00:00:00.040 - 00:00:08.080

The lectureship was established in 1949 by a generous gift from Mr. and Mrs. Edwin Flato of Corpus Christi, Texas, in honor of Mrs. Flato's parents.

00:00:09.680 - 00:00:31.040

The Westervelt lecturers form a distinguished roster of persons who have contributed significantly to the ministry of Christ's Church. But none has been more distinguished than this year's Westervelt lecturer, President Cynthia Campbell. My first encounter with Cynthia Campbell was in 1985 when I arrived in Austin and particularly in the Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary.

00:00:32.160 - 00:00:50.800

In my first semester, it was my good fortune to be assigned the responsibility of co-teaching a course with Dr. Campbell, a course of the Introduction to Theology and Ethics. There I was instructed by Dr. Campbell's knowledge and wisdom, and she led all of us into the exciting world of theological understanding and discourse.

00:00:51.600 - 00:01:13.920

She did so with sensitivity to first-year students, honoring their questions, pointing them into ways of thinking that were novel or new for them, often threatening, yet also often liberating. My reaction after two or three classes sitting under her lectureship was that in Cynthia Campbell, Austin Seminary had a winner. I was not mistaken.

00:01:15.200 - 00:01:30.320

But my vision was too parochial. She was not only a winning teacher for the students of Austin Seminary, but has become a teacher for the whole church. She's done this through various venues. One is the current position she holds as president of McCormick Theological Seminary.

00:01:31.200 - 00:01:49.360

Before that, she was pastor of senior pastor of the First President Church of Selina, Kansas. Adding to her pastoral experience in congregations, she has served in Dallas, Fort Worth, and San Antonio. Throughout her ministry, Dr. Campbell has served and currently serves as multiple committees of the denomination.

00:01:50.160 - 00:02:18.320

She's recognized and acclaimed for lectures and essays and governing bodies. colleges and universities, and special denominational events. She is in demand as one who can address from a theological perspective the challenges and opportunities of faithfulness in the Presbyterian Church USA. A graduate of Occidental College, Harvard Divinity School, and Southern Methodist University, she unites a formidable intellect with a deep commitment to the lordship of Christ.

00:02:19.120 - 00:02:29.200

I'm pleased to welcome Dr. Campbell look forward to her lecture, this initial lecture, on this high level, a multitude of blessings. Dr.

00:02:29.200 - 00:02:59.560

Campbell. In so many ways, Jack is my distinguished predecessor at McCormick Theological Seminary. What I do merely builds on a legacy of leadership for which all of us are deeply, deeply grateful. It was

00:03:00.040 - 00:03:13.680

A challenging day for McCormick when Jack left. It was a day of great joy here in Austin when he came to this presidency. And I thank you for your words. It is such a joy to be back here.

00:03:13.680 - 00:03:33.440

I am deeply honored by this invitation. I have not stood in this pulpit in 17 years, and it seems like I'm back home. Thank you very much, Ted, for this gracious invitation. I have changed the titles of my lectures slightly.

00:03:33.440 - 00:04:03.200

This morning's lecture is called A Multitude of Blessings, Christian Faith in a World of Many Faiths. And tomorrow I'm going to be looking specifically at the question of Christology and how we as Christians understand salvation. This is a work in progress that began for me on a sabbatical in the fall of 2003, Seminary presidents don't get sabbaticals as a normal part of work.

00:04:03.200 - 00:04:19.680

My board chair said, if you go on sabbatical, the whole institution will change. I said, in four months, my faculty can't make a decision. They can't possibly change the school in four months. Not to worry.

