Archive for the ‘Interreligious Dialogue’ Category
On the Inadequacy of “Anonymous Christianity”
Karl Rahner’s theory of “Anonymous Christianity” is a thoroughly inadequate approach to the reality of religious pluralism. It is inadequate insofar as it is caught up in the standard modern myth of the ability to transcend particularity and difference for the sake of a new “universal” (inter-religious) global (capitalist?) community. In Rahner’s time and perhaps especially in our own, we are constantly being reminded of the fact that Christianity is merely one religion among many. As the recent upsurge in religious violence (i.e. Islamic terrorism) is commonly perceived to demonstrate, a claim to the absoluteness of any single religion almost invariably lends itself to violent conflict. Of course, the only reason why the Western “enlightened” mind can point a finger at so-called “Islamic fundamentalists” is precisely because it is more than conscious of its own shameful history of imperialism and colonialism in the name of religion.
Rahner’s “Anonymous Christianity,” like many other modern theological attempts to be “inclusive” of the “other” is driven by the distinctively modern impulse that particularity must and can somehow be transcended by a universal. To be fair, Rahner, quite unlike John Hick, wants to retain something of a traditional understanding of Christianity. That is, Rahner’s “inclusiveness” is always underscored by a sense of the uniqueness of Christianity and the church (which is, by the way, precisely the reason why the Hick camp concludes that his theory remains “lukewarm.”) Ironically, the attempt to transcend particularity effectively ignores the reality of difference altogether, only to reintroduce a new instantiation of enforced homogeneity—in short, a neo-imperialism.
