Harvey Cox. Many Mansions: A Christian’s Encounter with Other Faiths. Boston: Beacon Press, 1988, 1992.
I first saw this book over ten years ago, when I was shelving books
at Harvard Divinity School’s library. I was a conservative Christian at
the time, and, upon seeing the book’s cover, I immediately dismissed it
as one of these pluralistic sorts of works that claim there are many
roads to God or heaven, whereas I believed that the Scriptures were
clear that there is only one path to God and the good afterlife: belief
in Jesus Christ. I did not read this book back then, but, after reading
it now, I wonder how I would have responded to it had I read it back
then. Surprisingly, even from my conservative Christian perspective at
the time, I probably would have appreciated a lot of what Harvey Cox had
to say.
This is particularly the case on the issue of interfaith dialogue.
Cox laments that formal interfaith dialogue is often rather stale and
boring. It usually includes the liberal adherents to religions while
the more conservative voices are left out. It focuses on doctrines and
rituals rather than people’s testimonies and stories. Moreover,
according to Cox, Christian participants in the dialogue are often
reluctant to bring up or to stress Jesus, fearing that would set up
barriers, when the irony is that many people in non-Christian religions
(including the Ayatollah Khomeini—-does that name ring any bells?)
actually want to talk about Jesus. Cox also states that it is
simplistic to construct interfaith dialogue in such a manner that it
places Christians in one category and Hindus in another, for the fact is
that there is diversity within Hinduism: some branches are
intellectual, whereas others are more emotional, and a Hindu from a more
emotional branch may identify more with a charismatic Christian than
with a Hindu from a more intellectual branch. That would have intrigued
my conservative Christian self, for I was interested in emotion and
intellect in the area of religion: I looked to conservative Christianity
to feed both my emotions and my intellect.
Cox tells a lot of interesting stories and offers a number of
profound insights, as he thoughtfully engages Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism,
Judaism, Liberation Theology, Marxism, Freud, and the list goes on. I
do not think that Cox successfully explains how one could bring
conservative Christian voices into a constructive interfaith dialogue,
however, but he does profile Christians who are rather conservative,
ranging from a dispensationalist fundamentalist in Israel who baffled
him immensely, to a well-read man in the Soviet Union who was very
familiar with philosophy and finally settled on Russian Orthodoxy as the
answer he was seeking. The latter may be open to dialogue, whereas the
former may not be, at least not the constructive sort of dialogue that
Harvey Cox probably promotes! Moreover, in the chapter on Judaism, Cox
affirms his belief that Gentile Christians have been included in the
commonwealth of Israel: Cox does not seem to think that Jews need to
believe in Jesus to be saved, holding instead that Christianity is about
the inclusion of Gentiles, not the exclusion of non-Christian Jews. I
am rather skeptical about this being Paul’s position, but, whether it is
or not, I still have a question: Can a Christian who believes that Jews
need to believe in Jesus to be saved participate in a constructive
dialogue with a non-Christian Jew, without sacrificing his or her
beliefs? If so, how?
Good book!