[benz] theological meaning of the history of religions

The Theological Meaning of the History of Religions

Ernst Benz

The Journal of Religion, Vol. 41, No. 1. (Jan., 1961), pp. 1-16.

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THE JOURNAL OF RELIGION

Volume XLI JANUARY 1961 Number I

T H E THEOLOGICAL MEANING OF THE HISTORY OF RELIGIONS

IT IS becoming more and more ap-parent that a new theological un-derstanding of the history of re-

ligions is an urgent task for present- day Christian theology. Theology faces the challenge to create a new under-standing of the place of Christianity within the universal religious development of mankind, a new understanding based on the relation of the development of non-Christian religions to Heilsgeschichte. The urgency of this task arises from the changes in the position of Christianity itself in the world, as well as from the changes in position and conduct of non-Christians during and after the two world wars.

I. GENERAL RELIGIOUS SITUATION OF

MODERN WORLD

Some of the most important considerations for discerning the radical change in the general religious situation of the modern world include the following:

1. The Christian religion is the only one among the different world religions that has realized its claim of universal validity through a successful missionary extension to all parts of the globe. In the history of the religions of mankind this phenomenon is unique and quite unexpected.

2 . This global extension was not ac- complished by one single Christian church body. Missionary activity by members of the Roman Catholic as well as by members of the Reforma- tion churches and Free-church tradi- tion meant that the world-wide spread of Christianity came in the form of ecclesiastical pluralism.

3. The global spread of Christianity has been conducted primarily in such a way that Christiainity encountered the existing religions directly. Until the nineteenth century there were always spots on the globe where the non-Chris- tian religions could remain outside any contact with Christianity and the Chris- tian mission. The extraordinary rise of Christian missionary activity during the nineteenth century opened up these

* Dr. Ernst Benz is professor of church history and historical theology and director of ecumenical studies a t the University of Marburg in Germany. He was educated at the universities of Tiibingen, Berlin, and Rome and was on the faculty of the University of Halle-Wittenberg from 1932 to 1935. when he assumed his present position. He is a regular participant in the Eranos Lectures. His writings cover a broad range of subjects, including such titles as Ecclesia spiritualis, Enzanuel Sweden- borg, and Die Abendlandische Sendung der Bstlich- orthodoxen Kirche. Professor Benz is coeditor of the Zeitschvift fur Religions- und Geistesgeschichte.

The substance of this article was presented in the form of a lecture given a t the University of Chicago in the spring of 1960.

2 THE JOURNAL OF RELIGION

remaining areas in Asia, Africa, and Indonesia to the Christian mission. To- day Christianity is in direct contact with all living non-Christian religions on the surface of the earth.

4. The global spread of Christianity during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was completed in immediate connection with colonization by Euro- pean states and in association with the commercial and political power of the United States of America. Through this connection the Christian mission provided the pioneering activity of Western civilization in mission lands.

5. In the meantime the value of the close relation between the Christian world mission and the political and commercial expansion of the white man has been cast into doubt. The traditional colonial system of the last century is completely destroyed, and most Asiatic states have become self-suffi-cient. In all the former colonial areas the situation of the Christian mission has basically changed in that both political and commercial privileges are gone. The former mission churches have developed into self-supporting "established churches" and carry the responsibility of the church's work themselves without being directly de- pendent on the countries that first sent missionaries to them.

6. The indigenous membership, con- ducting the work of the "young churches," has an understanding other than that of foreign missionaries of the political, cultural, and social problems of their own lands-in which they, as Christians, are a small minority. As native citizens and Christians, they show forth an entirely different responsibility in regard to their non-Christian countrymen than was the case in the

situation in which the mission was valued more or less as the spiritual exponent of the controlling colonial power. The Christians of the "young churches" know clearly that they cannot ignore or basically condemn the non-Christian religions to which the majority of their countrymen belong. They realize that a new understanding concerning them is required.

7 . Not only has there been this global extension of Christianity and the change of the relation of Christianity and non-Christian religions brought about by indigenous control of the "young churches," but there is also the sudden renaissance of Asiatic "high religions" to consider. Hinduism, Bud- dhism, and Islamism are each trying to capture the leading role in the religious and spiritual education of various countries; and all Asiatic high religions, in their turn, have entered upon world-mission activity. For instance, through the Ramakrishna-Vivekananda Mis-sion, Hinduism has created numerous Vedanta centers in North America and Europe. Likewise, different schools of Buddhism, the southern Hinayana Buddhism of Burma and Ceylon and the Mahayana Buddhism of Japan, contribute to the Buddhist renaissance through world-wide mission activity.

8. However, this influence of the non-Christian religions is seen less in the form of a directly organized mission in Europe and America than in the exceedingly intensive indirect in-flux of Asiatic religious ideas and practices by way of European and Ameri- can literature, philosophy, and psy-chology. This is related to the general change of religious consciousness in all mankind, begun through the development of modern Religionswissenschaft.

