THE UNIQUENESS OF CHRIST: SHAPING FAITH AND MISSION Charles Van Engen Used by Permission of Author My thesis is this: "Jesus Christ is Lord" is a foundational biblical, personal faith-confession that corrects the traditional pluralist, inclusivist, and exclusivist positions held by Christians concerning other religions and calls God's missionary people to be mobilized by the Holy Spirit to participate in Christ's mission which is culturally pluralist, ecclesiologically inclusivist, and faith particularist. INTRODUCTION Many of us would agree with Clark Pinnock when he says, "By all accounts the meaning of Christ's lordship in a religiously plural world is one of the hottest topics on the agenda of theology in the nineties." 1 The topic has been a matter of the Church's reflection since the First Century. Since the late 1400’s, the missionary expansion of the churches (both Roman Catholic and Protestant) has tried conquest, accommodation, adaptation, indigenization, acculturation, contextualization and inculturation in its relationship to other religious traditions. At the International Missionary Council's meeting in Tambaram, Madras, India, in 1938, 2 Hendrik Kraemer replied to William Hocking's earlier criticisms that led to the "Laymen's Foreign Mission Inquiry," by presenting The Christian Message in a Non-Christian World, based on his missiological interpretation of Karl Barth. 3 The matter has received increasing attention, particularly from the Roman Catholics after the Second Vatican Council, 4 and from the World Council of Churches since the Second World War. 5 Four years ago Gerald Anderson documented 175 books published in English between 1970-1990 that dealt with the subject of "Christian Mission and Religious Pluralism" (Anderson: 1990). Three years later Anderson wrote, "No issue in missiology is more important, more difficult, more controversial, or more divisive for the days ahead than the theology of religions" (Anderson: 1993, 200). Evangelicals have only recently begun to give attention to this matter. (Covell:1993, 162- 163). At the 1979 Evangelical Consultation on Theology and Mission, held at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, and in spite of the fact that the title of the published papers was New Horizons in World Mission, no major presentation dealt with the topic of other religions. (See David Hesselgrave: 1979.) Fortunately, during the 1980'a number of Evangelicals have made significant contributions to the conversation. 6 In this chapter, I will present my understanding of three generally-accepted positions or paradigms, suggest a fourth, examine two foundational assumptions that impact all four, and draw three major missiological implications from the fourth paradigm.