Beyond Toleration

by William O'Meara (copyrighted with Mary Washington College)

The history of Christian theology has had a range of attitudes, beginning with a negative stance towards other religions and growing towards a stance of political toleration of other religions, including an openness towards learning from the moral and spiritual heritages of various religions. However, the question facing many religious people today is whether Christian theology can transcend its Ptolemaic way of evaluating other religious traditions always in reference to its own emphasis upon Christian doctrines and grow towards a new stage even beyond toleration and dialogue. The question is whether Christian theology can undergo a Copernican revolution and begin to evaluate both its own moral and religious doctrines as well as those of other traditions in the light of a new emphasis upon the Deity that transcends all our various concepts of God in the West and in the East.

Stages in the Relationship of Christianity to Other Religions

We may select Catholic Christianity to examine various stages in one Christian tradition's attitudes towards other religions. Richard McBrien finds four historical stages in the development of Catholic Christianity's teaching about other religions. The first stage was primarily negative, taking for granted that other religions could not lead to salvation. There was only one Mediator between God and humankind, Jesus the Christ, and all other Christs were false. Although, at first, the Christian community of Jerusalem, led by the brother of Jesus, James, was as much Jewish as it was Christian, the gospels and epistles of the later part of the first century were more and more anti-Jewish. The culmination of this development in the first century occurred in the gospel of John which expressed a high Christology in which Jesus even explicitly claims oneness with God, saying, "Before Abraham came to be, I am." In this first stage, then, the normative Christian theology proclaimed the absolute uniqueness and necessity of salvation through Christ because Jesus Christ was the only begotten Son of God.

The second stage developed in medieval times when the Church, for example, declared in the General Council of Florence of 1442 that "(The Holy Roman Church) ... firmly believes, professes and preaches that `no one remaining outside the Catholic Church, not only pagans', but Jews, heretics or schismatics, can become partakers of eternal life ... unless before the end of their life they are received into it." However, a theologian such as Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century could write in response to one Christian ruler about treating the Jews tolerantly under her rule. And even in 787, the Second General Council of Nicea did not wish to force Jews to convert but to allow them to do so voluntarily if they sincerely desired to do so. "Otherwise," McBrien writes, the Council declared that `they should be allowed to `be Hebrews openly, according to their own religion' (canon 8)." Furthermore, Pope Gregory VII wrote to the Muslim ruler of Mauritania in 1076, affirming that Muslims and Christians "believe and confess one God, although in different ways, and praise and worship Him daily as the creator of all ages and ruler of this world." Nevertheless, the ending period of medieval times is infamous for the persecution of heretics under the Spanish Inquisition and the expulsion of the Jews from Spain under Ferdinand and Isabella. This period may be the greatest period of intolerance in Christianity despite the positive statements of the Second Council of Nicea towards Jews and of Pope Gregory VII towards Muslims. These latter statements and the explorations of the medieval theologians about state toleration of Jews show the potential for harmonious living for Christians, Jews, and Muslims in this second stage of Christian teaching about other religions.

A third stage of development occurred in the nineteenth century under the influence of Liberalism and its open acceptance of all religions as equally good if they are in accord with the insights of reason. Liberalism is classically expressed in the rational principles of the French Revolution. All peoples should be freed from the bonds and shackles that restrict their equality, their liberty, and their fraternity. Any religious belief which would impose inequality, loss of freedom, and enmity amongst peoples may not be endorsed by the political state. Every person must be free to accept religion or to reject it so long as their beliefs do not give rise to actions destructive of equality, liberty, and fraternity. A number of official papal pronouncements in the nineteenth century explicitly condemn religious indifferentism, the view easily compatible with Liberalism and a consequent acceptance of all religions as equally good or as equally bad. Nevertheless, despite the Church's attitude that error has no rights, Pope Pius IX proclaimed in 1854 that people who through invincible ignorance hold religious doctrines in error from the true Christian faith are "in ignorance of the truth through no fault of their own and so `are not subject to any guilt in this matter before the eyes of the Lord.'"