3 THEOLOGICAL MEANING OF HISTORY OF RELIGIONS

Until the beginning of this century the knowledge of non-Christian high re-ligions remained, to a large extent, the privilege of a few specialists in com-parative religion and of orientalists who were able to read the texts of oriental religions in their original languages- Sanskrit, Pali, Tibetan, Ceylonese, Burmese, Thai, Chinese, and Japanese. Today, after tremendous progress in studies in the field of comparative history of religions, the texts containing doctrine, liturgy, and the practical piety of the non-Christian religions are available in all Western languages in cheap popular editions-mostly in paper-backs. We are living in a second period of religious enlightenment on the broadest level, so that people are becoming more and more conscious of the plurality of coexisting world religions.

9. Another change in the interreligious encounter is brought about by the fact that the leading teachers of the different non-Christian religions are trained in the methods of historical criticism, developed by the Western comparative history of religions. Think- ers of Buddhism and Hinduism are beginning to adopt our own critical methods in the study of Christian the-ology, Christian ethics, and Christian civilization. Scholars like Radhakrish- nan and Suzuki bring the whole interreligious discussion to a completely new level, introducing a style of discussion on the level of equality. Today thousands of young Buddhist students and priests in the Buddhist universities of southern Asia and Japan are getting academic training in the methods of the religious sciences and of the comparative study of religions.

10. Because of the increased activity of non-Christian religions. the encsun-

ter between Christianity and non-Christian religions today is not limited to the duties of Christian missionaries sent out into foreign countries in Asia and Africa and the islands of Indo-nesia, it is a problem oi our daily life here in America and Europe. This encounter between global Christianity and the stimulated activity of non-Christian religions is not limited to one sphere of human activity, such as theology or philosophy, but penetrates all fields of human life and society. I t is no longer a noble privilege and the de- light of some experts in the comparative history of religions; it concerns the center of the great spiritual, social, and cultural revolution of our time; it is the daily experience of every educated individual who is aware of the interreligious encounter and for whom the question spontaneously arises : What does it mean to find that not only do so many other religions exist to-gether with Christianity but that they also energetically make the claim to truth?

11. PAST CHRISTIAN THEOLOGICAL

VIEWS O F INTERRELIGIOUS

ENCOUNTER

These considerations oblige us as Christian theologians to raise several interrelated questions. How are we to understand the coexistence of these different world religions and their com-petition all over the world? How, as Christians, are we to understand this plurality as it is related to the Chris- tian concept of God, man, and soteriology? One of the major difficulties in answering these questions results from the fact that Christian theology, with very few exceptions, never considered them to be vital. Generally, Christians

4 THE JOCRKAL OF RELIGION

of today are quite satisfied to repeat traditional answers without being aware that these traditional answers do not cover the modern situation at all. Dur- ing my stay in India, southern Asia, and Japan (1957-58), I was quite em- barrassed to discover how few of the ministers and teachers in the Christian missions were conscious of the general change in the religious situation and how much they insisted on repeating, under circumstances for which they were no longer adequate a t all, the classical, apologetic arguments. As a church history scholar, I began to med- itate about the historical background of this traditional Christian attitude toward non-Christian religions. Here I want to indicate in a condensed way some results of this study, as far as they are connected with our problem.

PRIRIITIVE CHRISTIAN CHURCH

The attitude of the primitive church was fundamentally influenced by the Jewish reaction against the heathen religions with which Jews came into contact. In its own view of non-Christian religions in its environment, the church was inspired by the Old ~ e s t a m e n t concept that considered the gods of pagans and heathens as idols, or as "nothings," and later as demons-understanding them somehow as the sa- tanic fiends over against the true God. This true God was understood and worshiped as the God who liberated his chosen children from the tyranny of the demons and from the slavery of the idols by teaching them true wor-ship and the true knowledge of wisdom and righteousness. This attitude, established in the primitive Christian church, was strengthened by the anticipation of the imminent end of the world, in

which the conclusion of the history of salvation was seen as a final battle between Christ and his church, on the one hand, and the ungodly powers, do- minions, and thrones, on the other.

APOLOGETIC TASK I N SECOND AND

THIRD CENTURIES

When Christians with higher education were obliged to defend the Chris- tian religion against criticism from non- Christian philosophers and scholars who defended the older religions and systems of religious philosophy, they discovered that it was impossible to adopt the scheme of a general con-demnation of the religious and spiritual traditions of the Greco-Roman pre-Christian world. Instead of understanding non-Christian religious thought as mere idolatry and error, the Christian apologists adopted a more positive eval- uation and even granted a real perception of truth to Greek religious philosophy. At the basis of this conception were the arguments of late Hellenistic Jewish thought which claimed a direct influence for Greek religious philosophy through the "philosophy" of Moses and the prophets.

Christian apologists had further fruitful ideas as they developed a positive theological approach to the pre- Christian history of pagan religion and philosophy. They expressed this through the concept of the divine Logos, indi- cating a "natural revelation" outside the inner progress of the Heilsgeschichte found in the Old and New Testaments. The Logos, which became man in Christ, was expressed not only in the special history of salvation, made known through Moses, the patriarchs, and the prophets but also in a "sem-inal" and flickering understanding, as manifested by the philosophers, legisla-


tors, and religious teachers of India, Persia, Egypt, and Greece. I t was the logos spermaticos who worked throughout the whole pre-Christian history of mankind, preparing even the non-christians for the coming manifestation of the divine Logos in his fulness and per- fectness in human shape in the person of Jesus Christ.

