The contemporary situation, whether one views it as modern or post-modern, is dominated by the reality of pluralism. Speaking descriptively, the spectrum of plurality ranges from simple differences of opinion at one end to mutually exclusive definitions of reality and allegiances to differing value systems or lifestyles on the other end. When we deal with commitments to symbols of ultimacy, we are dealing with a plurality of rival religions.
The plurality of religious traditions constitutes one of the most potent challenges to Christian faith in our time. The challenge is more acute now than before. In times past, religion was so closely identified with culture that the other religions of the world just seemed to belong to other lands and other cultures that lay beyond the border of our immediate concerns. We thought they belonged to a different history from ours. But things are changing rapidly in this regard. The religious atlases of the world are becoming obsolete. No longer can we label North America "Christian" or India "Hindu" or Indonesia "Islamic." More and more Americans and Europeans are investigating Asian philosophies and adopting the mystical disciplines of the East. Third World Christian churches have come into their own and, in the case of the Church of South India, are showing exceptional leadership in ecumenical affairs. In any given geographical location, increasing numbers of alternative commitments to ultimate reality can be found. We now have pluralism right in our hometown.
Not only are these alternatives all around us. They exist within us as well. We have begun to internalize pluralism, so that the confrontation between the various reality-defining agencies takes place within us as we wrestle with truth questions. This is possible because there speaks within our soul the still small voice of the ecumené, the sense that we belong to a single universal humanity sustained by a mysterious but single divine reality. Even if we are not fully clear regarding the proper relationship between Christianity and the other religions, we still work with the assumption that all human beings share a common status before God and in relation to one another.
I call this ecumenic pluralism because it makes the assumption that there is only one human race to which people in diverse times and cultures belong. Whether it is immediately visible or not, we believe all people have something in common. It is this trans-cultural and even trans-religious unity that makes pluralism possible, that provides the warrant for respecting and appreciating people who differ from ourselves. This is sometimes difficult to see when differences in language and culture seem to run so deep and when violent conflict between peoples seems unavoidable. Nevertheless, I believe we need to affirm through faith that the eschatological kingdom of God will reveal a oneness to the human race, a oneness that may be invisible to us at present.
Ecumenic pluralism tackles a somewhat different problem from that which we know under the term ecumenical movement. Coming from the Greek root meaning "one house," the term ecumenical movement refers to the attempt by the various Christian churches to understand all Christians as belonging to the single household of faith. This is a perfectly legitimate use of the term, but what I have in mind here is a bit broader. I suggest that we think of the whole creation as God's house and that all of us are guests of equal stature in the divine living room. Corresponding to God's oneness is a oneness of humanity.
The concept of ecumenic unity goes back to the epics of Homer. There oikoumené referred to the inhabited world, consisting of islands and continents. Surrounding the oikoumené on all sides is the okeanos, the ever-running river that returns to itself. The oikoumené is our cosmic habitat. Looking out over the okeanos we see the horizon, the boundary that distinguishes our world from the mysteries that lie beyond our cosmic order. Turning around, we see that there is but one world this side of the far horizon.1
Since Galileo and the rise of the modern mind, we have come to think of our oikoumené in terms of a single sphere and the okeanos in terms of the infinity of outer space. Looking outward toward the unfathomable horizon of intergalactic mysteries, we are awed by our relative minuteness and insignificance. Yet turning with camera in hand and looking back from the moon toward earth again, we get the picture that the shiny blue sphere that is our world is but one world. The satellites cannot see the lines between nations that we draw on our maps; nor can they report the parochialism of the human mind that imagines the okeanos to flow around the borders of one's own country, one's own race, one's own culture, or one's own religion.
Ecumenic pluralism is a perspective that sees all the differences that divide the human race as but outlines of the parts that constitute the whole. It is the recognition that this side of the horizon there is but one inhabited world and that it is a shared world. It is the condition that makes pluralistic thinking possible. Without the assumption of an ecumenic unity, we have no pluralism. We have only anarchy.