00:04:21.280 - 00:05:15.680

I was deeply privileged to have four months to do reading in a project that has interested me for a long time, and which is the subject of these lectures and a book manuscript that I'm working on, A Christian Approach to the Reality of Religious Diversity. Since 9-11, many in the United States have taken to saying everything has changed. While in some ways this statement is an exaggeration, it does seem fair to say that in terms of religious life and religion, many things, at least since the 1960s as well as since 9-11, have changed both dramatically and permanently. In particular, the reality of religious diversity among the world's peoples is a reality for us

00:05:16.080 - 00:05:55.520

In ways that present new theological challenges, the purpose of this address and my book project is to explore some of the ways that Christians can understand what it means to live. as people of faith in a world of many faiths. As we all know, the religious life of humankind is old indeed, perhaps even as old as human self-consciousness. Long before Jesus, long before there were Christians, people composed hymns to God giving praise for the light.

00:05:56.400 - 00:06:24.960

They followed the law of Moses, They patterned their lives on the five relationships. The diversity of religious life, the variety of ways in which humans have named and responded to the holy is not new. What is new for all of us on this planet is that we are now aware of religious diversity in a way in which we have not been really before.

00:06:25.840 - 00:07:04.320

More of us live in closer proximity to the religious lives of others than in arguably any other era of human history. Now, I live with that every day in the Hyde Park neighborhood of Chicago, where slightly to our N is one of the oldest synagogues in the city of Chicago. Just north of that is a traditional mosque, and two miles down the road is Louis Farrakhan's Nation of Islam, not to mention the garden-variety Christians who populate the area.

00:07:05.200 - 00:07:21.520

It's true in a city like Chicago, but it's true in Austin, Texas. It's true in communities that you come from. It's true in your own families. We live in closer proximity to religious diversity than ever before.

00:07:22.720 - 00:07:59.200

And if it's not true in your everyday experience, it certainly is true in the news we watch and what we read about. Now my interest in this presentation and in my work is not comparative religions. I'm not going to speak about other religious traditions and the ways in which they approach reality or understand God or the moral claims that they make. I'm not going to attempt a survey of the variety of ways in which religious people in general, or Christians in particular, approach religious diversity.

00:07:59.200 - 00:08:30.880

That's beyond the scope of my work and certainly of our time together. What I want to do this morning is present one way, or the first part of a way, that Christians might think about this topic from the standpoint of our own Christian faith tradition. It is my belief that the diversity of human religious life is a theological problem that must be approached theologically. We are Christians.

00:08:31.200 - 00:08:55.600

Part of what we do as religious people is that we think theologically. It's part of our practice, our habit, our way of being religious, is to ask and answer theological questions. It's A blessing or a curse, depending on how you look at it, it's kept me variously employed most of my life, so I'm kind of attached to it.

00:08:56.880 - 00:09:30.560

Now what do I mean by that? I mean that for us, this is a question, this question about how to live in a world of religious diversity, this is a question about God. It's a question about who God is and what God is up to in the world. I propose to approach this using very traditional Christian resources, notably this morning the Bible, and to some extent the theological tradition from which we have come, as well as reflection on our contemporary situation.

00:09:32.760 - 00:10:03.600

Perhaps the most evocative way of proposing the question in which I am interested is that of Wilfred Cantwell Smith. Wilfred Cantwell Smith taught at the Harvard Divinity School for many, many years, a Canadian Presbyterian, an expert on Islam. Over 40 years ago, Wilfred Cantwell Smith wrote this, How does one account theologically for the fact of humanity's religious diversity.

00:10:05.280 - 00:10:41.680

We, and he meant we Christians, we explain the fact of the Milky Way by appealing to the doctrine of creation. But how do we explain the fact that the Bahavagad Gita is there? And how do we account theologically for its continuing vitality? What Christian resources do we have for understanding and accounting for the historic and continuing vitality of religious diversity?

00:10:42.880 - 00:11:05.920

This question can be put another way. Christians believe in one God, creator of heaven and earth, in whose image all were created. Where do all of those who have lived and died following other Christian? other religious traditions, religious traditions other than Christian and Jewish, stand with God?

00:11:06.800 - 00:11:35.920

It's an old question and an important one. One voice from the larger Christian tradition has given a clear and explicit answer to this question. The Westminster Larger Catechism puts it this way, question 60. Can they who have never heard the gospel, and so know not Jesus Christ, nor believe in him, be saved by living according to the light of nature?