Both Clement of Alexandria and Origen included the philosophy of the Indians-the Brahmins as well as the Buddhists-the philosophy of the pu- pils of Zoroaster, and that of the teachers of the wisdom in Egypt in their concept of the progressive revelation and manifestation of the living Logos, preparing mankind for his coming in the fulness of time. In relating the truth of the religious and philosophical systems of the heathen world directly to the divine Logos as the teacher, logos paidogogos, Clement finally removed the basic difference between the character of revelation in the Old Testa- ment and in the history of religions outside Judaism. In his view, the history of salvation, soteriology, was not separated from the general history of mankind; Heilsgeschichte was not a disconnected improvisation inserted in- to universal history but, rather, in-cluded and covered the whole human development. Only from this stand-point is it possible to understand Au- gustine, who once asserted in regard to the whole history of man that Chris- tianity is as old as the world-for the first time at the birth of Christ it took the name of Christianity.

While the apologists were the first Christian theologians to relate the history of salvation to universal human history, this was consciously only a partial attempt inasmuch as it assumed

the denunciation of polytheistic, indigenous religions that grew out of early religious forms. Therefore it did not confront the claim to validity in the primitive, indigenous beliefs. Moreover, Hellenistic religious philosophy, in the guise of Neo-Platonism and the different kinds of gnostic theosophy, was basically the only "high" religion with which the early church had to deal. The idea of a "universal" revelation was usable only insofar as the correctness in basic dogmatic assertions in Christian belief was compatible with those systems whose assertions could be regarded as crude or glimmering expressions of God's revelation made known completely in Christ. The first non-Christian world religion opposing Christianity in an institutional form was Manichaeism. While Manichaeism is now thought to have had its sources just as much in Buddhism and Zoroastrianism as in Christianity, Christian apologists con-sidered Manichaeism a Christian here- sy. They made this judgment primarily on the ground that Mani in his let- ters designated himself as the "Apostle of Jesus Christ" and perceived himself as the fulfiller of the Johannine promise about the coming "Comforter."

Since the fourth century there has been no further elaboration of the Logos concept for relating Christianity to the later religious development of mankind. Why did the church return to a merely negative understanding of the history of religions? This question has never been studied in detail; and I can present here only my own pre- liminary answer. I think that the main reason is the historical fact that Islam was the only significant "high" religion with which Christianity came into contact for more than a thousand years


and that this contact was seen in terms of a life-or-death struggle on its eastern and western geographical frontiers. The merely negative understanding of non-Christian religions was definitely fixed as a result of using the encounter with Islam as the model and prototype of other religious encounters. Indeed, we can observe that all the methods of apology and mission which were de-veloped during the struggle with Islam were transferred without fundamental change to the encounter with non-Christians in later centuries.

THEOLOGICAL JUDGMENT CONCERNING ISLAM

The Logos theology, which could relate Christian dogma to other religious assertions in a positive manner, could no longer be used in the new situation formed by the entrance of Islam as a fulfilment and self-proclaimed crown of all former revelations. Islam was a religion which sought to reform and at the same time annul the Old and New Testament revelations. Therefore the Christian church interpreted the ap-pearance of Islam eschatologically. Islam was regarded as the fulfilment of the promise concerning the "latter days" of the coming of the "false prophet7' (Rev. 19:20). As Islam ex-panded its rule and mission through holy wars, overrunning the primitive Christian mission territory of the Near East and northern Africa, it was un-derstood through a strict historical ex- egesis of the Johannine apocalypse as the fulfilment of all those plagues, af - flictions, and persecutions which were prophesied for the "latter days."

Between the seventh and sixteenth centuries Western Christianity was in- closed on three sides by Islam. Its frontiers were continually under new threats and pressures not only from

the east but also from the south and west. When the control of the Moors was finally broken in Spain at the end of the sixteenth century, the Turks remained the great military threat to the kingdom in the west. The Reformation and European religious wars took place in the shadow of the invasion of the Hapsburg homeland by the Turkish sultan. The fact that Christianity's major encounter with a strange religion for a span of a thousand years was one whose mission was carried on in the form of military and political aggres- sion is very important; for it helped to shape a certain basic type of practical encounter between the Christian church and other religions. This basic type is summed up in the term "crusade."

I t is a huge paradox that the great preacher of the mystical love of God, the "sweet doctor7' Bernard of Clair-vaux, was the creator of the crusade ideology. His message to European knighthood was that the unbeliever who willingly closed himself to the procla- mation of the Christian message had forfeited his right to life. This crusade theology has entered, so to speak, into the collective subconscious of Chris-tianity. How near it lay to the surface of public opinion at the end of the first millennium is shown by the fact that the preaching of the crusades was the signal for the first great Jewish perse- cution in numerous German towns all over the Rhineland: the crusader began his mission practices at home.

The political injustices which were justified by the crusade ideology established the deep resentment which has operated so explosively until our day in the area from the Oder to the Vistula rivers. The alternatives given by the crusade ideology were either the un-conditional submission of non-Christian


peoples to Christian rule (which meant granting political sovereignty to Chris- tian lords) or physical annihilation. In the same way, a large measure of that poignant alienation between the Greek and the Russian church, on the one hand, and the Roman church, on the other, goes back to the fact that the crusades of the Roman west were di-rected not only against Islam but also against the church of Byzantium. Moreover, the crusades in northeast Europe, directed from Sweden and the Baltic provinces, were launched not only against the heathen tribes but just as much against the western Russian orthodox princedoms.

