arbitrarily constructed. Its mean-ing is grounded neither in “reality” nor intexts per se. Texts will invariably be inter-preted against the backdrop of theinterpreter’s social “home” and the histori-cal conditioning of the language itself.Granted this interpretive independencefrom the text, it is entirely appropriate andright for the interpreter to take bits andpieces of the text out of the frameworks inwhich they are apparently embedded(“deconstruct” the text), and refit them intothe framework (“locatedness”) of the in-terpreter, thereby generating fresh insight,

10

not least that which relativizes and criti-cizes the text itself.

The new hermeneutic reaches back sev-eral decades; radical hermeneutics anddeconstruction are a little younger; thisanalysis of the move from modernity topostmodernity is only a couple of decadesold. Yet together they have exerted vastinfluence in every field of Western intel-lectual thought, touching virtually everyintellectual endeavor.27 If here and there afew thinkers suggest that during the pastthree or four years postmodernism becamea spent force, several things must be saidin reply. First, no other worldview hascome along to displace it; second, its influ-ence on certain disciplines is still on the as-cendancy (as we shall see); and third, thesheer diversity of Western culture tends tonourish a kind of de facto postmodernity.In short, rumors of postmodernity’s demiseare greatly exaggerated.

Philosophical pluralism is the approachto cultural diversity that is supported by—and supports— postmodernity. Obvi-ously, it transcends mere empirical data;it outstrips assumptions that cultural di-versity is to be embraced and cherished.One of the principal arguments of thisbook is that confessional Christianity can-

not wholly embrace either modernity or

postmodernity, yet it must learn certain les-

sons from both; it must vigorously oppose

many features of philosophical pluralism,

without retreating to modernism.

The Impact of Philosophical PluralismRadical hermeneutics and deconstruction

are complex and difficult subjects. It is tempt-ing to think that at least some of their chal-lenge owes not a little to a certain kind ofintellectual arrogance that deploys technicallanguage and sophisticated argumentationto keep the masses at bay, excluded from the

fine tone and subtle spinning of the intellec-tual elite.28 Whether or not this is too harshan assessment, it is important to recognizesomething of the impact that philosophicalpluralism has already made on our culture.Some of these points will be taken up atlength in later chapters. At the moment it isnecessary only to perceive something of whatis at stake.

First, in one form or another these waysof looking at reality have made an impacton virtually all the humanities, and on nota few philosophers of science as well. Notonly in English 101 are students introducedto Jacques Derrida and Stanley Fish, but insociology, history, philosophy, law, educa-tion, anthropology, and even occasionallyin philosophy of science. In every instancethe net effect is predictable: while rightly de-crying the hubris that thinks human beingscan understand anything perfectly, that talksglibly about absolute truth without recog-nizing that all human knowledge is in someways culture-bound, these movementsunite in depreciating objective truth itself.Theory has thus buttressed both the empiri-cal and the cherished pluralisms of the age,generating a philosophical basis for relativ-ism. Moreover, unlike the old-fashioned lib-eralism, which took two or three generationsto work its way down from the seminariesand the universities to the ordinary personin the pew, this brand of liberalism has madeits way down to the person in the street inabout half a generation.29

The result is what Stephen Carter callsa “culture of disbelief.”30 Carter has cou-rageously and insightfully chronicled howwe have moved beyond mere civil religion(to use the expression that Robert Bellahmade popular by his famous 1970 essay)31

to the place where modern politics and lawtrivialize all values, all religious devotion.This stance is now in the air we breathe.

11

The extent to which it has invaded thechurch is troubling. Not less troubling, forthe preacher of the gospel, is the extent towhich it is everywhere assumed, especiallyby middle and upper classes, by the me-dia and print elite, by almost all who setthe agenda for the nation.

In this environment, it is not surprisingthat pollsters turn up all sorts of contra-dictory evidence. Thus while 74 percent ofAmericans strongly agree that “there isonly one true God, who is holy and per-fect, and who created the world and rulesit today,” fully 64 percent strongly agreeor agree somewhat with the assertion that“there is no such thing as absolute truth.”32

In the moral realm, there is very littleconsensus left in Western countries overthe proper basis of moral behavior. Andbecause of the power of the media, formillions of men and women the onlyvenue where moral questions are dis-cussed and weighed is the talk show,where more often than not the primaryaim is to entertain, even shock, not tothink. When Geraldo and Oprah becomethe arbiters of public morality, when theopinion of the latest media personality issought on everything from abortion totransvestites, when banality is mistakenfor profundity because uttered by a moviestar or a basketball player, it is not sur-prising that there is less thought thanhype. Oprah shapes more of the nation’sgrasp of right and wrong than most of thepulpits in the land. Personal and socialethics have been removed from the realmsof truth and of structures of thought; theyhave not only been relativized, but theyhave been democratized and trivialized.As a guest on a talk show dealing withpornography put it, “The great thingabout our society is that you can haveyour opinion and I can have mine.”

Even at the academic level, ethicistscompletely committed to pluralism arediligently attempting to create a consen-sus morality based on certain societalcommitments: on the recognition thathuman beings are persons who demandmutual respect, for instance,33 or on theassumption that reason is sufficient toevaluate the relative merits of concreteelements of competing moral systems, butinsufficient to evaluate the moral systemsthemselves (since that would be a viola-tion of philosophical pluralism).34 Ofcourse, all such attempts covertlyre-introduce objective values; the questionis whether the attempt is successful. Cer-tainly none enjoys wide credibility.

Consider the impact of philosophicalpluralism on the study of history. Thereare, of course, many competing schools ofhistoriography, and pluralism is repulsedby some of them. As recently as 1983,Schlossberg was criticizing historians forinterpreting what happened in the past asalmost inevitable, the canons of inevita-bility determined by some philosophicalstance.35 The classic example, of course—nowadays a great deal less believable thana mere decade ago— is Marxist historiog-raphy, but there are many others. Eachschool of historiography was in danger ofdivinizing its own interpretation of thepast, almost all of them entirely natural-istic. But today pluralism has taught atleast some of them that each interpreta-tion of the past is entirely subjective: noneof them can claim any supreme tie to the“truth.” Indeed, the pursuit of historical“truth” in any objective sense is a chimera.

Nowhere is this more easily seen thanin the comparison of two editions of onefamous book. In 1940 Mortimer J. Adlerpublished his justly famous work, How to

Read a Book.36 In it he does not devote a

12

specific section to the reading of history,but he includes such comments as these:“ . . . one must be not only a responsivebut a responsible listener. You are respon-sive to the extent that you follow what hasbeen said and note the intention whichprompts it” (240). Or again:

I think that knowledge can be com-municated and that discussion canresult in learning. If knowledge, notopinion, is at stake, then either dis-agreements are apparent only— tobe removed by coming to terms anda meeting of minds; or, if they arereal, then the genuine issues can al-ways be resolved— in the long run,of course— by appeals to fact andreason... This maxim then requires[the reader] to distinguish betweenknowledge and opinion, and to re-gard an issue concerning knowledgeas one which can be resolved (248-9).

In dealing with historical works it isimportant, Adler says, to compare histo-rian with historian, in order to “discoverthe interpretation a writer places on thefacts” (278)— a distinction no philosophi-cal pluralist will allow. “You may even getinterested enough to look into the origi-nal documents from which the historiangathered evidence” (279).

Granted, some of these formulationsare, by current standards, hermeneuticallynaive. Certainly they bristle with the as-sumptions of modernism. But the reallyshocking change comes when we comparethe 1972 edition, jointly written withCharles Van Doren. Now an entire chap-ter is devoted to the reading of history.Many useful things are said. But we arealso told that a historical fact “is one ofthe most elusive things in the world.”37 Ifwe must place history, “the story of thepast” (italics theirs), somewhere on thespectrum between science and fiction,“then it is usually admitted that history is

closer to fiction than to science.”38

In short, philosophical pluralism hasmade an enormous impact on an aston-ishingly wide spectrum of disciplines.Some of this impact will be sketched outin later chapters of this book.

Second, philosophical pluralism hasenjoyed remarkable success in engender-ing new forms of religious pluralism. I amreferring now not merely to the multipli-cation of religions (a subset of empiricalpluralism), but to one form or another ofthe view that all religions are really say-ing the same thing, or that all achieve sal-vation (however that is construed) withequal power and efficiency. The roots ofthis stance stretch back through Hegel toFeuerbach but their influence has beencatapulted ahead on the springs of con-temporary intellectual developments.

It is worth pausing to place the impactof philosophical pluralism on religionwithin a historical framework. Recent de-velopments in Western Christendom areracing in more than one direction. In amasterful essay, Leonard Sweet traces thecourse from the mid-1930s to the mid-1980s, especially in mainline Protestantchurches.39 The last stage, he contends, ischaracterized by a pair of reactions againstmodernism. On the one hand there is“antimodernism,” i.e., various evangeli-cal, fundamentalist, and charismatic re-surgence movements, both outside andwithin the mainline denomination. On theother hand there is “postmodernism” un-der various guises (though is less thanclear that Sweet has a good grasp of thelatter). The loss of objective truth and theextreme subjectivity bound up with mostforms of postmodernism have calledforth, in the religious arena, a variety ofresponses. These are most commonly re-duced to three:40

13

1. Radical religious pluralism: Under thedirect impact of philosophical pluralism,this stance holds that no religion can ad-vance any legitimate claim to superiorityover any other religion. Wherever any re-ligion (save the religion of pluralism) inany detail holds itself right or superior,and therefore holds that others are corre-spondingly wrong or inferior, it is neces-sarily mistaken. Of course, the challengefrom philosophical pluralism is not re-stricted to the experience of Christians,even though in most Western countriesconfessional Christianity is philosophicalpluralism’s primary religious opponent.Philosophical pluralism threatens any pre-tension of superiority, let alone exclusive-ness, in all of the world religions that comein contact with it41 — as indeed they willif they have adherents in the West.

2. Inclusivism: This stance, while affirm-ing the truth of fundamental Christianclaims, nevertheless insists that God hasrevealed himself, even in saving ways, inother religions. Inclusivists normally con-tend that God’s definitive act ofself-disclosure is in Jesus Christ, and thathe is in some way central to God’s plan ofsalvation for the human race, but that sal-vation itself is available in other religions.

3. Exclusivism: This position teachesthat the central claims of biblically faith-ful Christianity are true. Correspondingly,where the teachings of other religions con-flict with these claims, they must neces-sarily be false. This stance brings with itcertain views of who Jesus is, what theBible is, and how salvation is achieved.Normally it is also held that salvation can-not be attained through the structures orclaims of other religions. It does not holdthat every other religion is wrong in ev-

ery respect. Nor does it claim that all whoclaim to be Christians are saved, or rightin every respect. It does insist that whereother religions are contradicted by thegracious self-disclosure of Christ, theymust necessarily be wrong. Until the mod-ern period, this was virtually the unani-mous view of Christians. Christians whostill hold to this view sometimes now castit as a direct negation of both modernismand postmodernism; adherents ofpostmodernism are inclined to dismissthis stance as a reflection of bigoted fun-damentalism, and in part a reaction to thesheer fluidity and uncertainty of our age.