Vatican Council II in the 1960's reveals a more profound change in toleration than any previous stage of the Church's attitude towards other religions. In this fourth stage of development, the Council is very positive in stressing what unites Christians with other believers in religious and ethical beliefs and practices, respecting by name not only Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, and Judaism, but also religions of precivilized peoples. The Council finds precious religious values in these religions, treasures of ascetical and contemplative life, and rituals and symbols both expressive of the goodness intrinsic to human life and responsive to the revelation and inspiration of God even in non-Christian religions. The Council resolves to adopt an entirely new approach toward non-Christian religions, respecting whatever truth and holiness can be found in them and even doctrinal beliefs which are different than those of Christianity because even such beliefs may contain some truth in them. The Council does not see such truth and holiness found in non-Christian religions as deriving from unaided human effort but as coming from the generous gifts of God to all of humanity. Because civil society has the moral duty to respect the moral right of all persons to be free from coercion in matters of religious belief, the Council opposes all forms of discrimination, including religious discrimination. But more than just tolerating the multiplicity of religions in civil society and the freedom of individuals to believe according to the dictates of their conscience, the Council recommends all forms of dialogue, motivated by justice and love, seeking moral and spiritual enrichment.

Four Interpretations of Present-Day Dialogue Amongst Religions

(1) This recommendation for a dialogue based on justice and love is interpreted by one contemporary Catholic theologian, Richard McBrien, as follows: We should encourage all religions, including Christianity, to engage in self-criticism and purification, bringing out their best understanding of the truth and holiness in their own religions. The religions can seek to understand other religions and to understand themselves from the viewpoint of the other religions. For example, Christians can explore a Christian theology of Islam as well as learn from an Islamic theology of Christianity. Nevertheless, "Christianity in dialogue will not shrink from emphasizing its own uniqueness, but dialogue will make it increasingly open to the religious richness and salvific value of the other great traditions."

This emphasis upon the uniqueness of Christianity is not simply that it has a unique cultural tradition and various sets of religious rituals but primarily that it proclaims faith in Jesus Christ, the only begotten Son of God, as the Way, the Truth, and the Life just as the early Christians of the late first century proclaimed. Vatican Council II remains within the Ptolemaic way of evaluating all other religions in relationship to the saving truths of Christianity. The love and truth that peoples of other religions have attained with the help of God's gracious gift of revelation are, the Council declares, "looked upon the Church as a preparation for the gospel." As Pope Paul VI wrote in the encyclical letter Ecclesiam Suam in 1964, "there is one true religion, the Christian religion, and ... we hope that all who seek God and adore Him, will come to acknowledge this."

(2) A second Catholic theologian, Karl Rahner, has developed the notion of seeing non-Christians who live according to their conscience in the search for truth, love, and justice, whether they are atheists or people from other religions, as anonymous Christians. They are Christian in spirit even though they do not know it. Since Christian faith in God's love is supposed to enable Christians to live conscientiously in the pursuit of truth, love, and justice, anyone who lives thusly, even without explicit faith in the Christian God, is living in and through God's love. This attitude of Rahner is a generous appreciation of the conscientious pursuit of truth, love, and justice in all religions. However, this attitude remains within a Ptolemaic way of evaluating other religions in relation to Christianity. If Christians were to be evaluated as anonymous Muslims by a Muslim theologian or as anonymous Buddhists by a Buddhist theologian, how would Christians feel then? They would realize that they are not the only ones who have had a profound experience of God's saving love and truth in their own religion. They might then become open to a Copernican revolution in theology, evaluating their own religious tradition as one valid but limited way of approaching the Deity beyond all the religious insights of all the various world religions

(3) A third Catholic theologian, Hans Kung, attempted to achieve a generous interpretation of all religions in the spirit of the new pronouncements of Vatican Council II. He affirms that every person's religion of birth may be viewed as the ordinary way of human salvation and that membership in the Catholic Church may be viewed as the extraordinary way. It is the political right and moral duty of every person "to seek God within that religion in which the hidden God has already found" that person. Neverthe- less, Kung does support the missionary activity of the Christian Church in its attempt to bring non-Christians to convert to Jesus Christ as the definitive manifestation of God's saving truth and love. Still judging in a Ptolemaic way all other religions by their relationship to Christianity, Kung writes that "the individual people in the world religions are called upon by the Church of Christ to make the decision of faith in Christ only at that point in time when ... [the] Gospel itself is preached to them".