00:11:37.520 - 00:12:08.840

Answer. Those who having never heard the gospel, know not Jesus Christ, and believe not in him, cannot be saved. be they never so diligent to frame their lives according to the laws of nature or the laws of that religion which they profess. Now, in its context, Westminster is concerned to rule out the possibility of saving knowledge of God apart from revelation.

00:12:08.840 - 00:12:35.120

This was in part an anti-Catholic argument. But the statement as it stands is also an affirmation of the exclusive approach to understanding salvation. Namely, it is restricted to those who profess explicit faith in Jesus Christ. This view presents us as Christians with what I think is an obvious problem.

00:12:36.480 - 00:13:12.480

Why would a God in whose image all were created, whom the Bible says loves all creation, devise a plan of salvation that would automatically exclude most of the human beings who have ever lived. How is this way of understanding God's disclosure in Jesus Christ consistent with what we believe about the goodness of God and of God's care for all of creation and all people? How are those two ideas consistent with each other?

00:13:13.360 - 00:13:47.280

This is what makes this a theological problem for Christians. At its base, it is about what we believe about who God is. As this question has been asked in the 20th century, some new approaches have been suggested that help open up the problem some. Two documents from the Second Vatican Council argue that Christians can expect God to be at work in the hearts of those who have never heard the gospel, but yet who seek to follow the guidance of conscience.

00:13:48.160 - 00:14:32.640

This view builds on traditional Roman Catholic teaching about the ability of human beings, despite the effects of sin, to know God apart from explicit revelation. Thus, in Lumen Gentium, the Council writes, Those who, through no fault of their own, do not know the gospel of Christ or his church, but who nevertheless seek God with a sincere heart and, moved by grace, try in their action to do God's will as they know it through the dictates of their conscience, these too may attain eternal salvation. The door opens slightly.

00:14:34.080 - 00:15:28.000

In fact, the council takes this question a step further in another document and suggests that other religions may, and often are, ways by which human beings have sought and been found by God. Thus, while Christians witness to the truth as revealed by God through Jesus Christ, the Catholic Church urges openness to recognize elements of the truth in the faith of others. In Lumen Gentium, then, or in Nostra Aetate, they write, Let Christians, while witnessing to their own faith and way of life, acknowledge, preserve, an interesting verb, preserve and encourage the spiritual and moral truths found among non-Christians, together with their social life and culture.

00:15:30.080 - 00:16:07.520

Now, these two sentences come out of the context of very carefully written documents, out of another theological trajectory than the one we normally follow. But their words and their sentiments are, I think, important for us as seeing a new way of beginning to look at this problem. A similar approach has come from a very different direction, namely that of evangelical theology. A Canadian theologian by the name of Clark Pennock particularly takes up this argument.

00:16:07.920 - 00:16:59.280

He says that the particularity of the claim of salvation through Jesus Christ must always be held in tension by Christians with the biblical view of the universality of God's love for all creation and all people. Now this, it seems, to me is the place for Christians to begin any discussion of how we think about religious diversity, namely with these two fundamentally important theological ideas. The particularity of God's self-disclosure in Jesus Christ and the biblical witness of the universality of God's love and care for all creation.

00:17:01.040 - 00:17:34.160

To assert one to the exclusion of the other, or to emphasize one over the other, does damage, I would argue, to the core of Christian faith. Two things Christian tradition claims. It is through Jesus Christ that God is reconciling the world to God's self, and God is the one source of all that is. and God loves everything and everyone that God has made.

00:17:36.720 - 00:18:19.120

The recent study catechism of the Presbyterian Church makes precisely this point and puts it this way. God has made salvation available to all human beings through Jesus Christ crucified and risen. How God will deal with those who do not know or follow Christ, but who follow another tradition, we cannot finally say. We can say, however, that God is gracious and merciful, and that God will not deal with people in any other way than we see in Jesus Christ, who came as the Savior of the world.

