Conversations: Sharing Our Faith with a Skeptical World
What about Other Religions?
Rev. Richard H. Thompson, October 11, 2009

John 14:6; Acts 17:16–33

A pastor starting a church in downtown Manhattan asked people what their biggest problem was with Christianity. In one word, the most common answer was "exclusivity". How can Christians claim what they believe is "right" and what everybody else believes is "wrong"? Behind this skepticism no doubt lie countless stories of Christians behaving badly, putting on airs of superiority, holier-than-thou judgmentalism, abuse and certainly manipulation. It gets political on all sides. This sort of exclusivity makes for anger and resentment. It is the stuff of wars.

That pastor, Tim Keller, who wrote a book a couple of years ago entitled Reason for God, observes that there are three common responses to the problem of exclusivism (none of which is effective):

The first is to outlaw religion altogether. This was tried especially in the 20th century in Marxist countries around the world. The ironies of this response are many and bitter in the degree of intolerance and violence that was practiced on millions of people. Another irony is that religious belief actually increased in the places of greatest oppression!

The second response is to condemn religion through more subtle means. Saying, for example, that "all religions are pretty much the same" relativizes all religions and relegates them wholesale to a matter of indifference. It doesn't really matter what you believe, some say, as long as you "believe". It's as one person wrote to me in an email some years back, "All balloons go to heaven..."

But are all religions pretty much the same? Do the Branch Davidians teach pretty much the same thing as the Buddhists? What about those that practice human sacrifice? Or that regard women as property? Put the teachings of one religion alongside Christian faith and compare them and you will quickly discover that they do not say the same thing. Zen Buddhism teaches that there is no "god". Hindus teach that the object of religion is enlightenment and the destiny of the soul is extinguishment and non-existence of the self, quite different that the Christian understanding of "salvation". Nature religions are based on what is observed in the cycle of days and nights, and seasons, and the spinning stars overhead, and see time going in circles. Christian faith sees that there was a beginning to time itself, and that that time is moving to a conclusion. Animist religions believe that living beings and the earth itself are divinely occupied, what is called pantheism. Christian faith holds that God created all this but is separate from them. To compare the content claims of all the religions of the world is a huge but fascinating task. You'd learn a lot if you did the work. You would find some similarities on some ethical issues that we might summarize as the Golden Rule. But you would also find dramatic differences.

The great problem with saying that all religions are pretty much the same is twofold. One is that this is disrespectful of all religions. It's the kind of thing someone says who is not committed to any religion. And this leads to the second problem: How does one know that all religions are pretty much the same? How does someone know that all the religions are like blind men feeling an elephant unless you yourself have some sort of superior and comprehensive knowledge of spiritual reality? To claim this kind of confidence has to be based on some sort of faith in one's own point of view, doesn't it? But if all religions are relative, then so is this claim to superior perspective by the one who says all religions are the same!

It's here that, as we were talking a few weeks back, Christians need to think through what we say we and anyone can know, not just "believe", about God. We talked about how science itself helps us assess the evidence for the existence of God from what anyone can observe in creation. What if we can actually reasonably know that there is a God? It would no longer be a matter of belief or opinion, would it? God would be everyone's God whether they know or it or not.

And here we need to draw an important distinction between knowing something and being arrogant about what we know.

If I say, "I know how to speak French so that makes me better than you..." you would rightly tell me that's an arrogant thing to say. But it wouldn't change the fact that I know how to speak French. What if what I know is that I am a frail human being, and that so are you. Knowing this to be true doesn't make me arrogant, does it? What Christians know does not make them better than anyone else, does it? Does it?

The third, unsuccessful way to deal with the problem of exclusivism in Christianity is to make it a matter of private belief and practice. Ironically, it is to exclude Christianity from the public square. But how are we supposed to do this? Somehow we are to divorce our values reasoning from our faith. So, use hard and soft scientific data to back up every proposal. Base all our ethical, moral, legal, and leadership reasoning on empiric research. But this cannot work. Martin Luther King, Jr. stepped into the public square with a message of racial equality based on the message of the Old Testament prophets and Jesus' Sermon on the Mount. How are we supposed to work out such gnarly issues as marriage, and abortion, and immigration, and health care, if we cannot reference the basis of our convictions on what is right and good and true? Data is useful, but only tells us so much. It does not tell us "why". The other problem is that the assumption that only "secular" thinking is valid for how we decide, and value, and make for meaningful living, can become its own kind of religion...

