A common accusation flung at Christians is that we’re arrogant. “How can you believe that you’re right and Buddhists, Muslims— all the thousands of other religions — are wrong?” Isn’t it the height of arrogance to claim that Jesus is the way to God. A way, possibly. But the only way? Many Christians struggle with this issue. We don’t want to appear arrogant, bigoted, or intolerant. And so a pluralistic view of religions thrives easily here in Canada. It’s easy to slip from the true claim — “all people have equal value” — to the false claim that “all ideas have equal merit”. Those are two very different claims indeed. So let’s explore this “all religions are really the same” idea. Suppose I say that I’ve just got into literature in a big way. This last year, I’ve read Shakespeare, Virginia Woolf and Tolkien, but I’ve also read Harry Potter and “The Very Hungry Caterpillar” — and I’ve concluded that every book is identical. Would you think that this claim made me wise or tolerant? I suspect you’d conclude I haven’t read any of them. And the same goes for religion. To say “all religions are the same” simply shows that you haven’t investigated any of them. Because once you do, you quickly discover that most religions are not fundamentally the same with superficial differences but the reverse is true: most religions have superficial similarities but fundamental differences. You see truth, by its very nature, is exclusive. If it is true, as Christianity claims, that Jesus was crucified, died, and rose again, it is not true, as Islam claims, that Jesus never died in the first place and somebody else was killed in his place. Both claims cannot be true. Ultimately, to ask why we think Jesus is the only way misses the point entirely. Jesus competes with nobody. Nobody else in history made the claims he did, claimed to be able to deal with the problems of the human heart like he did, or claimed, as he did, to be God with us. Whether you believe his claims or not, Jesus was utterly unique.
Posted on: Wed, 07 Aug 2013 14:59:02 +0000
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