Is Christianity the Absolute Religion?

     Hegel was the first prominent person to highlight the absoluteness of the Christian message as part of his philosophy of religion and he refers to Christianity as the “absolute religion” in many places in his writings.1 Martin Luther called Christianity the true and only religion. The traditional Protestant understanding of this concept is based on John 14:6, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the father except through Me.” It was Ephraim Lenning who raised a number of doubts about the absoluteness of Christianity and its superiority over other religions. According to him, all religions may be true, or all may be false. But the proof is millions of years away. He talked about the “ugly bad ditch” Christianity faces with history on one side and the absolute on the other. He said Christianity should be judged not by a historical apologetics, but by an experience of the heart. Kierkegaard’s leap of faith contained the same idea. Kant separated the history and the absolute using his noumenal and phenomenal. 

​Hegel is credited with daring a dialectical maneuver to unite the absolute with history in a way that would translate the basic message of New Testament Christianity into philosophical thought.2 He did this by putting history into the life of the absolute as something essential to its very being and self-manifestation. Hegel reformulated the doctrine of the living God ‘in terms of Trinitarian dialectics, in contrast to the abstract absolute deity of the metaphysical philosophy.’3

​The nineteenth century produced conflicting responses to the problem of absolute religion. Orthodox supernaturalism retreated from history into an authoritarian system secured by the doctrine of inspiration and infallibility of scripture. On the other side was neo-Pietism, which postulated an immediate relation to the absolute in the depths of personal religious experience. The third position was theological liberalism, giving history its full due and living with its implications.4

​Ernst Troeltsch was someone who wrestled with the problem of historicism and its negative impacts on the claims of absolute religion of Christianity. But in the end, he could not answer some of the questions he asked and abandoned his position as the chair of systematic theology at Heidelberg.

​Karl Barth was convinced that the pendulum could not swing between historicity and absolute forever and that the question needed a definite answer. Barth chose to make a case for the absoluteness of Christianity by placing theology ‘beyond the contamination of the historical virus.’5 Barth wanted to secure both the central place of Christianity in mediating the salvation of humankind and the absolute uniqueness of Jesus for all humanity. He realized that to do so he would have to place these concerns beyond the reach of history and its relativizing effects. The absolute was located in the Word of God addressing us in the kerygma of proclamation. He simply presupposes the givenness of revelation and proceeds from there. He said theology is content to ‘retreat to the sheer datum of kerygma, the Word of God, in splendid isolation from the problems raised by the modern consciousness of history.’6

​For Barth, there is no need to construct a rational apologetic case for the absoluteness of the Christian religion, because religion itself is defined as an affair of the godless person. Bonhoeffer radicalized this position of Barth. He declared that the age of religion itself had to come to an end and had yielded its place to the modern secular age. 

​Bonhoeffer believed that true faith could thrive in a world come of age, in which it is free from the chain of religious bondage. In a technologically liberated era, Christianity can look upon the world of other religions as anachronistic.  This allows ‘the world to be worldly, liberated from the religious powers that enthralled the ancient world.’7

​As theology cut its link with history and philosophy, new problems arose. A number of left-wing Barthians concluded that if the case of the absolute cannot be made under the conditions of historical human experience, the God is dead.8

​Strong proposals for the future of theology advocate a return to the way in which Troeltsch formulated the absoluteness of Christianity in relation to the history of world religions. In the modern world, as more and more members of the Eastern religions have settled in the traditionally Christian West, a new awareness has risen. Christianity can no longer function in isolation. 

​Many of the well-known modern scholars want to bring Christianity into a history-of-religions framework. Troeltsch concluded a century ago that ‘it is impossible to construct a theory of Christianity as the absolute religion on the basis of a historical way of thinking or by the use of historical means.’9

​The philosophy of history that runs from Troeltsch to Jasper makes use of the historical method to de-historicize the Christian faith, to dichotomize history and revelation, and to remove the absolute from involvement in the affairs of history10 Paul Knitter, for example, calls for a distinction between the mythic Christ and the historical Jesus, because it is primarily the Mythic Christ, not the historical Jesus, who is Savior.11

​Karl Jaspers talked about an ‘axial age,’ the age in which the human spirit broke through to a new spiritual and more personal awareness of the Eternal One across the continents. He thinks this is the central event in history, not the one that divides history into Ad and BC. The axial age runs from 800 to 200 BC, during which time Confucius in China, Gautama in India, Zoroaster in Persia, and the great Hebrew prophets in Israel came to the scene. He thinks Christianity is just a later offshoot of Judaism. He says, therefore, it is incongruous for one of the religions to call itself absolute.12

​Troeltsch has an answer to this argument. He points out the eschatological nature of the Christian faith, which is unique to it. He points out that in Jesus’ preaching, the kingdom is the absolute, not the historical Christian religion. If we take Jesus’ own view of the kingdom, the absolute belongs essentially to the future end of history. So, we can conclude that, in this sense, history as such contains no absolute, and the truth of historical relativism is not abrogated by the idea of the kingdom as the absolute future.

1 Glockner H. G. in the Hegel- Lexikon, volume I. Evanston, IL: Adler’s Foreign Books.

2 Braaten, Carl E. No Other Gospel! Christianity Among the World’s Religions. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press. (1992) p31

3 ibid

4 ibid

5 ibid. p32

6 ibid. p33

7 ibid. p34

8 ibid.

9 Troeltsch, Earnst. The Absoluteness of Christianity and History of Religions. Richmond, VA: John Knox Press (1971) p63

10 No Other Gospel. p40

11 Knitter, Paul. “Jesus-Buddha-Krishna: Still Present?” in Journal of Ecumenical Studies 16, No.4 (Fall 1979)

12 No Other Gospel,. p40