RON DART & J. I. PACKER
Christianity and Pluralism
Copyright 2019 Ron Dart
Lexham Press, 1313 Commercial St., Bellingham, WA 98225
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Originally published as In a Pluralist World by Regent College Publishing (1998).
Print ISBN 9781683592877
Digital ISBN 9781683592884
Lexham Editorial Team: Todd Hains, Danielle Thevenaz
Cover Design: Peter Park
Ron Dart
The Reverend Dr. Archie Pell
Christianity or Religious Pluralism? A Review of Mansions of the Spirit
Ron Dart
The Way, the Truth, and the Life: A Discussion of Mansions of the Spirit
J. I. Packer
Christ, the Church, and the Parliament of World Religions
Ron Dart
The Enlightenment, the Liberal Establishment, and Religious Pluralism
Ron Dart
It’s a perennial dialogue: how do the various religions interrelate? Was Jesus merely a Jewish rabbi, a forerunner of Muhammad, a Hindu avatar, a Buddhist bodhisattva, a crypto-gnostic, or a Sufi in disguise? Or are Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Taoism, Hinduism, Buddhism, and other religious traditions all diverse paths to a similar goal? These questions tend to dominate interfaith dialogue.
The publication in 1997 of Bishop Michael Ingham’s Mansions of the Spirit: The Gospel in a Multi-Faith World brought such questions to the fore once again. Bishop Ingham was, at the time, the Anglican Bishop of the diocese in New Westminster (British Columbia), and his challenging missive could not be ignored. Ingham pondered four models as a way of answering the multi-faith issue: inclusivist, exclusivist, pluralist, and a form of subtle syncretism. He advocated subtle syncretism in which mystics of most religions were in agreement in a hidden way.
This extreme form of ideological liberalism—as also embodied in the life and work of John Hick and Bishops Ingham, John Spong, William Swing, and Richard Holloway (to name a few)—alerted conservatives to a more serious problem in the life of the church: the subversion of Christian truth claims. Mansions of the Spirit required a response that was neither uncritical nor excessively critical—a thoughtful and reasoned third way of sorts.
And so this short book was commissioned by a group of conservative Anglicans in the Anglican Church of Canada, who brought together a more classical catholic form of Anglicanism with Reformed, evangelical, and charismatic tendencies. (They were known as the Essentials Group; they convened the Essentials Conference in Montreal in 1995.1) Regent College (Vancouver, BC) originally published this as In a Pluralist World, part of the Charting Our Course series in 1998.
Mansions of the Spirit was, in many ways, a popular rendition ...
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About Christianity and PluralismAre the world’s great religions ultimately all the same? Christianity and Pluralism is a collection of concise yet thoughtful essays by J. I. Packer and Ron Dart, interacting with and responding to the four traditional models used to answer the existence of multiple faiths (exclusive, inclusive, pluralist, and syncretist), but focusing particularly that form of syncretism which claims that all faiths find commonality through their mystical traditions. Written in response to key events in the history of the Anglican church, Packer and Dart’s analysis gives us a perennially relevant model for how the church ought to respond to our own pluralistic culture with integrity and kindness—and how to uphold the distinctiveness of the gospel. Christians directly or indirectly engaging our pluralist world will find their ideas enriched by this short yet powerful book. |
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