Wider fieldsWhere does it meet other fields?
Comparative religion and theology of religions is the study of other faiths and how Christianity relates to them. Comparative religion, or religious studies, describes religions without deciding whether they are true; comparative theology studies another tradition from within one's own faith; theology of religions asks, from inside Christian faith, what other religions are and whether their members can be saved.
Study v1.1, 6 November 2026
How Christianity relates to other faiths. Christian views of other religions range from exclusivist to pluralist; major church statements affirm respectful dialogue alongside witness to Christ, yet differ on salvation.
Religions differ in their own sources, practices and goals. Christian views of them range from exclusivist to pluralist; major church statements affirm respectful dialogue alongside witness to Christ, yet differ on salvation.
Christians divide on whether non-Christians can be saved, whether other religions themselves mediate salvation, mission and conversion, multiple belonging, interfaith prayer, and whether Muslims and Christians worship the same God.
Holds that salvation is possible only for those who have heard about Jesus and believed before death.
John Sanders coined the term while himself arguing for inclusivism; a 1993 review summarizes his three main positions as restrictivism, universalism and a "wider hope".
In Four Views on Salvation in a Pluralistic World (1996), Alister McGrath presents a particularist view that leaves the fate of those who never hear to God, and Douglas Geivett and Gary Phillips a particularist view that requires explicit faith.
Terrance Tiessen, a Reformed theologian, holds that God can save through Christ "by forms of revelation less complete than the gospel".
He notes that his view is commonly called inclusivism but prefers the term accessibilism, and writes that gospel exclusivism "gives no hope for the salvation of the unevangelized".
Karl Rahner held that Christianity is the absolute religion but reaches people historically, and that until people are seriously confronted by it, other religions "must be considered as lawful religions leading to salvation"; their members can be called "anonymous Christians", and mission remains.
Some pluralists call the theory "patronizing and superseded"; Joseph Wong argues that this misreads Rahner's intention. The "anonymous Christian" is Rahner's theological proposal, not a magisterial teaching of the Catholic Church. David Basinger places Rahner as a non-restrictive and Clark Pinnock as a restrictive salvific inclusivist; Pinnock argued that "holy pagans" may be saved by faith, while holding, as Harold Brown's review reports, that other religions "do not lead to God, nor do they preach Christ in a hidden way".
John Hick held that the religions respond to one transcendent Real that is "epistemologically unavailable to human beings in itself", drawing on Kant's distinction between noumenon and phenomenon, with personal forms such as Yahweh, Vishnu and Amida and impersonal forms such as Brahman, nirvana and the Tao.
His lecture "Religious Pluralism and Salvation" appeared in Faith and Philosophy in 1988. Basinger names Hick the leading unitary pluralist and records objections, among them whether the religions really transform lives equally and whether Hick's ethical test is arbitrary.
S. Mark Heim's Salvations (1995) and The Depth of the Riches (2001) propose a Trinitarian account of different religious ends.
Basinger classes Heim and Panikkar as pluriform pluralists, and records Heim's charge that unitary pluralists are "inclusivists in disguise".
Gavin D'Costa, a Catholic, argues that pluralism and inclusivism are both forms of exclusivism and that modernity admits only religions that fit its own definition.
He offers a sevenfold typology in place of the three labels, and holds that righteous non-Christians may come to know Christ after death through his descent to the dead.
Church Dogmatics I/2, section 17, is titled "The Revelation of God as Aufhebung of Religion".
A Princeton review notes that "abolition" as a translation led readers to see wholesale negation, that recent readings see revelation as both abrogating and affirming religion, and that for Barth "the Christian religion is judged like all other religions". Paul Knitter places Barth in his replacement model.
Studies another tradition in depth from within one's own faith, for the sake of theological understanding: Clooney has worked most deeply on Hindu texts and Fredericks on Buddhist thought.
Jeannine Hill Fletcher describes the aim as "learning from" other faiths and not only "learning about" them. Fredericks proposed it as "an alternative to the theology of religions"; John Ross Carter's review questions whether the method uses other traditions mainly as resources for Christian reflection.
