This Sunday's Gospel lesson from the Revised Common Lectionary includes Jesus saying, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me” (John 14:6). It is something that some of a more liberal or progressive bent find troubling. But is is a central claim of Christianity. I suggest that this claim and others like it actually point to something we cannot get around. Christians cannot get around it if the want to be faithful. But, in the end, everyone believes something like this. It is is not Jesus, it will be something else.
In the 20th century, there was a great religious leader who also became a great political leader. After some time in exile, he returned to lead the people of his country as they threw off their oppressors and the forces that threatened their cultural integrity. When he died, the whole nation was frantic with grief. The leader’s name? It could be Mahatma Gandhi, the spiritual founder of modern India. But, Ayatollah Khomeini, the spiritual father of the current Iranian theocracy, also fits the profile. He remains in very high esteem, not only in Iran, but throughout the Muslim world.
Can we say that both these religious and political leaders had equally valid and appealing grasps on the nature of the divine and what it means to be human? Or that either’s guess was as good as the other’s when it came to pointing to the ineffable, the sacred, or the holy? Will we not inevitably credit one more than the other? On what basis? Their respective effects on American foreign policy? The degree to which their words and actions comport with certain intellectual currents in the West? How they conform to our own priorities, preferences, and prejudices? Our individual taste?
The Mahatma or the Ayatollah. If we prefer one over the other, it will be based on something. Nobody actually in practice accords all religions and all religious or ethical teaching equal respect. Everyone uses some standard by which to measure their merits – our cultural/political/class/national/spiritual prejudices and convictions etc. There is a presumed superiority in whatever standard we use and however conscious or unconscious its application. Something will be trump.
It is no more presumptuous for Christians to say that we measure Gandhi and Khomeini and everything else against the example of Jesus Christ because we understand him to be the definitive revelation of the divine-human drama than to use something else as the measure.
The earliest Christian creed was “Jesus is Lord,” i.e., Jesus is the true standard, the one to whom allegiance is owed, and the key to understanding God. It also meant that it was through Jesus that the contradictions and tragedies of human existence would eventually be resolved. It had to be declared. It had to be lived. It had to be, if it came to it, died for. Because it was true. If Jesus was just one among many “spirit persons,” even though a particular favorite, he could not – cannot – be Lord. And there would be little point in paying him any more attention than Spartacus or Socrates. Nor would there be any conflict between worshipping God and worshipping Caesar. To claim Jesus as Lord means that everything else, personal preferences, familial traditions, political ideologies, national loyalties, other religious teachings – everything – is measured in light of what we know of God and life in light of the life, teaching, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ.
This does not mean that there is no truth or wisdom to be learned elsewhere. One can hold emphatically that Jesus is uniquely Lord and still believe that the Holy Spirit sings in and through the hearts and scriptures of those who do not acknowledge him as Lord. Listening carefully and respectfully to their wisdom can be edifying. I have read widely the teachings of other faiths and philosophical traditions and learned from them.
Nor does claiming Jesus is the way the truth and life necessarily mean everyone who does not acknowledge that that is going to hell. It is possible to hold that no one comes to the Father (the ultimate Good) except through Jesus and remain a hopeful universalist (see Gollum's Choice or, What is Your Precious? Some thoughts on Judgment and Hell).
We lose something essential when we abandon the scandal of particularity that is the declaration that Jesus is Lord. If we are faithful to Jesus, we will do so with reverence, with gentleness, with humility, with forbearance, with curiosity, and with hospitality toward those of other faiths.
While there are certainly similarities across faith traditions, there are also fundamental, meaningful, and irreconcilable differences. Even to say that they are all about love obscures the fact that love is defined quite differently across religions. Not all faiths, for example, insist on loving one’s enemies.
Religions are based on metaphysical claims that ground and give meaning to their worship and ethics. To gloss over those differences and their importance is no way to respectfully engage them. And it betrays a modern agnostic bias.
It is also the case that each religion contains wide, sometimes contradictory differences. Ayatollah Khomeini does not represent all Muslims. His contemporary, Anwar Sadat, was a faithful Muslim and a different kind of leader. He was assassinated by other Muslims in 1981 because of his pursuing peace with Israel. Mahatma Ghandi does represent all Hindus. He was assassinated by another Hindu because of his efforts to foster peace between Hindus and Muslims. Each faith tradition has considerable diversity of belief and practice within it. It is also the case that it is not hard to find examples of Christians who claim Jesus as Lord and do not do what he tells them (Luke 6:46) or walk in love as he loved us (Ephesians 5:2). But hat only means they fall short of the Christian ideal. It does not invalidate the ideal.
I am concerned that in our reaction to simplistic, heavy-handed fundamentalism, we do not slip into a simplistic religious pluralism that has more to do with the intellectual agnosticism of modernity than with Christian witness to the mystery of God. We can slip into a false humility that says something like, “There are many of ways to understand or of entering into the reality of God” while actually judging their final legitimacy based on whether they affirm of offend things I consider non-negotiable. It is a false humility because it is not as humble or generous as it sounds. There is still judgement. There is the hidden hubris of presuming to know what the criteria are for adjudicating which teachings of any faith are better than others. Those criteria are not neutral. They are based on other preconceptions – the flotsam and jetsam of the religious, philosophical, and political prejudices of our age.
This is important because we do live in societies with a plurality faiths and philosophies. Embracing religious plurality is not the same as the ideology of religious pluralism. Religious plurality can be a good thing if we seek to truly understand one another and are willing together in harmony. But acknowledging and respecting the very real differences is a better place to start than assuming or imposing a sameness.
There is no getting around it. We all stand somewhere whether we acknowledge it or not ad we evaluate everything based on that. It is just a question of how honest we are about it. And how generous and hospitable we are towards those committed to other ways of believing and being.
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