Abstract
This book by Drew Collins, Associate Research Scholar and Lecturer for the Yale Center for Faith and Culture at Yale Divinity School, is essentially a sustained critique and rejection of Alan Race’s threefold typology of the theology of religions—exclusivism, inclusivism, and pluralism—along with the later model of “particularism,” from the standpoint of Hans Frei’s postliberal theology, to which the author fully subscribes, and to a lesser extent, that of Willie James Jennings. Indeed, “Refiguring the Theology of Religions” for this book consists in reorienting this theological subdiscipline away from Race’s popular typology toward Frei’s fivefold typology of theology to argue that a Christian theology of religions must affirm both the uniqueness and universality of Christ for salvation.
After a brief introduction to its main theses, the book is divided into three parts: a critique of Race’s threefold typology (chap. 2), an exposition and defense of Frei’s categorization of five types of theology and the theology of religions implicit to it (chap. 3), and a characterization of the theology of religions espoused by the twentieth-century ecumenical movement following Frei’s fivefold typology of theology (chap. 4). The book concludes with reflections on the relationship between Judaism and Christianity. Hewing closely to Jennings’s argument on racism in Christian theology, C. argues that the failure to affirm the particular and unique identity of Jesus, which must be given priority over his universal presence in history, is responsible not only for supersessionist anti-Judaism but also for the kind of pluralist theology of religions, such as Race’s, that prioritizes philosophy over Scripture.
In his account of Race’s threefold typology of the theology of religions C. helpfully shows how Race tries both to honor Ernst Troeltsch’s historical method and to eschew its liability to “wretched historicism.” C. argues that Race’s typology is not, strictly speaking, a theology of religions but a philosophical apologetics for the relevance of the Christian faith for the modern age, and that its fatal error is to grant philosophy the final authority for the validity and truth of theological assertions, which by right belongs to the Bible and church teachings alone.
By contrast, according to C., Hans Frei, whose theological concerns are similar to Race’s, adopts the opposite approach. Instead of granting, as Race is charged with doing, exclusive authority to “external discourses” of academic Wissenschaft, Frei retains the authority of faith (Glaube) for theology. C. goes on to give a detailed exposition and defense of Frei’s ad hoc and non-apologetic historicism, advocacy for the plain sense (sensus literalis) of Scripture, figural hermeneutics, appeal to divine providence to account for the presence of Christ in non-Christian religions, and prioritization of the non-mythological identity of Christ, especially as constituted by his resurrection, over his presence.
Central to C.’s project of refiguring the theology of religions is Frei’s fivefold typology of theology. These five types differ among themselves in the degree to which they regard Christian theology either as an instance of a general type of knowledge to be subsumed under the general criteria of intelligibility, coherence, and truth, or as a specific mode of knowledge proper to Christianity, partly or wholly defined by its relation to the semiotic system of Christianity as a particular religion.
Using Frei’s fivefold typology C. offers a helpful evaluation of the theology of religions in the various documents of the twentieth-century ecumenical movement (154–208). This analysis of the theology of religions contained in the ecumenical documents of the twentieth century is to my mind C.’s brilliant achievement, even if one may find Frei’s fivefold typology of theology too simplistic and narrow to encompass all current theologies of religions.
The basic problem, for Frei as well as C., is that they view the basic issue in the Christian theology of religions to be essentially the question of authority, that is, of whether philosophical reason or divine revelation is the ultimate source of intelligibility, coherence, and truth of theological assertions. With this view, it is easy to frame Race’s threefold typology as wholly dependent on the adoption of philosophical criteria and then to use Frei’s way of doing theology to condemn it. However, this either-or approach to philosophical reason and divine revelation is unwarranted. Furthermore, exclusivism, inclusivism, and pluralism, allegedly derived from philosophy, can be used as heuristic categories to interpret various and often mutually contradictory biblical assertions about non-Christian religions and their followers. The “plain meaning” of these much-disputed texts is anything but plain. It would be helpful if in future writings C. takes into account the many Catholic theologies of religion in addition to Protestant ones. The many qualities of this present work—clarity of thought, careful scholarship, judicious judgment, and attractive style—assure that his future work will be that of a first-class theologian.