There are, of course, other analyses.Even in the simple one I have just out-lined, there are many possible pointsalong the spectrum from exclusivism toconsistent religious pluralism.42

Since it is radical religious pluralismthat is the focus of this book, along withthe intellectual movements that sustain it,it may help to provide a few examples.Probably the best known exponent of con-sistent religious pluralism is John Hick.Hick’s many articles and books condemnthe Christian “monopoly of saving truth,”insisting that any sense of superiority isguilty of generating “the paradox of a Godof universal love who has ordained thatonly the Christian minority of the humanrace can be saved.”43 As for other reli-gions, Hick writes:

Around the different ways of con-ceiving, experiencing and respond-ing to the Real there have grown upthe various religious traditions ofthe world with their myths and sym-bols, their philosophies and theolo-gies, their liturgies and arts, theirethics and life-styles. Within all ofthem basically the same salvificprocess is taking place, namely, thetransformation of human existencefrom self-centredness to Reality

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centredness. Each of the great tradi-tions thus constitutes a valid contextof salvation/liberation; each may beable to gain a larger understandingof the Real by attending to the reportsand conceptualities of the others.44

Langdon Gilkey attributes the rise ofthis radical religious pluralism to a “shiftin the balance between what were calledthe requirements of faith and those oflove.” This has been accompanied by an-other shift: from an assumption of West-ern cultural superiority, we have movedto an assumption of rough cultural pari-ties, and this “shift in cultural conscious-ness has in turn had a vast effect on ourtheological consciousness,” moving ustoward a consciousness of theological andreligious parity.45 Don Cupitt’s recentbook in defense of absolute relativism in-sists that all values are mortal and there-fore transient, that even tragedy iscultural, and that there is nothing in theuniverse to assure us that life must makesense. What we therefore need is a “reli-gion of the fleeting moment and theslipping-away meaning.”46 In defense ofreligious pluralism, von Balthasar arguesthat truth is “symphonic,” reminding usthat etymologically symphony means“standing together.”47 To support thisposition, von Balthasar resorts to the mostbreathtaking array of misinterpreted bib-lical texts torn from their context that Ihave ever seen.

In defense of radical religious plural-ism, Harvey Cox finds support even in thefailed predictions of bygone atheists.48

Thus, if some of the eighteenth centuryFrench philosophes predicted that religion,like all superstition, was fated for promptextinction (Cox quotes Voltaire’swell-known line: “Not until the last priestis hanged with the entrails of the last kingwill mankind finally be free”), and have

obviously erred in their prognostications,nevertheless they were correct, Cox avers,“to foresee the disappearance of religionas an extension of that way of knowingthe external world we now call magic orsuperstition.”49 In other words, religioncannot supply any answers to questionsthat can be answered in an empirical way,but can provide answers to questions ofhuman meaning and purpose. If Leninpredicted that his own brand of natural-istic Marxist thought would ultimatelyreplace religion as a metaphysicalworldview, his predictions seem lessthreatening today. But, Cox insists, inso-far as Lenin was saying that religion mustbe understood not in isolation, but as tiedto all of life, he was right— a clever rein-terpretation that makes it unclear whetheror not Cox espouses philosophical natu-ralism. Cox attempts a similar justificationof Freud and Jung. All of this leans in sup-port of a universal, secular meaning ofreligion. Even Bonhoeffer’s famous apho-rism— that to be a Christian is, in the fi-nal analysis, to be fully human— isappealed to, almost as if what Bonhoeffermeant was that to be human is to be Chris-tian, or at least religious, whereas ofcourse what he was really saying was thereverse: to be Christian is what makes ustruly human.

Taking the long view, the pervasivenessof radical religious pluralism is astonish-ing.50 Religious pluralists capture nodenomination completely, but they domi-nate the discussion in many, and exerciseimportant influence in many more. Evenin Roman Catholicism, thought by manyto be a bastion of conservativism on thesepoints, some form of inclusiveness pre-dominates in the North Atlantic wings,and this not infrequently veers off towardradical pluralism.51 In the arena of aca-

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demic theology and religious studies,which after all shapes the next generationof clergy, it is sometimes difficult to findsomeone of stature who will stand up andcall this perspective into question. In aca-demic biblical studies, postmodernismlinks with the “new” literary criticism tocreate endless “fresh” readings, many ofthem clever and parts of them insightful,even if, taken as a whole, their insight ismore and more removed from reasonedand defensible anchorage in the text.52

Reading many of the documents of the1993 Parliament of the World’s Religions,one is struck by two features. First, thesheer diversity of mutually contradictoryreligions is fascinating, yet each is underpressure to avoid the one taboo: to sayanyone else is mistaken. Second, the docu-ments on which the delegates could agreeare strong on global ecology (raised to ahigher status by linking it with a call totruthfulness and tolerance and labelingthe result “global ethic”) and one or twoother “in” concerns, but in fact the docu-ments contain so little of anything distinc-tively religious that any decent atheistcould happily sign on.53 Indeed, that is thefinal plea: “Therefore we commit our-selves to a common global ethic, to bettermutual understanding, as well as tosocially-beneficial, peace-fostering, andEarth-Friendly ways of life. We invite all

men and women, whether religious or not, to

do the same [italics theirs].”54

For those who espouse radical religiouspluralism, there is no longer any heresy,except perhaps the view that there are her-esies. Other ages have disagreed over justwhat constitutes a heresy, but the categoryitself was inviolate. For the first time in his-tory, large numbers of people deny thattheological corruption is possible. For thesepeople, even to ask if there are any theo-

logical boundaries, let alone where they lie(in two senses!), is to flirt with sacrilege.

It is vitally important to recognize thatphilosophical pluralism exerted a dra-matic “softening” influence on manypeople who would disavow radical reli-gious pluralism. It is hard, for instance, todeny the influence of pluralism on evan-gelical preachers who increasingly recon-struct the “gospel” along the lines of feltneeds, knowing that such a presentationwill be far better appreciated than one thatarticulates truth with hard edges (i.e., thatinsists that certain contrary things arefalse), or that warns of the wrath to come.How far can such reconstruction go be-fore what is preached is no longer the gos-pel in any historical or biblical sense?

Or consider two recent books. One waswritten by a confessional Lutheran, CarlBraaten, who with unflinching couragerepeatedly affirms the exclusive suffi-ciency of Christ, the need for God’s grace,the uniqueness of Christian revelation.The book is littered with strong judgmentslike this: “When Raimundo Panikkarwrites that Christ has other names—Rama, Krishna, Isvara, Purusha,Tathagata, and the like— we must dis-agree mightily.”55 Yet despite his couragein defending this line of argument,Braaten ends up proposing a model that“pictures Jesus Christ as the revelation ofthe eschatological fulfillment of the reli-gions. The gospel of Jesus Christ does notdestroy but fulfills the religions.”56 Inother words, the assumption is that Godhas revealed himself in some sense in allreligions, and the eschatological fulfill-ment of all such revelation is Jesus Christ.But there are several slippery steps in theargument. That there is “revelation” insome sense in all religions few Christianthinkers (except some in the Barthian tra-

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dition) would want to deny. Some wouldspeak of the revelation implicit in theimago Dei; others would speak, quite dog-matically at that, of general revelation thatcan be found in non-Christian religions;still others of the residual revelation notdestroyed by the overlay of false religion.But Braaten moves from this weak senseof revelation to a much stronger sense, inwhich these revelations are “fulfilled” inJesus Christ much as the old covenant is“fulfilled” in Jesus Christ. But in the Bible,the fulfillment of the old covenant in JesusChrist (e.g., Matt. 5:17-20) is the fulfillmentof what systematicians have called spe-cial revelation, and “fulfillment” itselfmeans not the satisfaction of religious andpersonal aspirations, but the arrival of theeschatological event to which the old cov-enant Scriptures pointed in promise andtype. Although the Bible as a whole cansometimes speak of the gospel and ofJesus as bringing to fruition the aspirations

of pagans who surround the covenantcommunity, it does not speak of the gos-pel or of Christ as fulfilling their religion.Nor would the adherents of such religionssee themselves in such light; indeed, theywould be insulted at the suggestion.57

In the other book, Daniel Taylor rightlychallenges what he calls “the myth of cer-tainty.”58 The kind of pursuit of certaintyand affirmation of it that pretends to om-niscience to the point of idolatry. I shallhave more to say about such idolatry laterin this book. But so relentless is Taylor’sdisavowal of such Christians that they arecaricatured and stereotyped: when peopledefend their worldview or some systemof thought, they are simply defendingtheir own fragile self-identity. Overagainst such people are the “reflective”Christians (by which Taylor refers to him-self and to those who agree with him).

This simple, not to say simplistic, antith-esis is teased out throughout the book. Atthe end of the day, Taylor is forced to re-treat to the simplest fideism, uncheckedby any appeal to history or revelation or“fit.” Some form of fideism, I shall shortlyargue, is inevitable; Taylor’s form is a longway removed from the argument of Paulin 1 Corinthians, with his insistence onhistorical facts attested by ample numbersof eyewitnesses; or of Luke, with his af-firmation of “many convincing proofs”(Acts 1:3). Taylor is surely right to raise agentle protest against the invincible arro-gance of those who have never struggled.But where he comes out is, I suspect, muchmore indebted to philosophical pluralismthan he himself recognizes. I doubt that itis a stable position.

In short, philosophical pluralism hastriumphantly engineered the modernform of religious pluralism. By and large,this is not something with which contem-porary Christians have come to terms.

Third, under the impact of radicalhermeneutics and of deconstruction, thenature of tolerance has changed.59 In a rela-tively free and open society, the best formsof tolerance are those that are open to andtolerant of people, even when there arestrong disagreements with their ideas. Thisrobust toleration for people, if not alwaysfor their ideas, engenders a measure of ci-vility in public discourse while still foster-ing spirited debate over the relative meritsof this or that idea. Today, however, toler-ance in many Western societies increas-ingly focuses on ideas, not on people.

The result of adopting this new brandof tolerance is less discussion of the mer-its of competing ideas— and less civility.There is less discussion because tolerationof diverse ideas demands that we avoidcriticizing the opinions of others; in addi-

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tion, there is almost no discussion wherethe ideas at issue are of the religious sortthat claim to be valid for everyone every-where: that sort of notion is right outsidethe modern “plausibility structure” (to usePeter Berger ’s term), and has to betrashed. There is less civility because thereis no inherent demand, in this new prac-tice of tolerance, to be tolerant of people,and it is especially difficult to be tolerantof those people whose views are so faroutside the accepted “plausibility struc-tures” that they think your brand of tol-erance is muddleheaded.

In the religious field, this means that fewpeople will be offended by the multiply-ing new religions. No matter how wacky,no matter how flimsy their intellectual cre-dentials, no matter how subjective anduncontrolled, no matter how blatantlyself-centered, no matter how obviouslytheir gods have been manufactured to fos-ter human self-promotion, the media willtreat them with fascination and even a de-gree of respect. But if any religion claimsthat in some measure other religions arewrong, a line has been crossed and resent-ment is immediately stirred up: pluralism(in the third sense) has been challenged.Exclusiveness is the one religious idea thatcannot be tolerated. Correspondingly,proselytism is a dirty word. One cannot failto observe a crushing irony: the gospel ofrelativistic tolerance is perhaps the most“evangelistic” movement in Western cul-ture at the moment, demanding assent andbrooking no rivals.

