283 - Christianity Among the Religions of the World

Christianity Among the Religions of the World
By Arnold Toynbee
116 pp. New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1957. $2.75.

Professor Toynbee had previously done much more than the spade work essential for this volume. In The Study of History and An Historian's Approach To Religion, he virtually organized historical knowledge. He carried out his task in a purposeful and massively meaningful manner, setting religion at the core of civilization. In the relatively tiny treatise under review he addresses himself to four cardinal problems. are the criteria for comparison between religions? What are the chracteristics of the contemporary world? What is Christianity's relation to the Western civilization that is unifying the contemporary world? What should be the Christian approach to the contemporary non-Christian faiths?

The issue is considerably complicated the fact that modern man worships himself off and on in the form of collective human power. What the author finds disturbing, too, is the tendency to compare the highest of one faith with the lowest of another. If we compare the re-religions story story, he thinks, then the differences of level do not seem so very striking (P. 10). This seems vitiated, however, what Toynbee himself offers as a criterion for the comparison of religions (p. 28). He suggests the attitude of the religions toward suffering as the most effective

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standard for comparing one faith with another. But who will say that even at this point the differences are not striking?

Less inadequate perhaps is the author's treatment of the modern world's characteristics. From Pascal he takes the dictum that "a meridian decides what is the truth." In the realm of the religions, as in that of societies and civilizations, Toynbee proves his fantastic ability to discover parallel, almost identical and symmetrical systems of development. How swift he is to observe that there are two geographic groupings dominating the scene of the higher religions.

One is centered upon an Indian holy land. This is located about the middle reaches of the Ganges Valley in the province of Bihar. There Hinduism, Buddhism, and Neo-Hinduism arose. The other holy land, of course, is in the Near East. It is a meridian, so to say, which decides the truth for Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.

The primary characteristic of the modern world, however, is not a commitment to these great religions. It is a belief rather in the universality of Western culture. Denuded of the love principle and virtually post-Christian already, this Western culture holds out technology as its chief resource. Such a technology may have overcome the worship of nature; also, it has deepened the propensity of modern man to worship collective human power.

Whatever relation exists between Christianity and this Western culture must be partial, temporary, and tenuous. Christianity once served "as a midwife for our Western civilization." Yet the Church all along has had to withstand temptation to oppose force with force. The Church has had, moreover, a problem of its own: How to draw its inspiration from the Christian vision of God's being as love rather than from the equally Christian (as well as Jewish and Moslem) vision of Him as a jealous God (p. 73)!

Such a fanaticism indeed heightens in the twentieth century the worship of collective human power. It is a worship proclaimed in Communism and Nationalism. In the first, on a worldwide scale and on an. order reminiscent of that devotion demanded the goddess Rome and the god Caesar. In the second, within regional limits and as a modem, counterpart to the worship of Athens and Sparta and other city-states of the Graeco-Roman world before the foundation of the Roman Empire.

Nor are Toynbee's views without significance when it comes to the largely unresolved problem of Christianity's relation to the contemporary non-Christian faiths. Quite early in the narrative (p. 22), he voices an, apology. He is fully aware what perils await a "non-theologian... treading on what is rather well-worn theological ground, on which the last word has been said, perhaps long ago." Unorthodox at certain

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points, uncertain at others, he does also once in a while sound a little naive as, for instance, in a discussion he lets out in passing on the subject of free will. And this is no means the most conspicuously fragmentary thing he has to say.

Whether Toynbee shocks or not is beside the point. At a number of stages in the text, he does express what this reviewer believes cogent and timely. "If we can express what we believe to be the essential truths and precepts of our religion in action as well as in words," he counsels, "and if at the same time we can be receptive to the truths and ideals of the other faiths, we shall be more likely to win the attention and good will of the followers of those other faiths. If we can learn to present Christianity in this spirit we can perhaps manage to present it with conviction without at the same time relapsing into Christianity's traditional sin of arrogance and intolerance" (p. 105).

What Toynbee has to say in this regard has a direct bearing on the nature of missionary policy and on Ecumenical Christianity in its interfaith, inter-cultural, and international involvements.

Edward J. Jurji
Princeton Theological Seminary
Princeton, New Jersey