11. Christian Faith Among The World Religions
11 CHRISTIAN FAITH AMONG THE WORLD RELIGIONS
From the outset of his ministry St Paul acted decisively in his belief that the true interpretation of God’s covenant with Israel was that the God of Abraham was to be the God of all nations.
The original promise to Abraham was that in him all nations should be blessed. Israel was called upon to be the servant of the Lord, the servant who suffered and would bring the gospel, the covenant, to all nations. This servant would gather them all together to be the people of the God of Abraham, and of Isaac and Jacob, and would act so that this would come to pass.
All the nations would be gathered together to be the people of the God of Abraham, and the hope of Israel would thus be fulfilled in this new community created by God. That was the essence of the message St Paul took to the synagogues of Asia and Europe.
Judaism, of course, is the religion of those who have not accepted that message. Judaism is a post-Christian phenomenon. And when that terrible time came after the destruction of Jerusalem, what would remain? Jesus had frequently foretold this destruction: ‘If you do not repent, God will take away the vineyard from you.’
When this terrible thing happened, for those who did not accept the Christian interpretation of the story of Israel, what was left? No Holy Land, no Temple, no sacrifice and no priesthood. All that remained were the people and the Book – the scattered people and the Book. So after the fall of Jerusalem the Jewish scholars gathered to establish the canon, the sacred fixed canon of what we call the Old Testament and what Jews call the Law, the Prophets and the Writings.
The Book was the centre around which the nation could be sustained. That is why for Judaism today it is of such vital importance that the Jewish race is preserved, that Jews are not lost by cultural assimilation through inter-marriage into the Gentile society, which is Europe.
So the heart of Judaism is the faith that God will eventually vindicate himself. And the way this can be assured is by preserving the distinct ethnic community of Israel and the faithful study and observance of the Scriptures. But there is, of course, one important strand in Judaism which says that God must vindicate himself by restoring his people to the Promised Land: the Zionist segment of Judaism has sought to realise the promise in the formation of the state of Israel in the twentieth century.
The third religion of the Book is Islam. In the Koran there are many references to the Old Testament and to Jesus, who is regarded as the last of God’s messengers before the coming of the prophet himself. There were strong Christian and Jewish communities in South-West Arabia at the time of the prophet’s life.
Unfortunately, there was no Arabic translation of the New Testament so while Mohammed had some knowledge of Judaism and Christianity, it was patchy and at some points inaccurate. But Islam shares with Judaism and Christianity the conviction that the kingdom of God must finally rule. ‘Islam’ means ‘submission’ and at the heart of the faith of Islam is the affirmation that there is one God and that all must finally come under his rule, as laid down in the Koran, the Sharia and the hadith.
From the very beginning Islam has been a religion of conquest. When Islam was born in the great battle which led to the capture of Mecca, the peoples of South-West Arabia had to the north of them the great Persian empire and to the west the great Roman empire, what we now call the Byzantine empire, which was a Christian theocracy. No doubt Islam was shaped to a considerable degree by what it saw in the Byzantine Eastern empire, the Christian empire.
Immediately after this great victory at Mecca, the armies of Arabia rode out on their camels to bring these two great empires under the rule of Allah, of God. It is one of the most amazing stories of history that within a century those camel-riding Arabs had destroyed two mighty empires. They had wiped out the Christian civilisations of the Middle East and North Africa and their armies had penetrated the heart of France.
It was an amazing triumph of a new faith, which nothing in history has quite matched. But at its heart and from the very beginning it was the faith of a people who believed that the power of the sword must finally establish the kingdom of God. Perhaps one of the most significant ways to emphasise the distinction between Christianity and Islam is to remember that at the decisive moment of his ministry the prophet rode into Jerusalem on a horse with a sword, to conquer, and at the critical moment of his ministry Jesus rode into Jerusalem on a donkey, to die.
But God forgive us, we have constantly forgotten those facts. We know that Christianity has also taken up the sword and been humiliated by doing so. But the fact remains that at the heart of these two faiths, both of which are rooted in the Bible, there is this profound difference between the way God’s will was to be done on earth, as it is in heaven.
The next great world religion, and you might be surprised that I call it a religion, was that secular faith of ‘modernity’ or ‘modernisation’ which arose in Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which in the nineteenth century controlled Europe and led to the vast expansion of Western Europe into the rest of the world.
I call it a religion because modernisation functioned in the traditional way of religions. It dominated the understanding of reality and marginalised Christianity, and all other religions, allowing them only a small place in the private and personal lives of individuals. So the public life of nations came to be controlled by a comprehensive understanding of reality which one could conveniently sum up with the term ‘modernity’.