00:18:20.160 - 00:18:56.840

It's a nice moment of a generous orthodoxy, a generous, if you will, agnosticism about the limits of God's divine grace. Two ideas are held in tension. Through Jesus Christ, we know God's saving purpose, and we know that this purpose of intention extends to all, not just to some. that there is indeed a wideness in God's mercy, like the wideness of the sea.

00:18:58.720 - 00:20:11.280

Now, in the remainder of this lecture, what I want to do is look at the biblical witness, at parts of it that support this trajectory, this point of view. In particular, I want to ask how the Bible helps us understand the variety of religious life, human religious life, within the tension of these two convictions about the universality and particularity of divine love. Luke Timothy Johnson did a wonderful little moment of quoting a collection of polemical texts in the New Testament, very much in criticism of the Gentiles and idolatry, and made, if you noticed, a very important point about the way in which His argument would be that polemic picks up on a way of reading the Jewish polemic against Gentiles, against idolatry that is there in Jewish tradition of the time.

00:20:13.120 - 00:20:32.880

I think we know that polemical tradition very well. We use it a great deal. We'll look at some of those texts a little bit tomorrow. But there's another trajectory I want to argue in the biblical tradition that we need to look at in relation to this topic.

00:20:33.920 - 00:20:55.680

And one way to think about this, one entry point, is to ask how the Bible portrays cultural and religious diversity. Put it another way, how does the Bible portray the religious other? Because there are others. in the biblical narrative who are not Jewish or Christian?

00:20:55.680 - 00:21:08.000

They are Gentiles. They are the other. How are they portrayed? And what might those portrayals suggest about how we might think about religious diversity in our world today?

00:21:09.600 - 00:21:34.240

So with apologies to all of my dear friends, here and back at home in Chicago in the Bible field who always get really nervous when theologians pick up the Bible. We're going to start with a little trajectory through biblical scholarship. They know we don't really read it, we just make use of it for our own purposes.

00:21:37.360 - 00:21:59.960

Or at least that's what they've been telling me for 25 years. Okay. The first section I want to look at is, in Genesis, is a complex of early stories, and look at a trajectory from creation through the Tower of Babel. And I'm particularly instructed

00:22:00.080 - 00:22:34.000

in this discussion by the work of one of my colleagues, Ted Hebert, a professor of Old Testament, who is writing a commentary on Genesis and has been working in a fairly significant reinterpretation of the story of the Tower of Babel. And it has, I think, very interesting implications for this particular topic. Now, as we all know, the Bible opens with the story of creation. Humanity in particular is created in the image and likeness of God.

00:22:34.240 - 00:23:03.440

All humanity, the Bible, the narrative suggests, comes from this pair who are the very image and likeness of God. And the first commandment made to this couple, this pair in God's likeness, is to be fruitful and multiply, to fill the earth and subdue it. That is their task as given by God at creation.

00:23:05.280 - 00:23:32.480

And so that happens, and the world is populated, and then there comes a crisis. God looks out at the world and sees that the world is filled with evil and unrighteousness and iniquity. And so God finds among the humans, descended from this first pair, a righteous one, a man who walked with God.

00:23:32.480 - 00:23:55.040

His name was Noah. Now, note, this is an interesting little aside in this story. Noah is described by the text as a righteous man who walked with God. Before the law of Moses, before God's self-disclosure, Noah is seen as a righteous one.

00:23:57.040 - 00:24:22.720

And so God gathers Noah and family into the ark, and they alone survive the deluge. After the flood, God makes covenant with Noah. A very important covenant, a universal covenant. God's promise is never again to destroy life, human or animal.

00:24:23.680 - 00:25:02.400

God will preserve life forever. God's covenant is with Noah and Noah's descendants, which the people who will repopulate the world, and with every living creature, never to destroy life. And in that context, God reiterates the original command to the first couple, Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth. Now, what do the descendants of Noah do in response to that commandment?

00:25:04.240 - 00:25:48.320

They decide to settle down. They decide that they want to find a place, a location, and gather themselves together and be what they are, a large extended family, all speaking the same language, all with the same culture. They want to be together and make sure they can stay together, so they settle down in the plain of Shanar and they build a city. Now, parenthetically, they also build a tower, but the tower is not really as important as the city, because what does a city have in the ancient world?

