Thoughts on Pluralism
I could say 2.0 here, because I have posted on this topic before, but that would be too much of a steal from Adam’s blog series, so we’ll just say “Thought’s on Pluralism” and leave it at that.
It’s been a couple months shy of a year since I wrote that first post, and looking back I’m not sure that I had a very deep understanding of the term and thought processes behind “Pluralism.” I was (and still am, to a large extent) a Jesus is the right way kind of guy, my view of pluralism, a year ago, was that it was the belief and acceptance of the belief that all ways lead to heaven. To me there were two extreme options, the first being belief in pluralism meant that you shed all forms of belief in your religion’s authority, and the second being that you believe in the sole power of your religion’s authority. It was an either/or dichotomy, from a Christian perspective I thought that you either believed in the Ultimate Authority of Christ and were not a pluralist, or you didn’t.
Well, after living and growing another year, I look back on that post with a bit of a sigh. I would consider myself a religious pluralist now, which (like many things I now think/believe) if you had told me several years ago I’d be saying that, I would have laughed and told you I’d never believe that crap.
Now that we have the starting and ending points, I should probably talk a bit about my journey in the middle.
Sometime around December I discovered a Buddist Podcast. I had believed for sometime that it’s good to seek and grab “truth” wherever you find it, but hadn’t really put that into practice in the religious realm. When I discovered and downloaded the podcast (more on a whim than anything else) I found that a lot of what was said resounded powerfully to me. Things like a focus on simplicity and just ‘being’, these benign idea’s were very helpful in keeping my natural tendency for over-reaction in check. It made me start to really think about the idea of finding truth outside of one’s own religious structures and circles.
A couple months later I signed up to join the “Transformative Theology theo-blogger consortium,” and I received “Divinity and Diversity: A Christian Affirmation of Religious Pluralism” by Marjorie Hewitt Suchocki, and she presented some idea’s that really started to make things click for me. Suchocki talks about the Image of God that we have being one of a pluralistic nature, that is three entities represented in one, and how, if we are to truly be the Image of God, we must realize that Pluralism in our own lives. We have a God who created a diverse environment and a diverse populace, by failing to accept that diversity as it is, then we fail to fully accept the image of God.
I’m not advocating us failing to talk about Christ, what I am advocating is our need to understand and learn from the other. I am instead advocating a higher level of conversation with the other, an deeper desire of understanding of the other, and an attempt to find a common ground for growth with the other. We do not have the monopoly on “truth”, but instead have a piece of that truth that we need to bring to the table of conversation and use to grow with the other,
I’ll leave you with this, an example of acceptance of pluralism within the communes of Christianity, a beautiful post/story from Jeromy Johnson, about our failure to accept women within our conversations.
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