Is
Christianity the only true religion, or one among others?
(pdf available here)
(A talk given
to a Theological Society in Norwich, England)
The
likelihood is that all or nearly all of us here are Christians,
though no doubt with varying degrees of commitment to the church.
And so the question I am raising is inevitably an uncomfortable
one. For we have probably nearly all taken it for granted, for
as long as we can remember, that of course Christianity is the
only true religion, or at least much the most true. I myself
became a Christian by evangelical conversion when a Law student
and it was part of the package of belief that I accepted wholeheartedly
that Christianity is uniquely superior to all others and the
world in process of being converted to Christian faith.
But that was
some sixty years ago. In those days, like most of my generation,
I had never met anyone of another faith and knew virtually nothing
about the other world religions - and the little that I thought
I knew has turned out to be largely caricature. But the present
generation is generally much better informed. And today we all
know, when we stop to think about it, that people of the other
world religions have exactly the same view of their own faith
as we do of ours.
In other words
the religion that seems so obviously superior to anyone depends
in the vast majority of cases on where he or she happens to
have been born. Someone born into a devout Muslim family in
Egypt or Pakistan or Albania (or for that matter in England)
is very likely to grow up as a Muslim; someone born into a devout
Hindu family in India (or again in England) is very likely to
be a Hindu; someone born into a devout Buddhist family in Thailand
or Sri Lanka or Burma (or once again England) is very likely
to be a Buddhist; just as someone born into a devout Christian
family in this country is very likely to be a Christian; and
so on.
There are of
course and always will be individual conversions for individual
reasons in every direction both to and from each of the great
world faiths, and generally we must presume that this is a right
move; but such conversions are statistically marginal in comparison
with the massive transmission of faith from generation to generation
within the same religion. So normally the religion that you
accept - or of course the religion that you reject - is the
one into which you happen to have been born. I think that this
is obvious and undeniable, although theologians all too seldom
reflect on its implications.
So why do many,
in fact probably most, Christians believe that Christianity
is uniquely superior to all other faiths, the one and only true
religion ?
Well, above all
the New Testament says so. We read in St Johns Gospel
that Jesus said I am the way, and the truth, and the life;
no one comes to the Father, but by me (14:6), I
and the Father are one (10:30), He who has seen
me has seen the Father (14:9), before Abraham was,
I am (John 8: 58). In these texts, all from St Johns
Gospel, does Jesus not clearly claim to be God, or God the Son,
incarnate, and is he not claiming that his is the only path
of salvation, and thus the only true religion? So in the Acts
of the Apostles we read that there is salvation in no
one else, for there is no other name [than that of Christ] under
heaven given among men by which we must be saved (Acts
4:12).
I must say a
little about this New Testament basis of the belief, although
it would require a whole week, or more likely a whole year,
to discuss it properly. But most New Testament scholars today
do not believe that Jesus, the historical individual,
claimed to be God incarnate. That doesnt mean that they
dont believe that Jesus was in fact God incarnate, but
they dont think that he himself taught that he was. In
case this comes as a surprise to some, I will give some brief
quotations. Im going to quote only from distinguished
New Testament scholars who personally believe strongly that
the Church has been right in believing that Jesus was God incarnate.
They believe this with their whole heart. But nevertheless they
hold, on the basis of the evidence, that Jesus did not himself
claim this. Referring first to those New Testament sayings which
I quoted a minute ago - I am the way, the truth, and the
life . . . etc. - Professor Charlie Moule of Cambridge,
the doyen of conservative British New Testament scholars writes
(in The Origin of Christology, 1977, p. 136), Any
case for a high Christology that depended on the
authenticity of the alleged claims of Jesus about himself, especially
in the fourth Gospel [i.e. Johns], would indeed be precarious.
