Thinking a bit more about John Hick’s pluralism, spurred on by some of the excellent comments on the last post, it does seem that my original worry about Hick’s position could be stated in a stronger form.

My question was whether it’s necessary to believe in a tradition in a non-pluralist way (i.e., to believe that my tradition gets it right about the divine, at least in essentials) in order for it to be “soteriologically efficacious.” For if I come to view my tradition as simply a culturally conditioned response to the divine, that may prevent me from fully immersing myself in it, or committing to it, in the way necessary to move from self-centeredness to Reality-centeredness (to use Hick’s terms).

But an even stronger form of the objection, it seems to me, is that, on the Hickian hypothesis, it’s not clear what justification I have for believing that my tradition is soteriologically efficacious in the first place. Since the Real is, ex hypothesi, unknowable in itself, what reason do I have to believe that my tradition constitutes a reliable guide for relating to it?

The more traditional Christian view is that, while God remains incomprehensible, we can know certain truths about God (both through the use of natural reason and because God has revealed Godself to us). Because of this, we believe certain ways of relating to God are appropriate and others not. If we didn’t believe that such knowledge was possible, what grounds would we have for affirming the appropriateness of our (or any) traditition as a way of relating to the divine?

This doesn’t, however, commit us to a strong form of exclusivism. For it’s possible to hold that God is known/revealed in other tradtions and also to recognize that there is no tradition-independent (or subject-independent) way of establishing the truth of a single tradition. My reasons for being a Christian, for example, depend in part on my social and cultural context, personal experiences, and evaluative judgments–which means that there is an irreducible element of personal commitment in adhering to a particular tradition. This doesn’t make it irrational, but should humble us a bit in making overly strong claims for our own tradition. It also, however, doesn’t require us to give up its truth claims.