The reason pluralism and the human ecumené should appear on the theological agenda today is that they are currently being undermined by the ideological stance I have identified as radical pluralism--that is, a pluralism that fails to shoulder responsibility for its corresponding unity. Although the problem is by no means unique to theology, we have our version of it in current North American liberation rhetoric. Religious literature during the 1970s and 1980s told readers that white people simply cannot understand black people, that the rich cannot understand the poor, and that men cannot understand women. A hands-off policy has emerged. To some extent htis is justified. Past wrongs need to be righted. Neverheless, if left to persist in its own logic, such thinking will lead to baptizing a radical pluralism that will justify a return to tribal parochialism and the loss of a sense of responsibility to the shared ecumené.
Radical pluralism espouses the belief that plurality, variety, and diversity are in themselves a positive good. In its extreme form, radical pluralism defends what is different just because it is different; so it opposes the combining of various traditions. It judges the integrity of any existing approach to life inviolate; so any attempt to change it in behalf of transcultural or trans-ethnic unity is considered culturally immoral. Radical pluralism is antiholistic.
When the logic of making an "ism" out of cultural integrity is pressed to the extreme, the principle of supracultural human unity evaporates. Anthropologist Clifford Geertz gives us a hint regarding which way things might go. He suggests that "the basic unity of mankind" might become an empty phrase. To view the diversity of custom across time and over space not merely as a matter of garb or appearance but rather as an affirmation that humanity itself is various in its essences and expressions, he contends, "is to cast off the moorings of philosophical humanism, thus leading to an uneasy drifting into perilous waters. 2 In other words, if we are so intent on emphasizing the diversity or plurality, we will lose the sense of unity. We will sacrifice the very idea that there is one house for humanity. Geertz as an anthropologist is speaking as a social scientist. He is speaking descriptively. Pluralistic ideologists turn radical pluralism into a prescription, and this cannot but help somewhere down the line to fuel the flames of competition, division, and disunity.
What we need to affirm, I believe, is ecumenic pluralism. Ecumenic pluralism is based upon a vision of the whole. While from day to day on the surface of our earth we encounter the dividing walls of culture and the barriers of prejudice, we can still imagine the one world seen by the astronauts looking back from the horizon. Therefore, ecumenic pluralism affirms descriptively the side by side existence of various and contradictory perspectives, worldviews, or approaches to human understanding and living. In conjunction it affirms prescriptively that we should act as if all this plurality belongs to a greater whole. Such acting would be founded not upon what can be observed from our day to day perspective, nor upon the judgments of academic anthropologists, but rather upon our faith in God's unifying and fulfilling plan. The vision of one world is an anticipation of things to come.
All this comes down to this: the concept of a universal humanity must become an article of faith. We cannot prove this universality empirically on the basis of present terrestrial experience, yet it is something we both assume and strive after. Like other proleptic realities, the envisioned fullness of human unity will be realized only in the consummate kingdom of God. Now, amid the old aeon with its cultural conflicts, hierarchies, racism, and discrimination, it is not easily demonstrable that all people are equally and fully human. But we must assume it on the basis of a holistic vision, on the basis of a trust that God will eventually reveal that it has always been so.
This vision of a single universal humanity has already served as a driving force in the modern era. This belief in the unity of humanity ignited the fires of religious liberty, energized revolutions against monarchical tyrannies in the name of democracy, burned in the hearts of abolitionists and civil rights martyrs, still stokes the fires of opposition to apartheid and the caste system, and keeps ablaze the desire for equality between the sexes and the generations. This vision of human unity, whether an implicit or explicit article of faith, burns with the explosive power for transforming society.
This power may become defused, however, if the principle of radical pluralism like a Trojan horse makes its home within the citadel of theology, let alone within our culture. In the face of challenges in the past, the Christian faith has responded with confessional statements. Perhaps the time is coming when we will need to confess our faith in the existence of a single universal humanity, a faith not based upon empirical proof but upon trust in God's will for the consummate unity of the creation.
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