Also in Cambridge Canon Brian Hebblethwaite of Queens
College, a notable defender of the orthodox doctrine, says (The
Incarnation, 1987, p. 74) that it is no longer possible
to defend the divinity of Jesus by reference to the claims of
Jesus. Then the late Archbishop Michael Ramsey (previously
a New Testament professor) said in his book Jesus and the
Living Past (1960, p.39), Jesus did not claim deity
for himself. Again, perhaps the leading New Testament
scholar in this country today, Professor James Dunn of Durham,
after examining minutely every relevant text, in all four Gospels,
and indeed throughout the New Testament, writes (Christology
in the Making, 1980, p. 60) that there was no real
evidence in the earliest Jesus-tradition of what could fairly
be called a consciousness of divinity. These are all people
who accept the traditional Incarnation doctrine, but who are
also part of the scholarly consensus that the historical Jesus
did not himself teach this. It is generally held today that
the great I am sayings of the fourth Gospel, which
I quoted a minute ago, cannot be attributed to the historical
Jesus but are words put into his mouth by a Christian writer
some 60-70 years later, and also that Jesus sayings in
the Synoptic Gospels cannot be taken to constitute a claim to
be God incarnate - as Dunn says, there was no real evidence
in the earliest Jesus-tradition of what could fairly be called
a consciousness of divinity. If this comes to anyone as
a bit of a shock, that is because although theologically educated
ministers of the church know this, they do not mention it in
their sermons. And I must confess that I myself have never said
it in a sermon, but only in settings such as this. This silence
has been going on for a very long time, and of course the longer
you put off saying something difficult - difficult to the hearers
- the harder it becomes to say it. When some years ago, 1977,
a group of us, who included the Regius Professor of Divinity
at Oxford, and a former Regius at Cambridge, then Warden of
Keble College, Oxford, and the Principal of Cuddesdon Theological
College, Oxford, and others, published a book called The
Myth of God Incarnate in which we discussed this question
openly and frankly, we were attacked and reviled, not for saying
what the scholarly world had long known, but for saying it so
publicly and with such an alarming title. But today, more than
twenty years later, the whole subject is much more openly discussed,
and I dont have any hesitation in discussing it here.
Its also
well known today - another theme of that book - that the term
son of God was widely used in the ancient world.
Jesus was by no means the only person to whom the term was applied.
In particular, within Jesus own religion, Judaism, Adam
was called the son of God, and is so called in Lukes Gospel
where Jesus ancestry is traced back to the son of
Seth, the son of Adam, the son of God (tou Seth tou Adam
tou Theou, 3:38), angels were called sons of God, Israel
as a whole was called Gods son, and indeed any outstandingly
pious Jew could be called a son of God. And the ancient Hebrew
kings were enthroned as son of God - hence the words of Psalm
2:7, Thou art my son, this day I have begotten thee.
But no one within Judaism thought that God literally begot sons.
The phrase son of God was clearly metaphorical.
son of' meant true servant of or sometimes
given a special divine mission by or more generally
in the spirit of. The term was a very familiar metaphor
within Judaism and never implied deity. But as Christianity
expanded beyond its Jewish roots into the Graeco-Roman world
the metaphorical son of God was gradually transformed in Christian
thinking into the metaphysical God the Son, second person of
a divine Trinity. And it is this epoch-making development that
is under question today.
Now in the discussions
of the last twenty or so years, the idea that Christianity is
the only true religion and only source of salvation, and that
only Christians are saved, is today generally called exclusivism,
in distinction from the two other main positions, called inclusivism
and pluralism.
However today
the majority of Christian theologians and church leaders have
moved away from this strict exclusivism to what is called inclusivism.
This concentrates primarily on the question of salvation, and
is the view that salvation is indeed through Christ alone in
virtue of his atoning death on the cross, but that this salvation
is not confined to Christians but is available, in principle,
to all human beings. So non-Christians also can be included
within the sphere of Christian salvation - hence the term inclusivism.
People of good will outside the Church can be said to have an
implicit Christian faith, or to be anonymous Christians, or
to be in such a state that they will respond to Christ
as their lord and saviour when they confront him after death.
On this view Christianity remains the only true religion; but
those who do not know Christ can also benefit from his atoning
death. This position was adopted by the Catholic Church at the
second Vatican Council in the 1960s and is the position
of the present Pope and also of a majority of theologians within
the other mainline Christian churches, including the Church
of England, the Methodists, the United Reformed Church, Baptists,
etc. - except in each case for their fundamentalist wings. Its
attraction is that on the one hand it preserves the traditional
conviction of the unique centrality/normativeness/superiority
of Christianity, but on the other hand it does not involve the
horrifying implication that only Christians can be saved. This
is why it is today so attractive and remains such a popular
position.
But it does have
its negative side. If we think for a moment of the analogy of
the solar system, with God as the sun at the centre and the
religions as planets revolving around that centre, the inclusivist
position says in effect that the life-giving light and warmth
of the sun falls directly only on our earth, but is then reflected
off it to the other religions, which thus receive it at second
hand. Or in terms of economics this is a kind of trickle down
theory of salvation. We Christians are the spiritually rich
at the top but our riches trickle down in varying measure to
the people of the other world religions below. And just how
realistic this is will depend on what we mean by salvation.