What is sometimes forgotten is that thisvision of tolerance is, at one level, akin tothe view of religious tolerance in someremarkably intolerant countries. In someMuslim countries, for example, it is per-fectly acceptable to be a Christian; but itmay be illegal and is certainly dangerous

to become a Christian. What is overlookedis that genuine religious freedom neces-sarily includes the right to convert and toencourage others to convert. At the heartof such freedom is the assumption thatideas matter and must be argued out inthe marketplace, and that individualshave the right to change their minds andadopt new positions even if everyonearound them is convinced that their ideasare preposterous. Of course, these rightsare still largely maintained in the UnitedStates and the Western democracies. Byand large, however, they are not cher-ished, for the focus of tolerance haschanged. Philosophical pluralism hasmanaged to set in place certain “rules” forplaying the game of religion— rules thattranscend any single religion.

I do not for a moment mean that ev-eryone plays by these rules. In fact, it isbecoming clear that this third form of plu-ralism, philosophical pluralism, tends tomilitate, in time, against the first two. In-stead of a rich diversity of claims arguingit out in the marketplace (i.e., empiricalpluralism), in what Neuhaus calls “thenaked public square,”60 and instead of thisdiversity being cherished as the best wayto ensure freedom and to pursue truth(cherished pluralism), the pressures fromphilosophical pluralism tend to squashany strong opinion that makes exclusivetruth claims— all, that is, except the dog-matic opinion that all dogmatic opinionsare to be ruled out, the dogmatic opinionthat we must dismiss any assertion thatsome opinions are false. By way of reac-tion, various groups respond by becom-ing defensive. They circle the wagons andshout slogans. Small wonder, then, thatStanley S. Harakas can affirm that the pre-vailing worldview in America is not plu-ralistic (at least, not in the first and second

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senses, as I have labeled them), but atom-istic and antireligious.61

When philosophical pluralism is allied,in the popular mood, with the notion ofprogress, so that those who disagree areoften pictured as quaint vestiges of a by-gone era, the pressure to conform is enor-mous, since the notion of “progress” hasbeen a watchword of Western culture forat least two centuries. Recently, the ideaof progress has come under vigorous andlong-deserved attack.62 Moreover, in uni-versity circles deconstruction itself is justbeginning to be “deconstructed.” But asfar as I can make out, philosophical plu-ralism is still the dominant ideology, andit is proving to be enormously intolerant.

Several recent books betray the sever-ity of the challenge. In each case the crit-ics of “fundamentalism” tend to find theworst exemplars, and lump together un-der this rubric all who hold that objectivetruth and morality do exist— includingthose of us who think it is vitally impor-tant that people be allowed to disagreewith or rebel against objective truth andmorality. Because all “fundamentalists”are lumped together, they are all dis-missed together antipluralistic and evenantidemocratic.

Consider, for example, the introductoryessay in the third volume of the justly fa-mous Fundamentalism Project, beingpublished by the University of ChicagoPress. Marty and Appleby write:

If fundamentalism is defined andunderstood by the utterances andactions of its most radical propo-nents, then one may conclude thatfundamentalism is essentially anti-democratic, anti-accommodationist,and antipluralist and that it violates,as a matter of principle, the standardsof human rights defended, if not al-ways perfectly upheld, by Westerndemocracies. By this reading of fun-

damentalism, the battle lines aredrawn clearly between fundamen-talist and nonfundamentalist, mu-tual understanding is unlikely orimpossible, and public policy stud-ies like the present one are inevita-bly devoted to the defense ofprinciples and lifestyles under as-sault by the forces of resurgent reli-gious radicalism.63

Or here is Boone, with the same lack ofsophistication in her analysis:

Try as they might to be humble, toavoid pitfalls of intellectual pride—largely because the Bible tells them to,perhaps— fundamentalists are dog-matic and doctrinalistic because theirdoctrine of the text forces them to be.They are reading an inerrant text;what they read, and therefore whatthey interpret, must be inerrant.64

The result is that tolerance is no longera virtue; political correctness is in:

In the past, PC [=political correct-ness] generally centered on issuesthat were quite substantive. The Vic-torians were prudish about sex be-cause they were enthusiastic aboutbourgeois morality. In the fifties,many Americans were intolerant ofany notion that seemed remotely“pink” (socialistic) because they as-sumed communism to be a majorthreat to their economic and politi-cal freedom. Today’s PC, however,is intolerant not of substance but ofintolerance itself. Thus, although thepolitically correct would have agreat deal of difficulty agreeing onwhat constitutes goodness andtruth, they have no trouble at allagreeing that intolerance itself iswrong. Why? Because no one de-serves to be offended.65

Recently at an East Coast university, themost frequent term chosen in a word asso-ciation exercise by non-Christians to describea Christian was “intolerant.” Doubtless someof this perception derives from insensitiveChristians. But some of it derives from sig-

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nificant changes in what “open-minded”means. It no longer means that you may ormay not have strong views yet remain com-mitted to listening honestly to countervailingarguments. Rather, it means you are dogmati-cally committed to the view that all convic-tions that any view whatsoever is wrong areimproper and narrow-minded. In otherwords, open-mindedness has come to beidentified not with the means of rational dis-course, but with certain conclusions. Theirony is that Christians are a barely toleratedminority on most university campuses. Insociety at large there is growing documenta-tion supporting the ominous rise in “a fra-grance of oppression.”66 As Clark puts it,“Postmodern apologetic practice must faceboth the perspectivism that erases all truthand the political correctness that arbitrarilyreinstates it.”67

Fourth, the rising diversity in Westernculture (empirical pluralism) and the con-comitant loss of cultural consensus,coupled with the rising intolerance gen-erated by philosophical pluralism, hasproduced what Time magazine calls “ANation of Finger Pointers.”68 One ofAmerica’s most astute observers describesthe result: we have generated a “cultureof complaint.”69 Eventually his book,amusing as it is, becomes tiresome: theauthor’s only solution is that peopleshould try harder to tolerate each otherand get along. In other words, his workturns out to be a colorful preachment insupport of cherished pluralism, with oc-casional hints of philosophical pluralismthrown in.

Fifth, the rise of radical hermeneuticsand of deconstruction has sapped the faithof many undergraduates and introduceda raft of new challenges to those interestedin evangelizing them. Thus, Miss Chris-tian goes off to the local state university,

full of zeal and the knowledge of a fewfundamental truths. There she will notfind lecturers who will devote much timeto overturning her truths. Rather, she willfind many lecturers convincing her thatthe meaning in her religion, as in all reli-gion, is merely communal bias, and there-fore relative, subjective. No religion canmake valid claims of a transcendent na-ture. Truth, whatever it is, does not residein an object or idea or statement or affir-mation about reality, historical or other-wise, that can be known by finite humanbeings; rather, it consists of fallible, faultyopinions held by finite knowers whothemselves look at things that certain wayonly because they belong to a certain sec-tion of society. Miss Christian is told, atrifle condescendingly, that if her religionhelps her, she should be grateful, but thatno intelligent person this side of Derrida,Foucault, and Fish, could possibly believethat her beliefs have a transcendent claimon everybody everywhere. Thus, withoutovertly denying her faith, Miss Christiandiscovers that its vitality has been sapped.It has been relativized, trivialized,marginalized. Without ever having had asingle one of its major tenets overturnedby historical or other argument, the wholeedifice of Christian truth has been de-tached from the objective status it onceheld. Miss Christian drifts off, and it maytake years before she thinks seriouslyabout Jesus again—if she ever does.

For similar reasons, evangelism amonguniversity students has changed a greatdeal since I was an undergraduate. If aChristian offered testimony thirty yearsago, it was possible to get into a strongdebate, sometimes even a heated one, overthe validity of the truth claims that werebeing advanced. Part of intelligent Chris-tian witness on a secular campus was, for

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example, to muster the arguments for thehistorical resurrection of Jesus, to displaythe veracity and coherence of the Scrip-tures, and to demonstrate the awesomewisdom and love in God’s plan of re-demption. You can, of course, do all thesethings today, but the first question is likelyto be: “Yes, that’s fine for you, but whatabout all the Hindus?” In other words,granted the empirical pluralism of ourage, why should your particular brand ofreligion be thought better than anyoneelse’s? And granted the philosophical plu-ralism of our age, your expression of be-lief, though very interesting and valuablefor you and even, at times, compelling, isno more than the subjective product ofyour religious community. It is your de-piction of religious experience, decisivelyshaped by who you are; it is reality foryou, but it is not culture-transcending re-ality. Nothing is.

In the same way, a friend may listen toyour testimony, and then smile quietlyand say, “I’m so glad that your faith helpsyou. As for me, I don’t really need it, andfrankly I find it impossible to believe whatyou do. I enjoy your friendship, but pleasedon’t push your religion down my throat.We’ve each got to find our own way, andyour way isn’t mine.”

Where do you begin?

The Impact of Correlatives of PluralismBy “correlatives of pluralism” I am re-

ferring to a variety of societal trends thatare partly causes and partly effects of plu-ralism. For example, the third one I shallmention, rising biblical illiteracy, contrib-utes to pluralism in that there is a declin-ing percentage of citizens who are so wellread, biblically speaking, that they canrecognize, let alone withstand, the nega-tive features of pluralism’s onslaught.

They soon become part of the problem.On the other hand, the more philosophi-cal pluralism triumphs in the land, the lessincentive there is to read the Bible. In thatsense pluralism contributes to biblical il-literacy. Most of what I shall introduce asthe “correlatives of pluralism,” as I havecalled them, have this kind of dual rela-tion with one form or another of plural-ism. My concern here is not to give a richaccount of them, still less to analyze theirrelationships with pluralism, but to iden-tify them briefly, as part and parcel of thebroader challenge of pluralism, as partand parcel of movements that tend towardthe gagging of God. A few of them will bemore fully explored later in this book.

A. Secularization

Most social scientists do not think ofsecularization as one of the societal trendsthat tend toward the abolition of religion,but as one of those that tend toward themarginalization of religion. “By seculariza-tion we mean the process by which sec-tors of society and culture are removedfrom the domination of religious institu-tions and symbols.”70 In other words, re-ligious institutions and symbols maysurvive and even flourish, but their influ-ence in the culture at large is progressivelydiminished. As Wells puts it, “It is axiom-atic that secularism strips life of the di-vine, but it is important to see that it doesso by relocating the divine in that part oflife which is private.”71

The subtlety of this definition is cru-cial if we are to answer revisionist criticswho assure us, as Nielsen does, that “secu-larity seems to be declining in influ-ence.”72 One recent book has uncoveredsome important demographic sources thatenable the authors to reconstruct probable“religious adherence” rates from 1776 on.