(4) In addition to these three Catholic attempts to reconsider the relationship of Christianity and other religions, there is the liberal Protestant approach of Wolfhart Pannenberg who offers an expanded interpretation of Jesus' descent into hell. The symbolic meaning of this descent in Christian theology is that Christ then made salvation available to those who, having lived and died before Christ, could not therefore have come to salvation through knowledge of and conversion unto Christianity. In a similar manner, Pannenberg argues, even those who have lived after Christ and who have not had a true opportunity to accept Christ as their savior during their life time may also have an opportunity to accept Christ after death. Like the three Catholic theologians, Pannenberg is sensitive to the conscientious search of non-Christians for truth and love and their deep commitment to their religious truths and values, but he also remains within a Ptolemaic way of evaluating non-Christian religions. They are adequate until a person has a true opportunity to confront Christ either in the gospel or even in the world to come.

A Copernican Revolution in Theology

The Copernican revolution in astronomy enabled people to see the earth and the planets as revolving around the sun instead of the older Ptolemaic way of seeing the planets and the sun as revolving around the earth. The question that Christian theology can now face is whether it can undergo a similar transformation in way it views itself and other world religions. Instead of the traditional way of evaluating other religions always in relation to Christianity, a way which is inherent in all four stages of development in Catholic theology, for example, can Christian theology "shift from the dogma that Christianity is at the centre to the realisation that it is God who is at the centre" and that all religions revolve around this transcendent Deity whose truth and love are greater than any religion's insights into truth and love?

The possibility of bringing about such a Copernican revolution in theology depends, first of all, upon a deeper acknowledge of the Socratic commitment to the examined way of life at the heart of all the disciplines in the university. At first, in the pursuit of truth in all our various disciples, whether philosophy, theology, psychology, sociology, economics, physics, biology, or chemistry, we may have thought that we were making steady progress from ignorance towards truth, based upon methods and assumptions which were true without question. However, at some point in our intellectual career, we realized that there were fundamental paradigm shifts in the history of our disciplines and that we even personally had undergone some significant transformations of our own fundamental assumptions. For example, the analytic philosopher realizes that Wittgenstein himself underwent profound transformatiion of his basic intellectual assumptions from his early works to his later works. For example, again, the theologian begins to relate theology to evolution of the human species and begins to reevaluate sacred scriptures in light of historical-critical scholarship, thereby reconsidering an interpretation of the Book of Genesis that had stood for centuries in Christianity. Again, the theologian is raised as a child to believe in the classic understanding of redemption, the death of Christ on the cross, as a payment to God's justice for the ransom of sinners. However, then the theologian grows personally beyond the adolescent stage of moral thinking about God and humanity in terms of justice and grows towards a living love relationship with God. Then the theologian discovers that scripture scholars have gone beyond St. Anselm's Roman law influenced interpretation of redemption in Cur Deus Homo, Why God Became Human, and have grasped a God of love acting to liberate and redeem humanity, and that it really is contradictory for the old Anselmian theory to hold that God's love pays back God's justice by having Jesus lovingly pay the debt that sin requires in justice, the death of a God-human, the death of a perfect man. If Christian theology can change its understanding of the Book of Genesis and its understanding of redemption, may it not be possible for theology to change even further its understanding of the relationship of other world religions to Christianity?

Another precedent in Christian thought for the possibility of such change has developed within philosophy of religion. John Hick, one of the leading Christian philosophers of religion, has argued well that neither theism nor atheism can be proven. On the one side, religious experience that so profoundly transforms and inspires many people suggests God as the source of this experience. Yet, on the other side, the terrible reality of suffering suggests a universe without a God who cares. Again, on the one side, the order of the physical universe and the order of morality suggest a Divine Intelligence as the cause of world and moral order. Yet, on the other side, the fact of chance in the evolution of both the physical and biological order of the universe and the fact that God is not a useful hypothesis for any scientific explanation suggest that the universe is simply a natural phenomenon. There are evidences both sides of the question. Can we weight these evidences on some balance scale? It would seem subjective to do so. Some people would weight some claim to divine revelation and the efficacy of prayer more significantly, but other people might weight the apparently pointless suffering of those in desperation and great pain more significantly. Consequently, Hick concludes:

In my experience of teaching philosophy of religion with a reasonable examination of both theism and naturalism, I have found that a convincing case cannot be made either way for the students. Some students conclude theistically, but others conclude naturalistically, still others are agnostic. They have all heard the same lectures, considered the same arguments, but choose to resolve the question differently. In light of the ambiguity of philosophical argumentation about God and the ultimate nature of the universe, should not the famous Socratic statement of ignorance become even more important to our acceptance of our various theologies of the various world religions? Socrates affirmed that the only thing he knew was that he did not know. Should we not say that same statement about our knowledge of God? Is there not a penumbra of darkness surrounding all our claims to knowledge of God? Is it not possible, therefore, that Christian theology could undergo a Copernican revolution and cease evaluating other religions by the Christian concept of God and Christ?

