It frightens us to hear such open talk about truth. We are more concerned with how to live in a world where there is a plurality of truths—and with how to do so without killing each other—than we are with truth. Pilate himself was trying to deal with this problem of pluralism. It was difficult enough keeping Jews in their place—with their Sadducees, Pharisees and Essenes—without a young Nazarene claiming to be the truth. Pilate’s response to Jesus’ claim was to try to get him into a philosophical discussion about truth. And then, when this rabbi refused to enter the discussion—refused to be rational—he had him killed.

I’m not sure that we’ve gotten much beyond Pilate in handling pluralism. We are heirs to the liberal theological enterprise which assumes that there is some universal experience that can be characterized as "religious." The plurality of religions, the liberal assumes, is the varied expression of a universal human experience. We shouldn’t be too dismayed by the wide array of religious expressions in our society, according to this view, for the basic experience behind them transcends their particular expressions. But if we encounter an expression that is contrary to whatever we have defined as the "basic religious experience"— as happens, say, when a devotee of Campus Crusade tells a Mormon that she is going to hell—we dismiss this perspective as an unreasonable aberration, an inadequate expression of our basic religious aspirations. The liberal, despite his or her claims of openness, is really quite imperialistic in insisting that all religions be evaluated on the basis of some allegedly universal criteria.