If
the 6 billion inhabitants of the world were but 100, there’d be: 31 Christians,
21 Muslims, 14 Hindus, 6 Buddhists, 12 people who practice other religions and
16 people who’d not be aligned with a religion.
Among
the last two groups there’ll be a good number who raise the thought we’re to
engage with in this week’s Talking Points,
namely the claim that ‘all religions lead to God’.
Given
these statistics, we, as Christians, need discernment over how we share about Christ
and talk forward from this assertion in as positive a way as we can in a
context where awareness of the variety of religions is widespread, even in
Horsted Keynes!
I want to get us thinking about all of this on a Sunday when the
Lectionary centres helpfully on Abraham as father of faith. He is so for
Judaism, Christianity and Islam, the so-called Abrahamic faiths. In our first
reading from Genesis God promises to Abram I
will bless you and make your name great. So he has, as Paul says in the
second reading Abraham is the father of
us all. His faith as a Jew is in the same God we put faith in who gives life to the dead and calls into
existence the things that do not exist.
Our worship reminds us all the time of our Jewish roots. We chose
for our entrance procession an Abraham hymn used to open Synagogue worship with
last verse amended. The preface chant I sing at the Eucharistic prayer has
beauty because it traces right back to Jewish worship, as does the whole idea
of ‘eucharist’ or berakah, thanksgiving.
Let’s go back though, thinking beyond the three Abrahamic
religions to list five approaches to the varieties of religion in the world
today since we want to get our minds and hearts engaged with this key issue.
It’s key if only because though in a sense religion is God-given it’s also
heavily man-handled – even the Christian religion - and hence the source of
division in the world.
This morning’s teaching is important since, as Hans Kung once
said, there’ll be no peace in the world without peace between religions and no
peace between religions without understanding between religions. Put this
morning down to our going for deeper understanding from a Christian vantage point.
There are five possible approaches to the existence of different
religions:
- All religions
are false
- One religion
only is true, the others completely false
- One religion
only is true, the others mere approximations or distortions
- All religions
are true in what they agree about; and false wherever they disagree
- All religions
are true and any contradictions are superficial.
‘All religions are false’
is the first approach and such is the ownership of that approach we felt it
right to run ‘Talking Points’ in Lent to help us better engage with our
detractors.
‘One religion only is true, the others
completely false’ is a view we can quickly gauge from ‘door
to door religion sales folk’, Rector excepted – I mean Jehovah’s Witnesses and
to some extent Mormons. Roman Catholics were said to hold ‘outside the church
there is no salvation’ but now clearly deny
they do so, with recent teaching accepting in some degree the baptised of any
Church and looking positively, from a salvation angle, on all who follow their
conscience.
As you can guess as a good Anglican I’m aiming for the middle
thesis that ‘one religion only is true, the others mere approximations or
distortions’. I’ll come back to this.
‘All religions are true in what they agree
about; and false wherever they disagree’ may have some truth
about it in identifying a hierarchy of truth but it is over optimistic about
the clash of truth claims there is between religions.
Lastly ‘All religions
are true and any contradictions are superficial’.
Again too optimistic – some of you may have heard this very
beguiling story along those lines from Kevin
O’Donnell’s book ‘Inside World Religions’ .
‘There were
five blind Hindu holy men on the banks of the Ganges. A tame elephant wandered
among them one day. One reached out and touched its body; he thought it was a
wall of mud. One touched its tusks and thought these were two spears. One
touched its trunk and thought it was a serpent. One touched its tail and
thought it was a piece of rope. The last one laughed at them and held onto its
leg. He said it was a tree after all. A child walked by and asked, ‘Why are you
all holding the elephant?’
The story
is quite seductive, a sort of ‘plague on all your houses’ that fits those who
say ‘all religions lead to God’. The parable is used by Hindus to teach each
faith has the truth but not the complete picture.
So where
does this lead us? As I said earlier to the third
thesis that one religion only is true, the others mere
approximations or distortions’ which is the consensus of most Christian
churches.
In John
chapter 14, verse 6 Christ said: ‘I am the way, the truth and the life; no one
comes to the Father except through me’ and in Chapter 18 v38; ‘Everyone who is
of the truth hears my voice.’
If everyone
believed that life would be simpler and I wouldn’t be speaking as I am
this morning! Putting it in a more
challenging way to you and I, the
existence of other religions is proof of our failure to meet with Jesus at
a deep level and become the heart to heart draw we’re meant to be through his
magnetic love.
What though
of those who’re drawn elsewhere? We see distortions of Christ’s truth in faiths
and also approximations. If you read my
book ‘Meet Jesus’ it has a section on how I see other faiths where I write:
‘Saying
yes to Jesus does not mean saying ‘no’ to everything about other faiths. It can
mean saying ‘yes, but…’ or rather ‘yes, and…’ to other faiths, which is a far
more engaging and reasonable attitude.
I
say ‘yes’ to what Buddhists teach about detachment because Jesus teaches it and
Christians often forget it. At the same time I must respectfully question
Buddhists about the lack of a personal vision of God since I believe Jesus is
God’s Son.
I
say ‘yes’ to what Muslims say about God’s majesty because sometimes Christians
seem to domesticate God and forget his awesome nature. At the same time, I differ
with Muslims about how we gain salvation, because I believe Jesus is God’s
salvation gift and more than a prophet.’
Other
faiths can wake us up to aspects of Christian truth that might otherwise get
forgotten. What might happen, for example, if Christians were as serious in
their spiritual discipline as many Buddhists are?’
In
conclusion I invite you to think through this week’s questions along those very
same lines – ‘What good do you see in
people of other faith?’ Then, mindful of the Gospel reading this morning , that
God so loved the world he gave us his only son, I invite you to think about
what’s very basic to us as Christians namely the question ‘Can religion lead you to God?’ Our faith
sees religion as expressing love in return for love since in Christianity it is
God who leads us to God.
So
it is this morning in the eucharist – we can lift our hearts to God in the
eucharist only because God so loved us as to give us Jesus whose word and body
are the subject of this service.
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