None of these three proposals for dealing with the problem of exclusivism work. Is there a better way? I wonder, what about Jesus? What would Jesus look like, and sound like, among the religions of the world? How would he relate to them all? Here I'm asking an explicitly Christian question. By that I mean I assume that Jesus is who he says he is, and who Christians believe him to be based on what they know about him -- that Jesus is God come to be with us all, not just Christians, but Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Seiks, Hindus, Westerners or Easterners, Northerners or Southerners, agnostics, atheists, skeptics and cynics. How is God with all of this searching going on everywhere and at all times? What if God is actually causing it? What if the Spirit of God is loose, moving over the face of the planet and Universe, constantly provoking, inspiring, and drawing people out beyond themselves, to wonder, and yearn for beauty, truth, justice, and belonging? Then Jesus would love the questions, wouldn't he? Especially the sincere open-hearted ones, the skeptical ones more than the cynical ones, because good questions would lead, step by step, to God.

After all, this is the kind of world Jesus was born into. Sometimes I think we forget that the first century was every bit as pluralistic as our own. The public square was full of options. I think about this passage from Acts 17.

"While Paul was waiting for them in Athens, he was deeply distressed to see that the city was full of idols. So he argued in the synagogue with the Jews and the devout persons, and also in the market-place every day with those who happened to be there. Also some Epicurean and Stoic philosophers debated with him. Some said, ‘What does this babbler want to say?' Others said, ‘He seems to be a proclaimer of foreign divinities.' (This was because he was telling the good news about Jesus and the resurrection.) So they took him and brought him to the Areopagus and asked him, ‘May we know what this new teaching is that you are presenting? It sounds rather strange to us, so we would like to know what it means.' Now all the Athenians and the foreigners living there would spend their time in nothing but telling or hearing something new. Then Paul stood in front of the Areopagus and said, ‘Athenians, I see how extremely religious you are in every way. For as I went through the city and looked carefully at the objects of your worship, I found among them an altar with the inscription, "To an unknown god." What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you. The God who made the world and everything in it, he who is Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in shrines made by human hands, nor is he served by human hands, as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all mortals life and breath and all things. From one ancestor he made all nations to inhabit the whole earth, and he allotted the times of their existence and the boundaries of the places where they would live, so that they would search for God and perhaps grope for him and find him—though indeed he is not far from each one of us. For "In him we live and move and have our being"; as even some of your own poets have said,

"For we too are his offspring." Since we are God's offspring, we ought not to think that the deity is like gold, or silver, or stone, an image formed by the art and imagination of mortals. While God has overlooked the times of human ignorance, now he commands all people everywhere to repent, because he has fixed a day on which he will have the world judged in righteousness by a man whom he has appointed, and of this he has given assurance to all by raising him from the dead.' When they heard of the resurrection of the dead, some scoffed; but others said, ‘We will hear you again about this.' At that point Paul left them.

Here's the apostle Paul at the Aeropagus, a place for public discourse in front of the Parthenon. It was not an easy place to be. Those who brought Paul there were skeptical of what he had to say. In fact he posed a threat to stability. What if his teaching gained a following? At stake was how people saw the world, and made meaning. It's no different today. If you think about it, "religion" can take many forms, can't it? Money, Power and Sex for example. Archaeologists have uncovered vase paintings, statues and cult objects that leave little to the imagination about how people believed you worshiped the gods with your body, and somebody else's too! The Epicureans believed there was a great distance between the world and the gods, sort of like "deism" today. The Stoics believed the opposite, that divinity lay within the present world and within each human being, so get in touch with the inner spark, maybe a little like, you know, unleash the giant within, unleash your human divine potential.

How did Paul relate Christian faith to other religions? First he confirmed the search for God evident in a statue dedicated to the "unknown God", that there is a God that can be known. That this God is the Source of all life, and peoples. God is not the God of one nation, or one tribe, or culture. God cares and is engaged with human history, not disengaged and aloof. Paul quoted a Stoic philosopher named Aratus who said, "We are his offspring." Paul agreed. We are all God's children, created in God's image.

Then the apostle turned a corner. Because God cares, God has declared to the world Godself by one particular human being. Paul spoke of Jesus. By the way, Jesus is still very popular around the world. "Christianity" is under suspicion in many places for reasons I've mentioned, but Jesus? He's someone to talk about...

When Paul brought up Jesus on the Areopagus this was a new thing. It's not so much that Jesus was a brilliant teacher of new ideas, though what he taught riveted his audiences. It's not even that he demonstrated what he was talking about in healings, and the time he spent with excluded people of all kinds. Here is what is very important for you and me to understand. It's what happened. That this man Jesus was executed, but then on the Third Day, rose from the dead. And this did not happen in the minds of some followers, or in a corner. It was not, and is not a matter of wishing, or believing, but of knowing the way anything that happens in history can be known. Even more, it's what his rising from the dead signifies. To take Jesus' word, it meant, and means, that God has now begun to set all things right.