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The authors insist that the religious ad-herence rate doubled between the Revo-lution and the Civil War, from 17 percentto 34 percent, that it climbed to more than50 percent by 1906, and to 62 percent by1980. Along the way they debunk the im-portance of the Awakenings, and insist,against most strategists and ecumenists,that the most important factor in retain-ing or gaining a large “market share” ispreserving a distinctive religious iden-tity.73 Despite its interesting statistics, thework is flawed by remarkable reduction-ism. But in any case, it is inadequate as anindex to secularization as defined hereunless the “religious adherence” quotientmeasured the degree to which religionshaped the national discussion. Polls haverepeatedly shown that a large percentageof Americans (and other Westerners) stillassent to such fundamental Christian be-liefs as the existence of God, the impor-tance of moral order, the deity of Christ,and the authority of the Bible, “but thesebeliefs appear to be stranded on thebeaches of private consciousness. Cer-tainly they are not appealed to in any de-bate over the shape of our corporatelife.”74 One thinks of the oft-repeated sum-mary coined by Guinness: “privately en-gaging, publicly irrelevant.” In otherwords, sophisticated studies in the pro-cesses of secularization do not focus onlyon such brute statistics as the number ofthose who attend church services now andthen, but also on the way religious com-mitment bears, or does not bear, on all ofhuman life. What such studies show isthat millions of Americans are religiousin certain ways but that that fact has littlebearing on anything they really judgeimportant in their life.

Another way to get at this subject is toevaluate the national discourse. A century

and a half ago it was impossible to engagefor long in political or historical studywithout bringing up the subject of provi-dence. It was important for thinkingpeople to try to understand what Godhimself was saying in history, whether hewas speaking the language of blessing orof judgment. Today, there is not a historydepartment in the land that would ap-prove a Ph.D. dissertation that tried toinfer anything at all about providence.75

Fewer than six decades ago, PresidentFranklin Delano Roosevelt, at the heightof the Great Depression, could tell his fel-low Americans, in one of his radio fire-side chats, “Our difficulties, thank God,concern only material things.”76 It is im-possible to imagine any of the lasthalf-dozen presidents saying anythingsimilar.77 The national discourse is takenup with economics, politics, entertain-ment figures, sports, disasters, occasion-ally international affairs, and crime— butnothing about God, very little about reli-gion (except to snicker at its most pain-fully embarrassing hypocrites andfailures), not even very much about suchconcepts as truth, courtesy, civility, honor,duty, moral courage— all of which soundvaguely quaint and old-fashioned in ourears. And when a religious topic, such asconversion, is treated at the academiclevel, the treatment is likely to be entirelyconstrained by social science categoriescommitted to philosophical naturalismand utterly averse to “mysticism.” Thequestion of God’s existence or reality inconversion is carefully bracketed out,prompting the reviewer of one recentbook along these lines78 to complainrather ruefully, “What difference wouldit make to social science if… the origin ofthe sense of god was God?”79 The powersof secularization stalk the land.

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The bearing of all this on the preacherof the gospel is obvious. We must not onlydeclare the whole counsel of God, but doso in an environment where the subject isperceived to be vaguely or even explic-itly irrelevant. In fact, if you seem too pas-sionate about it, you too may appear tobe vaguely irrelevant. To bridge this gap,many preachers succumb to the tempta-tion to become entertainers (for entertain-ment is one of the categories people do

understand), or to the temptation to trans-mute the gospel into something that helpsus in our perceived inadequacies (for end-less self-focus certainly dominates the na-tional discourse). Other preachers, morerobust, dig in and condemn, and gather agroup of like-minded conservativesaround them, but make little impact onthe land. What shall we do?

But if the effects of secularization havebeen severe in the pulpit and in the pew,in higher education they have been incal-culable. This may owe something to thedecline in the study of classical texts andin the respect for tradition that oncemarked the academy,80 but it owes farmore to what Marsden and Longfield andtheir colleagues, in an insightful analysis,identify as the measured marginalizationof Christianity in the academy.81 From atime when organized Christianity, or atleast its ideals, exercised a leading role inthe founding, development, and mainte-nance of the principal schools of higherlearning, we have arrived at a point atwhich virtually all forms of Christianityare commonly ignored or even despisedin the academy, and especially those formsthat insist that there are objective truthsand standards.82

Modern secularization is an extraordi-nary phenomenon. Almost every civiliza-tion in the history of the world has been

undergirded by some sort of religious/philosophical outlook. Major exceptions,such as the Marxist nations, displaced thesupernatural, but strongly imposed othervalues—“religious” in the sense that theindividual was not his or her own measure,but was called upon to sacrifice everythingfor an almost transcendental value, certainlyan ultimate value, namely, the inevitabletriumph of socialism. From today’s vantage,we can easily see how ephemeral that “reli-gion” was, but at least it was moderatelyself-consistent. Western secularized society,by contrast, has no unifying commitmentto a single “other” or “transcendent” value.By this I am not overlooking the obviousfact that much of Western culture espousesde facto naturalism (as did atheistic forms ofMarxism). I mean, rather, to emphasize thatthere is no agreed-upon philosophy or out-look or value system or historical interpre-tation that binds the majority of the nationtogether, other than pluralism itself. If froma Christian perspective Marxism was an idolthat needed to be overthrown, Western secu-larized society, for all its marginalized reli-gion, is replete with myriads of individualidols, as each person thinks and does whatis “right” in his or her own eyes, unwittinglyconforming to the fragmented dictates ofthis secularizing age of pluralism.83 Howlong such a culture can survive is still anunanswered question.

B. New Age Theosophy

So many books and articles have ap-peared in recent years describing one facetor another of the New Age movement thatI need not describe it afresh.84 The branchesof this highly heterogeneous movementhave certain features in common. Most vi-sions of “god” in the movement are pan-theistic; some are tied to ecology or to themore radical strains of feminism.85 The aim

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is not to be reconciled to a transcendentGod, who has made us and against whomwe have rebelled, but to grow inself-awareness and self-fulfillment, to be-come self-actualized, to grow to our fullpotential, until we are rather more at onewith the god/universe than we otherwisewould be.86 The focus, in short, is self; evilis reinterpreted and thus emasculated; andany notion of judgment imposed by a per-sonal/transcendent God whose wrath hasbeen and will be displayed, is utterly re-pugnant. Thus “spirituality,” a popularnotion that enjoys full scope even in theNew York Times Book Review, is divorcedfrom any biblically faithful worldview.Needless to say, there is no need for a me-diator, let alone a suffering priest who takesour sin on himself.

There are at least two important impli-cations for the preacher of the gospel. Thefirst is that a person who is largely bibli-cally illiterate but who has absorbed sub-stantial doses of New Age theosophy willhear us to be saying things we do not re-ally mean. If we talk about God, Spirit,new birth, power, abundant life, peace,joy, love, family life, conscience, faith,trust, and a host of other topics, they willall be nicely slotted into a New Age frame-work. Even words like “sin” will be readas “bad things” or perhaps “bad karma”—but not at all as something whose badnessderives from its offensiveness to the Godwho has made us and to whom we mustgive an account. The entire structure ofthought of such a person guarantees thathe or she will hear us quite differentlyfrom what we intend to say, what we thinkwe are saying. “Sin” is a snicker word—that is, it conveys nothing of odium, butmakes people snicker. Millions of men andwomen fornicate without the slightestqualms of conscience.

The second implication is that manyostensible believers inside our churches—some of whom are genuine believers andsome of whom are not— have inevitablypicked up some of the surrounding chat-ter and, being poorly grounded in Scrip-ture and theology, have incorporated intotheir understanding of Christianity somefrankly incompatible elements. Remark-ably smarmy notions of “spirituality”abound; very few ask, for instance, whata “spiritual” life looks like according to the

New Testament documents.87 In this frame-work there is going on, as Tinker puts it, abattle for the mind,88 even though manyhave not perceived the nature of the fight.

C. Rising Biblical Illiteracy

In 1950 the Gallup organization askedthe question, “Did you receive any reli-gious instruction in your youth?” Only 6percent of Americans answered nega-tively. When the same question was putto people in 1989, the figure had risen to38 percent.

Many of us are so cocooned in our con-fessional churches, or we live in such rela-tively conservative parts of the country,that we really do not have any idea howserious this challenge has become. Twoyears ago I gave a series of evangelistictalks to a small group of scientists nearChicago, all with earned doctorates. Fromprevious experience, I went in expectingthat two-thirds of them would not evenknow that the Bible has two Testaments. Idiscovered that my estimate was a triflelow. Some churches that draw significantnumbers of university students take time,whenever they have a special servicegeared specifically to the outsider, to ex-plain what prayer is, before public prayeris offered: many of those who attend havenever prayed, or witnessed prayer. A few

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months ago I was on a television set for acouple of days, working on two or threereligious programs sponsored by TheLearning Channel and U. S. News and

World Report. I shared my faith, in somedetail, with three people; I probably chat-ted with thirty others. I found only twowho knew the Bible had two Testa-ments— and these two people had foundout only during the previous few weeks,while working on the programs at hand.

In many parts of the country, we can-not assume any biblical knowledge on thepart of our hearers at all: the most elemen-tary biblical narratives are completelyunknown. Furthermore, the situation isgetting worse, now that the Bible is all butexcluded from our schools, is not system-atically taught in most of our churches,and has been further sidelined with thedemise of family devotions.

The rising impact of biblical illiteracywas brought home to me a couple of yearsago in a rather vivid way. My son thenattended grade 4 in a public school which,by most standards, is excellent. For theirChristmas concert that year— or, moreaccurately, their Season’s concert— therewas not a single song that had anythingwhatsoever to do with Christmas or Ha-nukkah. By “anything whatsoever” I in-clude not only explicitly religious pieces,but also songs of the “Jingle Bells” vari-ety. I have never heard, in ten songs, somany eminently forgettable lines ofwell-sung poetry. It was all entirely harm-less. But it was also a sign that the cultureof disbelief is striking again. When I wasa child, all of us sang Christmas carols atschool, at home, and at church. It wouldhave been hard to find a child who couldnot recite the words, “Veiled in flesh, theGodhead see / Hail, the incarnate Deity.”Today the schools are becoming silent;

there is little singing at home, for it haslargely been displaced by VCRs; and inthe church, there is less and less congre-gational participation that ensures thatpeople learn truths through song. In a fifthgrade class of thirty students, not far fromour home, the teacher asked if anyoneknew who Moses was. Only one childcould say anything about him. On anotheroccasion in the same class, the word “sin”came up, and one child asked what theword meant. In some adult circles, if a bib-lical narrative is recognized at all, it is be-cause they have seen an epic film—Charlton Heston playing Moses, perhaps.Didn’t Moses have something to do withthe Ten Commandments?

We are thus ensuring that an entire gen-eration will be even theoretically ignorantof the most elementary structures of theJudeo-Christian heritage on which ourcivilization has been nurtured. Worse(from the perspective of the preaching ofthe gospel), they will not have the “hooks”on which to hang the appeals to the gos-pel that have been our staple. I recognize,of course, that with the rising empiricalpluralism in the land, adjustments in thepublic school education system are inevi-table, and in some instances desirable. Butmassive silence regarding all things reli-gious, a silence fostered by our culture ofdisbelief, is not the best option. As Jewishtalk-show host Dennis Prager puts it:

Liberals are always talking aboutpluralism, but that is not what theymean.... In public school, Jews don’tmeet Christians. Christians don’tmeet Hindus. Everybody meetsnothing. That is, as I explain to Jewsall the time, why their children soeasily inter-marry. Jews don’t marryChristians. Non-Jewish Jews marrynon-Christian Christians. Jews fornothing marry Christians for noth-ing. They get along great because

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they both affirm nothing. They haveeverything in common— nothing.That’s not pluralism.89

Or, more accurately, that’s not the firstkind of pluralism, i.e., empirical plural-ism, but it is most certainly the kind ofculture postmodern philosophical plural-ism wants to build.

