A constructive new proposal for Christian dialogue with other faiths. Religious pluralism is today the most challenging issue facing traditional Christianity. This constructive work by a leading voice on the subjects of religious pluralism and interfaith relations probes the Christian understanding of God and salvation and offers a new perspective on religious pluralism that affirms unique salvation in Christ while also recognizing the religious ends of other faiths. The questions explored here are both difficult and enlightening. What is the distinctive nature of salvation? Is there a place in Christian theology for recognizing other religious ends in addition to salvation? In pursuit of meaningful answers, S. Mark Heim uses the classical doctrine of the Trinity to develop a theology that allows Christians to respect the possibility that alternative relations with God exist in other religions.

Named by the International Bulletin of Missionary Studies as an Outstanding Book of 2014 for Mission Studies Over the last four decades, evangelical scholars have shown growing interest in Christian debates over other religions, seeking answers to essential questions: How are we to think about and relate to other religions, be open to the Spirit, and at the same time remain evangelical and orthodox? Gerald R. McDermott and Harold A. Netland offer critiques of a variety of theologians and religious studies scholars, including evangelicals, but also challenge evangelicals to move beyond parochial positions. This volume is both a manifesto and a research program, critically evaluating the last forty years of Christian treatments of religious others and proposing a comprehensive direction for the future. It addresses issues relating to the religions in both systematic theology and missiology, taking up long-debated questions such as contextualization, salvation, revelation, the relationship between culture and religion, conversion, social action, and ecumenism. It concludes with responses from four leading thinkers of African, Asian, and European backgrounds: Veli-Matti Kärkkäinen, Vinoth Ramachandra, Lamin Sanneh, and Christine Schirrmacher.

Founding his argument on a close reading of St. Augustine?s De Trinitate, Keith Johnson critiques four recent attempts to construct a pluralistic theology of religions out of the orthodox doctrine of the Trinity.

Shows that many so-called "pluralist" theologies are actually masks for a secularizing agenda and that the doctrine of the Trinity holds more potential for interreligious understanding and dialogue. D'Costa recommends the Trinitarian approach which attains the goals that pluralism seeks: openness, respect, and learning from other religions. It accomplishes this without the reductionism associated with pluralism and by examining the serious differences between traditions. He applies the Trinity to interreligious prayer with surprising results.

(Peeters 1994)

Freedom and Necessity in Modern Trinitarian Theology examines the tension between God and the world through a constructive reading of the Trinitarian theologies and Christologies of Sergii Bulgakov (1871-1944), Karl Barth (1886-1968), and Hans Urs von Balthasar (1905-1988). It focuses on what is called "the problematic of divine freedom and necessity" and the response of the writers. "Problematic" refers to God being simultaneously radically free and utterly bound to creation. God did not need to create and redeem the world in Christ. It is a contingent free gift. Yet, on the other side of a dialectic, he also has eternally determined himself to be God as Jesus Christ. He must create and redeem the world to be God as he has so determined. In this way the world is given a certain "free necessity" by him because if there were no world then there would be no Christ. A spectrum of different concepts of freedom and necessity and a theological ideal of a balance between the same are outlined and then used to illumine the writers and to articulate a constructive response to the problematic. Brandon Gallaher shows that the classical Christian understanding of God having a non-necessary relationship to the world and divine freedom being a sheer assertion of God's will must be completely rethought. Gallaher proposes a Trinitarian, Christocentric, and cruciform vision of divine freedom. God is free as eternally self-giving, self-emptying and self-receiving love. The work concludes with a contemporary theology of divine freedom founded on divine election.

Why does God permit the great suffering and evil that we see in our world? This basic question of human existence receives a fresh answer in this book as the mystery of evil is explored in the context of the mystery of the Trinity. God's permission of evil and the way in which suffering can lead human persons into the life of the Trinity are discussed in dialogue with the great Swiss theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar. In the light of Balthasar's model of the Trinity as divine self-giving love, we gain a profound grasp of the nature of suffering in human life by placing our suffering in the context of the divine life of the Triune God.