Toward a Theology of World Religions

This I wrote for a sermon on world religions and inter-faith conversation. I did a sermon series on world religions in 2006 and thought I would post this here.

The Issue at Hand

At some point in our lives, we all encounter people of differing religions. Our children will learn about other religions in school and will often have friends of different religions. Would you believe that Somerset has a Mosque and that Johanna had Hindu and Muslim friends in her class. I used to eat with Johanna and talk to her Indian Hindu friend Kodgil. We live in a world that is very different from the world we grew up in. Yet many of us know very little about the other major world religions and some of us know only a slanted version.

It is essential, in light of this fact, to seek to understand other religions better and to build bridges of understanding. How can we reach out to those with the message of Jesus if we have absolutely no idea what they believe? We are going to examine the five major religions of the world. But I’m going to start, in this sermon, talking about how we think about this? How can we be faithful to our Christian heritage and yet be openhearted with those of other religions? This can be threatening because we are forced to ask, “What if there is truth in other religions? Can my faith withstand serious consideration of other religions?” We should all feel a little uncomfortable but that doesn’t mean we should not ask these questions. We really must.

I have this experience often in class. When I lecture on Confucian, Platonic or Stoic thought, you would be amazed how many of the more devout Christian kids perk up. I’ll often say, “This sounds surprisingly familiar, doesn’t it?” “Yeah, it sounds very Christian” is their response. “Well, you aren’t the first to notice,” I respond. Christians have been reading Plato and the Stoics from the start. Virtually every Christian theologian in the early church had been schooled in Plato and the Stoics and quoted them with great regularity and fervor. They were plundering Egypt – that is, they were taking the very best of their cultural heritage and applying it to their Christian worldview.

The Problem: The Uniqueness of Jesus

On the other hand, people can go way overboard here. We need to remember that Jesus claimed to be – and the church confesses Jesus to be – the unique Son of God. “No one comes to the Father but through me” (John 14:6). All religions which claim to have something true to say, must, of necessity, also say something about the untruthfulness of other religions and philosophies. You can hardly get out of this – and it is true of anything claimed to be true in any area of life – not just religion. Many devout Christians are worried about Jesus’ exclusive claims to deity and truth and simply do not have the heart to agree with what Jesus himself seems to have claimed for himself.

Jesus was unique in his qualifications as the son of God – the one “whom the prophets foretold” (Acts 3:18)
Jesus is unique in his achievements – “There is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved” (Act 4:12)
Jesus is unique in his resurrection – “The one whom God raised from the dead” (Acts 4:10).

Key Point - The uniqueness in who he is and his efficacy as our savior from sin lies at the heart of Christian faith. This brings up two questions.

What must we say about other religions? Are they completely without truth? If there is truth in them, from whence does it come? Why such diversity?
What about those who have never heard? Are they all going to hell? None?

What about Other Religions?

Does the fact that Jesus is the unique Son of God and Savior of the world imply that all those outside of Christian revelation are completely misguided? One way of saying this is as follows: While in Christ we have infallible truth, outside of the Church are truths which can be instructive and of value. These truths arise from several facts.

1) Everyone in a universe that shouts the glory of God. The Psalmist said, “The heavens declare God’s glory.”
2) Everyone is made in God’s image (Gen 1:27) which gives them a certain conscience and knowledge of right and wrong. Every religions has something like a golden rule. Paul in Rom. 2 tells of those who do not know the actual law of Moses but who fulfill the law of God written on their hearts. Job was seen by the early church as a gentile who fulfilled God’s laws written on his heart and was blameless before God.
3) every heart hungers for God and for salvation.
4) In Methodism we talk about the prevenient grace of God which works in all persons drawing them to the truth of Christ. We not only know the laws by nature, we have a certain ability to understand and comply. Methodists have traditionally called this prevenient grace.