D. Vague But Emphatic Appeals to the

Cosmic Christ

The person who is usually creditedwith the expression “cosmic Christ,” as ithas come to be deployed in internationaltheological circles, is Professor JosephSittler, then of the Chicago DivinitySchool, in his 1961 address to the ThirdAssembly of the World Council ofChurches at New Delhi.90 Building onColossians 1:15-20, where the word “all”is used six times, Sittler assigned the “all”maximum reach, insisting that God’s re-demption is “cosmic in scope,” and thatthe Christ envisaged there is the “cosmicChrist.” From this lead, a number of writ-ers have used the same expression in pro-gressively complex ways. For example,Panikkar defends the view that “Christ”is found not only in the historical Jesus,but also in certain strands of Hinduthought.91 One can find not dissimilarnotions in Hans Kung, Karl Rahner, M. M.Thomas, and many others.

More conservative exegetes have oftenpointed out that to base such views on theBible it is necessary to pick and choose thetexts of the Bible, and then interpret themoutside their context. This is, of course, aform of deconstruction. No less disas-trously, “Christ” is so divorced from thehistorical Jesus that the term can be givenalmost any content one wishes— thoughcertainly no New Testament writer hadany such disjunction in mind. Thus what

texts are interpreted to say is intentionally

distanced from authorial intent.Whatever the problems inherent in

such views, they are widespread in main-line denominations. Where our witnesstouches men and women from such back-grounds, or includes students enrolled inreligious studies programs in many uni-versities, it is imperative that we addressthe distortion of the biblical portrait of theLord Jesus Christ.

E. The Sheer Pragmatism of the Baby Busters

The number of books and papers dif-ferentiating between “baby boomers”(people born between roughly 1945 and1960) and “baby busters” (people bornbetween 1960 and 1975) is now legion.92

It is said that baby busters do not want tobe lectured; they expect to be entertained.They prefer videos to books; many ofthem have not learned to think in a linearfashion; they put more store than they rec-ognize in mere impressions. As a result,they can live with all sorts of logical in-consistencies and be totally unaware ofthem. (How many times have I tried toexplain to a university-age young personwho has made some profession of faiththat it is fundamentally inconsistent toclaim to know and love the God of theBible, while cohabiting with someone?They can see they are doing what the Bibleforbids, but when you press them to ar-ticulate the contradiction they scuttle intoinconsistency without embarrassment.)They are cynical, not idealistic. They ve-hemently deny the existence of absolutes:that is their one absolute. Many havenever experienced principled morality inthe home. They have been brought upwithout a coherent vision or value system,and they have embraced pragmatism witha vengeance. Many of them are furious

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with the preceding generation (that’s meand my generation) for being so crasslymaterialistic as to ruin the economy anddump a tax load onto their shoulders. Onthe other hand, they are no less material-istic themselves, and will vote for any can-didate who promises to deliver moregoodies while lowering taxes— preciselythe same greedy stupidity that afflictedthe generation they condemn. Pluralismis so much their creed that even when thestrongest arguments are arrayed to ex-plain, on biblical presuppositions, whymorally “good” people should be rejectedby the Christian God and assigned to hell,their emotions so rule their heads thatvery frequently no amount of argumen-tation is adequate. On the other hand, theytend to be interested in “spirituality” (veryhazily defined), and on the whole tend tosee themselves as occupying a fairly highplace in the spiritual pecking order.

It does not take a great deal of imagina-tion to see how people with such positionsas these will have an enormous impact onthe way the gospel is perceived, if it ispreached in strictly traditional categories.The solution of some is to design what arein effect baby buster churches, or at leastbaby buster church services.93 The prob-lem, of course, is that unless the variouscomponents in the culture of baby bustersis analyzed biblically and theologically, wewill not know what elements we must con-front and reform, what elements are mor-ally neutral, and what elements should becommended and strengthened. But unlesswe engage in such reflection, we will ei-ther remain insensitive to the changing faceof American culture (and thus serve onlythose churches that are found in very con-servative parts of the country, or thosechurches with an aging population), or wewill capsize to merely pragmatic consider-

ations ourselves, and build so-calledchurches with a lot of happy baby bustersand very few genuine converts pursuingthe knowledge of God and growth in genu-ine holiness and service.

F. The Hegemony of Pop Culture

I do not want to succumb to the elitismthat makes sharp distinctions betweenpopular and high culture.94 Nor can Iquite bring myself to believe that the me-dium of television is so bad, intrinsicallyspeaking, that even if all the programswere Christian, the medium itself is be-yond redemption: so McLuhan, Ellul, andmany others.95 Granted, a great deal ofwhat appears on television is rubbish;granted, this medium, deployed in anundisciplined way, can take over families,squash conversation, fertilize couchpotatoes, discourage serious readingand thought, and pamper the desire to beentertained; granted, much thatevangelicalism has attempted to do ontelevision is theologically (not to say aes-thetically) pathetic;96 granted, a cultureaddicted to the visual presentation of datapresents peculiar challenges to the proc-lamation of a God who is not only invis-ible, but who insists that the desire forvisual security and certainty is one of thehallmarks of idolatry. Still, I think that oneof the most fundamental problems is wantof discipline. Homes that severely restrictviewing hours, insist on family reading,encourage debate on good books, talkabout the quality and the morality of tele-vision programs they do see, rarely ornever allow children to watch televisionwithout an adult being present (in otherwords, refusing to let the TV become anunpaid nanny), and generally develop ahost of other interests, are not likely to begreatly contaminated by the medium,

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while still enjoying its numerous benefits.But what will produce such families, if notgodly parents and the power of the HolySpirit in and through biblical preaching,teaching, example, and witness?

The sad fact is that unless families havea tremendously strong moral base, theywill not perceive the dangers in the popu-lar culture; or, if they perceive them, theywill not have the stamina to oppose them.There is little point in preachers disgorg-ing all the sad statistics about how manyhours of television the average Americanwatches per week, or how many murdersa child has witnessed on television by theage of six, or how a teenager has failed tothink linearly because of the twenty thou-sand hours of flickering images he or shehas watched, unless the preacher, by thegrace of God, is establishing a radicallydifferent lifestyle, and serving as a vehicleof grace to enable the people in his con-gregation to pursue it with determination,joy, and a sense of adventurous,God-pleasing freedom.

Meanwhile, the harsh reality is thatmost Americans, including most of thosein our churches, have been so shaped bythe popular culture that no thoughtfulpreacher can afford to ignore the impact.The combination of music and visual pre-sentation, often highly suggestive, is nolonger novel. Casual sexual liaisons areeverywhere, not least in many of ourchurches, often with little shame. “Geteven” is a common dramatic theme.Strength is commonly confused with law-less brutality. Most advertising titillatesour sin of covetousness. This is the air webreathe; this is our culture.

G. Rugged Individualism Veering Toward

Narcissism

It is a commonplace in the literature

that the United States, Australia, and tosome extent Canada espouse individual-ism more strongly than most Westerncountries.97 By contrast, although theBible leaves ample scope for individuals,both precept and underlying assumptionsmake much more of corporate values thandoes our culture: the value of family andthe importance of the covenant people ofGod as a body, are constantly reinforced.98

In one context, individualism breedscourage, an entrepreneurial spirit, indi-vidual heroism, self-denial, deferred grati-fication, and thrift. It may accent valuessuch as duty, honor, and industry. But iffor whatever reasons the cultural valueschange, individualism can easily becomea factor that reinforces narcissism,self-indulgence, instant gratification,self-promotion, and greed. This changehas been tracked and analyzed in a num-ber of ways. Robert Bellah and his associ-ates have shown that an older generationof Americans saw emotions as properlysubject to larger values: commitment,duty, reason, honor. But this vision ofthings has largely been replaced by whatthey call the therapeutic model. Feelingsand emotions assume extraordinary im-portance; individualistic self-fulfillmentbecomes the prime good. And often thisself-fulfillment will be achieved, it isthought, by self-expression. What wasformerly considered to be cheerfulself-discipline and self-control is now dis-missed with contempt as dangerous re-pression. Even marriage, formerly seen asin principle inviolate, is now merely ameans to the end of self-actualization andself-fulfillment, to be readily discarded ifemotional “needs” are not met. The hab-its of the heart have changed.99 Grantedthat these developments have helpedsome people escape genuine repression,

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it takes a willful blindness not to see thatfar more societal damage has been causedthan societal good.

Perhaps no one has put this more tren-chantly than Lasch:

In their emotional shallowness, theirfear of intimacy, their hypochondria,their pseudo-self-insight, their pro-miscuous pansexuality, their dreadof old age and death, the new nar-cissists bear the stamp of a culturethat has lost interest in the future.Their outlook on life— as revealedin the new consciousness move-ments and therapeutic culture; inpseudo-confessional autobiographyand fiction; in the replacement ofHoratio Alger by the happy hookeras the symbol of success; in the the-ater of the absurd and the absurdisttheater of everyday life; in the deg-radation of sport; in the collapse ofauthority; in the escalating war be-tween men and women— is theworld view of the resigned.100

The analysis of Yankelovich is scarcelydifferent.101 He thinks the change towardinstant self-focus and self-gratification (in1981 he thought this outlook controlledabout 80 percent of the American popu-lace) is so revolutionary that it is nothingless than a “world turned upside down.”Many have noted that the conservatismof the 1980s was rather different from theconservatism of the Eisenhower 1950s.The adults of the latter decade had en-dured the Great Depression and WorldWar II. Despite the menace of the cold war,they were determined to build familiesand communities, to leave something fortheir children. This too, of course, can beanother form of selfishness, but the lin-gering assumptions of the inheritedJudeo-Christian culture kept at least someof that selfishness in check. Such bondswere much loosened by the 1980s.Self-absorbed and lusting after personal

fulfillment, the conservatism of that de-cade could happily live beyond its meansand leave its debts for the children.102

Some of its couples could engenderlong-delayed children they once thoughtof as encumbrances, but only by placingthem fourth or fifth on their scale of pri-orities, after career, house, and two cars.

Individualism once allied with a soci-etal assumption of objective truth andeternal verities could generate at leastsome men and women of courage, honor,vision; individualism allied with philo-sophical pluralism and the scarcely quali-fied relativism of postmodernitygenerates “a world without heroes.”103

The proponents of modernism andpostmodernism alike “castrate, and bidthe gelding be fruitful” (in the witticismof C. S. Lewis).

