TV evangelist scandals. More varieties of Christianity than Baskin-Robbins has flavors. These are times of pluralism and disenchantment with organized religion. How do Christians today know which leaders and companions in faith to trust?
For help, Gerald McDermott returns to the work of Jonathan Edwards, the eighteenth-century pracher and college president widely regarded as the greatest American Theologian ever. Edwards wrestled expertly with similar questions arising from frontier revivalism.
Now McDermott, not only a leading Edwards scholar but also a master teacher, makes Edwards's insights accessible and practical for today's Christians. Seeing God offers a clarifying glimpse at the signs of genuine Christianity- yesterday, today and for the ages.
Arguably, the church's greatest challenge in the next century will be the problem of the scandal of particularity. More than ever before, Christians will need to explain why they follow Jesus and not the Buddha or Confucius or Krishna or Muhammed. But if, while relating their faith to the faiths, Christians treat non-Christian religions as netherworlds of unmixed darkness, the church's message will be a scandal not of particularity but of arrogant obscurantism.
Recent evangelical introductions to the problem of other religions have built commendably on foundations laid by J. N. D. Anderson and Stephen Neill. Anderson and Neill opened up the "heathen" worlds to the evangelical West, showing that many non-Christians also seek salvation and have personal relationships with their gods. In the last decade Clark Pinnock and John Sanders have argued for an inclusivist understanding of salvation, and Harold Netland has shed new light on the question of truth in the religions. Yet no evangelicals have focused--as nonevangelicals Keith Ward, Diana Eck and Paul Knitter have done--on the revelatory value of truth in non-Christian religions. Anderson and Neill showed that there are limited convergences between Christian and non-Christian traditions, and Pinnock has argued that there might be truths Christians can learn from religious others. But as far as I know, no evangelicals have yet examined the religions in any sort of substantive way for what Christians can learn without sacrificing, as Knitter and John Hick do, the finality of Christ.