Although the Christian armies fought four centuries against the Moslems in Spain, the theologians of that time were without knowledge of the Koran. The first Latin translation of the Koran was prepared by Petrus Venerabilis, Abbot of Cluny, in 1141, fifty years after Pope Urban I1 proclaimed the first crusade and five hundred years after the definitive edition of the Koran; however, Bernard of Clairvaux opposed very bitterly this Latin translation. The next publication of the same Latin version of the Koran came out in 1542143, four hundred years later; but the editor had many troubles, stemming from the side of the Protestant authorities in Basel. The magistrate of Basel, an- ticipating the Barthian idea that Chris- tianity is no religion but the crisis of all religions, put the editor and the printer into jail; and only a letter of recommendation from the hands of Luther and Melanchthon could save both from further persecutions. The book was finally printed not in Base1 but in the more liberal Zurich. After another hundred years of silence, in 1612, a new Latin version of the Koran

was edited by Ludovico Maracci in Rome, together with a Roman Catholic refutation of the doctrines of Mo-hammed. Comparing these dates with the fact that today one finds editions of the Koran in English in the drug- stores, we realize fully the change in the times.

The political crusade idea did not, however, remain uncontradicted in the Middle Ages. For instance, a significant champion of the opposition to the use of physical force to destroy unbelievers and heretics was Francis of Assisi. While his criticism of the crusades was not expressed as a new theory of mission, it was practically demonstrated as such in that he observed a kind of pacifism through which he wanted to show how the true crusade of a real disciple of Christ should appear and, on the contrary, how perverse the crusades were in the contemporary form of destructive military war. However, the crisis in crusade theology was af-fected by the blow of the sword itself. In 1453 Constantinople fell into the hands of the Turks, and the "holy war" threatened the eastern borders of the west. This experience led at least one of the spiritual leaders to try to place the encounter and discussion between religions on a new basis.

CRISIS OF CRUSADE THEOLOGY-

NICHOLAS OF CUSA

The news of the fall of Constanti-nople moved Nicholas of Cusa so deeply that it became the direct occasion for the composition of his dialogue, De pace fidei, on the harmony of faith. Here is recorded, in a fictional manner, a vision in which God declares that, despite varying rites, all pious worship is worship of the one God. In fact it is suggested that the differences in the


forms of worship contribute to the ele- vation of piety. The varying forms of religion are elements in the harmony of the one and only religion. From the catastrophe of war a new understanding of the relationship between reli-gions resulted. Here it was acknowl-edged that the other religions are also concerned with the one living God and that the common aim of worship is of necessity realized differently in varying peoples and times. I t is even ac-knowledged that God himself wants and has encouraged this difference inasmuch as he has sent different prophets, teachers, and law-givers to the different peoples and in this way has fur- thered the origination of different rites and cults. Nevertheless, this way of thinking did not lead to a relativism which regarded the different religions only as the historical or popular varie- ties of the same essence of religion. Rather, religious speech demonstrates how the elements of other religions con- verge in the Christian religion and how true love of God and knowledge of divine truth find perfect expression in the Christian revelation. Thus in De face fidei a new consciousness comes to expression, reshaping the forms of encounter and discussion between rival world religions.

RECOLLECTION OF CRUSADE THEOLOGY I N CATH-

OLIC WORLD MISSION OF SIXTEENTH

AND SEVENTEENTH CENTURIES

The convictions of Nicholas of Cusa did not penetrate the attitude of the times to a large extent, and the crusade ideology remained the model for the new mission task which emerged from the opening of America and Asia by Spain and Portugal, respectively. I t is not an insignificant fact that the discovery of the New World by Columbus

in 1492 happened in the same year in which Granada, the last bulwark of an independent Moslem kingdom on Span- ish soil, fell. The method of the Spanish mission on American soil was the same as that developed in Spain through a thousand years of strife with the Mos- lems. The crusades, transferred to American soil, extinguished the reli-gions of the Indian nations and king- doms and destroyed their temples and sacred books in the same way that Islam had been extinguished and the mosques destroyed in Spain.

The first missionary intrusted with the task of teaching the Gospel to the Indians was a monk from Montserrat, the famous sanctuary with the Black Madonna, which from the eighth century on had been the spiritual center of the reconquista. There, knights of all European countries used to stay for a whole night before joining the battle camps, standing before the image of the Virgin, hanging their weapons on the fence of the altar, dedicating them-selves and their arms to the holy war against the Moslems, and, after a night of meditation, repentance, and a gen-eral confession of sins, receiving the sacrament at the morning mass.

The same ('crusade method" was used by the Portuguese in colonies under their direct control on Asian soil. For example, in Goa all Hindu and Buddhist temples were completely de- molished so that no archeological mon- ument would recall the ancient cults.

