Religious Diversity, Personal Knowledge, and Oblivious Salvation

Abstract

In this paper, I employ recent work on divine ineffability (Jacobs, 2015) and personal knowledge (Benton, 2017) to argue that specific propositional knowledge cannot be required for salvation, where salvation is understood to involve a general claim about a person’s union with God. If this is true, I show that nobody can be excluded from salvation through mere happenstance of birth. Furthermore, I argue that adherents of this minimalist order of salvation ought to adopt a position of significant religious humility, for it is a consequence of this view that those with wildly divergent propositional beliefs about God, including people of different faiths, and even of no faith, can ultimately experience union with the same God. Although presented as an argument for salvific inclusivity, I conclude by showing that a similar argument can be adapted in defence of salvific pluralism. If there are no fundamentally true propositional beliefs about God to be had, each true claim made about God must be non-fundamentally true. Furthermore, just as there are multiple ways to truly, but non-fundamentally, describe the same object (ways that might contradict each other), so might there be multiple ways to truly, but non-fundamentally, describe God.