00:25:49.120 - 00:26:12.760

It has a wall. A wall that keeps things in and keeps things out. God looks down on this building plan, this plan to stay together, and God says, this is not a good thing. This is not helpful to the plan.

00:26:12.760 - 00:26:41.120

What's the plan? The plan is be fruitful, multiply, and fill the earth. And so God scatters the people from the town, not as punishment for their pride of the tower, but as disruption of their unwillingness to follow the command.

00:26:43.360 - 00:27:02.720

God wants the plan back on track. The plan is that humans will fill the earth. And the languages, the diversity of languages, is then a symbol of the diversity of human culture that will come out of this scattering.

00:27:04.560 - 00:27:36.800

Ted Hebert points as part of the clue to this exegesis the word balal from which babble comes and argues that every other time, the only other times in fact, that this Hebrew verb form is used, what it means is to mix. It's used in the rest of the Torah in instructions for mixing the appropriate. ingredients in offerings that are offered to God. It doesn't have a negative connotation at all.

00:27:37.040 - 00:28:01.760

In the Babel story in English it is, and in the Septuagint and in Latin that follows it, it has been used, it has been translated in a way that indicates punishment. Confuse their languages is the way we know the story. Confusion is a bad thing. No, in fact, they're being mixed.

00:28:03.360 - 00:28:53.920

Mixed does not necessarily mean bad. Now, this interpretation shifts the balance slightly of how we read these ancient stories. And Hebert's argument is that by seeing the Noahide story, and the Babel story, rather, as the conclusion of the ancient prehistory, rather than as the beginning of sort of downfall, we see an opening to understanding the reality of human diversity as part of God's intention for creation, rather than another sign of the fall, another sign of disaster, another sign intrinsically of sin.

00:28:55.680 - 00:29:43.920

So, from out of that diversity of humankind, out of the multiple cultures and religious traditions that humans find themselves, what's the next thing that happens? God finds Abraham living in one of those cultures, one of those cities, one of those places, and calls one out of the many to establish yet another covenant and remember what the purpose of the Abrahamic covenant is, through whom all the families of the earth will be blessed. Now, along the way, in the Old Testament, there is, of course, struggle, there is conquest, there is a lot of story of enemy.

00:29:44.400 - 00:30:25.360

But there are also, there's another side of the story, another picture of the religious others as they relate to the story now of God and God's covenant people, Israel. Think about them. Hagar, her son Ishmael, Ruth, those whom the Jewish and Christian tradition have called the righteous Gentiles, Abel, Enoch, Melchizedek, Job, perhaps even Cyrus the Persian, who, if he's not righteous, at least is a good instrument of God's plan and purpose.

00:30:26.240 - 00:31:10.080

Eventually, Isaiah and the other prophets will express an eschatological vision, a vision when all peoples will come to God's holy mountain. All will be at Zion. Not necessarily because they've become Jewish, but because God is gathering all of God's own. Now, that's a quick highlight of some of the Old Testament trajectory of this vision of the extent of God's love and compassion and the way in which these religious others figure into the divine story.

00:31:10.520 - 00:31:38.720

They have a purpose and a place. When we shift over to the Gospels, we have a very interesting and tricky picture, and one that takes a lot of the kind of careful scholarship that we've heard from Professor Johnson this morning. The Gospels, as we all know, were written a long time after the life of Jesus. By then, there was intense friction and animosity between the followers of Jesus and other Jews.

00:31:39.520 - 00:32:26.560

By the time the Gospels were written, the Christian movement had already spread, already spread, not only into Gentile territory, but had many Gentile adherents. Thus, much of the religious tension that we see in the Gospels needs to be read in that context. As we now know through the kind of scholarship we've been talking about, this early period is a time of the emergence of modern Judaism and Christianity side by side, more as sibling religions in a sense. And so we see in the gospels the tension between these two movements and a kind of anti-Judaism born out of a struggle.

