Christ and Constitutional Pluralism at a Crossroads
A few months ago, I attended an evangelical Sunday service featuring the first sermon in a series on Christian missions. The lesson had a simple thesis: Christ’s gospel is to be shared and spread – sometimes over and against other faith traditions. This position is neither uncommon nor surprising: Of course, an evangelical church is, by definition, interested in proselytizing and conversion! But undergirding this truism is a non-obvious assumption about Jesus and his relationship to religious pluralism: To preserve and foster religious diversity is to compromise one’s commitment to Christ.
Such assumptions have had tricky political implications, particularly in the United States, where they engender suspicion toward secular religious freedom. Analysts from David French to Bill Trollinger find that many American evangelicals fear that protecting religious diversity, thus undermining legal preference for Christianity, de-centres Christ by promoting the flourishing of faiths that deny him.
Scholars also often conclude that Christ-centred theology, what theologians call christocentrism, and religious pluralism are incompatible. In 1984 Charles Wilson wrote that christology was crossing the “threshold” of a “pluralist consciousness” and would lose its christocentric roots. Twenty years later, Reformed scholar Sarah Melcher called Presbyterian congregations to, in favour of pluralism, question their views on salvation through Christ alone, as though the two were mutually exclusive.
Many of us adopt similar defaults. The increasing need to edify democratic norms in constitutional systems, however, demands that we resist this status quo. If we do not, we risk running aground without concerted Christian apologetics for aspects of the liberal project necessary to establish peaceful societies, particularly religious freedom and pluralism.
So the question is: might there be a Christ-centred vision of religious diversity for today’s politics? Here, I turn to 19th century German, Romantic, Reformed (quite the hodgepodge of modifiers!) theologian-philosopher Friedrich Schleiermacher, whose simultaneous pluralism and christocentrism offer resources for reconciling the two in the Church today.
Christ, Schleiermacher, and the Religions
For his time, Schleiermacher was, as Reinhold Niebuhr once put it, a “christomorphic” theologian. His entire theological system, especially that laid out in his Glaubenslehre, his doctrine of faith, orbits and takes the shape of Christ the Redeemer. Even Wilson credits him with instantiating the modern christocentrism now ubiquitous in evangelical communities.
Yet Schleiermacher was also strikingly pluralist for his era, insisting that religious diversity was not merely tolerable but historically necessary, engaging other traditions on their own terms rather than as pale forerunners to Christianity, and declaring that, just as “nothing is more unchristian than to seek uniformity in religion.”
How does Schleiermacher manage this tension, even as it continues to puzzle congregations, pluralists, and scholars of his work alike? Schleiermacher refuses the standard binary of christologies that isolate Christ’s divinity or history, thus foreclosing the possibility of Christian pluralism. Instead, he formulates a “plural” Christ who is both the eternal archetype for creation’s ultimate “conscious” union with God in history and a particular figure who enters without remainder into time, and whose unique context enables the miraculous, corporate, unfolding process of creation’s redemption.
Christ’s work, thus, is not a single punctiliar event but an ongoing, universal one. And Christ’s dignity is not merely historically nondifferentiable essence, but one particular to a time, place, culture, and body.
Therefore, if redemption is still underway, then no single community exhausts it, including Christianity itself. Schleiermacher is explicit: “No particular form of fellowship is here definitely asserted or excluded.” Christian encounter with other religious traditions is a condition for rather than a threat to this process – without it, our march toward the eschaton found in Christ remains incomplete.
This generates what I call “christomorphic pluralism,” taking the shape of Christ. It is epistemically humble, because no tradition possesses the fullness of what is fundamentally an innate orientation toward the divine. It is dialogical, because religious traditions genuinely need each other for what Schleiermacher calls “a growing conformity with Christ.” And it is non-hegemonic, because even when Schleiermacher asserts Christianity’s ultimate truth, he measures it not against other traditions but against the eschatological truth not yet fully revealed to anyone but wholly available in Christ.
Christ-Shaped Pluralism for a Divided World
When I was 15, I attended a workshop called “Jesus and the Quran” on interreligious dialogue at my (evangelical) church in the American Bible Belt. The church sat a half hour drive from the country’s most diverse square mile, a large refugee community called Clarkston. I remember being moved by the session’s conclusion: Evangelism’s aim is not a swap of peoples’ religious labels but the relational expansion of the Kingdom of God. Jesus, then, might be a starting point for constructive conversation between traditions. Indeed, this framework spurred the church on toward years of neighbourly service and friendship with Clarkston’s predominantly non-Christian population.
But many of my friends left the workshop perturbed by what they perceived as a concession to other faiths. After all, my church was no theory factory and may not have had the philosophical resources to demonstrate how exactly Christ not only enabled but required interreligious generosity. The “christomorphic pluralism” articulated here aims to bridge this gap.
Today’s pundits often call ideologies that privilege one faith in constitutional interpretation “illiberal.” But Schleiermacher gives us more christological language: “incomplete,” as they struggle to adopt Christ’s morphology despite attempts to centre him. Instead, a christomorphic faith need not ground pluralist commitments in liberal tolerance but in the very form of its Redeemer who bridges the particular and the universal to fulfil creation in time. This account offers a robust salve for fears that pluralism undercuts Christ, seeing him as precisely the existential basis that makes pluralism not merely permissible but necessary.
