Volf Revisited

I’ve just come across a print version of Miroslav Volf’s paper, “A Voice of One’s Own: Public Faith in a Pluralistic World“. This is a portion of last October’s Laing Lectures, delivered at Regent College in Vancouver and was the subject of a number of posts here last year. One quote to give a bit of the flavour:

“The pluralist account of relations among religions is incoherent. I don’t mean here that it never ends up making good on its promise of including everyone on equal terms, although this is true, too. Some religious group always ends up excluded, mainly because the teachings and practices of concrete religions are not only different but sometimes outright contradictory and stubbornly refuse to let themselves be interpreted as instances of an underlying sameness. We can expand the circle of the included, but we cannot avoid excluding—unless we declare every religion to be acceptable in advance. From my perspective, this is as it ought to be; otherwise we would end up having to indiscriminately affirm anything and everything. Pluralists shouldn’t pretend, however, to have overcome religious exclusivism.“