00:32:27.840 - 00:32:54.560

And we see attempts to justify a mission to the Gentiles going beyond the family, going beyond the covenant tradition. It's very complex. But there are suggestions, I think, in the gospel materials about how the religious other is portrayed and the universality of God's love. Alongside the exclusive story,

00:32:55.280 - 00:33:28.560

There are signals about God's way with these others. who are outside the family. For example, Jesus comes in his so-called first sermon in Nazareth to speak, and he is acclaimed as a wonderful speaker, and his family and friends say, Do hear what you have done elsewhere. Jesus responds with a very, very bizarre response.

00:33:29.000 - 00:33:59.200

It's insulting, but it's also really very strange. He says, as you all remember, there were many widows in Israel, but Elijah was sent to another. There were many lepers in Israel, but Elisha was sent to heal Naaman the Syrian, the general of the opposing army. Now, what does this mean?

00:34:01.760 - 00:34:54.000

It means some things in context, but it means that Jesus is citing an example, a clear example, of God's compassion for the outsider. That it was God's intent to care for the life of this widow who was not a part of the family. not part of the covenant, to heal not only an other, but an enemy. And Jesus is suggesting that the fullness of God's love is not going to be confined to the life of the family, but is going to again extend and embrace and include the other.

00:34:56.960 - 00:35:29.120

Another fascinating example is the healing miracle story of the slave of the Roman soldier, who comes, who sends an emissary to Jesus to ask for the healing of his slave. And Jesus prepares to go and the emissary comes back and says, no, I am a man under authority. If I say, go, my servant goes. If I say, come, the servant comes.

00:35:29.360 - 00:35:48.240

Only say the word, and my servant will be healed. To which Jesus responds what? Never seen faith like this in Israel. Now, does the centurion become a follower of Jesus?

00:35:50.720 - 00:36:17.680

We don't know. A pious embroidery might suggest that, three, four, five years later, the centurion becomes a part of the followers, but we don't know that. The centurion is simply there as a man of faith. Something is at work in the life of that man, as the text puts it.

00:36:17.920 - 00:36:36.240

Matthew follows that interesting story. by the phrase that we know so well from the table. Many will come from east and west and sit at table with Abraham and Sarah. Or the Canaanite woman who begs for her daughter's healing.

00:36:37.280 - 00:37:06.640

That incredibly audacious statement and interchange which appears, at least in some readings, to expand Jesus' own self-understanding of the extent of his mission and the extent of divine love. Even the dogs, even the dogs, are worthy of food. Yes, they are.

00:37:07.520 - 00:37:39.280

There's a wideness, an expansiveness, of the divine purpose and mercy. The Samaritans, of course, are another classic example of the religious other and their place and role in the tradition of Jesus. His deliberate going beyond the boundaries of those whom the community thinks are in the program, in the religious family, the ones with the truth.

00:37:41.520 - 00:38:24.000

These others are the ones to whom and with whom Jesus interacts and touches and includes. If one were to move, and I will just do this quickly, into the Acts of the Apostles, there's another way of looking at this in the brief statement of faith of the Presbyterian Church. One of my favorite lines is the beginning of the section on the Holy Spirit. We trust in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver, the Lord, everywhere, the giver and renewer of life.

00:38:25.680 - 00:38:36.400

Now that was a brilliant moment, Jack, in the work of the brief statement committee. A brilliant moment. I mean that seriously.

00:38:37.840 - 00:39:08.080

The Nicene Creed says, I believe in the Holy Ghost, the Lord, the giver of life. What happens when you insert the word everywhere? Everywhere, the giver and renewer of life. It suggests, I think, that everywhere there is life, it is the one God, the Holy Spirit, who is giving and renewing that life.

00:39:08.960 - 00:39:51.120

Now, if that's not what you meant, the problem is, once one's got it out there on the page, it's there. But there is ample biblical support for that, beginning, of course, with the creation story itself, wonderful psalmic texts, but also the role and work of the Holy Spirit in the Acts of the Apostles. And we see this, I think, in those early and very familiar stories about characters such as the Ethiopian eunuch, who is defined, whom clearly is defined and described as a seeker.