Inevitably, individualism has made animpact on the way religion is conceived. Thespread of privatized spirituality, developedapart from a disciplined and discipliningchurch, doubtless fosters desires for per-sonal connection with the transcendent, but,at the risk of an oxymoron, it is a personallydefined transcendence. Privatized spiritu-ality is not conspicuously able to foster carefor others.104 God, if S/He exists, must sat-isfy the prime criterion: S/He must meet myneeds, as I define them. It is hard to resistthe conclusion that this God is less the Godand Father of our Lord Jesus Christ than aChristianized species of the genie inAladdin’s lamp. Having abandoned au-thoritative revelation and ecclesiastical tra-dition alike, many in this generation find iteasy to adopt all sorts of absurd beliefs, pro-vided only that they serve personal inter-ests: this is the age when huge sums are paidto psychic counselors, when even Time listscrystal healing as a possible medical rem-edy, when an American president seeks

29

guidance from astrologers.Phillip Hammond goes so far as to ar-

gue that the emphasis on personal au-tonomy during the past two decades hasbrought about the “third disestablishment”of religion in America.105 The firstdisestablishment was legal, embodied in theFirst Amendment; but although it hadprofound influence, it scarcely diminishedthe enormous influence of organized reli-gion on the public sector. The seconddisestablishment (by “disestablishment”Hammond means “a qualitative change inthe relationship between church and cul-ture”106 ) had occurred by the end of WorldWar I, in a progressive erosion of directChristian influence, such that until about1960 the relationship of Christian churchesto the cultural core was more custodial thandirectorial. The third disestablishment, onwhich Hammond focuses his attention,springs from the emphasis on personal au-tonomy and its effect on the religious sphere.Personal autonomy has become an ideol-ogy that is suspicious of ecclesiastical loy-alty and doctrine alike. The new generationdoes not readily think in terms of service tothe church or to God, but in terms of what itcan get out of it; they shop around forchurches until they find a product they like.The churches themselves feel the pressureto respond to the “consumers” by takingpolls to find out what they want.

It is hard to avoid the suspicion thateven the contemporary penchant for dis-covering new victims is tied to modernspecies of individualism. We have enteredan era of multiplying litigation, in whichpunitive compensatory damages are ar-dently sought, less out of a passion fordispassionate justice than out of passion-ate greed, out of vengeful pettiness thatfeeds on newly discovered forms of “vic-timization.” They haven’t been fair to me.

Under the impact of philosophical plural-ism, the new individualism believes thatno ideology or value is intrinsically supe-rior to any other, and therefore that nosingle individual’s heritage is in any respectinferior. To think otherwise is to displaycultural bias. There are not a few ironies,as Sowell reminds us:

Any group whose past has not pro-vided them with as many heroes, cul-tural contributions, or other glories assome other group’s past now has agrievance against those who write his-tory. Apparently a past to your likinghas become an entitlement. It is noteven considered necessary to demon-strate any reality before claiming thata group’s “under-representation” inhistory books shows “exclusion” or“bias.” Many of those who argue thisway also loudly proclaim the manyinjustices suffered by the variousunder-represented groups. Yet, some-how, these pervasive injustices are notregarded as having inhibited theachievements of those who sufferedthem. Such is the self-contradictoryvision of multiculturalists.107

H. Freudian Fraud

As scientism (as opposed to science)has sought to reduce human nature andconduct to matter, energy, time, andchance; as the social sciences have some-times skewed data to arrive at conclusionsthat will undermine morality,108 so theinfluence of Freud, whatever good it hasproduced, has been pervasive and oftenmalign. Criticisms have graduallymounted, and have recently become ex-tensive and well-documented.109 Freud’sinfluence extends well beyond those whowould identify their brand of psycho-analysis as essentially Freudian. Directlyor indirectly, it has fostered our therapeu-tic culture, in which the substitution ofmedical and quasi-scientific terminologyfor moral, ethical, and religious categories,

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to the enormous benefit of therapists andsupport groups, has bulldozed moral re-sponsibility into the nearest landfill, andinvented new “ailments du jour.”110 Onceagain, this is not to say that no positiveadvances have been made: such a conclu-sion would be both ignorant and mischie-vous. But the damage, as Torreydocuments, is incalculable.111

The therapeutic culture has so invadedthe church that some seminaries now havemore students enrolled in counseling pro-grams than are training to be preachersof the gospel. Some “evangelical”churches pride themselves on being“Twelve Step” churches, i.e., churcheswhere the “Twelve Step” model of Alco-holics Anonymous is taken as the control-ling model for support groups dealingwith everything from addiction to obesityto codependency to problems withself-esteem. Relatively few pastors haveboth the training and the courage to dealwith genuine problems in biblical catego-ries that challenge the therapeutic cultureat multiple levels.112 In the realm of bibli-cal scholarship, one can read learned es-says with titles like “The Heuristic Valueof a Psychoanalytic Model in the Interpre-tation of Pauline Theology.”113

The point is that the Freudian model,locked in naturalism, has both reinforcedand been reinforced by philosophical plu-ralism. The loss of truth and standards“out there,” in objective reality, has en-couraged this inward focus, thisself-absorption. It is a long way from theperspective that teaches that the first com-mandment is to love God, and the secondis to love one’s neighbor— from which ofcourse we must infer that the first sin isnot to love God, and the second is not tolove one’s neighbor. It is a long way fromthe instruction of him who insisted that

those who seek their own life will lose it,while those who take up their cross dailyand follow him will find life, eternal life(Matt. 16:21-28; Mark 8:31-9:1; Luke9:22-27).114

Summary and ReflectionsIn aiming for a measure of clarity in a

confusing discussion, I have distin-guished empirical pluralism, cherishedpluralism, and philosophical pluralism.The first is merely a useful label for refer-ring to the growing diversity in mostWestern countries. The reality is neitherintrinsically good nor intrinsically bad,though clearly it spawns elements of both.The second category is cherished plural-ism: the empirical reality is highly praisedin many quarters as a fundamentally goodthing, though many disagree, circle thewagons, and retreat to their own subcul-ture. The third category, philosophicalpluralism, is at bottom an epistemologi-cal stance: it buys into a basket of theoriesabout understanding and interpretationthat doubts whether objective truth is ac-cessible, and locates most if not all mean-ing in the interpreter, not in the text orobject interpreted. This step distinguishespostmodernity from modernity; an exten-sion of this step is deconstruction.

The impact of philosophical pluralismon Western culture is incalculable. Ittouches virtually every discipline— his-tory, art, literature, anthropology, educa-tion, philosophy, psychology, the socialsciences, even, increasingly, the “hard”sciences— but it has already achievedpopularity in the public square, evenwhen its existence is not recognized. Itachieves its greatest victory in redefiningreligious pluralism so as to render hereti-cal the idea that heresy is possible. Toler-ance is radically redefined, and masks a

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sometimes brutal intolerance, at times inthe faddish categories of PC (“politicalcorrectness”). It has contributed to thedestruction of gratitude, and turned nota few women and men into chronic whin-ers and finger-pointers. For the Christian,it has certainly altered some of the priori-ties that must be adopted in evangelism.

What I have called the “correlatives” ofpluralism are no less significant. They arenot exclusively causes of philosophical plu-ralism, nor are they exclusively effects.They are fellow travelers, and doubtlesswithin various elements of society at anygiven time they are more one than theother. Eight were briefly described and dis-cussed: secularization, New Age theoso-phy, rising biblical illiteracy, vague appealsto the cosmic Christ, the sheer pragmatismof baby busters, the hegemony of pop cul-ture, rugged individualism veering towardnarcissism, and Freudian fraud. The selec-tion is arbitrary: it is based on personalimpressions of what elements are impor-tant. But it would not take much imagina-tion to extend the list.

Much of the rest of this book is an at-tempt to understand and evaluate thesedevelopments and to think our way for-ward from within the Christian frame-work. This is not the place to anticipatethe discussion, but two things may use-fully be said.

First, all but the most sanguine plural-ists admit that there are immense dangersahead and that signs of cultural decayabound. Where we differ is in both diag-nosis and solution. But let no one doubtthat although the issues discussed in thisbook are in the first instance intellectualchallenges, and occasionally difficult in-tellectual challenges, they are fraught withpractical implications for church and so-ciety alike. Writing of only one small part

of the broader problem, namely thesingle-minded pursuit of individualistic“rights,” Feder is not wrong to conclude:

Absent a delicate balance— rightsand duties, freedom and order— thesocial fabric begins to unravel. Therights explosion of the past three de-cades has taken us on a rapid descentto a culture without civility, decency,or even that degree of discipline nec-essary to maintain an advanced in-dustrial civilization. Our cities arecesspools, our urban schools terror-ist training camps, our legislaturesbrothels where rights are sold to thehighest electoral bidder.115

Or as Colson puts it:

As Dorothy Sayers observed: In theworld it is called Tolerance, but inhell it is called Despair . . . the sinthat believes in nothing, cares fornothing, seeks to know nothing, in-terferes with nothing, enjoys noth-ing, hates nothing, finds purpose innothing, lives for nothing, and re-mains alive because there is nothingfor which it will die.116

Second, it is imperative that we remindourselves how innovative philosophicalpluralism is. When Machen confrontedthe impact of modernism on Christianity,his driving point was that the liberalismof his day, whatever it was, was not Chris-tianity at all, even though that was theway it paraded itself.117 At least he recog-nized what was at stake, and addressedthe fundamental issues. Today we mustrecognize that philosophical pluralism isnot only non-Christian (though someWestern pluralists think of themselves asChristians), but that the nature of the rela-tivism it spawns and the worldliness thatit engenders are in some respects qualita-tively new, and must be addressed in freshterms. Many generations have recognizedhow difficult it is for finite and sinful

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mortals to come to close agreement as tothe objective truth of this or that subject,but this is the first generation to believethat there is no objective truth out there,or that if there is, there is no access to it.This necessarily changes the character ofat least some of the debate.

For example, a bare fifteen years ago,Stephen Sykes, arguing that tolerance fortheological diversity must not be adoptedunquestioningly but must be justified byargument, wrote the following:

A Christian Church which is awareof a wide variety of diverse theologi-cal positions and which deliberatelydecides not to adopt one of them, butrather to tolerate diversity, still hasto offer a definite reason for doingso and to justify that reason in theface of objection…. Toleration of di-versity itself needs to be justifiedtheologically if it is to be able toclaim any kind of integrity.118

Modernists may be impressed by thereasonableness of this argument;postmodernists will be entirely unim-pressed. If their understanding of under-standing is correct, if their deployment ofradical hermeneutics is correct, the notionof a coherent theological position that achurch adopts to the exclusion of otherscan never be more than a socially deter-mined preference, which is scarcely whatSykes has in mind.

And that is the challenge.

ENDNOTES1 This article first appeared in D. A.

Carson, The Gagging of God: Christianity

Confronts Pluralism (Grand Rapids, MI:Zondervan, 1996) 13-54, and is reprintedwith permission.

2 “Christianity in the Wider Context:Demands and Transformations,”Worldviews and Warrants: Plurality and

Authority in Theology, ed. WilliamSchweiker and Per M. Anderson (NewYork: Univ. Press of America, 1987) 2.

3 Paul V. Martinson, “Dynamic Pluralism”Dialog 28/1 (1989) 8.

4 Jon Butler, Awash in a Sea of Faith: Chris-

tianizing the American People (Cambridge:Harvard University Press, 1990).

5 Richard W. Pointer, Protestant Pluralism and

the New York Experience: A Study of Eigh-

teenth Century Diversity (Bloomington: In-diana Univ. Press, 1988). That is also oneof the leitmotifs of the recent textbook byMark Noll, A History of Christianity in the

United States and Canada (Grand Rapids:Eerdmans, 1992).

