Autor: Burleigh, Michael

Buch: Sacred Causes

Titel: Sacred Causes

Stichwort: säkularer Liberalismus - Immigration; multikulturelle Gesellschaft; extra ecclesiam nulla salus

Kurzinhalt: ... the translation of people from countries where religion was all-pervasive to a developed society where the dominant creed was secular liberalism with Christian remnants ...

Textausschnitt: 357a Ironically, in view of events across Europe, one major change in the field of religion attracted almost no attention at the time, namely the translation of people from countries where religion was all-pervasive to a developed society where the dominant creed was secular liberalism with Christian remnants. While the arrival of many migrants who were devout Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs (not to speak of Pentecostalist and Seventh Day Adventist Christians from the Caribbean) gave a timely boost to the numbers of religious believers in an otherwise secularising society, the need to acknowledge their faiths (as well as that of the existing Jewish minority) dealt a lasting body-blow to the exclusively Christian Constitution of Britain. The fact that there was no apparent or conceivable challenge to the verities of Western liberalism (except from a lunatic far right and its analogues on the extreme left) meant that the religious implications of mass immigration went unattended. The idea that Britain is a 'multi-faith' society has become so ingrained, often with the explicit encouragement of the Establishment, that it is easy to forget how this development happened. This is mysterious, because what seemed a promising celebration of difference has turned out to be highly divisive.1 (Fs)

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358b The first substantial attempt by a theologian to address these issues was by John Hick, a Presbyterian minister and philosopher at Birmingham, in his 1973 book God and the Universe of Faiths. This rejected the traditional belief in extra ecclesiam nulla salus or 'no salvation outside the Church' and called for a 'Copernican revolution' which would recognise all major religions as 'valid' routes to God. The various creeds were parallel 'ways through time to eternity'. Hick resolved the problem represented by the divinity of Jesus by claiming that the doctrine of the incarnation was a necessary myth.1 While the majority of British people remained directly unaffected by immigration, in such centres as Birmingham the larger question of race relations led to Christian initiatives to defuse tensions, which had briefly exploded into violence, through dialogue with people of other faiths. These meetings were of a very informal kind, and were as much about exchanging knowledge, with a few cautious experiments in common worship. It took time for the development of forums of the kind that had long existed to facilitate dialogue between Christians and Jews, even though the latter had in the interim been eclipsed as Britain's main religious minority. (Fs)