If you define
salvation as being forgiven and accepted by God because of the
atoning death of Jesus on the cross, then salvation is by definition
Christian salvation and Christianity is by definition the only
true religion. That is to settle the matter by definition. Suppose
however that instead of doing this we start with the realities
of human life around the world as we find it and mean by salvation
something concrete, something that can take place progressively
in peoples lives, something that is meant to begin here
and now in this life and to make a manifest difference. We can
describe it as the gradual transformation of men and women from
natural self-centredness to a new orientation centred in the
divine reality that we call God, liberating us into love and
compassion for our fellow beings. On this view it is those who
love their neighbours; who have compassion - that is feeling
with and for others, - and who give something of their time,
energy, intelligence, resources to those in much greater need
both far and near, who are on the path of salvation. Or again,
putting it in biblical terms, it is those whose lives embody
what St Paul called the fruit of the spirit, which he described
as love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness,
gentleness, self-control (Galatians, 5: 22) - to which
we must I think add a commitment to social justice as an expression
of love - who are on the way of salvation. Its not a question
of Are you saved or not saved? but of the direction in which
you are going, the path you are on.
Now the call
to self-transcending love and compassion comes to humanity through
a number of channels. Jesus taught that we are to love and value
our neighbours as we love and value ourselves, even to love
those who regard themselves as our enemies, so that you
may be sons of your Father who is in heaven; for he makes his
sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the
just and on the unjust (Matthew 5: 44-5). Others hear
the call to an equal concern for all in the Hebrew scriptures
in such divine commands as you shall love your neighbour
as yourself (Leviticus 19: 18), or in the teaching of
the Talmud, What is hateful to you, do not do to your
neighbour. This is the entire Torah; the rest is commentary
(Babylonian Talmud, Shabbat 31a). Others again hear it
such Hindu teachings as one on which Mahatma Gandhi based his
life: If a man give you a drink of water and you give
him a drink in return, that is nothing. Real beauty consists
in doing good against evil . . The truly noble know all men
as one, and return with gladness good for evil done. (Gandhi,
Autobiography, I, chap.10). And yet others hear it in
such Buddhist teachings as As a mother cares for her son,
her only son, all her days, so towards all living things a mans
mind should be all-embracing (Sutta Nipata, 143).
And yet others hear it in the Quran, where we read Repel
evil with what is good. Then you will find your erstwhile enemy
like a close, affectionate friend (41: 34), or in the
teachings of the Sufis of Islam, such as this parable of Rumis,
God rebuked Moses, saying, I fell sick, thou camest
not. Moses said, O transcendent One, what mystery
is this. Explain, O Lord! God said again to him, Wherefore
didst thou not kindly ask after me when I was sick? Moses
answered, Lord, thou never ailest. My understanding is
lost. God said, Yea, a favourite and chosen servant
of mine fell sick. Consider well: his infirmity is My infirmity,
his sickness is My sickness (Nicholson, Rumi: Poet
and Mystic, p. 65). You see, such ideas are genuinely Christian,
but they are also genuinely Jewish, Islamic, Hindu, and Buddhist.
There is in fact a basic moral outlook which is universal, and
the concrete reality of salvation consists in a spiritual transformation
whose natural expression is unrestricted love and compassion.
I stress the word basic, because what is common to the
different faiths is this truly basic principle, not the specific
moral codes which have developed within different societies
at different times and places and in different circumstances.
These latter reflect the particular historical circumstances
in which they were formulated and are not immutable, but ought
to develop as societies change, and when they dont they
can produce evil instead of good. We see this, for example,
in some of the harsh rules of desert life in parts of the Old
Testament and in parts of the Shariah of Islam, and also, in
a lesser way nearer to home in current debates within the churches
about the ordination of women, about the remarriage of divorced
persons, and about homosexuality. New moral sensitivities, and
new scientific knowledge, rightly enter into the development
of our specific social norms.
