Can Evangelicals Learn From World Rel..., Gerald McDermott
Can Evangelicals Learn From World Rel..., Gerald McDermott
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Can Evangelicals Learn From World Religions?
Jesus, Revelation and Religious Traditions

Author: Gerald McDermott

Narrator: Gerald McDermott

Unabridged: 6 hr 50 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 05/01/2005


Synopsis

Arguably, the church's greatest challenge in the next century will be the problem of the scandal of particularity. More than ever before, Christians will need to explain why they follow Jesus and not the Buddha or Confucius or Krishna or Muhammed. But if, while relating their faith to the faiths, Christians treat non-Christian religions as netherworlds of unmixed darkness, the church's message will be a scandal not of particularity but of arrogant obscurantism. // Recent evangelical introductions to the problem of other religions have built commendably on foundations laid by J. N. D. Anderson and Stephen Neill. Anderson and Neill opened up the "heathen" worlds to the evangelical West, showing that many non-Christians also seek salvation and have personal relationships with their gods. In the last decade Clark Pinnock and John Sanders have argued for an inclusivist understanding of salvation, and Harold Netland has shed new light on the question of truth in the religions. Yet no evangelicals have focused--as nonevangelicals Keith Ward, Diana Eck and Paul Knitter have done--on the revelatory value of truth in non-Christian religions. Anderson and Neill showed that there are limited convergences between Christian and non-Christian traditions, and Pinnock has argued that there might be truths Christians can learn from religious others. But as far as I know, no evangelicals have yet examined the religions in any sort of substantive way for what Christians can learn without sacrificing, as Knitter and John Hick do, the finality of Christ. // This book is the beginning of an evangelical theology of the religions that addresses not the question of salvation but the problem of truth and revelation, and takes seriously the normative claims of other traditions. It explores the biblical propositions that Jesus is the light that enlightens every person (Jn 1:9) and that God has not left Himself without a witness among non-Christian traditions (Acts 14:17). It argues that if Saint Augustine learned from Neo-Platonism to better understand the gospel, if Thomas Aquinas learned from Aristotle to better understand the Scriptures, and if John Calvin learned from Renaissance humanism, perhaps evangelicals may be able to learn from the Buddha--and other great religious thinkers and traditions--things that can help them more clearly understand God's revelation in Christ. It is an introductory word in a conversation that I hope will go much further among evangelicals. (Gerald McDermott, in the introduction to Can Evangelicals Learn from World Religions?)

Reviews

Goodreads review by Adam on April 23, 2023

This book is hard to review: The first half is a discussion on theology and revelation (in order to assure readers that the author isn't a heretic for what he does in the second half of the book), and there are lots of great bits in that half. The second half is a discussion on what theological aspe......more

Goodreads review by Sara on December 12, 2014

Gerald McDermott uses his book Can Evangelicals Learn from World Religions? to examine the contribution world religions can make to the theological studies of evangelical scholars. McDermott establishes the foundation of his argument be defining “evangelical” and identifying himself as one. He then......more

Goodreads review by Beau on October 14, 2009

If the answer to the question in the title of this book isn't obvious: yes. I was pleasantly surprised that McDermott gives the reader an explanation (albeit not an in-depth one) of revelation, what the Bible and Christian tradition tell us, and then a nice summation of what the major religious trad......more

Goodreads review by Andrew on November 08, 2011

The first few chapters were hugely valuable for me, providing a thorough definition of "revelation" and defining "evangelical" and contrasting this to fundamentalism and liberal protestantism. McDermott takes a solidly evangelical approach to other religions, accepting that while there is no salvati......more

Goodreads review by Taylor on December 31, 2009

Very good and useful read. Enjoyed the audio version from christianaudio.com. A bit of warning: it is written at a fairly high reading level, but it's far from pretentious.......more