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Mansions of the Spirit
Mansions of the Spirit: The Gospel in a Multifaith World. by Michael Ingham, Anglican Book Centre, Toronto, 1997.
When I first began reading Michael Ingham's 1997 book, Mansions of The Spirit, my cynical sense rushed to the fore and wanted to re-title the book "Mansions of Ecclesiastical Bureaucracy". What he seemed to be doing was outlining theological and theo-bureaucratic reasoning for and against a Christian acceptance of the plurality of religions. By the time I was finished the book, my cynicism had evaporated, and in its place was a sense of respect for the author, his faith, and his abilities as a teacher.
In the introductory pages, Ingham explains to us why he wrote the book - a trip to a foreign land where he encountered spiritual practitioners of an alien faith. What he seemed to learn there was that proselytization of his own faith was inappropriate; that these practitioners were comfortable in their faith, and that the appropriate response was respect and a sense of kinship with fellow seekers.
This may sound strange to the ears of those who believe that the Good News of Christ is The Truth, The Light and The Way. After all, Ingham is a bishop of a faith where the New Covenant is not A path to God and Salvation, but The path to God and Salvation; as such, it is the Christian's duty to rouse the heathen from his misguided belief and offer him the Salvation of Christ. This is what we might expect from a Bishop of the Anglican Church.
But it is not what we get from Michael Ingham. Ingham displays a sound commitment to multifaith dialogue and respect, and in good Western form, goes to some considerable trouble to convince us that this multifaith broadmindedness is a respectable Christian response to the faith of our neighbours. So Ingham is not entirely out of the evangelism business, it's just that he is out of the Christian evangelism business and has signed up as a Multifaith evangelist. (It may, after all, be possible to change a tiger's stripes, but though changed, striped he will remain.) This is certainly not a criticism, at least as it flows from my own pen, but it did strike me as peculiar, in the context of the introduction, where he learns to accept the belief systems of his fellows.
The structure of the text is sound. It is well reasoned, and very cleanly edited. Ingham begins by putting the notion of interfaith respect into the context of the latter 20th century's globally mobile population.
In our world, we are cheek by jowl with practitioners of every imaginable faith group; there are a variety of responses which we can offer to this circumstance, ranging from isolationism, to hostility, to partnership. Ingham is an advocate of the latter, and he argues his case from a variety of standpoints.
In his third chapter, Ingham rehearses the history of the official interfaith movement and the progressively tolerant response of Christendom from the 1893 Parliament of the World's Religions through the 1993 version of the same summit. It is a useful summary, and it sets up the reader for Ingham's own Christian response to multifaith dialogue.
In structuring his argument for 'Grounded Openness' his first job, (a formidable one) is to summarize the case against Christian Exclusivism - shaking the underpinnings of the belief that Christian dogma demands the exclusive jurisdiction of Salvation. This is a fine road to walk without eroding the very foundations of the veracity of the Christian canons. He summarizes the arguments against those biblical passages which demand that Christ is the only path to God. The problem with this road is that it is a slippery slope from questioning the authority of some Biblical passages into bringing the entire Testament into question. Ingham walks this line carefully, and in my own view, rather successfully. And once he has opened the door to universal Salvation across many thresholds, his project becomes simpler: The Good News is the Truth, but it is not the only Truth.
Having dealt with the chief obstacle to Christian acquiescence in a multifaith world, he takes on the notion of Christian Inclusivism, a position which holds that non-Christian religions share in a measure of the Truth, but cannot, finally, reach the brass ring without the acceptance of Christ. The difficulty of this position, Ingham maintains, is that it is difficult to square an all Loving God who desires the Salvation of all men with a created world in which all men do not have equal opportunity to choose, or even to know, Christ.
The third Christian response to multifaith dialogue is Religious Pluralism, the idea that all religions are true and valid. This would seem to be a comfortable place for Christian acquiescence, (once we have discarded exclusivism) but for Ingham, it is not a destination which gives much comfort. "Pluralism has difficulty addressing the concern that it does not provide solid enough ground for any spiritual commitment. One way may be as good as another. This does not exactly stir the soul or fire the imagination. It is more likely to lead to spiritual lassitude and indifference "
Before we arrive at Ingham's own apparent position, ('Grounded Openness'), we move through two chapters which dissipated my own cynicism, and which I think prepare the reader for both his groundedness and his openness.
In 'The Dynamics of Power' he sketches and dismisses Isolation and Hostility as legitimate theological responses to our multifaith environment, and concludes that Partnership is the appropriate response of Christians who share the 'pulpit' with their non-Christian brethren. In chapter 8, 'The Mystical Path', he begins to uncover the roots of his own position. In the end, it is the Mystical which unites the world's religions. One can argue (as Ingham does) for interfaith dialogue and respect, but to go beyond dialogue and argument - into acceptance - one enters the 'mystical', where questions of sameness and difference lose their traction. The parry and thrust of theological debate falls away in the face of the encounter with 'the transcendent'. "It is precisely this quality of seeing-through (italics added) that participants in inter-faith exploration begin to develop, and it is learned more from immersion in prayer and contemplation than from theological debate. This is the value of the mystical traditions in each of the world's religions, much neglected in modern Western Christianity."
Ingham's postion of 'grounded openness' is exactly what it says. The Christian must be firmly grounded in her own faith before she can safely enter the world of other faiths. In order to be open to the truth of an alien faith, one must be secure in one's own.
In the end, Mansions of the Spirit is a primer for multifaith education. It does not, in my opinion, answer great questions, or deliver great truths. What it does is rehearse the arguments in favor of what our multifaith community is about - from the Christian perspective - and gives the Christian some solid intellectual ground for her multifaith praxis (if she needs it).
I have often wondered how a Christian could operate with integrity in a world which made proselytization out of bounds and still remain true to her faith. Ingham has gone a long way toward providing me with an answer, both from a theological and metaphysical position. I am not convinced that he has answered all the questions, but he has gone a very long way toward bringing his reader up to speed on the questions, traditions, and arguments which populate the Christian multifaith dialogue.
Joseph Romain is the Librarian at the Ontario Multifaith Council.
Posted by editor on September 30, 2003 10:05 AM