But the basic
moral teaching of the religions remains the same. It constitutes
the universal ideal. But how does it actually work out in peoples
lives? Do Christians in fact respond to it better than the rest
of humankind? Are Christians in general better human beings,
morally and spiritually, than non-Christians in general? This
is the question that I would invite you to focus upon. In order
to answer it of course one has to get to know people of other
faiths; and this is much easier for some than for others. Birmingham,
for example, where I live, is a multi-faith city. There are
eighty thousand or more Muslims, large Sikh and Hindu communities,
a smaller but long established Jewish community, and growing
number of Buddhists and Bahais. When you go into the mosques,
synagogues, gurudwaras, temples, as well as churches, something
strikes you, or at least has struck me, very forcibly. On the
one hand, all the externals are different. When you go into
a Hindu temple, for example, the sights, colours, sounds, smells
are those of India and you can easily imagine yourself back
there. And not only what the senses perceive, but also the language,
the concepts, the whole way of thinking are distinctively Hindu.
And the same is true in their different ways of each of the
other places of worship. But at a much deeper level it seems
evident that essentially the same thing is going on in all these
other places as in our Christian churches namely men
and women are coming together under the auspices of some ancient
highly developed tradition which helps them to open their minds
and hearts upwards to a higher divine reality which
makes a claim upon the living of their lives; and the basic
claim is in each case, as I illustrated a few minutes ago, the
same. So it seems right to say with the thirteenth century Muslim
writer Jalaludin Rumi, writing about the religions of his time,
The lamps are different, but the Light is the same: it
comes from Beyond (Rumi, Poet and Mystic,
trans. R.A. Nicholson, 1978, p. 166).
But further,
it is a very common experience of Christians in such a city
as Birmingham that when you get to know some of your neighbours
of other faiths - and you meet them today in every walk of life,
but particularly when you know individuals and families - you
do not find that they are in general any less loving and caring,
any less honest, any less likely to help a neighbour when someone
next door is ill or in some trouble and needing friendly support,
any less law-abiding, any less concerned for the good of society,
any less ready to make sacrifices for the education of their
children, any less faithful in the practice of their religion,
than are our Christian fellow citizens in general. I do not
say any more, but I do say not any less. There are good and
bad people, and all degrees of goodness and badness, within
each faith community, including Christianity; but it does not
seem that Christians in general stand out as morally and spiritually
superior to everyone else.
And theres
another kind of encounter has been to me equally important.
Partly in the course of inter-faith dialogue over a number of
years with Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus and Sikhs, and from
time spent in the heartlands of these other faiths, I have had
the very good fortune to come to know a small number of individuals
whom I regard as, in Christian terms, saints - saints in the
sense that they have largely transcended the ego point of view
and become channels of the higher divine reality. Such all-too-rare
individuals are extremely important to us, because they make
it much easier for us to believe in the higher reality to which
the religions point. And they are to be found not only within
Christianity but within each of the great faith traditions.
And, although
this is a huge topic which I cannot open up here, I do not think
that history shows Christian civilization through the centuries
to have been morally superior to all other civilizations. It
is an unpleasant business to compare historical evils, but since
many people take it for granted that Christianity has a manifestly
cleaner record than the rest of the world, I would just remind
you of the centuries-long persecution of the Jews, the Crusades,
the burning of witches and heretics, the conquest and exploitation
of what today we call the Third world, the carrying off so many
of its people as slaves, the history of Christian Europe through
the twentieth century, which saw two terrible wars between Christian
nations in which tens of millions were killed, and the Jewish
Holocaust, and churches supporting Fascist dictators in Italy,
Spain, Brazil, San Salvador, Chile (the most recent being General
Pinochet), and for a whole generation supporting apartheid in
South Africa . . But we can take all this up further if you
want to in the discussion period.
And so it just
does not seem to me that Christians, either individually or
collectively, are manifestly better human beings than the rest
of the human race.
But - and this
is the question that we now have to ask ourselves - is this
what you would expect if our traditional doctrines are straightforwardly
true? According to these doctrines we have an uniquely direct
knowledge to God in Christ, an uniquely direct access to and
relationship with God in prayer and worship in the name of Christ,
and the direct presence of God with us in the sacraments of
the church. Would you not then expect all this to make a visible
difference in the lives of Christians? Would you not expect
the fruits of the spirit to be more evident in Christians than
in non-Christians? I suggest to you that we should expect that,
because otherwise the unique superiority of Christianity would
be mere rhetoric. But then on the other hand can we honestly
claim that Christians are in fact morally and spiritually better
human beings, in general, than non-Christians?
You see where
all this is pointing - to the conclusion that perhaps Christianity
is not after all the one and only true, or one and only salvific,
religion. So this brings us to the third option that I mentioned
for understanding the global religious situation. Ive
said a little about exclusivism, and more about inclusivism.