6 For example, the 1991 National Surveyof Religious Identification, performed bytwo researchers from the City Univ. ofNew York, found that 7.5 percent of theirrespondents indicated “no religion”; theWilliamsburg Charter Survey on Reli-gion and Public Life insists that while“religious nones” constituted only 5 per-cent of the population as recently as 1972,by 1988 they constituted 11 percent of thepopulation. Whereas some polls put thepercentage of Muslims in the U. S. at 0.5percent (so the National Survey of Reli-gious Identification [1991]), others saythe percentage of Muslims now rivals thepercentage of Jews (about 2 percent).

7 For some useful statistical data, cf.George Gallup, Jr., and Jim Castelli, The

People’s Religion: American Faith in the 90s

(New York: Macmillan, 1989).8 One thinks, for instance, of George

Gallup, Jr., and Sarah Jones, 100 Ques-

tions and Answers: Religion in America

(Princeton: Princeton Religion ResearchCenter, 1989).

9 Robert Wuthnow, The Restructuring of

American Religion: Society and Faith Since

World War II (Princeton: Princeton Univ.

33

Press, 1988); idem, The Struggle for

America’s Soul: Evangelicals, Liberals,

and Secularism (Grand Rapids:Eerdmans, 1989).

10 See, for example, the highly diverseessays in Mary Douglas and StevenM. Tipton, ed., Religion in America:

Spirituality in a Secular Age (Boston:Beacon Press, 1983).

11 Of the various books that extrapo-late present trends into the future,one of the sanest (and certainly oneof the easiest to read) is Russell Chan-dler, Racing Toward 2001: The Forces

Shaping America’s Religious Future

(Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1992).12 “God Is Alive,” Maclean’s 106/15

(April 12, 1993) 32-42.13 The Myth of the Empty Church (Lon-

don: SPCK, 1993).14 The Gospel in a Pluralist Society

(Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1989) 1.15 Ted Peters, “The Lutheran Distinc-

tiveness in Mission to a PluralisticWorld,” Dialog 22 (1983) 296.

16 The Gravedigger File (DownersGrove: InterVarsity Press, 1983) 92.

17 Ibid., 96.18 James Davison Hunter, Culture

Wars: The Struggle to Define America

(New York: Basic Books, 1992).19 Cf. John D. Woodbridge, “Culture

War Casualties,” Christianity Today

39/3 (March 6, 1995) 20-26.20 Dr. Harold Netland, in a private com-

munication, rightly says that “philo-sophical pluralism is, in my usage, anumbrella term that embraces a varietyof contemporary positions that areunited in their opposition to the ideathat we can know objective truth: e.g.,ontological non-realism (there is no ob-jective reality “out there” to be experi-enced and known); constructivism

(“reality” is merely a construct of so-cial experiences); perspectivism (wecan never know reality as it is; the mostwe can know is reality from our per-spective); various forms of relativism(truth, rationality norms, and the likeare all relative to, or internal to, par-ticular contexts).

21 For a useful essay, see Thomas Fin-ger, “Modernity, Postmodernity—What in the World Are They?”Transformation 10/4 (Oct./Dec.1993) 20-26.

22 This phrase is commonly used torefer to the basket of tendencies thatfocus less and less attention on ei-ther the author of the text (the con-cern of historical criticism andexegesis) or on the text itself (theconcern of the more recent literarycritics), and more and more on thesubject, the knower, the reader.

23 The distinctions between moder-nity and postmodernity will be ex-plored at some length in the nexttwo chapters.

24 “Theology and the Many Faces ofPostmodernity,” Theology Today 51(1994) 105.

25 Ibid., 105.26 Tracy, “Theology and the Many

Faces of Postmodernity,” 106.27 See the important work by David

Harvey, The Condition of Post-

modernity (Cambridge, MA/Oxford:Blackwell Publishers, 1990).

28 See the provocative and analogousthesis of John Carey, The Intellectu-

als and the Masses: Pride and Preju-

dice Among the Literary Intelligentsia

1880-1939 (New York: St. Martin’sPress, 1992).

29 This fact makes the assessment ofsome popular conservatives sadly

out of touch with reality. See, for ex-ample, Pat Robertson, The Turning

Tide: The Fall of Liberalism and the Rise

of Common Sense (Dallas: WordBooks, 1993), which sounds morelike optimistic hype announcinganother run at the presidency ratherthan careful cultural analysis. Theconservative backlash he perceivesis itself profoundly pragmatic; thereis little evidence that the underly-ing worldviews are changing.

30 Stephen L. Carter, The Culture of

Disbelief: How American Law and Poli-

tics Trivialize Religious Devotion

(New York: Basic Books, 1993).31 Robert N. Bellah, Beyond Belief: Es-

says on Religion in a Post-traditional-

ist World (Berkeley: Univ. ofCalifornia Press, 1970). According tomy colleague John Woodbridge, theexpression was first coined by JeanJacques Rousseau in 1761-62.

32 See George Barna, What Americans

Believe: An Annual Survey of Values

and Religious Views in the United

States (Ventura: Regal Books, 1991).33 So H. Tristram Engelhardt, Jr., Bio-

ethics and Secular Humanism: The

Search for a Common Morality (Lon-don/Philadelphia: SCM Press/Trin-ity Press International, 1991). E.g.,p. 140: “All that remains to grounda general secular morality. . . is thepossible bond of mutual respectamong persons.” It is not difficultto demonstrate the appalling insta-bility of so fragile a basis.

34 So John Kekes, The Morality of Plu-

ralism (Princeton: Princeton Univ.Press, 1993). A similar attempt tosalvage advantage out of both em-pirical and philosophical pluralismin the arena of literary criticism is

34

found in Wayne C. Booth, Critical

Understanding: The Powers and Lim-

its of Pluralism (Chicago: Univ. ofChicago Press, 1979).

35 Herbert Schlossberg, Idols for De-

struction: Christian Faith and Its Con-

frontation with American Society

(Nashville: Nelson, 1983) 11-38.36 New York: Simon & Schuster.37 1972 edition, 236.38 Ibid., 237. Of course, several inter-

esting presuppositions lurk behindthis “spectrum” as to the science,but I shall briefly treat this subjectin chaps. 2 and 3. At one point,where they treat biographies andautobiographies, Adler and VanDoren acknowledge that “we expectthe author to be accurate, to knowhis facts.” The work almost calls outfor a little source criticism.

39 Leonard I. Sweet, “The Moderniza-tion of Protestant Religion inAmerica,” Altered Landscapes: Chris-

tianity in America, 1935-1985, ed.David W. Lotz, Donald W. Shriver,Jr., and John F. Wilson (Grand Rap-ids: Eerdmans, 1989) 19-41.

40 This analysis has been common sincethe 1970s, and especially in some ofthe work of John Hick. It is nicelysummarized in Harold A. Netland,Dissonant Voices: Religious Pluralism

and the Question of Truth (Grand Rap-ids: Eerdmans, 1991) 8-27.

41 See especially Harold Coward, Plu-

ralism: Challenge to World Religions

(Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1985).42 For example, under the first cat-

egory we may place what S. MarkHeim (Is Christ the Only Way? Chris-

tian Faith in a Pluralistic World [Val-ley Forge: Judson Press, 1985]111-14) would call “parallel plural-

ism”—the view that the Christianfaith is right for me, while the Mus-lim faith may be right for Muslims,and so forth. Such a position can bereasonably adopted only when thetruth claims of the respective reli-gions have been relativized or aban-doned or reinterpreted. See also R.Panikkar, The Intrareligious Dialogue

(New York: Paulist Press, 1978) xviii.43 John Hick, Problems of Religious Plural-

ism (New York: Macmillan, 1985) 99.44 Ibid., 102. Cf. also his Interpretation

of Religion (New Haven: Yale Univ.Press, 1988). Hick is discussed atlength in part 2 of this book.

45 “Plurality and Its Theological Im-plications,” The Myth of Christian

Uniqueness, ed. John Hick and PaulF. Knitter (Maryknoll: Orbis Books,1987) 37-50, esp. 38, 39.

46 The Time Being (London: SCM,1992).

47 Hans Urs von Balthasar, Truth Is Sym-

phonic: Aspects of Christian Pluralism

(San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1972).48 Many Mansions: A Christian’s En-

counter with Other Faiths (Boston:Beacon Press, 1988).

49 Ibid., 200. I should mention that Coxfails to note that a number of thephilosophes were in fact deeply religious.

50 For a useful hint at some of the reli-gious implications of postmodernism,see Philippa Berry and AndrewWernick, eds., Shadow of the Spirit:

Postmodernism and Religion (London:Routledge, 1993).

51 The “anonymous Christian” theoryof Karl Rahner (a form ofinclusivism) is well known, and Ishall discuss it later. But some dis-cussion goes beyond that: e.g.,Ernest D. Piryns, “Current Roman

Catholic Views of Other Religions,”Missionalia 13 (Aug. 1986) 55-62;Chester Gillis, Pluralism: A New

Paradigm for Theology (Grand Rap-ids: Eerdmans, 1993).

52 I shall deal with this more substan-tially in chps. 2 and 3. For an excel-lent example, one might readFrancis Watson, ed., The Open Text:

New Directions for Biblical Studies?

(London: SCM Press, 1993).53 This is not an exaggeration: only a

very vague statement would be ac-ceptable to the Theravada andmany Mahayama Buddhist and Jainparticipants, who are of course ex-plicitly atheistic.

54 Closing paragraph of the finaljointly signed Declaration, widelycirculated in manuscript form be-fore being published in newspapersand other media.

55 Carl E. Braaten, No Other Gospel!

Christianity Among the World’s Reli-

gions (Minneapolis: Fortress Press1992) 78.

56 Ibid., 80.57 The problem is compounded when

Braaten (ibid., 72) seems even moreopen to “the so-called religions ofgrace,” viz., Bhakti Hinduism andMahayana Buddhism. HereBraaten, possibly influenced byEmil Brunner, seems to be undulyswayed by the importance of sola

gratia in confessional Lutheran per-spective, without really coming toterms with the essential polytheismof Hinduism and flickering panthe-ism that lies even behindMahayama Buddhism. On the lat-ter, see esp. Masao Uenuma, “AChristian View of Prayer and Spiri-tuality in Muslim Thought,” in Teach

35

Us to Pray: Prayer in the Bible and the

World, ed. D. A. Carson (Exeter: Pa-ternoster Press, 1990) 192-204.

58 The Myth of Certainty (Grand Rap-ids: Zondervan, 1992).

59 The next few paragraphs areadapted from D. A. Carson, “Chris-tian Witness in an Age of Pluralism,”in God and Culture: Essays in Honor of

Carl F. H. Henry, ed. D. A. Carson andJohn D. Woodbridge (Grand Rapids:Eerdmans, 1993) 38-39.

60 Richard John Neuhaus, The Naked

Public Square: Religion and Democracy

in America (Grand Rapids:Eerdmans, 1984).

61 “Educating for Moral Values in aPluralistic Society,” Greek Orthodox

Review 29 (1984) 393-99.62 See especially Christopher Lasch,

The True and Only Heaven: Progress

and Its Critics (New York: W. W.Norton, 1991).