John Hick proposes that we reflect upon the creative, interpretative quality of our knowledge and faith, whether natural knowledge, moral knowledge, or religious faith and knowledge. As for natural knowledge, we cannot prove that our experience discloses an external world. Descartes' famous methodic doubt questioned whether he could tell the difference between a dream world and a real world and whether he could overcome the doubt that an evil spirit was tricking him into falsity in everything that he claimed to know. Many philosophers have found these doubts a labyrinth from which there is no escape. "As the history of modern western epistemology has established, there is no theoretical proof that we perceive a real world, or even that there is a real environing world to be perceived." Nevertheless, the human interpretation of our perceptual and emotional experience is that we do live in a natural world and that we can pragmatically interact with things and events in this world in order to survive and even flourish. All our perceptual experience has the character of experiencing-as. For example, we do not simply experience what is on the table as a pie-tin. We experience it as a container for a pie. We interpret the thing as meaningful within our causal interaction with it. Such interpretations are not fixated. For example, we can creatively interpret the pie-tin as a frisbee. In general, the interpretation that we do live in a natural world with which we causally interact works, but we cannot prove it conclusively.

So also for our knowledge of other persons. One significant question in twentieth century philosophy has been our knowledge of other persons. Just as Descartes raised the issue of how do we know the external physical world, a similar question derived from his method about how we know that other persons or minds exist. While we cannot prove that the external world exists, neither can we prove that other persons exist. Nevertheless, the fundamental interpretation of ourselves as living in interaction with other persons works and works very well. We are born without any concept of ourself or others as persons, but we gradually learn to interpret our experience of our own body as the center of a consciousness that lives in relation to other bodies that are also centers of consciousness. This fundamental experience of others as persons "is so basic that someone who did not perceive in this way would probably have to be controlled in a mental hospital; for this way of experiencing-as is the basis of the moral and therefore of social life." In general, the interpretation that we live in a natural world with other persons and that we have moral responsibilities to them works and enriches our lives pragmatically, but we cannot prove this fundamental interpretation conclusively.

We can develop an example that shows the ambiguity of experience as capable of being interpreted on a natural level and on a moral level. Suppose someone is hit by a car and lies unconscious by the side of the road. An individual drives by, simply interpreting this event as having natural significance. An object was impacted by another moving object at a certain velocity and a specific angle resulting in an impetus to the first object off to the side of the road. This interpretation remains on the level of natural significance. To interpret this person as needing help and to interpret myself as morally responsible to help in some manner is to experience this event as having moral significance. Now it might be possible to train an individual by rewards and punishments to conform to a set of social rules in responding to such situations, but such conditioning would not conclusively prove to such an individual that one should adopt the inner attitude of morality. The inner attitude of morality requires, Hick affirms,

Just as there is a creativity involved in our perceptual experience of natural objects as having potential meanings for our interaction, so also is there a creativity involved in our moral experience of other persons as having potential meanings for our interaction. But this freedom in how we interpret our experience of other persons in moral ways is much greater than our freedom in interpreting our perceptual experiences. Morally, we might limit our sense of mutuality to our own family or ethnic group or nation. Pre-literate tribal societies and even slave-owning societies until the nineteenth century typically did not interpret people outside of their tribe or outside of their racial grouping as entitled to the same moral considerations as people of their own group. Even today, our "perception of the human person as an end in him- or herself, as a neighbor to be valued as we value ourselves, is an ideal seldom achieved." It cannot be conclusively proven that we ought to value all humanity as an end in itself. We have a significant degree of freedom and creativity in our consciousness of our moral responsibility to others, and it is reasonable to say that moral conversion to a more inclusive sense of mutuality for all persons is what we are called to by the better possibilities of human nature.

