CHRISTIANITY AND RELIGIOUS PLURALITY

Over the past two centuries the Christian faith has spread to all continents. Although more global than ever, Christians are religious minorities in most societies. Religious freedom is hardly universal.   In the past fifty years, millions of people have been uprooted from their traditional homelands in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Some have emigrated to Western Europe and North America. The West has become the scene of cultural, linguistic, and religious variety on a scale unimagined in 1900. Today, the full range of faiths and religious practices from all continents are present in Europe and North America. Christians are challenged to come to terms with this changed situation. These developments have intensified religious plurality. Christians all over the world are being urged to understand and engage with this new situation.   This volume highlights this new reality and specifies some sources for engagement, not least among them the Judeo-Christian scriptures--fundamental to all Christianities--that emerged out of religious plural contexts. On the basis of their faith in the Triune God disclosed in this text, all followers of Jesus Christ must interact with these opportunities in todays radically context-sensitive world. While the relativistic ideology of religious pluralism has been rightly subject to critique for the last generation, evangelical theology has yet to come to grips with the fact of religious plurality and its implications for Christian theology and witness in the present time. Shenk and his colleagues here provide historical, missiological, and global perspectives on this phenomenon, not only showing what we can learn from how others before us have responded, but also indicating how the plurality of our neighbors can be a source of our own revitalization. The cases covered in this book will never be dated! --Amos Yong, author of Hospitality & the Other