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Divine Love and the Gift of Religious Diversity
 
Adis Duderija

Adis Duderija is a first-generation Bosnian-Australian. He obtained his Ph. D in 2010 at the Centre for Muslim States and Societies at the University of western Australia on interpretational methodologies of Qur’an and Sunna in Neo-Traditional Salafism and Progressive Islam. He is currently an academic at Griffith University in Brisbane Australia where he teaches courses on Islam and Gender, Islamic intellectual tradition and Islam and Muslims in the West. He is the author of 9 books on various aspects of Islamic intellectual tradition (progressive Islam, Qur;anic  hermeneutics, the concept of sunna, maqasid al shari’a, Salafism) and Islam and Muslims in the West and over 100 academic publications on these subjects...more

 
 
“The divine Eros that wooes the world toward beauty is at work in every tradition that has genuinely sought wisdom, justice, and the sacred. Religious plurality is not a scandal to be overcome but a testimony to the inexhaustible creativity of divine love” (Hartshorne 1984, 61).

HARTSHORNE, C. (1948) The Divine Relativity: A Social Conception of God. New Haven: Yale University Press.
 
For many people, religious diversity feels like a problem to solve. If one faith is true, the thinking goes, then others must be wrong—or at best incomplete. History shows where this logic can lead: suspicion, rivalry, and sometimes violence. But the philosopher and theologian Charles Hartshorne invites us to see the matter differently. He writes, “The divine Eros that wooes the world toward beauty is at work in every tradition that has genuinely sought wisdom, justice, and the sacred. Religious plurality is not a scandal to be overcome but a testimony to the inexhaustible creativity of divine love.”

That sentence quietly overturns a great deal of religious anxiety.

At the heart of Hartshorne’s vision is Eros—not in the narrow romantic sense, but as desire, attraction, and creative love. Divine Eros is God’s restless longing for relationship, beauty, and flourishing. God does not dominate the world through force or decree but draws it forward through persuasion and invitation. Reality, on this view, unfolds because it is loved into becoming.

If that is true, then religious traditions are not competing products in a marketplace of truth. They are responses—imperfect, culturally shaped, historically conditioned responses—to the same divine lure. Different languages, symbols, stories, and practices emerge not because humanity is hopelessly confused, but because divine love is richly responsive to human diversity. Just as beauty appears in countless artistic styles, divine wisdom appears in multiple religious forms.

From this angle, religious plurality is not a failure of revelation. It is evidence of abundance.

This is a challenging idea, especially for traditions accustomed to seeing themselves as uniquely chosen or exclusively true. Yet Hartshorne does not deny that religions make strong and sometimes conflicting claims. He simply insists that God’s relationship with the world is too dynamic, too generous, to be captured in a single sacred vocabulary. The divine Eros “at work” in the world is patient, adaptive, and deeply relational. It meets people where they are—historically, culturally, linguistically—and invites them toward justice and compassion from within their own worlds.

That reframing could not be more timely. In an age marked by religious nationalism, culture wars, and fear of the “other,” diversity is often treated as a threat. Difference becomes something to manage, tolerate at best, eliminate at worst. Hartshorne offers a different posture entirely. What if religious difference is not an obstacle to God’s work but one of its primary signs?

Seen this way, traditions that genuinely seek wisdom and justice—whether Buddhist, Jewish, Christian, Muslim, Indigenous, or humanistic—are not rivals but companions. Each carries insights the others lack. Each also carries blind spots others may help illuminate. Diversity does not relativize truth; it deepens it by making truth relational rather than monopolized.

This perspective also reshapes interfaith engagement. Too often, dialogue assumes a hidden agenda: persuasion, correction, or quiet hierarchy. Hartshorne’s vision calls instead for curiosity. If divine love is inexhaustibly creative, then genuine encounter across traditions becomes an opportunity for learning—not just about others, but about God. Listening becomes a spiritual discipline. Humility becomes a form of faithfulness.

There are ethical consequences as well. If divine Eros is always wooing the world toward beauty, then justice is not optional. Traditions that claim divine sanction while ignoring suffering, oppression, or exclusion contradict the very love they invoke. Hartshorne’s openness to pluralism is not sentimental tolerance; it is morally demanding. Not every religious expression is affirmed—only those that genuinely seek wisdom, justice, and the sacred. Love is generous, but it is not indifferent.

Importantly, this vision does not flatten differences or erase commitments. People remain rooted in particular traditions, stories, and practices. What changes is the posture toward others. Conviction without hostility. Belonging without exclusion. Faith without fear.

Perhaps what unsettles many readers is Hartshorne’s final claim: religious plurality testifies to the “inexhaustible creativity” of divine love. Inexhaustible means never used up, never finished, never complete. God is still at work—still luring, still calling, still creating new responses to old questions. The future of religion, then, is not about narrowing possibilities but about deepening responsibility.

In a fractured world, this theological vision offers something rare: a way to affirm difference without despair, commitment without conquest, and faith without finality. If divine love is truly at work everywhere people seek beauty and justice, then our task is not to guard God from pluralism—but to learn how to recognize God within it.
Religious diversity, in the end, may not be the problem. It may be the invitation.