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DOES GODCONDEMNNON-CHRISTIANS?
-George Sumner-
Driving to a Church conference in Richmond Hill, a suburb of the city of Toronto recently, I was surprised to see, a block from the Pentecostals and the Catholics, across the street from the shopping mall with its stores and fast food, a vast construction site for aHinduTemple dedicated to the elephant-headed god Ganesa. Though still scaffold, the edifice already rises in golden splendor. I should not have been surprised, since Toronto is one of the most multi-ethnic, multi-faith cities of the world, still I pondered what it meant for my Anglican ministry day at Holy Trinity Church, that, but a few blocks away, prayer and sacrifice will soon rise up to the son of Siva, Lord of creation and destruction. What does it mean that my Church, English by way of Rome and Jerusalem, sits virtually next door to this faith born by the banks of the Ganges? Even if we live in a town much smaller than Toronto, in some way the new reality of followers of once isolated religions now thrown up against one another is familiar to us all. This essay is simply an effort to “unpack” this experience, which assumed dramatic proportions in the great GanesaTemple. And with it a question forces its way into our mind, a question often merely implied and left unuttered: what difference does it make to my faith that Christianity in fact stands as one religion among many? This one basic question then flows into many tributary questions: if I as a Christian believe the claims of my own faith to be true, what can and must I say about the claims of others? And finally, can all these worshippers of Ganesa, next to whom I ride the morning subway, really be damned?
It is easy to imagine to very clear-cut but different responses to questions such as these. On the one hand we might utterly reject what we see at the GanesaTemple: its claims are false, its effect pernicious, its adherents damned. Or on the other hand we might accept Ganesa- worship on an equal footing with our own Christian faith: the different religions are but different roads up the same mountain. But if we think more about the matter, we realize that we are not really satisfied with either or these answers. We sense, on the one hand, that something right and true can be found in the Temple, and we may have met someone whose apparent sanctity makes a blanket assumption of damnation hard. On the other hand, the religions are, quite plainly and simply, radically different. To say that all things their followers actually say and do don’t matter (since they all amount to the same thing), is to do them the disservice of not taking their actual religious lives seriously. These observations leave us in search of a middle ground, not in the service of a lukewarm commitment to the truth of the Christian faith, but rather as a place to balance a full commitment to truth and uniqueness of the Gospel and a charitable and generous attitude to other beliefs. Such a goal will certainly have an appealing ring for Anglicans! But is it possible consistently to inhabit this middle space?
We cannot help but acknowledge that we do not pursue this perspective somehow suspended in mid-air, but seek it as we find ourselves in a very particular place and time culturally. For we are conditioned to think about plurality, including that of religions, in terms of our consumer culture. But one problem (among others) with consumerism is that it only seems to offer a plurality of choices. For each alternative has become a commodity, an option at the seeming disposal of the choosing will, though all subserve the will of those presenting the menu. This is hardly how the traditional Muslim (whose religion after all means “submission”) sees the nature of the choice before human beings between obedience and rejection of Allah. Consumerism only seems to offer options, but actually reduces all to the status of commodity.
In fact Christianity ought to be happy to compete where there is a real array of different options. That is, after all, how the faith’s history began, in the first three centuries of her history, when the Church was successful in converting much of the empire. In the crowded streets of 2nd Century Alexandria, sectioned off as it was into ethnic regions, real debate existed between Jews, philosophers, mystery religionists, and Christians. In such a world the first great Christian theologian, Origen, sharpened his skills of argument and interpretation. The early “apologetic” (which has to do in Greek with offering a defense) writers sought only to ward off imperial persecution so that Christians could live in peace and make their case in the marketplace. There have been other moments, unfortunately few, in the history of the Christian mission, when windows of choice and debate opened. For example the 14th Century Mongol emperor Akbar listened intently (if indecisively) as Muslim clerics and Jesuit priests showed their debating wares. Christians have no reason to fear or resist these moments of religions side by side in the bazaar: they underline the distinctiveness of the Gospel offer and the accompanying need for conversion, a decisive turning of heart and mind.
There is a second aspect of our contemporary context we need to bear in mind as we commence the work of finding the middle ground in a Christian understanding of other traditions. I have in mind the confusion in Christian minds about our own faith. Understanding Christianity is enough of a challenge, much less Sikhism! For it turns out that the question about other religions has become acute at the very moments when faith in Christ itself has weakened. In the age of the Enlightenment, with the rise of modern science in the 19th Century, pluralism emerged for the same reasons, and for the same people, who were also questioning the claims of the creed. One need only read a play like Nathan the Wiseby the German philosopher Lessing, in which the religions are all indistinguishable golden rings. It turns out that pluralism is a contemporary as carriages and periwigs! Christians, now as then, can only hope to find the right approach to the beliefs of other traditions if they are clear about their own.
