Saving TruthSample

 Clarity about Religious Pluralism

Think about this statement: “Christianity may be the true path for you, even if it isn’t the true path for me. We don’t need to say one view is right and the other is wrong.” This is a very popular and well-meaning sentiment—one that’s frequently recited over the Culture of Confusion’s loudspeakers. For the Christian, logic plays a key role in choosing a faith. But for those locked into the Culture of Confusion, with its elevation of preference over truth, personal experience is what matters more. As many a religious pluralist has said, “While you think logic excludes certain faiths from being true paths to God, I believe that each of our experiences of God shows us that we’re all on the right path.” 

Pluralism was once a clear idea. It meant that all religious and nonreligious worldviews were welcome to set up their booths in the marketplace of ideas where we could debate their merits. Today, pluralism is an ambiguous concept that confusingly uses “tolerance” to shield certain religions from scrutiny and to assail other religions for having the nerve to claim that they’re actually true. Regaining clarity requires three important realizations.

First, tolerance simply cannot mean universal agreement with everyone’s different beliefs. We used to be able to explore the most important questions in life, such as purpose and meaning, in what Os Guinness calls the Civil Public Square. The problem today is that the public square isn’t very civil. In the past few decades, religious rhetoric in our culture has become so heated that all we ever seem to do is inflame each other’s anger. Accordingly, the culture has shunned almost all religious debate, even at the cost of remaining ignorant about the richness of the various religious traditions. That self-imposed ignorance gives birth to a confusion with many heads. We confuse engaging in argumentation with quarreling. We confuse disagreeing with someone’s beliefs with disrespecting the person. In fact, we’ve confused the difference between people and ideas altogether. We wrongly believe that challenging a person’s beliefs is the same thing as denigrating that person himself.

Second, only by recognizing their fundamental disagreements can we respect different faith systems. Rather than express a deep understanding of world religions, today’s popular claims, like All roads lead to God, end up disrespecting the world’s religions. Giving each other “the dignity of difference” is crucial if we’re to have genuine tolerance and a sincere journey to truth. 

For example, polytheistic Hinduism teaches that there are millions of gods, each being incarnations of the Brahman. Hinduism’s beliefs are considered blasphemous in the monotheistic faiths, and the monotheistic faiths are considered misguided by Hinduism. Islam claims that we are born morally innocent, whereas Christianity claims that we sin because we are inherently sinful. In pantheistic religions like Buddhism and Hinduism, there is the cycle of karma and reincarnation that the monotheistic faiths reject. Recognizing and honestly wrestling with these diverse claims affords religious people the dignity of difference. If we don’t acknowledge the fundamental differences, we end up disrespecting thousands of years of each religion’s traditions and theological development. To claim that all roads lead to God isn’t only illogical, it’s disrespectful.

Third, believing that Jesus is the only way to God is a claim that’s worth personally investigating. Every religious system claims to have the exclusive truth. If we are to show respect to each faith, it’s critical that we understand this. Truth, by definition, is exclusive; every truth claim necessarily excludes its opposite as false. Even religious views that claim to be all-inclusive—like Baha’ism and some forms of Hinduism—are exclusive in that they claim that the exclusivists are wrong. If we confuse universal agreement with tolerance, we end up indicting every single religious (and even nonreligious) view as intolerant. This is why Jesus’ claim to be the sole means of salvation (John 14:6) doesn’t put him outside the realm of tolerance, but squarely within it. Where other religious founders claimed to have the way or to have the truth, Jesus claimed to be the way and the truth, vindicating that claim in an objective manner through His bodily resurrection from the dead.

Where atheism tells us that we are the measure of all things, the gospel tells us that God is the standard by which we are measured. Where pantheism tells us that our problem is that we have forgotten that we are God, the gospel tells us that our problem is that we wanted to be God rather than commune with God. Where Islam tells us that we can earn God’s forgiveness, the gospel tells us that such a view is self-contradictory and only Jesus’ payment for our sins solves the contradiction. The fact that nearly every other worldview seeks to make humanity the achiever of salvation or utopia suggests that they are human-made worldviews. But the gospel tells us that our self-aggrandizement is the very thing that gets us into trouble. We need someone who is not us to save us from ourselves. Jesus is that someone. Jesus is the centerpiece—the way, the truth, and the life. He is all three and offers them to us so that we don’t need to forge them ourselves. The Christian message is that there is an exclusive way to get to God. And that one way cost God more than it will ever cost us. But the invitation to accept it includes us all (John 3:16).

Questions

• Many times non-Christians aren’t so much protesting the fact that the gospel is exclusive, but the way Christians sometimes boast about it. Consider Jeremiah 9:23–24. How should a Christian “boast” about his or her faith in Christ? How should the fact that Jesus offered Himself as our ransom (Mark 10:45) dismantle any prideful sense in us that the gospel is true because it is ours?


• Atheism claims that humanity is the measure of all things and that we have the sole and ultimate authority for morality and destiny because there is no God. Likewise, pantheism teaches that we are the measure of existence because God is all there is. How are these different worldviews similar in their glorification of humanity?


• By making the test for His claims falsifiable (either Jesus rose from the dead or He didn’t), Jesus respects our rational faculties. In other words, one’s choice to accept or reject Christianity is based on propositions that we can know are either true or false. How does this demonstrate the uniqueness of the gospel among different worldviews?

Bible Passages

• John 8:58


• John 14:6


• John 2:18


• Acts 4:12


• Psalm 8:2


• Matthew 21:16


• Luke 19:40


• Jeremiah 9:23–24 


• John 3:16