Review of Ron S. Dart and J.I. Packer, Christianity and Pluralism (Lexham Press, 2019), 70 pages.
Christianity and Pluralism is a fresh and poignant new edition of a booklet first composed just over two decades ago, titled In a Pluralist World (Regent, 2008). The collection of essays was originally written in response to Anglican Bishop Michael Ingham's controversial pluralist manifesto, Mansions of the Spirit. Ron Dart and J.I. Packer, also both Anglicans (though of very different streams), each offer their respective and respectful critical analyses of Mansions as an entry point into the broader discussion of the various shades of Enlightenment pluralism.
This little booklet is just 70 pages long but astoundingly efficient and clear in its nuanced explication of the issues at hand. As such, it would provide an excellent primer for students and teachers who want to understand pluralism's various shades, strengths and pitfalls without the sort of reductionism that often plagues the topic.
After the prefaces (Dart, 2019 and Rev. Dr. Archie Pell, 2008), the book unfolds in three acts and an appendix.
Chapter 1 features Ron Dart's critique of Mansions, which he regards as both a "subtle syncretism" of the hidden agreement within mystical traditions across religions and "ideological liberalism" that in fact subverts Christian (and other religion's) truth claims.
Dart's review focused on laying out the content of Bishop Michael's book and offering ten points of rebuttal. He initially welcomes the book as a timely challenge, calling Christians to think carefully about what we believe and why. But ultimately, Dart's response boils down to three major deficiencies in Ingham's work: "it lacks a rigorous mystical theology, a radical politics and a high Christology-ecclesiology." Dart hints at a better and alternative framework for interfaith dialogue, which comes later in the book.
Chapter 2 is J.I. Packer's response to Mansions of the Spirit begins with his affirmation of Ingham's kind and compassionate character, then proceeds to his objections, not only to the Bishop but to "the modernist-liberal-progressive coalition." A key concern is with how they alter Christian language to evacuate it of its truth claims. "Gospel" for example, is rightly defined as good news, but when emptied of a Christology of Jesus Christ, crucified and risen, the unique Way, Truth and Life.
Packer summarizes the purpose of Mansions as promoting interfaith dialogue and coming clean with what Ingham stands for. Then, like Dart, after a nod of affirmation toward efforts at respectful dialogue and religious tolerance, he lays out the deep problems of Ingham's religious pluralism. In the main, he finds it inconsistent. That is, Mansions claims Christ and the Christian tradition while simultaneously abandoning the central claims and tenets of both. I would think a close assessment of Packer's own arguments is due again, twenty years after the fact. Do they still hold true as tests for today's expanded pluralism? They certainly need to be taken seriously.
Chapter 3, back to Ron Dart, is titled "Christ, the Church and the Parliament of World Religions." This chapter is the most important and precise explanation I've read delineating four approaches to interfaith dialogue. Namely, exclusivism, inclusivism (or the Catholic model), pluralism and syncretism. Dart is enthusiastic about authentic interfaith engagement (and a brilliant practitioner) but also wise enough to see the naivety of Cousins' "2nd Axial Age" theory and the long hangover of Hegelian religious dialectic.
Ron concludes with the stubborn fact that we do live in a pluralist society embedded in Enlightenment establishment culture, where tolerance is preached with great intolerance of any unique truth claims. His answer to this is that we might look to ancient roots in order to sojourn new routes to a much deeper pluralism that he describes as a marriage of "prophetic exclusivism and enlightened inclusivism." And that's where he leaves us hanging! In truth, a second reading of the chapter unveils what that means for Dart. For further reading on what that looks like, Ron's many Red or High Tory articles and books surely add content, but having seen Ron's analyses of the four approaches, I would love to see a companion volume to Christianity and Pluralism. Ron's titles are always clever, but the subtitle "Prophetic Exclusivism and Enlightened Inclusivism" would reap what's been sown in this present classic.
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