Toward a Christian Theology of Religious Pluralism by Jacques Dupuis, S.J. (review)

316 BOOK REVIEWS Toward a Christian Theology of Religious Pluralism. By JACQUES DUPUIS, S.J. Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 1997. Pp. 500. $50.00 (cloth). ISBN 1-57075-125-0. Jacques Dupuis has been writing for more than thirty years about the questions raised for Christians by the facts of religious pluralism. In the work under review here he offers the elements of a Catholic Christian theological account of religious pluralism understood both abstractly (the bare fact that there are non-Christian religious communities), and in terms of some of its particulars (what some of these religious communities proclaim and do). Dupuis understands himself as a Catholic theologian correlating the objective tradition (what has been preserved of what Christians have thought and said about the religiously faithful non-Christian) with a particular context (that of Catholic Christianity at the end of the twentieth century, increasingly faced as it is with the reality of faithful non-Christians), and offering, on the basis of this correlation, a tentative synthetic theological account of religious pluralism. The first part of the book (25-201) is historical. In it, Dupuis offers an account of the most influential models that have shaped Christian theological evaluations of non-Christian religions. He begins with the Bible, which he reads in search of data capable of providing a "generous theological evaluation of the other religious traditions of the world" (30). He finds these data principally in the traditions about Adam and Noah which emphasize God's covenantal relation with all humanity. He also places stress upon Jesus' positive evaluation of the faith of non-Jews (e.g., the Canaanite woman in Matt 15 and the centurion in Matt 8), and upon the recognition of God's presence in all human communities implied by Johannine Logos-theology and the Lukan Paul of Acts 17. Dupuis then turns to Justin, Irenaeus, and Clement as instances of Logos-theology in the early Church (with some passing comments on Augustine ). In them, he suggests, we can see a recognition of the presence of the divine Logos, the Second Person of the Trinity, in the philosophical traditions of non-Christians, and a concomitantly positive evaluation of pagan philosophy as a teacher of partial truth and as a possible vehicle of salvation. Dupuis then provides a detailed and careful study of the history and use of the axiom extra ecclesiam nulla salus ("outside the Church no salvation"). His treatment is nuanced, showing how varied the understandings of this axiom have been between its first use in the late second or early third century, and its recent reinterpretations. He shows how the axiom has provided a focus for discussions of how it might be possible for faithful non-Christians to be saved without baptism or explicit faith in Christ, and surveys the range of traditional responses to this question (implicit faith, baptism of desire, explicit encounter with the gospel at death). But the most detailed historical treatment is reserved for twentieth-century developments, especially those leading up to and flowing from Vatican II. Before the council, as Dupuis shows, theological interest began to shift from the question of the possible salvation of non-Christians to that of what God BOOK REVIEWS 317 intends by and is doing with the non-Christian religions. Two families of positions on this were evident by 1960. The first (Dupuis calls it "fulfillment theory") is represented by Henri de Lubac and Hans Urs von Balthasar: it judges the non-Christian religions as intended by God only as preparation for the Christian religion, which is their proper fulfillment. The second (Dupuis calls it "the presence of the mystery of Christ") is represented by Karl Rahner: it sees the religions as vehicles of supernatural grace with Christ genuinely (though of course implicitly) present in them, and as proper means of salvation for their faithful adherents. Both had their influence on the council; Dupuis rightly concludes (169-70) that the council was not concerned to (and did not) decide between them. Instead, it advocated a set of attitudes (openness, respect) and practices (dialogue, colloquy) toward the religions that can be accounted for, theologically, by either. Neither does the postconciliar magisterium clearly decide between...