Any discussion of religious diversity and salvation (see last post) ultimately has to come to terms with what salvation means. It’s pointless to debate how people “get saved” if we don’t know what people are supposed to be saved from (or for).

Following custom, I’ll distinguish between exclusivist, inclusivist, and pluralist views on religious diversity:

Exclusivist: There is one correct religion, and in order to be saved, one must adhere to it.

Inclusivist: There is one correct religion, but adherents to all religions can potentially be saved.

Pluralist: There is no one correct religion; all religions (or sometimes all “higher” religions) are paths which can lead to salvation.

(There is also a variation of pluralism which holds that “salvation” actually means different things in different religions, so they aren’t actually competing in providing the true path to salvation, but I’m going to ignore this option for the purposes of this post. In part that’s because I think it ultimately reduces to one of the other three options.)

In Christian terms then, both the exclusivist and inclusivist hold that God in Jesus has accomplished something definitive for our salvation, where “salvation” means something like deliverance from sin and its consequences and communion with God which comes to ultimate fruition in the Beatific Vision along with the saints in heaven. How Jesus accomplishes this is, of course, a matter of great debate in the history of Christendom. But I think all traditional theories of the Atonement agree that there is an objective change in the situation of humans vis-a-vis God due to the life, passion, and resurrection of Jesus. The difference between the exclusivist and the inclusivist, then, is that the former holds that one must come into some conscious relationship with this event (in this present life) in order to be saved, whereas the inclusivist (or one kind of inclusivist) believes that it’s not necessary to be consciously aware of the work of Christ to benefit from it. As C.S. Lewis put it, to say that only Jesus saves doesn’t necessarily entail that only those who know him are saved by him.

Contrast this with the view that says that Jesus simply reveals the nature of God, but doesn’t necessarily bring about some new state of affairs in the divine-human relationship. The God revealed by Jesus is what God has always been like: merciful, just, compassionate, etc., and the problem is that humans don’t sufficiently realize this. But, at least in theory, they could come to the same knowledge by routes other than the life and teachings of Jesus. Hindus, Buddhists, Muslims, etc. can come to a correct view on the benevolent nature of Ultimate Reality without believing in, or even being aware of Jesus. Salvation is the realization of the truth about the Divine along with the corresponding changes in one’s life from being self-centered to being “reality-centered” as the pluralist theologian John Hick likes to put it.

This view can be given either an inclusivist or pluralist spin. An inclusivist can hold that the divine nature is best, or most clearly revealed, in Jesus while still holding that other religions can contain saving knowledge of the divine. The pluralist, meanwhile, can say that this knowledge is (at least potentially) equally present in all faiths, and whether any particular person finds that knowledge in a given religious tradition will depend on circumstances (such as their own upbringing, temparment, etc.).

It’s worth pointing out, I think, that theologians who have a more subjective account of the Atonement also tend to lean more toward inclusivist or pluralist positions, whereas objectivist theories of the Atonement correlate with exclusivism and certain forms of inclusivism. And getting clear on religious diversity requires, I think, getting clear on what we think the work of Christ is and what it accomplishes.