Can Evangelicals Learn From World Religions?: Jesus, Revelation and Religious Traditions

Gerald McDermott

may 2005 · Christian Audio · Narrado por David Heath

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Arguably, the church's greatest challenge in the next century will be the problem of the scandal of particularity. More than ever before, Christians will need to explain why they follow Jesus and not the Buddha or Confucius or Krishna or Muhammed. But if, while relating their faith to the faiths, Christians treat non-Christian religions as netherworlds of unmixed darkness, the church's message will be a scandal not of particularity but of arrogant obscurantism. // Recent evangelical introductions to the problem of other religions have built commendably on foundations laid by J. N. D. Anderson and Stephen Neill. Anderson and Neill opened up the "heathen" worlds to the evangelical West, showing that many non-Christians also seek salvation and have personal relationships with their gods. In the last decade Clark Pinnock and John Sanders have argued for an inclusivist understanding of salvation, and Harold Netland has shed new light on the question of truth in the religions. Yet no evangelicals have focused--as nonevangelicals Keith Ward, Diana Eck and Paul Knitter have done--on the revelatory value of truth in non-Christian religions. Anderson and Neill showed that there are limited convergences between Christian and non-Christian traditions, and Pinnock has argued that there might be truths Christians can learn from religious others. But as far as I know, no evangelicals have yet examined the religions in any sort of substantive way for what Christians can learn without sacrificing, as Knitter and John Hick do, the finality of Christ. // This book is the beginning of an evangelical theology of the religions that addresses not the question of salvation but the problem of truth and revelation, and takes seriously the normative claims of other traditions. It explores the biblical propositions that Jesus is the light that enlightens every person (Jn 1:9) and that God has not left Himself without a witness among non-Christian traditions (Acts 14:17). It argues that if Saint Augustine learned from Neo-Platonism to better understand the gospel, if Thomas Aquinas learned from Aristotle to better understand the Scriptures, and if John Calvin learned from Renaissance humanism, perhaps evangelicals may be able to learn from the Buddha--and other great religious thinkers and traditions--things that can help them more clearly understand God's revelation in Christ. It is an introductory word in a conversation that I hope will go much further among evangelicals. (Gerald McDermott, in the introduction to Can Evangelicals Learn from World Religions?)

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Gerald McDermott was born January 31, 1941 in Detroit, Michigan. He began studying art when he was admitted to a class at one of the nation's finest museums, the Detroit Institute of Arts, when he was just four years old. He continued pursuing his passion for art at Cass Tech, a public high school for the gifted. Upon graduation, he was awarded a National Scholastic scholarship to New York's Pratt Institute. He took a leave of absence during his junior year to become the first graphic designer for Channel 13, New York's educational television station, the year it went on the air. He also designed and directed his first animated film, The Stonecutter. He then toured Europe, visiting and exchanging ideas with filmmakers in England, France, and Yugoslavia. He returned to Pratt to finish his degree in 1964 and began producing and directing a series of animated films on folklore. It was then that he met Joseph Campbell, who served as the consultant on four of McDermott's films. McDermott then began to adapt his films into picture books. His first book, Anansi the Spider: A Tale from the Ashanti, was named a Caldecott Honor Book. His other books include Arrow to the Sun: A Tale from the Pueblo that won the 1975 Caldecott Medal, Raven: A Trickster Tale from the Pacific Northwest, another Caldecott Honor Book, and Musicians of the Sun. He died on December 26, 2012 at the age of 71.