Again, there are roots in the Bible. This new understanding of reality was a product of Western Christendom: it could not have arisen from one of the Asian cultures. Its biblical roots affirmed that history had a real meaning, that it was going somewhere, and was not just an endless series of cycles.
The difference was that the meaning of history in the Bible was to be comprehended by understanding the acts of God, but in this new faith that meaning was to be understood in terms of the actions of people. Human power, skill, civilisation, science and technology – these attributes would master the world and lead to the proper consummation of history.
In the twentieth century this faith expressed itself in two forms: Marxism and liberal free market capitalism. Of the two, Marxism is the closer to the Bible because Marx was a Jew who had a theological training. One can see clearly in Marx the influence of that biblical background. The ideas of freedom and liberation from slavery occur as the central themes of history together with this notion of a messianic people, a chosen people, who would become the agents of liberation.
Obviously it was neither Israel nor the church that would fulfil that task. The messianic people would be the proletariat – the workers. And finally, as in the Bible, the struggle between these two powers, of oppression and the oppressed, would reach a climax, an apocalyptic outcome, when the final battle would be fought and after that, freedom would be achieved. This Marxist picture dominated much of the twentieth century, but as we know, in its public, political form, it has now collapsed.
The other is the liberal free market, with its central idea of individual freedom from any kind of limitation, not human submission to God, as in Islam, but human freedom basically to do what we want. It is freedom defined negatively rather than positively. That is the fundamental point.
One can define freedom negatively as freedom from limitation, so that one is not constrained by any power external to oneself. In that sense the ultimate example of such freedom would be an astronaut floating in space having lost contact with the spaceship. That unfortunate person would be free of any constraint whatever, but would be incapable of doing anything, because one can only act if limitations are accepted.
Freedom defined positively, as the freedom to accomplish something, is wholly different. But our Western culture defines freedom negatively as freedom from limitation. Its centrepiece is the concept of the free market, that every individual is entitled to be free, without constraint, to get as much as possible for as little expenditure of labour as possible – often at the expense of another, or at the expense of another’s freedom.
I know perfectly well, of course, that the free market is a good servant. It is the best way of continually balancing supply and demand in a changing world. But the free market is a bad master. When it is treated as the ultimate power, as it is in our Western culture, and when it is assumed that not even governments can control the markets, that these markets ultimately decide human destiny, then we are in danger of economic, social and moral slavery. We will have handed ourselves over to what Paul calls ‘the principalities and powers’, to the irrational forces which in many ways can enslave us, as indeed they do.
The difficulty is that essentially the Christian church has allowed itself to be domesticated into this religion of modernity. It has tried to accommodate itself at every point to what was called ‘modern thought’ and has effectively become incapable of challenging this false religion. Consequently a collapse of confidence also occurred which overwhelmed the whole project of modernity, leading to a picture of society completely unimaginable to our Victorian forebears.
We know with what supreme confidence they went throughout the world, completely convinced that Christian civilisation was the world’s future. Today the picture is totally different. There is now a sense of guilt, apology and diffidence. And the church, because it was so closely identified with modernity, has suffered a similar loss of confidence.
So firstly we have the religions of Asia, secondly the religions of the Book – Christianity, Judaism, Islam – and thirdly the ‘religion’ of modernity, which in many ways is now the most powerful. The church is awakening slowly to the fact that modernity is the most powerful enemy it has faced in its two thousand years of history. This fact is made obvious when we consider that in the rest of the world the church is now growing faster than ever, but in those parts of the world where modernisation has taken over, the church is in retreat.
The next group are now known as the primal religions. They were once called the primitive or tribal religions. They are what might be called the natural religions of simple tribal peoples of Australia, Africa, the American continents and many village people in India, with whom I have spent most of my ministry, who do not know much about what we call Hinduism but whose religion is similar to the tribal religions of Africa.
Here, there is a universal sense of the presence of God, a god vaguely understood and without a clear personality. There is a sense that he is everywhere, that he is present in the trees, rivers and mountains. He is intimately tied up with the affairs of the tribe and there is a continuity between the present generation and its ancestors, of whom the ultimate ancestor is God and there is, in contrast to the religions of Asia, a profound sense of mutual responsibility.