Pentecostal theology of religions is less codified in church statements than Catholic or evangelical teaching.
Amos Yong's Beyond the Impasse (2003), the most cited Pentecostal proposal, holds that "God is universally present and active in the Spirit" and discerns the Spirit's presence in the religions by criteria of truth, goodness, beauty and holiness. J. Scott Horrell judges that it "does not escape an inclusivist perspective" and notes its tension with classical Pentecostal exclusivism.
Rejects "nothing that is true and holy" in other religions (Nostra Aetate, 1965) and holds that those who "through no fault of their own do not know the Gospel" can attain salvation (Lumen Gentium 16, 1964).
The Catechism restates "Outside the Church there is no salvation" as meaning that all salvation comes from Christ through the Church. Dominus Iesus (2000) calls Christ "Lord and only Saviour", and the notification on Jacques Dupuis (2001) holds that other religions are not ways of salvation complementary to the Church.
The Holy and Great Council of Crete (2016) supports inter-religious understanding and cooperation "without this involving any religious syncretism" and asks that mission be carried out "not aggressively or by different forms of proselytism".
Orthodox writers divide on dialogue: Metropolitan Georges Khodr wrote in 1971 that "All who are visited by the Spirit are the people of God", while the traditionalist publication The Orthodox Informer accuses him of holding that the Spirit works "independently of Jesus Christ and His Church".
Its Guidelines on Dialogue with People of Living Faiths and Ideologies frame dialogue as "dialogue in community", define syncretism as the attempt to create a new religion from elements of different religions, and state that dialogue and witness are not in contradiction.
With the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue and the World Evangelical Alliance it issued Christian Witness in a Multi-Religious World (2011), which rejects "all forms of allurements" and false witness and affirms the right to change one's religion.
The Lausanne Covenant (1974) holds that everyone has "some knowledge of God through his general revelation in nature", which cannot save, and rejects dialogue which implies that Christ speaks equally through all religions.
The Manila Manifesto (1989) grants that religions may contain "elements of truth and beauty" but holds that "They are not, however, alternative gospels". The Cape Town Commitment (2010) rejects "any form of witness that is coercive, unethical, deceptive, or disrespectful".
Mircea Eliade, professor of the history of religions at the University of Chicago, publishes The Sacred and the Profane, treating the sacred and the profane as modes of being and calling the appearance of the sacred a hierophany.36
Lumen Gentium 16 says that Muslims "along with us adore the one and merciful God" and that those who "through no fault of their own do not know the Gospel" can attain salvation.20
Metropolitan Georges Khodr of Mount Lebanon, addressing the World Council of Churches, speaks of the economy of the Holy Spirit.25
The Lausanne Covenant rejects "every kind of syncretism and dialogue which implies that Christ speaks equally through all religions and ideologies" and affirms dialogue whose purpose "is to listen sensitively in order to understand".29
The World Council of Churches' Guidelines on Dialogue with People of Living Faiths and Ideologies are drawn up at Chiang Mai in 1977 and published in 1979.27
At the close of the World Day of Prayer for Peace in Assisi, John Paul II says that the participants prayed "each in his own way", and that "there can be no question of reducing them to a kind of common denominator".39
Dialogue and Proclamation names four forms of dialogue, of life, of action, of theological exchange and of religious experience, and calls dialogue and proclamation "intimately related, but not interchangeable".40
Dominus Iesus (6 August 2000) calls Christ "Lord and only Saviour". A notification of 24 January 2001 finds "notable ambiguities and difficulties on important doctrinal points" in Jacques Dupuis's Toward a Christian Theology of Religious Pluralism, while stating that it is not a judgment on the author's own thought.2223
The World Council of Churches, the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue and the World Evangelical Alliance jointly issue Christian Witness in a Multi-Religious World, which rejects "all forms of allurements" and false witness and affirms the right to change one's religion.28
The Holy and Great Council of the Orthodox Church, meeting in Crete, supports inter-religious cooperation "without this involving any religious syncretism" and rejects proselytism.24
Pope Francis and the Grand Imam of Al-Azhar sign the Document on Human Fraternity in Abu Dhabi, which says that "pluralism and the diversity of religions ... are willed by God in His wisdom". Readers differ on how to reconcile this sentence with Dominus Iesus.44
Keep the three fields apart: religious studies describes religions without deciding whether they are true, comparative theology studies another tradition from within one's own faith, and theology of religions asks its questions from inside Christian faith.
