In talking about the claims made by the world’s religions, this is the familiar typology used to map the possible positions:

Exclusivism: the view that only one religion is true and/or salvific.

Inclusivism: the view that one religion is maximally true and/or salvific, but that adherents of other religions (or none) can potentially be saved.

Pluralism: the view that all religions (or sometimes, the “major” or “classic” religions) are equally true and/or salvific.

It should be clear by my use of the phrase “true and/or salvific” that there are a variety of possible combinations of these positions. For instance, one could hold that Christianity gets more of the truth right, but that adherents of other religions can have salvation mediated to them by their traditions. Alternatively, you could say that only the church mediates salvation, but that other religions contain insights about the truth.

Each position has its weaknesses. Exclusivism seems intolerant and, well, exclusivist, not to mention lacking in humility. Inclusivism is more generous, but can seem patronizing since it still ranks one religion above all others. Pluralism, ostensibly the most generous position, flattens important differences between religions and pretends to a superior “God’s eye” perspective from which it judges that all religions are essentially saying the same thing.

Recently I’ve been reading a book by Jay McDaniel called With Roots and Wings: Christianity in an Age of Ecology and Dialogue. As the title suggests, McDaniel is concerned both with the way religion addresses (or fails to address) ecological problems and with interreligious dialogue. While I don’t agree with McDaniel’s entire perspective (which is that of process theology), the book contains a lot of valuable insights.

McDaniel introduces the concept of religious distinctivism as an alternative to the three positions sketched above. Distinctivism rejects exclusivism in denying that only one religion can mediate truth and salvation; it rejects inclusivism in denying that any one tradition has the full truth; and it rejects pluralism in denying that all religions are saying essentially the same thing.

Instead, McDaniel proposes, each religion reveals a distinctive aspect of both the truth about reality and about human salvation or fulfillment. Instead of being different ways of saying the same thing, religions each contribute to a composite picture, while emphasizing particular parts of the truth:

Each religion has its strength, its distincitve insights, that help humans to become whole. This means that, as Christians, we can recognize that Christianity itself has unique fruits to share with the rest of the world, even as other religions have fruits to share with us.

But we must also recognize that our fruits are not exclusive or final; they do not exclude other fruits from other trees, that is, other truths from other religions. They are not final because there is always more to God than is ever seen in any of the truths of any of the religions. (p. 147)

So, for instance, a distinctive emphasis of Christianity is that the nature of God is characterized by limitless mercy and compassion and that this nature has been disclosed in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. But are Christians committed to saying that this is all the truth about God there is? Or do other traditions contain truths that could supplement what Christians believe? McDaniel would say that other traditions provide additional emphases, and even corrections, to what Christians believe. Religions don’t need to surrender their distinctiveness; in fact, it’s in their very distinctiveness that they can enrich each other.

I think this view has some promise. Too many Christians, even those who don’t adhere to the harsher exclusivist forms of their faith, assume that they don’t have anything to learn from other traditions. And, in fact, throughout its history Christianity has borrowed freely from other traditions.

One question that presents itself, though, is how a distinctivist position would deal with apparent contradictions between traditions. Even if traditions are presenting different and specific aspects of the truth, what happens when their insights conflict?

This worry can be softened a bit by pointing out that many apparent contradictions turn out not to be actual contradictions upon closer inspection. For example, it may seem as though traditions with an impersonal concept of the divine are irreconcilable with theistic traditions that emphasize the personal nature of God. However, theistic traditions also teach that God transcends our understanding and that, even if there is a personal aspect to God, there is also an impersonal (or maybe better supra-personal) aspect to the divine. Other traditions can provide a helpful corrective here to an excessive anthropomorphism.

Still, we will sometimes be faced with irreconcilable differences, cases where, at most, one religion gets it right. In such cases, we will often end up making exclusivistic claims for one tradition or another. The only other way I can see to salvage a truly distinctivist position would be to push it in a more radically relativist direction and suggest that the various religious traditions are incommensurable modes of discourse or language games or what have you. But this just seems implausible. If religion is dealing with ultimate reality and ultimate human fulfillment in some sense, then all religions are trying to talk about the same thing, even if using different conceptual and linguistic tools to do it. Not only that, but if the traditions are truly incommensurable, then how can they enrich each other?

Distincitivism, it seems to me, ultimately reduces to a (perhaps modified) form of inclusivism. It allows that we can learn from other traditions, that their adherents are not outside the scope of salvation (and indeed that those other traditions can be paths of salvation for their adherents), and that no one tradition contains all the truth. However, unless we’re willing to embrace complete religious relativism (or some form of non-cognitivism), we can’t avoid affirming the superiority of some truth-claims over others.