Harmonizing World Religions

[element771]

I understand that as Christians we hold that our faith is the one true faith. I also know that in today's postmodern society that no one is wrong and as long as you are true to yourself, then that is what is important.

So a couple of questions for anyone who wants to ponder them.....

How can we be so sure that Christianity is the true path when all others make the exact same claims?

There are a lot in commonalities with the Abrahamic faiths, but what about Eastern traditions? Their view on the true nature of the world is vastly different than ours.

How do you guys feel about this?

I can't imagine that we have an exclusive truth that dictates everyone else is wrong. I also can't believe that you can say that everyone is right. Maybe Christianity is the most true while others are true in different ways.

Besides the problem of evil....this IMO is a big stumbling block for people with issues with faith.

[eckadimmock]

I personally don't take the view that Chistianity is 100% right and all the others wrong. They're all efforts to comprehend the infinite or "resolve the human problematic' as an American acquaintance puts it. They're all mental models of reality, not reality itself.

I suppose cultural predisposition has something to with it too, but while I've learned a lot from other traditions (particularly Buddhism, having lived for a number of years in Asia) I still find the greatest inspiration in Jesus Christ, who must have been a true revolutionary whether you accept his divinity or not.

[unkleE]

These are very important questions which I dearly want to have a go at, but I have to leave for a plane in an hour, so this will be brief.

How can we be so sure that Christianity is the true path when all others make the exact same claims?

1. By faith. If we believe the evidence indicates Jesus was historical, and if we then believe he told the truth.

2. I don't see why we should think that no other beliefs have any truth. After all, some believe in a similar God, and similar ethics (on many matters), etc. So I suggest they have truth, but Jesus has more truth, only he has sufficient truth, perhaps even all truth.

3. I believe Jesus said John 14:6, so he is the only way of salvation, but I don't think that means only christians can be saved. No-one in the OT was a "christian" yet many earned God's favour. Both Romans 2:10-16 and Acts 17:24-27 indicate that God will look favourably on some non-believers (though doubtless they are still saved through Jesus, they just don't know that yet). And CS Lewis taught this idea in his Narnia book "The Last Battle" - not that he's authoritative, but it shows the idea isn't way out.

Besides the problem of evil....this IMO is a big stumbling block for people with issues with faith.

Yep, the biggest. But I've always felt that it all depends on how we define evil. I can't see how we can have an objective moral standard without God, so we need God to formulate the charge against him! In the end, for me, it becomes a difficulty but not a reason to disbelieve. And again, if I trust Jesus, I trust his God.

So the key things are (i) the historical evidence for Jesus, and (ii) whether you believe the evidence and believe him. James and others here can help you with the first, and only you can answer the second.

I hope that isn't too glib - I'd love to say more, but no time for now. No doubt you'll get other, and better, ideas from others here. All the best.

[element771]

Not at all too glib...I welcome all opinions and feelings. I could read as much or a little as you want to contribute. I am just grateful to have others cut from the same cloth as I am that enjoy discussing these things.

[humphreyclarke]

There is a sense in which we are engaged in a relentless endeavour to convert the world to Christianity, not so much in terms of the religion itself and its promise of salvation, but in terms of the values that have developed in its mental landscape. Our civilisation is rooted in Greek thought and Roman law but both have been heavily modified by Judeo-Christianity, a good example being the abolition by law of infant exposure under Constantine in AD 313. Christianity was original in three important respects. It made God personal and available to all individuals, it made ordinary people supremely and dangerously important and it made self improvement of individuals in accordance with divine purposes the be-all and end-all of the universe. It is the main reason why all westerners see the world differently and behave differently than non westerners. Although we often put other cultures on a pedestal in order to denigrate our own, I think western culture carries with it a deep sense of its own superiority and a feeling that the world would somehow be better off if it adopted our modes of thought.

A good example is the so called Universal Declaration of Human Rights which its author wrote was ‘basically the Judeo Christian tradition without the tommyrot’ (unfortunately it is the tommyrot that gives it its legitimacy). The Iranians refuse to ratify it because they see it as "a secular understanding of the Judeo-Christian tradition", which could not be implemented by Muslims without trespassing the Islamic law. In other words, while we fail to evangelise our religion we enshrine the values it promotes and try to spread them as much across the globe. The question of comparative religion becomes clearer when you see things in that context, and recognise just what the intellectual legacy of the Christian tradition has actually been. H Allen Orr stated it well, when he said in his review of the God Delusion:

“Our entire history has been so thoroughly shaped by Judeo-Christian tradition that we cannot imagine the present state of society in its absence. But there's a deeper point and one that Dawkins also fails to see. Even what we mean by the world being better off is conditioned by our religious inheritance. What most of us in the West mean—and what Dawkins, as revealed by his own Ten Commandments, means—is a world in which individuals are free to express their thoughts and passions and to develop their talents so long as these do not infringe on the ability of others to do so. But this is assuredly not what a better world would look like to, say, a traditional Confucian culture. There, a new and improved world might be one that allows the readier suppression of individual differences and aspirations.”

Societies tend to mould themselves in the image of the God(s) they worship and ours is no exception. Christianity has dictated the values we have developed and enshrined, for example, the idea of individual descent, the notion of personal dignity, the idea of equality, the equal dignity of men and women, an antipathy towards the idea of oppression and slavery, the idea of compassion and forgiveness as a social virtue and the idea of civil society and the church as a separate entity to the state, ‘render unto Caesar what is Caesars, render unto God what is God’s’. To these I would add the idea of natural rights and the metaphysical assumptions that gave rise to western scientific tradition. Some of these are just assumed to be enlightenment values but I think it is historically demonstrable that these all predated the 18th century and developed out of the Christian tradition. Indeed, the project of the enlightenment seems to have been to create a more rational Christianity and this intention can be seen in Spinoza's writings. In this way most of the enlightenment was about altering Christianity and open it up to ways of reformulating the questions and answers that make up Christian belief.