Ignatius of Loyola, the former offi- cer, who considered himself conse-crated as a knight of the Madonna and founded a spiritual military order for the conversion of unbelievers and heretics, is himself the most impressive symbol of that direct continuity of the crusade mentality of the Middle Ages


that flowed for a century of the modern period through him and his order. I t was at the basis of the Jesuit under-standing of Buddhism when their first missionaries arrived in China and Ja- pan and were confronted with the astonishing similarities between the Ro- man Catholic and Buddhist liturgies and forms of monastic life. The Jesuits were convinced at the beginning that Buddhism was a counterenterprise of the devil in the Far East against Chris- tianity, trying to stop the spread of the Christian Gospel by establishing an anti-Christian demonic church under the cover of liturgical and institutional forms like those of the Roman Catholic church.

Similar, merely negative concepts are found also among the early Prot- estant missionary enterprises in India at the beginning of the eighteenth century. We see this in the case of one of the missionaries, Bartholomaeus Ziegen- balg, who--perhaps influenced by some concepts of the Christian mission and its relation to non-Christian religions, as expressed by Leibniz in his book about China-studied the original texts, liturgical life, and religious ethics of the different religions in south India. He sent the manuscripts to August Her- mann Francke, his theological teacher at the University of Halle, asking him to publish them; but Francke, the head of German pietism, answered him saying that it was not the task of a Chris- tian missionary "to waste his time with studying pagan nonsense"; his only task was to make the pagans Christian.

WORLD RELIGIONS I N ENLIGHTENMENT THEOLOGY

AND I N HISTORICAL THEOLOGY O F

GERMAN IDEALISM

The Enlightenment philosophy was the first to spread the conception of a

plurality of high religions throughout the consciousness of the cultured people of Europe. I t pointed to the con-spicuous similarities between non-Christian high religions and Christian- ity in the areas of ethics, teaching, and divine worship. For the first time there was a conscious promotion of tolerance in regard to followers of non-Christian religions and an interest in the comparative study of religious life. Before a particular science of comparative history of religions was established, a new literature of critical conlparisons of re-ligions became popular. A favorite mo- tif of the criticism of religions and cul- ture among authors of the Enlighten- ment was to portray the particular religious, political, and social relation- ships found in the west, reflected by a fictitious non-Christian Asian visitor in a European capital. This naturally included the contrast between the apparent distortions in the visible character- istics of Christianity as compared to the spotless, ideal picture of one of the newly discovered Asiatic religions.

Criticism of the west's claim to absolute religious truth by authors of the Enlightenment resulted in making particular expressions of piety relative in value. This idea found prominence in the religious philosophy of German idealism. This understanding consid-ered the history of mankind as a whole, both in terms of causation and in terms of religious development. Here the history of salvation became newly interpreted as the history of the self-realization of the absolute religion. All religion is truth from God, corresponding to the general steps of spiritual becoming; but also there must be a highest and final step, which as such, shows through the fulfilment of the develop- ing law, lying in the notion of religion.


With this understanding the confused reality of the whole history of religions became transparent, the apparent chaos was changed into a "wonderland" of lucid necessity. Here the idea of the absoluteness of Christianity was re-tained; however, it did not stand over against the remaining religions in the sense of negation but in the sense of the crowning of a historical, develop- mental process. On this spiritual foun- dation the great discovery and investi- gation of non-Christian religions were established. Nevertheless, while it was realized in the guiding spirit of German classicism and romanticism, it has not been demonstrably realized in the mission practice of the church.

111. CONSIDERATIONS FOR A TWEN-

TIETH-CENTURY THEOLOGICAL

UNDERSTANDING

CONTEMPORARY LOKG-TERM VIEW OF HISTORY

When considering the traditional predominance of a fixed exclusive claim of absoluteness for Christian truth with a critical eye today, one discovers that it is impossible indeed to return to the old Logos theology and to repristinate the attitude of the apologists of the third century toward non-Christian re-ligions and philosophical concepts. Cer- tainly its main idea always keeps its value: namely, the idea that history of religions is related directly to the history of salvation or, as one can say, to church history in a positive sense, that the historical development of the religious consciousness cannot be excluded from the soteriological view of history; but this main idea has to be brought into relation with our modern historical consciousness and our modern state of knowledge of the history of mankind with respect to two vital points of view.

1. At first, in our attempt to elabo- rate a Christian understanding of history of religions, we cannot exclude the picture of the historical development of mankind given by modern studies of primitive history, prehistory, and the early history of mankind. The traditional Christian view of history of salvation was based on the Old Testamen- tarian chronology. This chronology presupposes that the whole history of mankind with its different epochs will be fulfilled within a relatively short period. According to the calendar of the Byzantine church, Christ was born in the year 5509, after the creation of the world. In Hebrew chronology, accepted by the ancient church, the date of the creation of the world was still nearer to the fulness of time: it happened in the year 3761 before Christ.

Into this image of the history of mankind, based on such a short-time chronology, the theologians of the old church introduced a scheme of history of salvation which had its backbone in the history of the Jewish people, coming to its climax in the incarnation of the divine Logos in Jesus Christ and which expected the second coming of Christ in the near future, the epochs before and after the decisive term of the incarnation being connected with each other in the scheme of promise and fulfilment.

