Stackhouse on inclusivism

Here's an excellent discussion of inclusivism, exclusivism ("restrictionism") and pluralism by John Stackhouse

An excerpt:

In orthodox Christian terms, inclusivists share with restrictivists the exclusivistic belief in the central and necessary place of Christ’s work on behalf of humanity. Orthodox inclusivists, then, are those who believe that God applies the salvific benefits of the work of Christ to those who have not heard the gospel, but who nonetheless are granted the gift of saving faith as they respond to what light of the Holy Spirit they have been granted–which may or may not include information about Jesus.

Inclusivists point to Old Testament saints as examples of people who did not know of Jesus but did know of God and responded to him with saving faith (Hebrews 11). So too, they say, might people elsewhere in the world who do not (yet) know of Jesus nonetheless have knowledge of the true God, however hazy it might be, and respond (by God’s grace) to that knowledge with saving faith.

It is worth noting in passing, however, that there are at least two unorthodox versions of Christian inclusivism available as well. The first is the pattern set out by Wilfred Cantwell Smith, John Hick, and other ostensible “pluralists.” These theorists suggest that there are multiple paths to human fulfilment, many of them having nothing to do with Jesus Christ, explicitly or implicitly. In Hick’s formulation, one can be rightly oriented toward the Ultimately Real with or without the assistance of Jesus. Such a view, however, rests on the fundamental conviction that there is only one basis upon which people can reach their summum bonum. Smith, Hick and their ilk say that this basis is not the person and work of Jesus Christ, but instead is the revelation of God abroad in the world, the correct response to which is “other-mindedness,” charity, and moral rectitude. There are not really multiple paths, but multiple versions of the same path to the same end.

So, too, does mysticism offer multiple versions of the same path to the same end: union with the divine. Whether the Christian mysticism of Meister Eckhart or the Society of Friends, or the non-Christian mysticism of Sufi Muslims or bhakti Hindus, mysticism around the world is understood to have the same basic ethos and trajectory, which are expressed in multiple forms.