In other words, when we think about other religions, we do not think about people who have absolutely no access to divine Grace. Traditional theology tells us otherwise. Let me put this differently. CS Lewis in Mere Christianity says that when he was an atheist, he was forced by his worldview to be intolerant of all religions. They were all fundamentally false and misguided about the basic truth of reality. There is no god or gods or God or spirit or angels or forces or anything but matter. When he became a Christian he could take a more tolerant liberal view about other religions as well. While he might not agree with the understandings of Muslim about the nature of the deity and the questions of God’s incarnation in Christ, he could agree with the Muslim on many things. God exists, is personal, and demands humility and divine service. The same is true of all other religions. Becoming a Christian helped him take a more liberal view of other religions.

Bishop Lesslie Newbiggin was a bishop on South India for forty years and wrote extensively about world religions. He knew many persons who had converted to Christianity from other religions. He noted that they experienced both continuity and discontinuity. They had a clear sense that they had to serve Christ and Christ alone. Yet they also knew that it had been Jesus who was dealing with them all along in the pre-Christian searching.

Why the Diversity?

If this is the case, why so many different religions? People believe very different things about God; surely God could have made clear which is the right path. To some people, the sheer number of religious options shows that religion is a human invention. Yet, the fact that virtually all human beings have religions or spiritual quests of some sort point to the reality of God and the fact that God made us to long for him. The spiritual longings which are so ubiquitous is a fact itself that cries out for explanation and the best explanation for it is simple: God made us in his image and shaped us to live in relationship with Him.

The multiplicity of opinion is to be expected. Adam Hamilton points out that often, when he sees a movie with his wife, and discusses it later, he wonders if they saw the same movie! They both experienced it so differently and thought of such different meanings to the exact same film. Paul tells us, “We know only in part . . . For now we see in a mirror dimly” (I Cor 13:9, 12). God allows religious differences, in part the way a parent lets a child struggle to learn. If you are teaching your children how to spell, you don’t say, “pencil – now that is p, e, n, c, i, l.” They would never learn to spell. You have to let them struggle to learn. I think in all religions we see God allowing humans to struggle with the ultimate questions of life. God could simply open the heavens and say, “Look, you humans. Christ is my son and you all need to be saved by believing in him.” God could do that but chooses not to. He wants us to struggle, we who see in the mirror darkly. Religious diversity is part of that struggle.

We see this struggle right in the pages of the Bible. If you were in our OT class, it has been something of a theme of the class. You can see the development of ideas and thinking about God right in the pages of the Bible. You have to close your eyes not to see it. God choose Abraham to follow him, even thought Abraham was certainly not a full monotheist the way Isaiah was. Moses brought the laws of God on Mt. Sinai but is constantly updating the law for new situations as they arise. God gave the law – you would think it would be perfect from the start. But Moses has to go back to God and say, “What about this?” And God gives a more defined law (for example: Num 27:1-11 and 36:1-13). It happens over and over. Jesus adds new light to what was previously known about God.

How Should we View Other Religions?

Did you realize that only 1/3 of the world’s population have an affiliation to Christianity. Two thirds of the world’s population are not Christians. They long to know truth and seek to serve God and their fellow humans as they best understand. God formed these persons also from their mother’s womb as Ps 139 notes. So what about other religions: Will they be saved? Here are three perspectives.

The Pluralist Perspective claims that all religions are equally valid paths to the Ultimate Reality of the universe. All religions are at their core saying and believing and experiencing the same divine reality in the world. “Your truth is true for you if it is honestly held and internally consistent.”

This has problems for me for three reasons. First, it fails to be faithful to the uniqueness of Jesus we outlined above. If Jesus is the unique Son of God, that truth must trump all other truths and be of ultimate importance. Second, I don’t think this really honors other religions. If a Muslim hears a religious pluralist, he isn’t going to agree and say, “Yes, Islam is really teaching the same thing as Christianity.” A Hindu may come closer to agreeing but in the end he’ll want to say, “Yes, but Hinduism is not the same as your religion. We believe things that are fundamentally different.” While the pluralist wants to honor other religions, he fails to do so. Thirdly, different religions teach exactly the opposite things in many regards. The Muslim fundamentalist who believes that Mohammed was Allah’s prophet doesn’t have much in common with the Theravada Buddhist who doesn’t believe in a deity of any type at all. These religions cannot be boiled down to an essential unity.