Describe each religion from its own sources and from its own bodies, in its own terms4647.
Cover practice and community as well as belief, as Ninian Smart's seven dimensions do: ritual; narrative and mythic; experiential and emotional; social and institutional; ethical and legal; doctrinal and philosophical; and material48.
Bracket the question of truth, as Joachim Wach did in leaving "the determination of both the essence and the truth of religion" to theology and philosophy49.
Name each religion's internal diversity rather than treating it as uniform, the point of the critique of "world religions"50.
Give counts with their source, date and method, since counts depend on method5152.
In comparative theology, study the other tradition in depth, "learning from" it and not only "learning about" it; the method "expects expertise" in two traditions16.
Avoid reading another religion through Christian categories, the point of Okot p'Bitek's critique, and present historic polemic and Christian readings of another scripture as their writers' views53.
The works below shaped the field and are cited in this study, from the earliest to the most recent. Hover over a book, or select it, to see its author and the sources behind it.
Listed because this study draws on their published work; no association with or endorsement of Numa Verse is implied. Suggest a correction.
The words that carry the most weight in this field, each defined from the sources of this study. Turn a card over to read its definition.
Christians divide. Restrictivists hold that only those who hear and believe are saved1; Alister McGrath leaves the fate of those who never hear to God3; and Terrance Tiessen's accessibilism holds that God can save through Christ by forms of revelation less complete than the gospel4. Catholic teaching holds that those who through no fault of their own do not know the Gospel can be saved2021. Gavin D'Costa holds that righteous non-Christians may come to know Christ after death, and John Hick held a pluralist view129.
Christians divide on it. Lumen Gentium says that Muslims "along with us adore the one and merciful God"20. Miroslav Volf holds that Muslims and Christians who hold their normative traditions refer to the same Being while describing God differently, and Timothy George answered "Yes and No"45. In December 2015 Larycia Hawkins of Wheaton College wrote that Muslims and Christians worship the same God; Wheaton placed her on leave, and in February 2016 the two parted under a confidential agreement4574.
The Qur'an calls Jesus the Messiah and a Word from God, born of the virgin Mary, and has him call himself God's servant and a prophet757677. It says that he was neither killed nor crucified but that it was made to appear so, and Muslim interpreters differ on how78. It says that God raised him up to himself79. It rejects calling God three, and rejects taking Jesus and his mother as two gods beside God8081.
Muslim views differ. Martin Whittingham, of the Centre for Muslim-Christian Studies in Oxford, distinguishes tahrif al-lafz, corruption of the text itself, from tahrif al-ma'na, corruption of its meaning73. The Qur'an says that a party heard the word of God and changed it after understanding it (2:75), and tells the People of the Gospel to judge by what God revealed in it (5:47)8283. Christian writers answered the charge from early on, among them John of Damascus, the Patriarch Timothy I and 'Ammar al-Basri73.
On the Pew Research Center's count for 2020, from censuses and surveys, Christians were 28.8 percent of the world, Muslims 25.6 percent, the religiously unaffiliated 24.2 percent, Hindus 14.9 percent and Buddhists 4.1 percent63. Counts depend on method: in Japan religious bodies report more adherents than people, and in China 10 percent of adults identify with a religion while far more keep folk practices5152.
Reviewed and approved by Duane Herholdt, BA (Theology), Chief Executive Officer, Numa Verse
Study version: v1.1, 6 November 2026 (theology map v1.27)
Last reviewed: 9 November 2026
