What about other religions?

Question 60007.

What about other religions is rarely a neutral enquiry. Behind it usually stands a colleague, a neighbour, a daughter in law, somebody sincere and kind who believes something else, and the real question is whether I am prepared to say that person is wrong.

So let me answer it honestly and without the swagger this subject sometimes attracts. I do believe Jesus is the only way to God. I also believe that holding that conviction badly has done enormous damage, and I would like to hold it properly.

The claim behind the question

The popular view is religious pluralism, the idea that all faiths are different paths up the same mountain, culturally conditioned responses to one ultimate reality. It is usually presented as humble, and it is worth noticing that it is not.

Pluralism requires you to know that no religion has the full truth, which is itself a substantial claim about ultimate reality made from nowhere in particular. The famous parable of the blind men and the elephant only works if the narrator can see the elephant.

It also requires flattening what other religions actually teach. Buddhism denies a personal creator, Islam insists there is one God who has no son, and Hinduism embraces many deities within an ultimate unity. To call these the same is not respect, it is not paying attention.

Taking the differences seriously

Genuine respect begins with accuracy. Other religions disagree with Christianity and with one another about the most basic questions, and their adherents know it even when Western commentators do not.

They disagree about God, about whether the ultimate is personal or impersonal, one or many. They disagree about the human problem, whether it is ignorance, imbalance, or moral guilt before a holy God. They disagree about the remedy, whether enlightenment, submission, ritual, or a substitute who dies in your place.

A Muslim friend of mine once said that the Christians he found hardest to talk to were the ones who told him our faiths were basically the same. He knew they were not, and the flattery felt like a refusal to engage.

What Scripture says without softening

Jesus said He is the way, the truth and the life, and that no one comes to the Father except through Him, John 14:6. Peter told the council there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved.

Paul wrote that there is one God and one mediator between God and men, the man Jesus. The New Testament writers were living in a world of many faiths, considerably more pluralistic than modern Britain, and they made these statements anyway.

So Christian exclusivity is not a mediaeval accretion or a Western import. It is there from the beginning, and any attempt to remove it has to remove most of the New Testament with it.

What is true in other religions

Exclusivity about salvation does not require denying that other religions contain anything true. Scripture itself supplies the framework for expecting otherwise.

Paul says that what can be known about God is plain, since His attributes have been perceived in the things that have been made, Romans 1:19. He also says that Gentiles who do not have the law show the work of the law written on their hearts. General revelation and conscience are given to everybody.

So I am not surprised to find real moral insight in Confucius, a serious wrestling with suffering in Buddhism, or a fierce insistence on the oneness of God in Islam. What I do not find anywhere else is a God who comes down and dies for His enemies.

Why sincerity is not the issue

The most common objection is that sincere people cannot all be wrong, or that God will accept anyone who is genuine. Sincerity is a wonderful quality and it is not a truth detector.

I can be entirely sincere about the platform my train leaves from and still end the day in Carlisle. Reality is not adjusted by the confidence of my belief about it, and that is as true in religion as in railway timetables.

This cuts both ways, incidentally. Sincerity does not save a Christian either. Plenty of people are sincerely religious about a Jesus they have constructed, and Jesus warned that many would say Lord, Lord, and be told He never knew them.

What makes the gospel different in kind

The difference is not that Christianity has better rules. Every faith has ethical teaching, and some of it is admirable. The difference is the direction of travel.

Other religions, broadly, tell you what to do in order to reach God. The gospel tells you what God has done in order to reach you. Grace, in the Greek charis, is favour given to those with no claim on it, and it is not a category the religions of the world generate on their own.

That is also why the resurrection matters so much. Founders of other religions left teachings behind them and stayed in their graves. I have set out the historical case in the evidence for the resurrection of Jesus, and I develop the wider contrast in what makes Christianity unique.

Those who have never heard

This is the question underneath the question, and it deserves a straight answer rather than a dodge. What about the man in a remote valley who never hears the name of Jesus.

I hold that nobody is condemned for not hearing. People are condemned for sin, and Scripture is clear that everyone has enough light to be responsible, through creation and conscience, and that nobody lives up to the light they have. Paul concludes that they are without excuse.

I also hold that God is entirely just and will do right by every individual, and that He goes to remarkable lengths to reach those who respond to the light they have. Cornelius was a seeker and an apostle was despatched to him. What I will not do is turn that hope into a doctrine that makes missions optional, since Paul’s own reasoning in Romans 10 runs the other way.

How to talk with a believer of another faith

Start by learning what they actually believe rather than what a book told you they believe. Ask questions and listen to the answers, and be willing to say that you have misunderstood something.

Look for the point of genuine contact. With a Muslim it is often the character of God and the question of assurance, and I explore that in whether Islam is compatible with Christianity. With a secular pluralist it is usually the question of how anyone knows that no one knows.

And be a friend rather than a project. People are not conquests, and other religions are held by human beings with families and fears and a great deal to lose by changing. That cost deserves acknowledgement rather than impatience.

Truth and love together

Christians tend to fail at one end or the other. Some hold the truth about other religions with a hardness that repels, treating people as errors to be corrected. Others are so anxious to be kind that they never say anything a Muslim or a Hindu would need to hear.

Paul’s instruction is to speak the truth in love, and the phrase resists being split. Truth without love is a weapon, love without truth is a sentiment, and the New Testament expects both from the same mouth.

In practice that means I will tell a friend plainly that I believe Jesus is the only way, and I will also drive him to hospital at two in the morning. If only one of those is happening, something has gone wrong.

What is at stake

If pluralism is right, evangelism is an impertinence and the missionaries wasted their lives. If the New Testament is right, then silence is not kindness, and the most loving thing available to me is to tell somebody the truth.

I cannot hold both. Nobody can, and the attempt usually produces a Christianity that has stopped believing its own message while continuing to sing about it.

So I hold the exclusive claim, and I try to hold it the way Jesus did, which was with an openness to Samaritans, centurions and Syrophoenician women that scandalised the religious people of His day.

The three positions on the map

It helps to know the categories that get used. Pluralism holds that all faiths lead to God. Inclusivism holds that Jesus saves, but that people may be saved through Him without knowing His name, on the basis of a response to whatever light they have. Exclusivism holds that conscious faith in Jesus is required.

I stand with the exclusivist position, held with the qualifications I have already given about those who never hear. What I want to point out is that inclusivism is not the same as pluralism, and Christians who reach for it are usually trying to protect the justice of God rather than to dilute the gospel.

Understanding those three positions makes conversations about other religions far more productive, because you can identify what your friend is actually claiming. Most people who say all other religions lead to God have never separated the claim that God is fair from the claim that all paths are equally true, and separating those two is often where the real discussion begins.

So, now what?

Learn something accurate about the faith of the person you actually know. Not a summary of world religions, but the specific beliefs of the man you work beside, asked about with real curiosity.

Then examine your own motive. If the thought of talking about Jesus with a believer of another faith makes you want to win, wait until it makes you want to give.

And pray for one person by name. I have found that praying for someone changes how I speak to them long before it changes them. Who came to mind as you read that?

Jesus said to him, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.”

John 14:6, ESV