But which Christian belief can be the starting-point for the appropriate approach to other religions? For we as Christians don’t believe only one thing, but rather hold a series of beliefs outlined most concisely in the Nicene Creed. This may be the initial clue we are looking for. What if there isn’t one thing Christian need to say in response to the challenge of other religions, but a series of things we need to say? What if the trouble with competing Christian views of our neighbors is that we have tried to sum up our attitude by making use of only one claim, and that a fuller picture can be given if we say several things, based on several beliefs, simultaneously?.
The place to begin is in the beginning, in this case of the Bible. By listening there we learn what we as Christians believe about God’s creation. In chapter 1 God’s creation is variegated, a rich profusion, and at the same time it is ordered, each creature having its place, and over it all God pronounces his blessing: “...it is good.” At the culmination of the creation story God forms the human, to be in God’s own “image and likeness” (1:26) There has of course been a great debate about the meaning of that phrase “image of God,” but it surely includes the idea that God entrusts to humans some role of ordering, caring for, and appreciating his creatures and the created order as a whole.
Just as God made the world and gave it order, so He also has entrusted to humans a role in preserving that ordered creation. Here an example may be helpful. A Papuan tribe may have its own laws governing courtship and marriage, hunting and eating, warfare and reconciliation. These laws may seem in many ways cruel and contrary to what God intends. At the same time, they may serve to preserve and order the lives of the people of that tribe. We would not want to equate those tribal customs with God’s will, but they may also, to some extent, serve a function related to God’s creation. And just as that creation is manifold, so too are the customs and systems of law for the many peoples of the earth. In such a way we might say that the Sharia of Islamic peoples subserves order, and teaches virtues like kindness, humility, and discipline. Insofar as it does this, it may be understood as on “order of creation.” Now according to this understanding, there is something valuable and God-given in religions themselves. They are from this perspective creaturely artifacts which support the ordered nature of creation itself. At the same time it is easy to see how this view might come to be abused, for features that are oppressive and contrary to God’s will might come to be “blessed” as God-given when they are in fact opposed to His will. But that leads us to our next topic.
In those same opening chapters of Genesis we also learn that human beings have rebelled against God and so have caused the corruption of their own nature. This sinfulness effects not only their “baser” nature, but their whole person. (This is what the tradition actually means by “total depravity,” not that there is nothing good in us, but rather that there is no portion or corner of us unscathed). This is supported by the story in chapter 3, itself, in which the serpent tempts Adam with a religious desire, the aspiration to be like God (v.5). . Our religious dimension is sinful, as is every other dimension, but here in our religiosity our rebellion against God is particularly vivid. This is confirmed by St. Paul’s account of the rebellion of humans against their creator in Romans 1, where Paul gives the following account of the connection between sin and religious worship: “they became futile in their thinking…and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortals or birds or animals…”
Now at the heart of the Christian understanding of the human person is our two-sidedness, like the face of Janus in ancient Roman lore. We are at once creatures in the image of God and sinners, and there is no way to separate or sequester one from the other. And precisely in the religions we see how inextricably interwoven the two are. The belief in caste in Hinduism is part of a whole system of beliefs which give order to the world, at the same time that it subserves the interests of the powerful and suppresses the hopes of the weak: .The native Navajo belief in hozho, often translated “beauty,” is at once a sense of the connectedness of all things, and an invitation to manipulation of the spirits for (sometimes malevolent) human ends.[1] There is no way to separate out the good and evil aspects of the religions, any more than we could surgical remove the sinful parts of our minds.
The distress of our sin leads to the question of redemption, of God’s response to that distress. This is the next chapter of the Biblical plot we are retelling. “While we were yet helpless, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly.” (Romans5:6) The important point here is that no account of something general called “redemption” will do, for Christians know of no other kind of redemption apart from the person and work of Jesus Christ. That is quite simply what the Creed is saying when it says that He who is “very God of very God” “for us and our salvation” lived and died. Under the rubrics of creation and sin we could include the Christian faith alongside Islam or Juju or Buddhism. Christianity too is a created thing, and a source of social order: any potluck supper will tell you that. And the Crusades, the Inquisition, and acquiescence to the Holocaust on the part of many Christians should suffice for the sinfulness issue. But when we come to the point of redemption, and here alone, Christianity is in a unique position, precisely because redemption entails and requires the specific Redeemer, Jesus Christ.