Take the idea of natural rights which finds its most famous expression in the American Declaration of Independence, ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights’. One of the most influential exponents of this idea was John Locke who saturated his writings with Christian references and was heavily influenced by Richard Hooker, the Anglican theologian. However, the idea of natural roots did not even begin with the religious dissent of the 17th century. In fact historians such as Tierney have traced these ideals all the way back to Rufinus and Ricardus, to Huguccio and Alanus, and to their "obscure glosses" of the twelfth century. These writers based their ideals on the concept of the Imago Dei and the belief that people, as creatures of nature and God, should live their lives and organize their society on the basis of rules and precepts laid down by nature or God.

Getting back on topic, I think it was Freeman Dyson who wrote:

‘Science and religion are two windows that people look through, trying to understand the big universe outside, trying to understand why we are here. The two windows give different views, but they look out at the same universe. Both views are one-sided, neither is complete. Both leave out essential features of the real world. And both are worthy of respect..’

I think that, to an extent, the same applies to the world’s religions which are all human attempts to see the divine in a clearer light and deal with the same problems. As Acts says

“The God who made the world and everything in it, who is Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in temples made by human hands, nor is he served by human hands, as if he needed anything, because he himself gives life and breath and everything to everyone. From one man he made every nation of the human race to inhabit the entire earth, determining their set times and the fixed limits of the places where they would live, so that they would search for God and perhaps grope around for him and find him, though he is not far from each one of us.”

The problem arises when we encounter something like the harshness of Shariah law, the Buddhist notion that the annihilation of the self is desirable, the Hindu Caste system and the idea that one should not give to charity because of the system of past lives and Karma, and the old Shinto ideals of pre WWII Japan where the emperor was seen as a living God and giving to charity was a sign of weakness. We can commend the search for the divine in other cultures, but our Christian heritage compels us to speak out against these aspects.

We could also look at the Pagan society Christianity replaced, with its widespread infanticide, massive enslavement and ideal that most men are mainly means for the production of a few rulers and sages. We could look at those societies that sought to expunge their Christian heritage, Revolutionary France, Hitler’s Germany and Communist Russia with their state sanctioned mass murder and shameless worship of ruler and nation state. Here we have to acknowledge the superiority of our moral vision, despite its corruption over the centuries. The shattering of the cross leads to Gehanna in an earthly sense, whether it be the fall of the Guillotine, the shadow of the gas chamber or the long march to the Gulag. The challenge is to acknowledge the legitimacy and contribution of other religious traditions without repudiating our own or diluting it into a meaningless amalgamation.

[humphreyclarke]

Thought I would post a follow up because I don’t think I really answered your question. The comment you hear most often is that ‘Isn’t it extraordinary that people tend to take on the religious beliefs of their parents!, if you were born in a Hindu country you would be a Hindu etc etc, so how do you know your beliefs are true?’. Well unfortunately the idea that all that exists is matter and that there is no God is a metaphysical world view, and thus the same argument can be applied. If you are born in a post Christian society you are more likely to be a secular humanist, whereas someone born in Saudi Arabia is more likely to be a Muslim, if secular humanism was nothing more than an accident of birth then does that thereby invalidate your belief?. Of course it doesn’t, beliefs stand or fall on their own merits.

If it is the case that beliefs stand or fall on their own merits then one must judge Christianity based on both its content and its intellectual legacy, and if you take a lot of the values and presuppositions that our cultures holds as objectively true you find they are rooted in Christian metaphysics. The secular humanist is quite happy to inherit the ethics of a Christian culture and pass them off as some kind of universal morality whose tenants are objectively true, but when shorn of its metaphysical underpinnings much of the concepts lose their validity.

That doesn’t mean, however that other religions are not worthy of respect and it seems glib to be a Christian atheist and draw a red line through the worlds religious traditions. Actually I think it is interesting that humanity as a whole has developed a kind of metaphysical sense and that similar moral systems have developed around the world. It seems to echo what is being said in Acts.

I’ll leave others to deal with the salvation question.

[jamierobertson]

Bravo, humphrey. It's deliciously ironic when Dawkins et al blast the Bible off as bloodthirsty, uncivilised, etc etc, and yet one realises that their "humanistic"morality eventually traces back to that book which they ridicule so much...

[Mike D]

It's a good question. There is an exclusivity to most forms or expressions of truth - even those that seem most inclusive seem to me to practise a kind of 'everyone is right but I'm most right'-ism.

Certainly I find that other faiths throw helpful light on some aspects of life - I have read a bit on Buddhism and Taoism and found them to be very insightful.

But it seems to me that there is a difference between being insightful or wise and being right. A faith can have gathered some useful practices and some degree of wisdom on the human condition whilst still being metaphysically wrong-headed - an extreme example o0f this would be Scientology, which could not be more obviously a load of baloney, but still seems to have incorporated some useful NLP-y and guided meditation stuff into its sessions (from what I have read).

Back to the question: how do we know that Christianity is true? At least one answer is, "We don't" - but then, there's no way on the same basis on knowing anything is true. During my atheist time, I found myself getting increasingly frustrated as I found that I couldn't find a clinching argument that *proved* Christianity false. And this state is true of any worldview or faith, including Christianity. But there seems to be good reason to *believe* it: the historical record of Jesus, the witness of the church (i.e. the conspicuous lack of the church ever proclaiming any other view of Jesus other than the risen Lord).

Mike