Religious Pluralism for the Modern Christian

Today’s Christian is bombarded with the existence of alternative faiths to his own through modern communications technology. While most adherents to the faith have little theological knowledge of the beliefs and practices of others, the relative closeness and openness with which they operate is strikingly new. From the foundation of the church up until the last century Christians, unlike Muslims and Jews, Hindus and Buddhists, have operated, in the most part, in ignorance of the other faiths and their followers. It has been seen for centuries, by Christians, that the only way to salvation is through Christ and that those who practice amongst the other religions are in need of spiritual instruction to overcome their geographical deficiencies. However, the explosion of world-wide communications, especially through the Internet most recently, paired with the religious freedom movement experienced throughout much of the western world has opened the eyes of many Christian practitioners to the existence of other religions and to the idea that perhaps there are sufficient, quality alternatives to the Christian method.

On the Singularity of the Trinity

On the Singularity of the Trinity

The Doctrine of the Trinity has been the basis of Church policy and practice for over 1600 years.  In building up what is supposedly a monotheistic religion around multiple divine beings, the Church has sectioned itself off from the rest of western religion.  Potential Jewish and Muslim converts, who were not raised in neo-Trinitarian societies (virtually everywhere outside of the Americas and Western Europe), find themselves taken aback and confused by the Doctrine.  What's worse is that many of the Church's parishioners, who claim allegiance to the Trinity, do not themselves understand the full meaning of their words when they ascribe thanks, "in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit."  While it may have been sufficient from the Middle Ages up through the Renaissance for the common person to have almost no understanding of the beliefs they were practicing, it is not so today; today a much greater portion of the population has the ability to read and write, practice religious or denominational freedom, and seek a general understanding of their religious institutions' practices.  The Trinity is an exclusivist ideal at heart; that is, it is difficult to understand without a previous experience in Christianity and therefore, necessarily keeps outsiders out.  Exclusivism is quite contradictory to traditional Christian thought on the conversion, in which it has been practice to make as much of the world Christian as possible, sometimes regardless of peoples' personal preference.  This exclusivism breeds a superiority complex in many Christian believers; the fact that one cannot understand, or at least make the claim of understanding, the Doctrine without being in the faith in earnest, makes those within Christianity feel that they are somehow better than those outsiders who they should in all reality be attempting to convince, but are really merely holding contempt for.