If God is one and the Christian faith is the true understanding of God’s revelation, why are there so many other religions? They do not refer to the same idea of God. They cannot all be correct—they are mutually exclusive. So why does God permit other religions to exist? If God is not without a witness in the entire world, then are non-Christian traditions not also God’s witnesses? If they are, then Jesus cannot be the only way. If they are not, then God cannot have witnesses among them. This is a demanding issue facing theologians, and no one has offered a fully satisfactory answer. That is why I am grappling with it. My tentative attempt reflects a passion for “the lost,” and represents a small step toward a theology of religions.
Let us begin by defining what we mean by religion. The Christian notion of religion refers to the binding belief of communities in their response to divine revelation. Non-Christian religions need not include a god, a community, or revelation. Their diversity makes it impossible to make simplistic statements about what they are, so I will limit myself to considering how Christians ought to relate to them. I believe we should engage other religions with respect, humility, and awe. Why awe? Because the persistence of religions in every known human culture testifies to humanity’s restlessness—a restlessness that prompts humanity to seek security and significance beyond the biological needs. It reminds us that among creation, humanity alone is the praying animal. We anticipate future joy with our imaginations and suffer the anguish of the past with recollective memory. We invest huge amounts of resources in celebrating births and mourning deaths. We ritualize the passage of time with symbolic markers of our existence, and we create art, music, and poetry to express the inexpressible as we monumentalize our presence. Is it any surprise then that the study of religion is the oldest persistent preoccupation of human existence or how it bears on every discipline of inquiry?
I grew up in Malaysia, a multiracial, multicultural and multi-religious nation once colonized by the Hindu and Buddhist kingdoms of the Indonesian archipelago and of India, the Chinese mariners of southern China, the Arabs, followed by the Portuguese, the Dutch, the British and then the Japanese. Each left its religious influence and, today, we have no fewer than twenty different religious faiths actively practiced. How did I end up a Christian? Why do I remain one when so many options are present? Bertrand Russell argued that where you grew up and how you were exposed strongly influences your religious inclinations. Living in New York City, today, I am reminded of the increasing options for religious beliefs around me and the appearance of new religious identities brought by immigration from faraway countries. This led me to ask: What is the Christian view of other religions?
Elements of Truth in Other Religions
Christians of my background typically assert that non-Christian religions are demonic. We describe them as works of the Devil, or we consider them man-made, false attributions of divinity. But why would demonic religions also teach many of the moral values shared by Christianity, and why would man-made religious continue to thrive alongside Christianity? Could it be that many of these religions that share kernels of truth claims with the biblical teachings survive as corruptions of the original, syncretized with animism, legendary myths, and shamanism? Or are other religious local variants of the Western, idealized faith we call Christianity. When we ignorantly assume that non-Christians have no knowledge of God, or that non-Christian religions, usually coupled to nationalistic cultures, are demonic, we project a climate of hostility and condemnation, killing any opportunity for building trust and dialogue. Yet dialogues are not fusions of thought. They demand clarity and precision of thought regarding one’s convictional beliefs while respectfully learning about others. This discipline is a labor of love, one that requires a suspension of disbelief while engaging the opinions of another.
The challenge before the Christian claim in a world of religious pluralism is Jesus himself, specifically, the finality and particularity of Christ. Why should the non-Christian accept the view that Jesus alone is the source of salvation? The quick answer is in fact, a retort: no other religion really avoids this question of particularity. Even the most amorphous notions of Hinduism and animism claim particularity and finality. Yet, asserting the finality of Christ does not relieve us from explaining the status of other religions. Do they also save? Do they offer truths?