Abstract

Since the early 1980s a popular threefold typology has been the dominant means for classifying theories of religious diversity within the Christian theology of religions and the Western philosophy of religion. Despite its popularity, this typology has also been widely criticized for being incoherent on account of including a theoretical type that is not real; namely, religious pluralism. Religious pluralism is considered unreal in the sense that it is not sufficiently different from the other two types, called religious exclusivism and religious inclusivism. Indeed, some critics have argued that there is only exclusivism, or only inclusivism, and so the threefold typology should be abandoned altogether. This work will review late twentieth century theories of religious diversity, and argue that religious pluralism is a real and distinct theoretical option for religious diversity theorists. More specifically, it will argue in favour of a fourfold typology that includes two different types of religious pluralism; humanistic-universalistic pluralism and metaphysical pluralism. Within this fourfold typology, both types of pluralism are characterized by an argument that pluralizes some particular idea of true religion. Thus, both types of pluralism advance the novel idea of true religions and, by extension, the even more novel sounding idea of the true religions.