Just as there is some creativity in our perceptual experience and a greater degree of creativity in our moral experience, there is an even greater degree of creativity in our experience of the ultimate meaning of our natural and moral experience. On the one hand, we have seen that it is reasonable to interpret our natural and moral worlds as religiously significant. The theist sees the natural world and moral responsibility as deriving from the God who creates matter, energy and life and who inspires moral responsibility and moral conversion to a life lived in the spirit of the Golden Rule, even loving all humanity as God loves all humanity. On the other hand, we have also seen that it is reasonable to interpret our natural and moral worlds naturalistically. The atheist holds that it is reasonable to interpret the natural world without God as an explanatory hypothesis. The atheist also holds that it is reasonable to interpret our moral responsibility to all human beings as ends in themselves as revealing the better possibilities of our nature. Even if God does not inspire morality or does not punish evil-doers, still moral values are ends worth seeking for their own sake. Their future realization can deeply motivate human beings even though they do not believe in an almighty personal being who is Perfect Truth and Perfect Love. Our cognitive freedom, our creativity, in interpreting the ultimate significance of our natural and moral worlds is very great. If we understand "religious experience very broadly, as the whole experience of persons in as far as they are religious, then the element of free responsive choice within this would seem to lie at the heart of faith...." Faith in this broad sense is defined in Wilfred Cantwell Smith's well-known account as:

While there are, of course, theistic interpretations of faith in Western religions and pantheistic interpretations of faith in Eastern religions, it is important to recognize that there have been atheistic, non-realist interpretations of faith by such thinkers as Ludwig Feuerbach, John Dewey, John Herman Randall Jr., Julian Huxley, R. B. Braithwaite, and many others. Such non-realist interpretations of the transcendent dimension of human experience grasped in faith seem, Hick afirms:

Consequently, we cannot charge the atheist with ignoring the transcendent faith dimension of human life. The atheist can interpret a religious dimension to the universe and morality but still do so naturalistically. We cannot resolve the argument between the theist and the atheist with conclusive proof. Socratically, we need to acknowledge our own ignorance at the very heart of our interpretations of the ultimate significance of the natural and moral worlds.

Christianity and Other Religions

If we have some creativity in our perceptual interpretations of natural objects and the world, more creativity in our moral interpretations of relationships with other persons, and even greater creativity in our religious interpretations of our natural and moral worlds, whether these interpretations be theistic, pantheistic, or atheistic, is it not reasonable to suspect that there is a profound degree of cognitive freedom in our interpretations of God in the various world religions?

There does appear to be an opening in the theologies of many of the world's religions for recognizing a significant distinction between God as existing within the Divine Reality itself and God as existing for human worship and conceptualization. Hindu theologians recognize a difference between Brahman without attributes, which cannot be grasped in human concepts, and Brahman with attributes, worshipped and conceptualized as the personal creator and governor of the universe. Buddhist theologians have a similar distinction. Shinran, the founder of the Pure Land tradition in Japan of Mahayana Buddhism, followed another great Buddhist theologian in holding a distinction between dharmakaya-as-suchness, the Buddha essence as such, and dharmakaya-as-compassion, the personal Buddha of infinite compassion. The Taoist scripture also affirms a distinction between the Tao that can be expressed in human conceptualization and the eternal Tao. Furthermore, in the Western religions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, there is a similar distinction between God in God's own infinite being and God in manifestation to human awareness and conceptualization. Hick relects upon the reason for the distinction between Deity in itself and Deity for humans:

Relying upon this distinction between the Deity in itself and the Deity as humanly conceptualized-and-experienced, Hick proposes (1) that the great world faiths represent different conceptuali- zations-and-real-experiences of Deity as related to humans and (2) that they can all serve the primary function of religious experience and faith of bringing about human transformation from self-centeredness to centeredness upon Deity and the universal community of humankind and nature.

(1) For the first point, Hick develops a theory of religious knowledge somewhat similar to Kant's theory of knowledge. Kant held that the human mind contributes categories, ways of interpreting, all sensible experience into perceptual experience so that there is a difference between the world as it is in itself, the noumenal world, and the world as it really, that is, empirically, appears to us, the phenomenal world. For example, Kant affirms that all perceptual experience of the world is structured by the category of cause-effect relationship such that when any event happens, the human mind must conceptualize that event as an effect flowing necessary out of some immediately preceding state of events as a cause. What exactly that cause would be would take careful experimentation to discover, but that there must be a cause of any event is a fundamental contribution of the mind to any perception of events in the empirical world. In a manner similar to Kant's theory, Hick distinguishes between Deity as it is in itself, noumenal Deity, and Deity as it is for humans, phenomenal Deity. Although Kant believed that the categories for interpreting perceptual experience were universal and necessary structures of the human mind, Hick affirms that the categories of religious experience are not universal and necessary structues of our mind but are on the contrary culture-relative. Theists, pantheists, and atheists can all live reasonable lives without using the fundamental interpretative religious categories of the other ways of living. Furthermore, even when one lives within a religious tradition, one's way of conceptualizing and experiencing Deity can undergo personal and cultural change because of both personal and cultural transformation.