The Resurrection of Jesus is the "Big Bang" of a movement now 2,000 years old that has rippled out all over the planet. It is not a Western, Northern, Southern or Eastern thing. It is a global thing.

Rather than being "exclusive", the message of Jesus is "inclusive".

Oh yeah? So what did Jesus mean when he said, "I am the way, the truth, and the life", and "No one comes to the Father but by me"? That sure sounds pretty exclusive, doesn't it?

Like anything anybody says, you have to allow what Jesus said to be taken within context. Jesus said this in John's gospel which begins by saying who Jesus is. That he is the very presence of God with us. This is the same Jesus who washed the feet of his followers, who healed the sick, who ate with people the Greeks considered animals or mere property to be used. It's the same Jesus who loved children, gave new hope and purpose to a Samaritan woman, who said, "Blessed are the poor in spirit for theirs is the kingdom of heaven..."

It makes me wonder, do we Christians understand what Jesus meant when he called himself the way, the truth and the life? Jesus was never much impressed with "religion" because by it people lay claim to status, they divide up on sides, they use for it for all kinds of personal purposes. He taught instead a "religion of the heart turned toward God". The New Testament as a whole is not too impressed with religion either, if by it someone hopes to be able to make oneself pleasing to God. As the old saying goes, "Going to church makes someone a Christian the same way standing in a garage makes someone a car."

Thank God, God does not work with humankind on the basis of their merit, but on the basis of God's mercy.

Two conversations.

The first took place on a catamaran speeding across Lake Titicaca on the Altiplano between Bolivia and Peru on our way to Sun Island, an ancient worship site of the Tiahuanacan Indians. We were all from California working in Santa Cruz, Bolivia on a Habitat for Humanity Global Village project building homes alongside some hardworking families. As we cruised along the lake I thought, "This would be a good time to talk about Christ in the world..." So I asked what others thought about this. One man, not from the church where I was serving, shocked me. He said he believed that anyone who lived before Jesus, or who has never heard of Jesus, all went to hell. "Wow," I remember saying. "You actually believe that? That it's about where and when you are born?" "Yep", he answered without hesitation.

But how does that fit with "For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son so that whoever believes in him may not perish, but have eternal life"? And Jesus is called the Word of God who was with God before there was time. All things are created in and through Him including time itself. If this is true, then Jesus is not only an historical figure who lived 2,000 years ago. He is not limited by that time, or culture. He is not just a peasant poet, or famous rabbi. His Resurrection reveals him to be far more than we can reason out or comprehend.

I'm forced to realize that I do not comprehend what Jesus means when he says that he is the way, the truth and the life. It's not that I have no idea what he means. I think I do. But I have a very long way to go.

Dallas Willard wrote something that I've got to think a lot about. He said, "Where there really is a way to God, where there really is truth about God, where there is genuine life of God, Christ is there."

If this is close to right, I'm going to be surprised by what He is doing in this world.

Which leads to my second conversation. I was on an airplane flying from Miami to Port au Prince. I was having difficulty getting my glasses clean and the stranger next to me pulled one of those little cleaning cloths out of his shirt pocket and with an accent said, "Try this." I cleaned my glasses and folded up the cloth to give back to the man. But he refused, "Please, keep it. No problem". We struck up a conversation. I asked where his accent was from. "Turkey", he answered. He told me he was on a U.N. assignment to drive trucks for six months in Haiti. He asked what I was doing. I explained about our clinic. We talked about our families, our countries, hospitality in our two countries. We talked about Haiti. Somehow the conversation turned to our faith. He shared how he prayed using beads, several times a day, and then he gave them to me... He shared with me how hard it is to be a devout Muslim -- you can't look at television because there is so much temptation. Women's dress makes it hard too. He said, "It's hard to be a good Muslim". It sort of created an opening. I shared about how I prayed too, how we live on grace and mercy, and how we are tempted to take this for granted. We talked about the Koran and the Bible, the messages of Muhammad and Issa, the Arabic name for Jesus.

More and more we are blessed with opportunities to share our faith with people from all around the world. What a gift!

We are all under mercy. No question that makes you and me special. Gifted. Graced. But that same mercy we see in Jesus also makes everyone special, gifted and graced, doesn't it?

And so we go out in peace, to serve the Lord.

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Questions for Reflection and recommended reading.