I'm becoming a big fan of the ExploreFaith.org newsletter. This week, there was an article entitled "Do Christians believe followers of other religions are doomed?" It's a good question and one that I've struggled with in the past. For example, if I choose to affiliate myself with a particular religion, am I implicitly saying that particular religion is "right" (or at least "more right") and other religions are "wrong" or "confused" or "incomplete"? Not surprisingly, the article takes a moderate (almost politically correct) stance on the subject. But there is some thought-provoking material in there. My two favorite excerpts were:
(1) My own feeling is that Christianity is unique but it is not exclusive. Let me illustrate: A magnifying glass focused on the bare shoulder of a person can burn and burn deeply. That glass makes more intense the heat of the sun. But that sun is shining all over the world--it just burns more intensely through the magnifying glass. My belief is that God is trying to make his love known through every source possible-- this includes religions other than Christian. In their religion they find a magnifying glass.
(2) We make God too small when we declare that only people like us can know God.
I'm currently of the opinion that all religions are incomplete in some way. For example, why would God create man and then offer revelations to different people / prophets around the world (“to every people we have sent a messenger”)? One explanation is that God wants man to search out the “truth” and conduct that search of their own free will. But that begs the question of why such a search for truth (religion) has led to so much turmoil and violence in the world? Perhaps it’s all a test of man. Perhaps God gave different pieces of the puzzle to different faiths but left enough overlap and confusion that it wouldn’t be immediately clear which pieces were which (or even what is or isn’t a piece in the first place) and how the pieces go together. Perhaps that man’s greatest test – finding a single truth among all the revelations (old and new), being selfless and God-seeking enough to set aside some of our prior beliefs, and come together as a people (all of us) in that new found truth.
Or maybe there is indeed one true faith and the rest of us will suffer eternal damnation. I doubt it, though. I just can't accept that's how God operates.
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This article from ExploreFaith.org goes into this topic in a little more detail - posing the question "How can Christians accept Christianity as the way to God, and still give credence to the truth and reality of other religions?". I especially like the last entry from Tom Ehrich when he says "This is a matter of debate within the faith communities. Each of the world’s primary faiths would claim that it is the one way to God. I prefer to think of God as one and our responses to God as partial and inevitably flawed. Each faith, then, might have a piece of the truth."
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