00:39:52.640 - 00:40:16.800

Now, he's not seeking Jesus. He's a seeker. He is a religious man. He is responding to some call of God in his life and has habitually now been coming to Jerusalem, reading the texts of Israel, responding to God's work in his life and heart.

00:40:19.200 - 00:40:36.280

Or Cornelius. The centurion with whom and through whom Peter discovers the wideness of God's mercy. See, the conversion of Cornelius is really the conversion of Peter. This is really a Peter's story.

00:40:36.280 - 00:40:41.120

I mean, fine. Cornelius gets converted all into his household. They receive the Holy Spirit. Great.

00:40:41.440 - 00:41:18.240

You know, this happens 1000 times. Now, clearly it happens 1000 times in the Acts of the Apostles. But the transformation happens to Peter, who in his sermon says, I truly see that God shows no partiality, but in every place is at work in the lives and hearts of people. Or Paul in Athens, who cites the evidence

00:41:18.520 - 00:41:53.280

of devotion to an unknown God, and quotes phrases that we think are part of the philosophic tradition. Now, alongside the trajectory of exclusion and particularity, which I'm going to talk more about tomorrow, alongside that tradition, I'm arguing, is this other trajectory. God is doing something else. that is a witness to the wideness of God's mercy.

00:41:54.800 - 00:42:31.040

God is not left without a witness because the Spirit is the giver of all of life. For our purposes here, I've been trying to distinguish between 2 aspects of the biblical witness. On the one hand, there is the story of God's particularity, that is, making covenant with Israel and in God's unique self-disclosure, self-revelation in Jesus Christ. That particularity is at the heart of our religious identity.

00:42:32.000 - 00:42:46.560

This we affirm. This we live. to this we bear witness. That's what it means to be Christian, is to bear a witness to the particularity of that love.

00:42:48.160 - 00:43:25.680

That particularity sometimes manifests itself as exclusivity, which I think is different. That theme, the exclusivity theme, is evident in the prophets and in Psalms that draw a strict dichotomy between the God of Israel and all the other gods who are idols. It manifests itself in the kinds of texts that Luke Timothy Johnson cited quickly in the first lecture about idolatry. Exclusivity is 1 manifestation of particularity.

00:43:26.800 - 00:43:52.960

I think those are powerful and important texts. Mostly what I think they are, however, are questions of loyalty. The critical issue inside of those exclusive texts has to do with covenant faithfulness. Will those of us who know the God of the covenant be as faithful, as loyal to that God as that God is to us?

00:43:54.320 - 00:44:04.640

It's about loyalty. Having come into... covenant relationship? Will you stay loyal?

00:44:06.240 - 00:44:37.520

It's not the same question about what about the others. Will Israel be true to God as God is true to Israel? Because for Israel to worship anyone besides the God who has claimed them is to betray that one who has named them as God's own. But my argument is that those texts alone do not answer the question of the status of other religious traditions and the people who follow them.

00:44:39.840 - 00:45:41.600

The answer to that question, I think, cannot be given solely on the basis of those texts alone without taking into account the larger picture of God's creating and sustaining love for all of creation. Thus, this is, if you will, the other side of the story. The wideness of God's mercy, the universal scope of God's design and desire, the bedrock of God's commitment to be for and to love everything and everyone that God has made. In the next lecture, my intention will be to turn to our particular confession of faith in Jesus Christ as Savior and Lord, and specifically to the question of salvation, and how we articulate, understand, and express that idea of God's salvation in a world of religious diversity.

00:45:42.320 - 00:46:04.560

Thank you very much. It's a pleasure to be back. Thank you, President Campbell, for that illuminating address, which both synthesized and pointed out particularities. We're grateful to you.

00:46:06.240 - 00:46:14.720

We look forward now to some time for coffee and fellowship. It is awaiting you in the Cord Community Center directly behind the chapel. We are adjourned.