If redemption is something that various religions do in various ways, then by virtue of this commonality it must be something we humans have a hand in. But at the heart of the Christian message is the radical message of grace: somebody else, Jesus, did this for us, while we were yet helpless. For this reason alone, and not for any virtue in us, Christianity is incomparable, and by being so, it is unique. What we mean by “redemption” is the new relation to God and the new kind of life that follows from what Jesus has done for us, realized as we accept that work in faith. In other words, what Christians mean when they say “redemption” already implies the person of Jesus: he packed into the definition itself. Redemption can be defined in this way: that relationship we have with Jesus, who is God’s Son, which brings us into relationship with God Himself by means of Jesus life, death, and resurrection. “Redemption”, then, is a “Gospel-specific” word on the lips of Christians. For followers of Jesus Christ redemption in general would for Christians be, by definition, no redemption at all.
If this is true, then, Christianity’s third relation to other religions must be one of utter difference and uniqueness located in this Jesus, combined with the other relations we have spoken of, like a third overlay of an overhead projector. In this third relationship it is harder to draw a line of comparison from Christianity to other religions. By definition, this third relationship, tied to the person of Jesus, resists immediate comparison. We can only proceed by analogy, by an act of imagination, though we bear in mind that the key thing for Christians, the factor that rules the very content of redemption, is who brings it, Jesus Christ, the one factor Christianity shares with no other religion.
This uniqueness is clearest if we return to the example of a Muslim at prayer. As he kneels in reverence, his notion of the nature of the divine, of Allah, whom he addresses has its own specific content. For example, as a Muslim he is told by the Koran that God can never become incarnate. For him this would imply a second god, and so is blasphemy, and as such the very contrary of redemptive belief. Islamic tradition calls this heretical belief shirk, and they had in mind quite consciously to deny Christian faith. Denial of Christ is embedded in Islam’s sacred test itself. Utter difference and disagreement cannot be avoided.
But at this point we must face head-on a challenge from our culture. Yes, Muslims and Buddhists, across the globe, or across the street, may be after something quite different. But why can’t their goal work for them, and ours for us? Though ours may even be best, most true, why can’t theirs be true enough to redeem a life? Steak is best, but you can live on hamburger too. This question too is most salutary, for it drives us back to our own Scripture, to see more clearly what our own faith claims. Consider, for example the following verses from the opening of the Epistle to the Hebrews: “In many and various ways God spoke of old to our fathers by the prophets; but in these last days he has spoken to us by a Son, whom he appointed the heir of all things, through whom he also created the world.” We have been talking about the relationships between Christianity and other religious traditions with a view to the Bible’s story of salvation. But all chapters of this story are not equal: the story has, Hebrews reminds us, a climax, namely the advent, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. This is the full and final revelation of God, the very coming of God Himself into His lost humankind to save them: “and the Word was made flesh…” (John 1:14) and “for in Him the fullness of God was pleased to dwell…” (Colossians1:19) are, for example, making the same point using different terms. Other ways may have values that can be built up into virtues, but human lives have, claim Christians, only one ultimate goal.
Of course history did not end with the resurrection, though at the heart of the faith is the claim that Jesus’ coming again is to confirm and make clear what He has already brought about through His death and resurrection. The “something more” of the Second Coming is not separate from the great events of cross and open tomb, but rather both together make up the “fullness of time” which Hebrews refers to. In other words, if we take seriously the kind of claim the New Testament is making, that Christ is the center or focal point of all history, before and after, then there is no history to which His advent does not pertain, no human life which can happily remain with another, separate goal, oblivious to the goal set out by Jesus at the “fullness of time,” all human time.
If, then, we look back at our verses from Hebrews, we can see that Jesus’ inheritance of all things at the “fulness of time” has the very same universal reach as does the creation in which He, as Second Person of the Trinity, also shared. The technical term for this in theology is “eschatology,” which means the idea of the “last things,” the End-time. One of the great discoveries of modern critical study of the New Testament has been that eschatology, the thought that these events in Jesus’ life usher in the end of all things, lies not at the periphery, but at the very heart of the New Testament message. If this is so, then it follows that the claim made by Jesus must have the same universal reach for all persons, in all cultures, in all places and times. To believe that Jesus is who He claims to be is to believe that He by rights makes that same claim on all the people of the earth.