Toward a World Theology: Faith and the Comparative History of Religion

Written by Wilfred Cantwell Smith Reviewed By Bruce A. Demarest

The author, a Presbyterian, is Professor of the Comparative History of Religion at Harvard University. An authority in the field, Smith has devoted his life to the study of world religions and their relation to Christianity.

At the heart of Smith’s argument is the empirical judgment that although all religions are not objectively the same they do share a common religious history. The world’s religions are historically interrelated, for they have all borrowed from a common pool of formal beliefs, ethical ideals, and religious rites. A Christian, according to Smith, is one who participates in the matrix of Christian history, community, and culture; a Muslim one who participates in the complex of Islamic religious life; and so on. This vision, which Smith claims to have arrived at by scientific historical analysis of world faiths, implies at least two things: first, that no one religion can claim to be of a higher order than any other. And second, just as God has been at work in Christian religious history, so also he is savingly operative in Buddhist, Hindu, and Islamic religious history.

As for epistemology, Smith rejects the positions that God is known in terms of objective, formal knowledge, on one hand, and in terms of immediate subjectivity, on the other. Postulating the model of ‘corporate critical self-consciousness’, Smith insists that religious knowledge is both that which can be personally experienced by all (the subjective pole) and that which can be scientifically analyzed and verified (the objective pole). In addition to scientific testing of the facts one must attempt to view the universe through the eyes of the other religionist. If one is to avoid a narrow provincialism one must attempt to participate in the consciousness of those of other faiths, which is to say, one must stand imaginatively in their shoes. For example, to formulate a world theology one must seek to understand what the temple and the sacrificial ritual mean to pious Hindus and what fetishism and ancestor-worship signify in the consciousness of African traditional religionists. Only then can one begin to construct a theology which in any sense could be called global.

Within Professor Smith’s system faith is viewed as a universal quality of human life. Faith is not a matter of assent to formal truths; rather it is a way of viewing one’s self, one’s neighbour, and the world. We must speak, argues Smith, not of Christian faith, nor of Buddhist faith, but simply of faith as a fundamental quality of man as man.

Since God is at work in all religions more or less equally, and since faith is a generic human quality, Smith concludes that each person is saved by participation in the life and experience of one or another of the world’s religious communities. ‘Just as Christians have been saved by Christian faith, so have Muslims by Islamic, Buddhists by Buddhist’ (p. 168). God saves Christians through Christ’s death and resurrection, Buddhists through the teachings of the Buddha, Jews through the Torah, and Hindus through the poetry of the Gita. According to Professor Smith, the history of every religious community is Heilsgeschichte. ‘If St Paul or anybody else thought or thinks that only Christians can be saved, St Paul was wrong’ (p. 171).

Smith argues that his generic approach to religion enables modern man to be a compassionate pluralist and relativist without being a nihilist. Moreover, the professor insists that it provides the only viable model for the religions department in the modern university. And finally, it offers a theoretical base for building a world community in which people of differing faiths may live together in peace.

Whereas Professor Smith’s book is imaginatively written and handsomely produced, the evangelical Christian will disagree with a number of his assumptions and conclusions. Smith proceeds via the naturalistic premise that man as a rational creature is capable of securing ultimate truth by applying the scientific method to the data gathered from the historical process. One finds no acknowledgment of the need of special revelation to inform man of divine truths which lie beyond human cognizance. Indeed, Smith develops his case without appeal to a single passage of Scripture.

The professor, moreoever, makes much of the unity of humankind, but he overlooks the crippling effects of universal sin on the human heart. At bottom, we affirm that the non-Christian religions represent sinful man’s darkened and perverted response to God’s universal general revelation (Rom. 1:19–32; 3:9–18). The world’s religions constitute man’s futile search for God, whereas the gospel represents God’s gracious initiative to rescue man from the morass of sin. If Smith’s construction be true, then the coming of God in flesh, the cross of Christ, and his mighty resurrection from the dead are stripped of their cosmic significance.

The Bible, furthermore, never links salvation with mere participation in the life of a religious community, as Smith suggests. Paul regarded his early life in Judaism (Gal. 1:13–16) and the Thessalonian Christians their experience in traditional religion (1 Thes. 1:9–10) as a condition of darkness rather than light and of death rather than life.

Smith claims to have arrived at his pluralistic position by a scientific analysis of the facts. Yet the Christian understanding of God, man, sin, and salvation differ so radically from the Hindu and Buddhist, for example, that the situation seems more like ships passing in the night than vessels steaming a similar course. One ought to avoid a narrow provincialism, but when conflicting claims are presented one must make a choice. If one view offers a coherent explanation for the person, claims, miraculous works, and resurrection of Jesus Christ and others fail to do so, the enquirer has good reason to accept the supported view and reject contradictory alternatives.

Smith’s proposals, in sum, have little in common with historic Christian theology as enunciated by St Paul, Augustine, Luther, Calvin, or Wesley. Rather they represent an exercise in free-wheeling modernity where one’s judgments are shaped not by the Word of God but by the naturalistic assumptions of ‘man under the sun’. On the other hand, Smith’s study and others like it confirm the aphorism, ‘There is nothing like comparative religions to make a person comparatively religious.’


Bruce A. Demarest

Denver Seminary, Denver, Colorado