The Exclusivist Perspective is at the other end of the spectrum. It states simply that those who do not believe in Jesus will all go to hell out of sheer necessity. It does not matter how devout they are or how closely they follow moral beliefs and lifestyles. They simply had not been given the opportunity to believe in Jesus who is the only way, the only truth, the only life (John 14:6 again). We will consider this passage again.

The Inclusivist Perspective says that Jesus is in fact the only basis of salvation – no one is saved other than through the work of Christ – but that one does not have to know Jesus during this life to be saved by Him. Salvation is available to those who profess other religions but by means of the hidden Christ. One who throws themselves upon God’s mercy in this life is essentially throwing themselves into the arms of Christ without knowing it. This person knows that they have done wrong and feel contrition about this wrong. They do not understand historically who Jesus was and what Jesus has done to solve the problem, but God judges them as if they did understand. God judges them on the basis of what they know.

The biblical text comes in Luke 18: the parable of the Pharisee and the publican. The publican or tax collector simply beat his chest and said, “God have mercy on me, a sinner.” He never believed in Jesus or knew about Jesus in Jesus own parable. But Jesus says that he went up from the temple justified before God that day. This is an important truth: the essential prayer of all those who repent is, “Lord, have mercy on me a sinner.” This prayer activates God’s saving grace which historically depends upon Jesus even when the person does not fully understand this. I must add that John Wesley was an inclusivist and on several occasions wrote about this.

The Last Battle

Adam Hamilton in his book of World Religions quotes CS Lewis’ The Last Battle. In this tale, Emeth (which means truth in Hebrew although I don’t know if Lewis intended this) meets Aslan in final judgment. Emeth had been a devoted worshipper of Tash – a different deity - his whole life. When he comes face to face with Aslan (who represents Jesus) he expects to be put to death. He realizes he’s been mistaken and worshipping the wrong deity. Here is his encounter with Aslan.

He touched my forehead . . . and said, “Son thou art welcome.” But I said, “Alas, Lord, I am no son of Thine but the servant of Tash.” He answered, “Child, all the service thou hast done to Tash I account as service done to me.” Then I asked, “Are Thou and Tash one?” The Lion growled so that the earth shook . . . and said, “It is false. Not because he and I are one but because he and I are opposites, I take to me the services which thou hast done to him. . . “ I said, “I have been seeking Tash all my days. . .” The Glorious one said, “Unless thy desire had been for me thou wouldst not have sought so long and so truly. For all find what they truly seek.”

Paul in Phil. 2:10 says “every knee will bend and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord.” Those who didn’t know the Lordship of Christ in this life will, as Emeth did, when he encounter Jesus will realize that they were worshipping Christ implicitly all along. You may ask, “Then why should we obey the commission of Jesus to make Christian disciples of all nations?” We should tell them because Christ is indeed the way, the truth and the life; he gives us the most complete picture and relationship with God available. We offer Christ to provide assurance of salvation and simply because Jesus commanded us to do so.

Conclusion

My desire for you is that you will struggle with these questions. I’m not an expert but I’ve read and thought about these questions a lot. I’ve chosen to say, “I not only can learn about other religions respectfully, I can learn from then in ways that are helpful to my own faith walk. I can do that and be absolutely faithful to Jesus and to my Christian heritage.”

My hope is that you will be openhearted. Remember that we will also discover where other religions contradict Christian teachings and we will humbly reject them at that point. I hope that this will help you grow in your Christian walk and help us all develop the kinds of spiritual sensitivity that helps us be better witnesses to the resurrection power of Jesus Christ. We can only effectively bear witness to Christ if we have faithfully understood what other religions presently believe. I believe we set out on this pilgrimage out of a direct desire to be faithful to Jesus and to his calling to bear witness to his name.