The tribe has a cohesion, which leads to this strong sense of mutual responsibility. In this sense the tribal religions are in some ways much closer to the Bible than the religions of Asia, which ultimately are so individualistic. It has always seemed to me puzzling why we call them ‘lower religions’ and why we call the religions of Asia ‘higher religions’. Perhaps part of the reason is that these tribal religions have no written scriptures. But that is not a legitimate basis for classifying them as ‘lower’.
What conclusions can we draw from this brief survey? The first is that God has not left himself without witness anywhere. Every language in the world has a word for God. In some languages there is a sense of the reality of God being everywhere, but often without clarity or distinctness. And because in those languages God does not have a distinct character he is worshipped under many different names.
One of the most basic texts of Hinduism occurs in the Veda: ‘Reality has many names, the wise know that it is one.’ There are many names and many different characters; there is something there but it is not clearly known; it has no clearly marked character and therefore you have the pluralism of the world as we know it. This ought not to surprise us when we remember that the early church was launched into a pluralist world. As Paul said to the Corinthians, ‘ … there are many “lords” and many “gods”’ (1 Corinthians 8:5). That was the world into which the early church was born.
The historian Edward Gibbon put it quite neatly in his great work The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Of that Roman world, he stated: ‘All the religions were for the people, equally true; for the philosophers, equally false; and for the government, equally useful.’ This is a nice succinct way of putting it.
Roman law tolerated that plurality of religions. There was a distinction drawn in law between what was called the public cult and the private cult: cultus privatus, cultus publicus. The private cults, of which there were an immense number, many of them coming from Asia, were ways of personal salvation through various kinds of discipline, mystical experience or ascetic practices. They were religions of personal salvation and the Roman empire made no difficulties for them. And if the church had been content to be simply a religion of personal salvation it would have had no trouble with the Roman empire.
But there was a sharp distinction between these and the public cult, which was expressed by the worship of the emperor. This was a specific act of worship. It would involve a little pinch of incense and bowing down in front of the statue of the emperor, one of which stood in every major city. As we know, the Christians refused that act and were ready to die for it. They could not, and would not, compromise on the question, ‘Who is Lord?’ To accept the title of Lord for the Roman emperor was impossible and the church was prepared to pay the ultimate price.
This new message, the gospel, then came into that Hellenistic classical world. But let us remember that this is about the gospel, not Christianity. It is important to make that distinction. The gospel is the story of what God has done in Jesus Christ, of his incarnation, ministry, death, resurrection and ascension with the promise of his coming again. That is the gospel. It is a factual story about what God has done.
As the first letter of John (v.l) says, it is about ‘what we have seen and heard and touched’. It is about facts in that sense. I know it can only be understood in the context of the whole Bible and that the whole Bible can only be understood with this as the key, but the essential point is that it is a factual account of what God has done.
Christianity is what we have made of it – and we have often made a mess of it. Christianity, as a religion among the religions of the world, is a changing and variant entity; it has both good and bad in its history, including some very dark passages. So this is not about Christianity but about the gospel, which is that by which Christianity must always be tested. And when that gospel came into that pluralistic world, what were they to make of it? What could they do with it? Of course, they could disbelieve it; and a vast number did.
But if it is accepted as true, if it really is true that Almighty God has done those things that we repeat in the creed and in our hymns, if what we read from Colossians 1 is true, then it must be part of a governing principle. If it is true that in Jesus Christ, the very power that created and controls the universe, is present here as part of our history and is not an unknown God, but one whom we can know and love and follow, if all that is true, then it cannot be something that fits into existing worldviews. It cannot be slotted in; it cannot be just an article in an encyclopaedia based upon other principles. It has to be the governing principle which shapes absolutely everything else.
Take the great controversy between Arius and Athanasius. Arius wanted to fit the gospel into what everybody took to be the facts. The ‘facts’ are that God is other than the human world and therefore Jesus cannot be God – he must be like God. There was the famous controversy between homoiousios, of a like substance, and homoousios, of the same substance, which is what we repeat in our creed – ‘Of one substance with the Father’ – and some people have scoffed at the great battle fought over a diphthong, over ‘o’ as against ‘oo’. But many of the great battles of the world have been fought on a narrow point, because it was a crucial point.
G. K. Chesterton illustrated this in an appropriate way when he wrote of a little girl away from home in bed at night, crying for her mother, and a lady goes to her and says, ‘I am very like your mother.’ But that does not help.
Is it really the presence of God or is it just very much like God? If it is the presence of God then all our ideas, beginning with what we understand by the word ‘God’, have to be completely recast and rethought, and that was the tremendous struggle for the church of the early centuries. What would recasting now mean in our science and knowledge and in our political and economic practices in this multi-religious area? But that is another topic.
