I don't follow Jesus because I think Christianity is the best religion. I follow Jesus because he leads me into ultimate reality. He teaches me to live in tune with how reality is. When Jesus said, "No one comes to the Father except through me," he was saying that his way, his words, his life is our connection to how things truly are at the deepest levels of existence. For Jesus then, the point of religion is to help us connect with ultimate reality, God. I love the way Paul puts it in the book of Colossians: These religious acts and rituals are shadows of the reality. "The reality...is found in Christ."
~ Rob Bell http://www.marshill.org
In an informational, shrinking world, religion too begins to compress. Religious ideas tend to merge in the matrix, with the result that no single faith seems to stand out. Increasingly, we are confronted with that old concept: All paths lead to God.
While this is a comfortable idea for many pantheists, it grates against most monotheists and Christians. There is an exclusivity to our faith that is very important. Jesus is not just another one of the boys in the pantheon of history's messiah-parade. He is the exclusive gateway to God, the only real Messiah.
That said, how do we as exclusive believers in the uniqueness of Christ and the superiority of our faith dialog with other religions. I think Rob Bell (quoted above) is onto something about truth being truth no matter where you find it. And he backs it up with quotes from Paul. Bell goes on to say:
Truth is everywhere, and it is available to everyone.
But Paul takes it further, because for him truth is bigger than his religion. Notice what he says in the book of Titus. He is referring to the people who live on the island of Crete when he writes that even one of their own prophets has said, "`Cretans are always liars, evil brutes, lazy gluttons.' He has surely told the truth."
So Paul quotes one of the Cretan prophets and then affirms that this guy was right in what he said. "This testimony is true." What the prophet said was true, so Paul quotes him.
For Paul, anybody is capable of speaking truth. Anybody, from any perspective, from any religion, from anywhere. And these words from the book of Titus, the quote from a Cretan prophet, are in the Bible. So the Word of God contains the words of a prophet from Crete. Paul affirms the truth wherever he finds it.
For humanity in history, religion has been the means to connect to whatever men perceived as the Divine, or the creative force, or the Prime Mover, or God. Shall we suppose that God never reciprocated by giving them information that was true?
Those of us who know the truth that is in Christ have the privilege of understanding the plan of God, even the will of God as it is revealed in the only Son. But we should not act like we are superior or better. We should, instead of trying to brutalize those who seek God through other means, show humility and mercy to everyone, hoping to help them to a better understanding of the God they desire to know.
3 comments:
Perhaps the conviction that if there is a "prime mover" that it certainly must have in its will to reveal ultimate truth to us is the fundamental requirement of faith. I remember Steven Hawking once wrote that even if there were a unified theory of everything, it need not necessarily determine that we should ever know it. This is a fundamental difference.
Speaking of Truth, Paul said" you can hold the truth in unrighteousness" So knowing truth is not all there is to it. Even having the Truth is not all there is to it. When the Truth has you then your Judgement is not you but His. That is when truth is spoken moreover lived out by the Holy Ghost.
I've been reading a popular philosopher who discusses the "theory of everything." I may blog about it later. His name is Ken Wilber. So Hawking said we need not know it. Yet he seeks it so hard. He would probably like to have his own E=Mc2. I believe the "Prime Mover" was the Greeks. Maybe you studied that in Great Ideas.
And I agree with you, Pat, that knowing truth is not everything. Perhaps Jesus is the "theory of everything" they seek, by the way.
I think what Emergents are, I hope, discovering is a way to get past our modern version of the gospel and get to the core of it, so that we aren't tacking things onto it that don't belong. We can reach people with our message by appealing to their sense of truth. That's exactly what Paul did in Acts and in saying he was "all things to all men." When in Rome he was a Roman (sans the orgies and the bloodfests). Jesus is ultimate truth: all other truth points to him.
Good stuff, guys.
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