In the false Spring of our times, everything is painted green: it is the appointed liturgical colour for our post-historical sabbath. It’s to everyone’s taste, the guarantee of minimum respectability. There’s a Green party, but that doesn’t get very far, because it appears to appropriate for a particular cause the symbol that belongs to all. The colour has a utopian hint, or rather that of a puritan arcadia, but at the same time it soothes the passages of capitalist economic exchange. More than that: the guarantee of a ‘good’, ‘healthy’ relation to nature, as to one’s own body, increases surplus value. Capitalism has already incorporated, in the interests of profit, the new religiosity of our times, which takes the form of transcending one’s humanity in order to celebrate nature or animality as the ‘other’ with which one nonetheless seeks to become united.

I don’t want to be misunderstood. The planetary structures which support life have been dangerously interfered with; much natural beauty, along with the delicate and long-developed harmonies of people’s everyday environments has been ruined or destroyed. Technology is employed indiscriminately and for the mere sake of size and complexity. However, ‘Green consciousness’ is not the complete answer to all this: in too many ways it may collude with precisely what it purports to oppose.

At one point in Speculum Mentis, R G Collingwood remarks that

Given the distance that can separate academic inquiry from any humane application of its results, the thinking that is fostered within the universities is often accused of being useless. With images of famine, war, and ecological disaster appearing daily on our screens, the pursuit of many avenues of learning can easily seem like the sort of treachery which Collingwood condemned. ‘We try to understand ourselves and our world’, Collingwood argued, ‘only in order that we may learn how to live’. Often the connection between learning and living is so tenuous that it seems to have been lost altogether. On any map of knowledge drawn today there must, from the point of view of the hungry, the homeless, the oppressed, be many desert areas, arid zones which seem intellectually barren and morally bankrupt. The quality of the intellectual flora which flourish in such impoverished regions is pointedly identified in Lucky Jim when the book’s hero, honestly assessing the worth of an article he has written, talks about its ‘niggling mindlessness, its funereal parade of yawn-enforcing facts, the pseudolight it throws upon non-problems’.

In a world so full of ‘desperate evils’, every academic must surely be faced with the question of whether there is any point in his or her work.

The church employs its scriptures for the attainment of human authenticity in Christian conversion, conceived as both event and lifelong process. Its pedagogy aims at the transformation of the cognitive and affective consciousness of human subjects, of the decision-making and activity of responsible human agents, in every sphere of their relational existence (intrapersonal, interpersonal, social, national, international). The theocentric and Christocentric process of self-transcendence in Christian conversion entails four complementary aspects: metanoia (transformation), kenosis (generosity), diakonia (service), and koinonia (friendship).

Scripture is both informative and above all transformative. The Old Testament is a call to theocentric self-transcendence in religious conversion. The New Testament is a call to Christocentric self-transcendence in Christian conversion. Christocentricity guarantees the authenticity of theocentricity in religious conversion.

Conversion entails the transformation of the human and its world in all the spheres of human intentionality and conscious operations. As subjects, our cognitive and affective consciousness undergoes a transformation in both the event and continuous process of conversion. The transformed or ‘converted’ subject has a new way of knowing and loving: it is no longer the center of its world. The theocentric self-transcendence of religious conversion becomes Christocentric when we are enabled by Jesus Christ to know as we are known and to love as we are loved (1 Cor 13:12; 1 Jn 3:2; Gal 4:9). The theocentric sel-ftranscendence of Jesus Christ enables our own, it transforms our cognitive and affective consciousness by making us sons in the Son.

Organization and classification of material is essential as an aid to effective communication. Good teachers and writers will use labels to organize material, which play a valuable role in simplifying a debate. They provide a way in for the student or reader. However, this organization and classification of material is not a neutral and objective enterprise. One’s classification will hide certain basic decisions and options.

It is the argument of this article that the ‘theology of religions’ debate has been stifled by an over-emphasis on the standard threefold paradigm. I will be taking issue with John Hick’s judgment: ‘the simplest and least misleading classification is the now fairly standard threefold division into exclusivism (salvation is confined to Christianity), inclusivism (salvation occurs throughout the world but is always the work of Christ), and pluralism (the great world faiths are different and independently authentic contexts of salvation/liberation) ‘. I am not alone in wanting to point out the cracks in this paradigm, but I want to go a stage further and attempt to formulate one option which cannot be embraced by the traditional paradigm.

The underlying problem with the traditional classification results from the conflation of three matters:

1. The conditions for salvation.

2. Whether the major world religions are all worshipping the same God.

3. The truth about the human situation.

The traditional paradigm emphasizes the first, is confused about the second, and, with regard to the third, links truth questions with soteriology. This is easily exposed as unsatisfactory.

Ian Markham makes two basic contentions in his article ‘Creating options: Shattering the “exclusivist, inclusivist, and pluralist” paradigm’. The first is that the threefold paradigm of approaches to the question of salvation outside explicit Christianity are flawed and therefore unhelpful. The second is that his own tentative proposal further indicates this point, for his own position does not fit neatly into any of the three approaches. I think that Markham’s arguments for his first contention are not entirely convincing and therefore his own proposal fails to fit the categories, not because it has created a new option, but because it leaves certain questions unanswered and introduces a certain amount of confusion. In fact I will suggest that the usefulness of the three categories of exclusivism, inclusivism and pluralism allows us to see more clearly what type of questions he leaves unanswered and thereby justify themselves heuristically in providing a basis for criticising those who question their viability. This brief reply has as its main purpose to defend the threefold paradigm in the theology of religions.

This is not to say that these three categories are problem-free. It is simply the case that a sustained and convincing critique of them is yet to be produced. I agree with Markham that Michael Barnes develops a sophisticated Trinitarian inclusivism despite his claim to break the paradigm. Kenneth Surin’s critique of the paradigm is of an altogether different nature. Surin seems to redescribe the terrain so that there are no valid theological questions left, only political-sociological questions.