The two fundamental categories for interpreting real experience of Deity are first, the concept of Deity "as personal, which presides over the various theistic forms of religious experience; and second, the concept of the Absolute [Deity] ... as non-personal, which presides over its various non-theistic forms." These two ways of conceptualizing- and-experiencing Deity, as personal and non-personal, may be compared to the ways of conceptualizing-and-experencing light, as waves and as particles. Light is not experienced in itself but only as it appears to us. If we hypothesize and seek experimental results in one way, we will succeed in finding light to appear objectively to behave like a shower of discrete particles. However, if we hypothesize and seek experimental results in another way, we will succeed in finding light to appear objectively to behave as a succession of continuous waves. Similarly, Deity is not known and experienced in itself but only as it appears to us. If we hypothesize within some cultural traditions and seek experiential results in one way, the mode of the I-Thou encounter, human beings can successful attain conceptulization-and-experience of Deity as personal, namely, "as the God of Israel, or as the Holy Trinity, or as Shiva, or as Allah, or as Vishnu...." However, if we hypothesize within other cultural traditions and seek experiential results in another way, in the mode of non-personal awareness, human beings can successful attain conceptualization- and-experience of Deity as non-personal, namely, "as Brahman, or as Nirvana, or as Being, or as Sunyata...."

One objection to Hick's proposal that various religions of West and East both have valid ways of conceptualizing-and- experiencing Deity for humans will come from Christian believers who emphasize that Christ is the only begotten Son of God who claimed explicitly to be one with God and that all other concepts of Deity are inadequate. While this is a most serious difficulty, Hick proposes that the objection itself is not now recognized by many major Christian scripture scholars as based in authentic statements attributable to the historical Jesus. Many scripture scholars understand the gospels as faith proclamations of the Risen Christ, and they find many evidences of gradual development of various Christologies in the gospels and epistles in the early church. Consequently, there is a possibility in Christian theology for reinterpreting the relationship between Deity and Jesus since the historical Jesus himself may not have had the definitive understanding of himself at which the early church and, indeed, the early Councils of the Church in the fourth and fifth centuries finally arrived. It is highly unlikely that Jesus understood himself in terms of the Greek philosophical concepts of substance and person which were used in the counciliar pronouncements and creeds. In this post-Kantian and post-Hegelian world of thought which recognizes the interpretive creativity of human thought and the profound influences of history and culture upon various stages of thought, a Socratic re-examination of Christology and of the relationship of Christianity to other religions is most appropriate.

(2) For the second point, Hick argues that the primary function of religious experience and belief in Deity is not to give humanity information about Deity in itself, but to give significance to human life. Just as interpretive awareness of the external world guides our natural interactions with things and events and just as interpretive awareness of our moral existence with other human persons guides our social interactions, so also interpretive awareness of Deity guides our interactions with Deity and also with all of humanity and nature, giving ultimate significance and worth to our lives. Consequently, the ultimate criterion of true religious belief is not a question about abstract statements about God and humanity, but a question of human transformation towards saintliness, including both spiritual and politico-economic liberation. However, even with such a criterion, it is most difficult to evaluate the transforming effects of the various religious beliefs and experiences. There have been many good and many bad practices in all the major religious traditions, but all have helped to produce outstanding, saintly figures who have called humanity by their living example to transform themselves from self-centeredness to centeredness upon Deity and the universal community of humankind and nature. Christianity cannot claim a monopoly upon such exemplars of human transformation. Consequently, a Socratic re-examination of the relationship of Christianity to other religions is most appropriate. Christianity may be able to grow beyond its Ptolemaic way of evaluating other religions always in relationship to its own experiences of and beliefs in God and grow towards a Copernican way of evaluating itself and all other religions by the transcendent Deity which is infinitely greater than all our religious experiences and doctrines.

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