Already in Hebrew theology, still more in Christian theology, the problem had arisen whether the universal history of mankind in the epoch before the election of the Jewish people, the proper bearer of the divine promises, could be understood as history of salvation and could be included in the special scheme of soteriology. We find the answer to this problem expressed in the idea of a first covenant of God with

11 THEOLOGICAL MEANING (IF HISTORY OF RELIGIONS

Noah, the father of the new humanity surviving the great flood. In this concept of God's covenant with Noah, Jewish theology-in spite of all con-sciousness of a special election and a special covenant of God with the Jew- ish people in Abraham-maintained the idea of the universality of salva-tion, including the religious development of mankind before the time of the special covenant. The idea of the covenant of God with Noah preserved the universal understanding of soteriology: history of salvation being basically identical with the history of mankind and no single period of the development of mankind excluded from God's love.

The Christian church adopted this Old Testament scheme; and the apologists of the second and third centuries tried to understand the Christian church as the fulfilment of the soteriological development described in the Old Testament and to maintain a universal Christian understanding of history of salvation as comprehending the whole of mankind and including all periods and generations of its history. But this universal concept was preserved by the theologians in the later Christian centuries in its traditional pattern and never adapted to the general development of the historical consciousness.

The first crisis became evident after the discovery of America. Where did these people and nations and religions on the American continent come from? The Christian theologians of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries gave two different answers: Some tried to maintain the traditional biblical scheme of history and chronology and understood the inhabitants of America as the descendants of the lost ten tribes of Is- rael, thus bringing the inhabitants of

the New World into a direct relation to the chosen people of the Old World. This attempt was theologically quite proper, but it was difficult to prove the assertion historically, and only the Mormons finally accepted the theory as truth.

The other way was to presuppose the existence of human generations before Adam; and so some of the theologians of the seventeenth century developed the theory of the so-called preadam- ites, a mankind before Adam. This theory was finally anathematized by the church, and I think this was proper, too. The preadamite theory limited the history of salvation to a single late group of mankind only and divided mankind into two parts-one part living outside God's design; the other living under the special privilege of God's endeavor. This meant to limit God himself, reducing his ruling power to Jews and Christians only.

In the meantime, our knowledge of primitive history and prehistory and early history of mankind has been deepened. The discoveries of modern anthropology and prehistory represent the most important contribution to our modern historical consciousness and are the beginning of a revolution in our whole concept of man and history. I t is no longer possible to deny that the development of mankind runs through hundreds of thousands of years before humanity enters the period of the "modern" cultures that we call "historical" cultures from a very inciden- tally chosen moment of the fourth pre- Christian millennium on.

I think it is a truly theological task to work out a new relation between this modern concept of historical and pre- historical development of mankind and Christian soteriology. We can no longer


ignore, as Christian theologians, the new historical and anthropological out- look and consciousness created by the new discoveries of anthropology and prehistory. I t is very typical that a Christian anthropologist, Teilhard de Jardin, and not a scholar of Christian dogmatics, should take the first steps in that direction.

If God is really the Lord of nature and the Lord of history, the development of early mankind cannot be excluded from the whole picture of so-teriology. Or let me say it more person- ally: I cannot accept a God who deliv- ers thousands of generations of man-kind to idolatry, cannibalism, to a trog- lodytic way of life, dominated by magic rites in the darkness of caves, and who, then, after some hundreds of thou-sands, or perhaps millions, of years makes a kind of violent step-in into lost mankind by the very late improvisation of certain isolated soteriological events whose effect is only to the profit of very few people, chosen from the general massa perditionis which is definitely delivered as beforehand to death, sin, and corruption. This may be the doctrine of Marcion, the doctrine of the Unknown God, the Foreign God, breaking in into the darkness of lost mankind and saving some few of them; but it has nothing to do with the God of the New Testament and with Christ, who did not die for the church but for mankind.

I t seems to me to be a task of emi- nent theological significance to bring the modern understanding of the development of man and mankind, of the development of religious consciousness, throughout all the different steps of early primitive religions, into a mean- ingful relation with our concept of so-teriology. If God is truly the creator of man, if man is really created in the im-

age of God, if Christ is truly the second Adam, in which the image of the original Adam is restored and trans-formed, this has to be referred to all the different steps in the development of mankind and to all the different lev- els in the unfolding of the religious consciousness of mankind; and we cannot say that this period, this state of mind, this people, has nothing to do with Christ-that they do not belong to the image of God. Either man bears the promises of God from the very first moment of human history on-and this promise comprehends the whole of its history, giving the history of mankind the soteriological brand from the first moment-or let us drop the whole concept of salvation and soteriology.

2. The second problem is connected with the relation between history of religions and soteriology after Christ, post Christum. Here also we have to develop new concepts, the traditional Logos theology being unfit and unprac- ticable with respect to our modern knowledge of history of religions and to the present situation of the Chris- tian church.

The traditional Logos theology presupposes that the whole history of pre- Christian mankind, during which the divine Logos manifested himself in different degrees to the prophets of the Old Testament as well as to the philosophers and legislators of India, Persia, Greece, came to its fulness in Jesus Christ. This means that history of religions was fulfilled in Christ and came to its end in Christ-was integrated in Christ and in the Christian church; and it is the main endeavor of the apologists to prove that all that was good and true in pre-Christian mankind came now to its fulness in the Chris- tian church.