I shall conclude with a number of points about what I think this should mean for our practice. First, our relationship with people of other faiths must be to remember that they are made in the image of God. The same light that lightens everyone shines upon us all. There is no human being in whom there is not some witness to the truth of God, some evidence of the grace of God.
Therefore our first approach must be to seek out, to welcome, to cherish, to rejoice in the good that we find in a Hindu, a Muslim or a Marxist, or whatever, and not to take the other line: ‘Well, this fellow is a Hindu so there must be something wrong with him – let’s find out what it is’, and then go on to wrinkle out his sins, so that we can talk to him about salvation.
That approach is completely wrong. The first thing we must do is to thank God for whatever good there is in a person of another faith.
The second is that we still have a story to tell. I like the wonderful story in Acts 10 of that pagan Roman centurion. We read, you remember, that an angel of God told this pagan soldier that his prayers and offerings had been accepted by God. The angel did not go on to say, ‘Okay, no problem.’ He said, ‘Send to Joppa for a man called Peter who will tell you something you need to know.’ And Peter came and told quite simply the story of Jesus. And as he did so this whole company, the people who came with Peter and the household of Cornelius, were caught up into an experience of the Holy Spirit.
So we have both to affirm the goodness that is there already, by the grace of God, but also to tell the story that is entrusted to us. Of course, we are not worthy to tell it, but if we do not tell it, then nobody else will. We are all entrusted with that story.
I was once at a meeting when a distinguished and able lady blasted off about the church. She said it was a hopeless institution with absolutely nothing worth looking for in it. If you wanted new and interesting ideas you had to find them elsewhere – and never in the church. And the man sitting next to me, Professor Nicholas Lash of Cambridge, just quietly replied, ‘But if we don’t tell the story, who will?’ We are entrusted with that story, the gospel, and we have to tell it.
The third point is that we are not the judges. We are entrusted with the story and we are witnesses, not to ourselves but to Jesus. We are not the judges. We have no authority to discern or decide in advance who is and who is not going to be saved. Allow me to enlarge upon that.
In all of the teachings of Jesus about the last things, the emphasis is on the element of surprise: ‘The first will be last and the last will be first.’ The people who thought they were in will find they are out; those who thought they were out will find they are in. The things that are going to be burned are not the thistles growing around the vine, but actually the branches of the vine that do not bear fruit. We have to be prepared for surprises.
Then there is the whole debate about inter-faith relations, which has in my mind been radically poisoned by making a central issue of the question, ‘Who is going to be saved?’ So we have the famous classification of ‘exclusivists’ who believe that only Christians will be saved – and then you have to decide who is a real or a nominal Christian. On the other hand the ‘inclusivists’ say other people will be saved but only through Christ, while the ‘pluralists’ maintain that everybody will be saved whichever way they go.
None of these is a possible or tenable position. My view is that if it is true that God has done what the gospel tells us he has done, the question of who is going to be saved does not arise. The questions should be: ‘How shall God be glorified? How shall he be thanked?’ My understanding is that the whole mission of the church is the glorifying both of God and the name of Jesus.
The whole emphasis should not be on me and my salvation, nor on his or hers, but on God and his glory. Quite simply, the final salvation of other people is God’s business. Remember, when somebody asked Jesus, ‘Are there few that are saved?’ Jesus replied, ‘You try to go in by the narrow gate because there is a broad way that leads to destruction and many go that way.’ Salvation is in God’s hands. We have the responsibility of following Jesus along that straight and narrow way.
The fourth point is that there is no spectators’ gallery, no non-committed point of view from which we can judge our different positions. And I return to the proposition that if you seek to justify your faith in Jesus in conversation with people of other faiths by resting upon some other grounds, some philosophical or historical grounds, you are in fact selling the past.
In the end we simply have to introduce people to Jesus and tell the story of what God has done. But even that is not the last word. I have often been pressed by Hindu friends who ask, ‘Why do you insist on Jesus only? Why can’t you recognise that Jesus is only one, perhaps even the greatest of all the great souls that have lived in the world? Why can’t you accept that?’
At the end of the day, I can only say because God has called me in ways that I cannot fully understand. God has called me to be a witness for Jesus Christ, and I must bear my witness.
So I fall back on the words of Jesus: ‘You did not choose me, I chose you’ (John 15:16). ‘I chose you.’ That is why we are here. And that is the ultimate ground of our confidence as we bear witness to Jesus as Lord.