[The Boston Globe Online][Boston.com] [Boston Globe Online / Editorials | Opinion] [ Send this story to a friend | Easy-print version ] The purpose of religion By James Carroll, 9/19/2000 [Image]nce, an esoteric theological statement from the Vatican would not have been the subject of an op-ed column in a secular newspaper. But the recently published ''Dominus Jesus'' concerns the way various religions think of each other and how believers regard nonbelievers, both of which have become pressing public questions. The document is a direct attack on so-called religious relativism, the philosophically fashionable idea ''that one religion is as good as another.'' On the contrary, humans can hope to achieve salvation only through Jesus Christ, which gives an absolute primacy to the Christian religion, which has its fullness in the Roman Catholic Church. Consistent with recent Catholic teaching, the document is careful to indicate that salvation, through the mystery of God's grace, is available, even if defectively, not only to non-Catholics, but to non-Christians. Buddhists, Jews, Hindus, Muslims, and others can be beneficiaries of the ''universal salvific will of God,'' but, whether they recognize it or not, that saving will is worked exclusively through Jesus. Many non-Catholics and some Catholics winced at this document because it seemed to reassert a Catholic triumphalism out of the past. My concern is with something more basic - whether it is any longer useful to emphasize the purpose of religion as ''salvation,'' which implies changing the mind of God, as the theologian Jarislav Pelikan once put it. We are saved when God shifts from wrath to compassion. What if the purpose of religion, instead, is ''revelation,'' which implies changing the mind of human beings, whose dread of God's wrath is misplaced? Just as open-ended pluralism, which Rome properly criticizes, is rooted in the philosophical fashion of a shallow modernity, the traditional notion of religion as ''saving'' is rooted in the philosophical fashion of an earlier time. The Vatican's rejection of contemporary relativism in favor or a timeless absolutism is itself a relative and time-bound act. When second- and third-century Christians attempted to understand Jesus, they invoked categories of neo-Platonism, which assumed a radical divide between body and soul, grace and sin. God was infinitely removed from the human world, especially so after the Fall. Only a being who was both divine and human could bridge this gulf - Jesus Christ. He was understood as changing something in the structure of the cosmos. Hence the logic of his centrality as Savior for all people whether they know it or not. But what if, consistent with a Biblical view, there never was such a gulf? What if the neo-Platonic idea is wrong, and the cosmos remains not ''fallen,'' but, as Genesis put it, ''very good''? What if God, that is, has never taken offense at the world, for all its chaos; what if God's attitude toward human beings is not one of righteous indignation from which we poor sinners need to be saved, but one of unconditional love? In that case, Jesus would be understood not as ''salvation,'' but as ''revelation,'' revealing through his words and life that we are all already saved. In that case, the crucial relationship is not with Jesus, but with God, and every human being has that relationship simply by virtue of being God's creature. Grace is not exclusive but universal. Here is another way the point is made, a story. A father had two sons. One was good, belonging, presumably, to the right religion. He stayed home and worked the farm. The other's life was gravely deficient. He squandered his inheritance. Christians know the story as the ''Prodigal Son,'' but the truly prodigal one is the father because his attitude of acceptance is so extravagant. He receives his spendthrift son with open arms, which mystifies the stay-at-home son, and, frankly, irks him. The father loves both his sons, period. Neither need do anything to be saved from him. What they need to do is to recognize the permanent bounty of their situation. This is how it is with God - or so the Lord Jesus said. In assessing the difficult question of how religions relate to each other, and noting in particular how easily the ancient - and often deadly - wounds of mutual disdain are opened, it is useful perhaps to recall that the subject of every religion, Roman Catholicism included, is God. And God alone is absolute, by definition transcending every effort at definition. That is why human claims to superiority in the name of God can seem so wrong. James Carroll's column appears regularly in the Globe. This story ran on page A15 of the Boston Globe on 9/19/2000. © Copyright 2000 Globe Newspaper Company. [ Send this story to a friend | Easy-print version ]