This attitude was quite understand-


able among people who did not reckon with long periods of historical development after Christ but lived in the ex- pectation of the imminent coming of Christ and of the events of the "latter days." But we are confronted today with the fact that the history of reli-gions goes on also after Christ and goes on in a very surprising and creative way. Unfortunately, Christian theology until today denies the crucial fact that history of religions goes on even post Christum. Christian theologians for some centuries tried to explain the further development of new religions by interpreting them in the traditional Christian categories, either as Christian heresies-as they understood Mani-chaeism, ignoring its Buddhist and Zoroastrian background-or as a Chris- tian apostasy, as they understood Islam. But history of religions went on much further.

The fact that Christian theology denies any subsequent development in the history of religions after Christ, seeing in Jesus Christ the fulfilment and end of the earlier history of religions, today still influences that con-cept of history of religions which presupposes fixed patterns of more or less established religions; and our first attempt is always to fit new religious phenomena into the framework of such fixed religious patterns: Hinduism, Buddhism, etc. So we forget that the history of religions is a living move-ment, a stream of free development, a growing process that never keeps itself in fixed patterns and schemes but always transcends the framework of its established historical forms, producing new expressions and manifestations of life, of worship, of symbols, of social attitudes, of customs.

Thinking in traditional classical patterns, we also forget to see the correla-

tions, not only the correlations among religions of the same epoch, but also the correlations among religions in different historical epochs. We consider the classical religions of Greece and Rome as fixed, closed, established patterns, and so we are blind to the discovery that the same forms of religious consciousness are still alive throughout the whole world, e.g., in Japanese Shin- toism in its adaptations to modern life. We also understand Buddhism with the eye of the scholar, looking on the classical forms of Buddhism in the fourth or third centuries before Christ or after Christ; and we forget that there is a tremendous living, creative develop-ment in Buddhism today, breaking through most of the original patterns, combining itself with new religious concepts-including and digesting older religions and changing them into itself, producing new forms of life and of thought and creating new concepts and models of society.

Thinking in fixed religious patterns, we neglect also the mutual influence and penetration of living religions. Thus Islam, deeply influenced itself by Nestorian and Syrian Christianity, created on Indian soil, meeting Hinduism, new religious ways of life and of thinking, and sometimes these new schemes acquired the appearance of completely new religions-as in the case of the Sikh religion. Also of special interest is the influence of Christianity on the different modern types of Hinduism, Bud- dhism, and Islamism. I cannot go into details. I will mention only the phenomenon itself, which should be studied more intensively.

Modern Christian theology should not persist in ignoring the fact that history of religions continues after Christ and in addition to the history of the Christian church. We should begin to


study what it means for a Christian and for a Christian concept of soteriology, that the history of the Christian church goes on in the midst of and together with a general development of history of religions. If Christians cannot explain this fact, they a t least should be moved by it to consider that evidently their own claim to represent the absolute religion in an exclusive sense does not yet correspond to the historical reality of the Christian churches, at least in the sense that the church has not yet reached the stand- ard of full catholicity and universality.

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The concern for a new theological understanding of the relationship between God's work in Christ and the non-Christian religions is generated not only from the work of science but also from the study of the New Testament. In the New Testament itself there are indications that can lead to a new understanding. A very significant starting point is expressed in the missionary preaching of Paul to the people of Lystra as recorded by the author of the Acts of the Apostles. (Acts 14:15-17). Here Paul is not declaring that the pre- Christian religions manifest the movement of man toward God and claiming that Christianity is the movement of God toward mankind. On the contrary, he stresses the continuity of the self- manifestation of a living God who has made heaven and earth and the sea and everything which is therein, who through the chain of past generations of man has not left himself without witness. Paul expressly relates his own present time to that in which the listen- ers are denoted as the receivers of the blessings of the self-manifestation of

God. The movement of men toward God is not the concern of this dis-course; rather, it is expressly about the continual self-direction of God toward mankind.

Here Paul brings previous human and religious development into a positive relationship with the divine will inasmuch as he says concerning God: He permitted all people in past times to walk in their own ways. Now the use of the concept "permit"-eiasen-is quite clear in the Acts of the Apostles. Nowhere in the Acts by Luke can the word "permit" be understood in the sense of a weak looking-on or a waiting toleration regarding the free activity of another. Above all, "permit" is allied with a positive activity of will concerning permission. If it says here that the living God permitted the people in past generations to go their own way, this does not mean that he could not have stopped them from going their own way but that they took this way with his express permission. Also, the previous historical development of the people lay, according to these words, not outside the divine plan of salvation. So the words of Paul give a glimpse of the inner continuity of the Jewish-Christian development with the pre-Christian history of man and place the whole history of mankind under the rubric of a self-manifestation of him who is the living God, both the maker of the uni- verse and Lord of the history of salvation.