63 Martin E. Marty and R. ScottAppleby, eds., Fundamentalisms and

the State: Remaking Polities, Econom-

ics, and Militance, The Fundamental-ism Project, vol. 3 (Chicago: Univ.of Chicago Press, 1993), “Introduc-tion,” 5 (italics theirs). I am indebtedto John D. Woodbridge for drawingthis passage to my attention.

64 Kathleen C. Boone, The Bible Tells

Them So: The Discourse of Protestant

Fundamentalism (Albany: State Univ.of New York Press, 1989) 72-73 (ital-ics hers). One cannot fail to note thather dismissal of dogmatism is verydogmatic. Her comment must befallacious for any reader to avoid adogmatic acceptance of it!

65 S. D. Gaede, When Tolerance Is No

Virtue: Political Correctness,

Multiculturalism and the Future of

Truth and Justice (Downers Grove:InterVarsity Press, 1993) 23.

66 See Herbert Schlossberg, A Fra-

grance of Oppression (Wheaton:Crossway, 1991).

67 David K. Clark, “Narrative Theol-ogy and Apologetics,” Journal of the

Evangelical Theological Society 3(1993) 515.

68 Time 138/6 (Aug. 12, 1991) 14-22.69 Robert Hughes, Culture of Com-

plaint: The Fraying of America (NewYork: Oxford Univ. Press, 1993).

70 Peter L. Berger, The Sacred Canopy:

Elements of a Sociological Theory of

Religion (Garden City: Doubleday,1967) 107. For a detailed outline ofhow secularization proceeds, ana-lyzed from a social science perspec-tive, see David Martin, A General

Theory of Secularization (New York:Harper & Row, 1978). For discus-sion of the theory, see Jonathan D.Harrop, “The Limits of Sociology inthe Work of David Martin. Towardsa Critique of David Martin’s Soci-ology of Religion Centered on HisEssay: ‘Can the Church Survive?’”Religion 18 (1988) 81-85. Cf. alsoKlaas Runia, “The Challenge of theModern World to the Church,”Evangelical Review of Theology 18(1994) 301-24.

71 David F. Wells, No Place for Truth,79. Wells distinguishes betweensecularization (a process dealingwith the external and sociological)and secularism (that which con-cerns the internal and the ideologi-cal [80]); others make slightlydifferent distinctions. But the dis-tinctions do not concern us here.

72 Niels C. Nielsen, Jr., Fundamental-

ism, Mythos, and World Religions (Al-

bany: State Univ. of New York Press,1993) 153.

73 Roger Finke and Rodney Stark, The

Churching of America, 1776-1990:

Winners and Losers in Our Religious

Economy (New Brunswick: RutgersUniv. Press, 1992).

74 Wells, No Place for Truth, 81. This isnot to say that there are no elementsof contemporary secularizationtheory that do not need challenging.For example, Harvie M. Conn, “TheSecularization Myth,” Evangelical

Review of Theology 12 (1988) 78-92,offers substantial evidence againstthe commonly held thesis that ur-banization and secularization gohand in hand.

75 Some would argue that the decisivenail in the coffin of any doctrine ofprovidence was the Holocaust.Among Jewish theologians, that isa recurring theme. The argumenthas received relatively meager treat-ment by Christian theologians,though see Wolfhart Pannenberg,Human Nature, Election and History

(Philadelphia: Westminster Press,1977); Carl F. H. Henry, God, Revela-

tion and Authority, 6 vols. (Waco:Word Books, 1976-83) 6: 485-91.

76 Quoted by Dan Coats Imprimus 20/9 (Sept. 1991) 1.

77 The contemporary presidential“God bless you” or “God blessAmerica” is no parallel.

78 Peter B. Stromberg, Language and Self-

Transformation: A Study of the Christian

Conversion Narrative (Cambridge:Cambridge Univ. Press, 1993).

79 David Atkinson, Expository Times

105 (1994) 190.80 Amply if sensationally chronicled by

E. D. Hirsch, Jr., Cultural Literacy:

36

What Every American Needs to Know

(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987)and Allan Bloom, The Closing of the

American Mind: How Higher Education

Has Failed Democracy and Impover-

ished the Souls of Today’s Students

(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1988).81 George M. Marsden and Bradley J.

Longfield, eds., The Secularization of

the Academy (New York: OxfordUniv. Press, 1992).

82 See George M. Marsden, The Soul of

the American University (New York:Oxford Univ. Press, 1994).

83 See J. A. Walter, A Long Way from

Home: A Sociological Exploration of

Contemporary Idolatry (Exeter: Pater-noster Press, 1979).

84 Among the better ones are RussellChandler, Understanding the New

Age (Dallas: Word Books, 1988);James R. Lewis and J. GordonMelton, eds., Perspectives on the New

Age (Albany: State Univ. of NewYork, 1992).

85 E.g., Rosemary Radford Ruether,Gaia and God: An Ecofeminist Theol-

ogy of Earth Healing (San Francisco:Harper San Francisco, 1992).

86 Peter Jones, The Gnostic Empire Strikes

Back: An Old Heresy for the New Age

(Phillipsburg: Presbyterian and Re-formed, 1992) perceives not a fewparallels between the New Agemovement and ancient Gnosticism.

87 Cf. the appendix to this volume,“When Is Spirituality Spiritual?”

88 Melvin Tinker, “Battle for theMind,” Churchman 106 (1992): 34-44.

89 Cited in Christianity Today 35 (May27, 1991) 40.

90 For a useful summary of the devel-opment of the expression, and a tell-ing critique, see Sun and Sumithra,

“Conversion: To Cosmic Christ?”Evangelical Review of Theology 16(1992) 385-97.

91 Raimundo Panikkar, “The Meaningof Christ’s Name,” in Service and

Salvation, ed. Joseph Pathrapankal(Bangalore: C. M. I., 1973) 242ff. Cf.also his 1964 book, The Unknown

Christ of Hinduism: Towards an Ecu-

menical Christophany (Maryknoll:Orbis Books, 1981). Panikkar ex-egetes a passage from the HinduScriptures, Janmadi Yasyatah, whichon his reading speaks of the cause,power, and goal of all things, butleaves this cause/power/goal un-named. Panikkar names it “Christ.”

92 One of the most useful surveys is afairly recent article in Atlantic

Monthly. Neil Howe and WilliamStrauss, “The New GenerationGap” (Dec. 1992) 67-89.

93 E.g., Leith Anderson, Dying for

Change: An Arresting Look at the New

Realities Confronting Churches and

Para-Church Ministries (Minneapo-lis: Bethany House, 1990).

94 See, for example the telling reviewof Kenneth A. Myers, All God’s Chil-

dren and Blue Suede Shoes: Christians

and Popular Culture (Westchester:Crossway, 1989) written by WilliamEdgar and published in Westminster

Theological Journal 53 (1991) 377-80.95 See, most recently, Simon Vibert,

“The Word in an Audio-Visual Age:Can We Still Preach the Gospel?”Churchman 106 (1992) 147-58.

96 See especially Quentin J. Schultze,Televangelism and American Culture:

The Business of Popular Religion

(Grand Rapids: Baker, 1991).97 Clearly this is a sweeping generali-

zation. Quite apart from individual

exceptions, there are numerouspockets within these countries (e. g.immigrant Chinese) which in thisrespect stand in marked antithesisto the broader culture.

98 Whatever its faults, the modernstudy that turned scholarly atten-tion to the emphasis on the corpo-rate in the Old Testament was H.Wheeler Robinson, Corporate Person-

ality in Ancient Israel (Philadelphia:Fortress, 1964 [1935]). For a usefulstudy of the place of the individualin the same corpus, cf. Frederick J.Gaiser, “The Emergence of the Selfin the Old Testament: A Study inBiblical Wellness,” Horizons in Bib-

lical Theology 14 (1992) 1-29.99 Robert N. Bellah et al., Habits of the

Heart: Individualism and Commitment

in American Life (New York: Harper& Row, 1985).

100 Christopher Lasch, The Culture of

Narcissism: American Life in an Age

of Diminishing Expectations (NewYork: W. W. Norton, 1978), flyleafoutlining the thrust of the chapters.

101 Daniel Yankelovich, New Rules:

Search for Self-Fulfillment in a World

Turned Upside Down (New York:Random House, 1981).

102 This is not to go along with cliché-ridden assessments of the 1980s ad-vanced by the political left—“thedecade of greed” and the like. Thehard economic data do not, by andlarge, support the view that the1980s were the worst of times eco-nomically, except for the very rich,or that most Americans were moregreedy in the 1980s than in the1970s: see the well displayed datain Richard B. McKenzie, What Went

Right in the 1980s (San Francisco:

37

Pacific Research Institute for PublicPolicy, 1994).

103 Cf. George Roche, A World Without

Heroes: The Modern Tragedy (Hillsdale:Hillsdale College Press, 1987).

104 Cf. Robert Wuthnow, Acts of Com-

passion: Caring for Others and Help-

ing Ourselves (Princeton: PrincetonUniv. Press, 1991).

105 Phillip E. Hammond, Religion and Per-

sonal Autonomy: The Third

Disestablishment in America (Columbia:Univ. of South Carolina Press, 1992).

106 Ibid., xiv.107 Thomas Sowell, Is Reality Optional?

and Other Essays (Stanford: HooverInstitution Press, 1993) 4 .

108 One thinks of the well-documentedcase of Margaret Mead (on whichsee a fuller treatment in chap. 5).More generally, see, for example,Robert J. Priest, “Cultural Anthro-pology, Sin, and the Missionary,”Carson and Woodbridge, God and

Culture, 85-105.109 See, for example, O. Hobart

Mowrer, The Crisis in Psychiatry and

Religion (Princeton: Van Nostrand,1961); Karl Menninger, Whatever Be-

came of Sin? (New York: Hawthorn,1975); Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson,The Assault on Truth: Freud’s Suppres-

sion of the Seduction Theory

(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985);Robert C. Roberts, Taking the Word

to Heart: Self and Other in the Age of

Therapies (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans,1993); and especially E. FullerTorrey, Freudian Fraud: The Malig-

nant Effect of Freud’s Theory on Ameri-

can Thought and Culture (New York:HarperCollins, 1992).

110 The expression is that of CharlesSykes, in Imprimus 21/7 (July 1992) 1.

111 Freudian Fraud, see above n. 108.112 See Robert C. Roberts, “Psycho-

babble,” Christianity Today 38/6(May 16, 1994) 18-24.

113 Robin Scroggs, The Text and the

Times: New Testament Essays for To-

day (Minneapolis: Fortress Press,1993) 125-50.

114 See Paul C. Vitz, Psychology as Reli-

gion: The Cult of Self-Worship, 2nd ed.(Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1994).

115 Don Feder, A Conservative Jew Looks

at Pagan America (Lafayette:Huntingdon House, 1993) 219.

116 Cited by Charles Colson, with EllenSantilli Vaughn, Against the Night:

Living in the New Dark Ages (AnnArbor: Servant Books, 1989) 93.

117 J. Gresham Machen, Christianity

and Liberalism (Grand Rapids:Eerdmans, 1923).

118 The Integrity of Anglicanism (NewYork: Seabury, 1978) 7-8; cited inJerry L. Walls, “What is TheologicalPluralism?” Quarterly Review 5 (Fall1985) 61.