How to Be an Inclusivist

Abstract

Chapter 9 postulates that inclusivism is a middle position between Exclusivism and Pluralism, but current formulations suffer from limitations. First, Rahner’s version is put in Christian terms, but if it is supposed to be metatheoretic, it needs a formulation that is religiously neutral in terms of truth. Second, attempts to generate such neutrality run into the difficulty of being unable to delineate exactly what distinguishes this middle position from fully relativistic Pluralism. The solution to both problems, the chapter argues, is to adopt a broader understanding of faith, one that is not centrally cognitive, one which explains why faith is a generic virtue in any context, and one which gives a way of distinguishing Inclusivism from its alternatives. The key element of the proposal is that, if faith is not centrally cognitive, there is nothing about this attitude that makes an appeal to it a partisan one with respect to the universe of faiths.