There are also various words of the Lord which clearly delineate the inner connection between the history of religions and the history of salvation. At the conclusion of a discourse whose theme is: "By their fruits you will know them," Jesus says, '(Not every one who says to me, 'Lord, Lord,' shall


enter the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the will of my Father who is in heaven'' (Matt. 7:21). The judgment of Jesus (Matt. 7:22) regarding the "Lord, Lord" speaker indicates that those who are either dogmatically "secure" or even charismatically sure of their righteousness do not necessar- ily manifest the activity of God in the Lord's eyes. The surprise ending to the pronouncement against the "Lord, Lord" speaker is in the words of the Lord, who says that at his return there will also be some men included in God's kingdom who had not heard of him, who did not know his name-that heathen and non-Christians had ful-filled the command of love.

The most powerful of these words is in Matt. 2 5 :31 and following. On the day of judgment the Son of Man will divide the '(sheep" from the "goats." On both sides there will be some who knew and some who did not know Je- sus. The crucial element in the judgment will be the person's deeds to fellow men. Many heathen who did not know Christ at all are chosen for membership in God's kingdom. The choice is not limited to a particular commu-nity of Christians or to an epoch which had heard and known of him; rather, the choice concerns all people and cov- ers all times.

Likewise in Luke 13:29 there is a promise that a t the coming of God's kingdom many men will be sent away who are held to be correct disciples of Jesus. "And men will come from east and west, and from north and south, and sit at table in the Kingdom of God." This promise does not denote members of the Christian church, but heathen who, after all, had not known Christ and yet were called to the King- dom of God. Clearly, Jesus is saying

the opposite to what the members of the community of God's people ex-pected to hear.

Above all, here the astonishing fact of the essence of Christianity is settled. The crucial element for the Son of Man lies not in the theological prestige re-sulting from an absolute claim to God's manifestation; it is the fulfilment of the commandment of love in regard to the least human brother, which includes those outside Christianity. The history of salvation is realized not only in the confines of the organized churches but also in the total scope of the history of religions. The history of salvation is the history of humanity.

While there are some theologians who are ready to grant, in somewhat the same sense as the apologists, that in the human generations before Christ a praeparatio evangelica was permitted to exist, these same theologians refuse to acknowledge that it is permissible to speak of such beginnings of the knowledge of Christian truth and salvation outside the Christian church in the area of non-Christian religions after the coming of Christ. Such an attitude in no way complies with the intention of the recorded words of the Lord found in Matthew and Luke's Gospels. We must take into consideration that these promises were not based on long- term church history, in our sense to-day, and that there was the anticipation of a speedy return of Christ. Yet these Gospels were written when an organized Christian community existed, together with the followers of the non- Christian religions. Those chosen for the Kingdom of God at the judgment are from the Christian community and from the more extensive regions of the heathen world. The situation in which there is hidden Christianity in the


scope of the heathen world, that one's membership in the Kingdom of God is only discovered at the final judgment, continues also in the time after Christ and after the historical entrance of the church into the world. Thus there is a primary positive relationship between Christianity and non-Christian religions -not only in the time before Christ but also in the time after Christ.

The unique commentary on this fre- quent judgment regarding love as the basis for membership in the kingdom is the hymn of the Apostle Paul concerning agape in I Corinthians. Without love, all dogmatics, faith, and ethical acts are nothing. The idea of agape was directed toward a consideration which was important for the original Chris- tian community and for those who were concerned to define formal orthodoxy. The designation of Jesus as God was made dogmatically correct, and this perception was raised to a high level as the absolute truth. This understanding penetrated throughout the history of the Christian church and was used over against the non-Christian religions. I t led to a very particular, and apparently logical, conclusion. The argument was: the Christian religion which is founded on the self-revelation of God in the Lord Jesus Christ alone has the truth and even the entire truth. From this it follows that all other religions are false and have no meaning at all for the knowledge of truth; in following Christ, one need know nothing about them; for missionaries, who go out to do battle with the other religions, it is enough to know the weak points of the non-Christian religions in order to bol- ster apologetics. This naive logic led to the widespread attitude that a Chris-tian was entitled to ignore the non-Christian religions insofar as he was not authorized to remove them. As we

have mentioned before, the words of Jesus stress that the members of the Kingdom of God are chosen according to a realization of love toward fellow men rather than in elevating the dedi- cation to an absolute claim to truth.

Revision of the traditional fixed patterns of soteriology and history of re-ligions seems to be more and more un- avoidable, especially in such countries where we have to do with a living evo- lution of new religions, as in Japan and also in central Africa. In Japan the problem becomes very crucial for the Christian churches because the Chris- tian mission, in spite of all its efforts, including educational and financial en- deavors, has not penetrated the Japa- ese people and has not surpassed the first half-million in membership among a population of ninety millions. At the same time, new religions have grown up beside the Christian churches and in spite of the efforts of the Christian mission-religions with an increasing number of believers, some of the great- er of them comprehending more than two or three million members. Chris- tian theologians try again to ignore the true meaning of this development, call- ing it "syncretism"; but this is a meaningless word, meaningless even in its theological sense because these new religions are not only abstract doctrines but living centers of new communities and of new cities built on the base of new religious principles of social life; and they are no more syncretistic than Christianity itself is a syncretism of Jewish and Hellenistic elements.

A true Christian concept of soteriology should no longer ignore the changing understanding of history of reli-gions both before and after Christ and should bring history of mankind, so-teriology, and history of religions into an inner theological relation.

[benz] theological meaning of the history of religions

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