Now the third option, generally called pluralism. This holds
that there is not just one and only one point of salvific contact
between the divine reality and humanity, namely in the person
of Jesus Christ, but that there is a plurality of independently
valid contacts, and independently authentic spheres of salvation,
which include both Christianity and the other great world faiths.
In developing
this pluralist point of view I am assuming that religion is
our human response to a transcendent reality, the reality that
we call God. And as a human response there is always
an inescapably human element within it. To remind ourselves
of this, look at the histories of both Judaism and Christianity.
The image of Jahweh reflected in the Old Testament develops
over the centuries from a violent tribal god who commands the
Israelites to engage in genocide against the original inhabitants
of Palestine [go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy
all that they have; do not spare them, but kill both man and
woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass,
I Sam. 15:3] to the universal Lord, blessed be He, of later
and modern Judaism. Within Christianity, for quite a long period
of time in the medieval world most Christians thought of God
as a terrible figure who would send most human beings to eternal
hell, and before whom they trembled in terror, expecting to
be judged by the equally terrible figure of Christ, and their
Christian faith was largely one of dread. Lifes calamities
- disease, death, droughts, plagues, floods and so on - were
seen as Gods punishments for human sin. And because life
was so precarious, they thought that God must be very angry
with his human creatures. For mercy they looked to their local
saints and to the figure of the Virgin Mary, who might intercede
on their behalf. It was only in the 13th and 14th centuries
that Jesus came again to be thought of by many as manifesting
divine love, which is how most of us think today. Now is it
Gods nature that has changed through the centuries or
is it our human images of God that have changed? Clearly, it
is our human images of God.
So in other words,
between ourselves and God as God is in Gods ultimate transcendent
being there is a screen of varied and changing human images
of God - not graven images but mental images, or pictures, or
concepts of God. And our awareness of God is always through
and in terms of these human images. We worship God through our
own images of God, to which our human ideas and cultural assumptions
have inevitably contributed. These mental images not only differ
considerably between religions, but also within a given religion.
In fact if we could see into one anothers minds now I
believe we would find a great range of images or concepts of
God in this room.
But how can this
be? The basic principle involved was stated long ago by Thomas
Aquinas when he said Things known are in the knower according
to the mode of the knower (S.T., II/II, Q.1, art 2). This
is a principle that was taught in a much more massively systematic
way by the philosopher Immanuel Kant, and which has been strongly
confirmed since by cognitive psychology and the sociology of
knowledge. Things known are in the knower according to
the mode of the knower, and the mode of the knower differs
as between the different religions and the different cultures
and histories within which they have arisen. This, I suggest,
is the basic clue to a religious understanding of the fact of
many religions each producing, so far as we can tell, equally
valuable fruits in human life.
Ive been
concentrating so far mainly on the question of salvation. But
what, more briefly, about the different and often incompatible
teachings of the different religions, what about their conflicting
truth-claims? For example, for Christians God is a Trinity of
Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, whereas for Jews and Muslims God
is strictly unitary; for Christians Jesus was the second person
of a divine Trinity, whereas for people of all the other religions
he was a great prophet or teacher or guru but was not literally
God walking on earth. Again, for the monotheisms the ultimate
reality, the absolutely real, is an infinite person but for
Buddhism, for example, the ultimate reality is not a person
but a reality beyond the scope even of the personal/impersonal
distinction. And of course on a less basic level there are innumerable
other differences between the teachings of the different faiths.
But how can this be if they are all responses to the same ultimate
reality that in Christian language we call God?
Well, if we accept
the distinction between the divine reality as it is in itself
and as variously imaged by us, then our Christian doctrines
are about the ultimate divine reality as conceived by us, in
distinction from that reality as it is in itself. And the different
truth-claims of the different religions are claims about different
manifestations of the Ultimate to different human mentalities
formed within different human cultures and different streams
of religious history. As such, they do not contradict one another.
That Muslims, for example, think of the divine, and experience
the divine, as the Quranic Allah is not incompatible with
the fact that Christians think of the divine, and experience
the divine, as the heavenly Father of Jesus teaching,
or more theologically as the Holy Trinity. In other words, what
are called the conflicting truth-claims of the religions do
not in fact conflict, because they are claims about different
human awarenesses of the divine, made possible by the fact that,
to quote Aquinas again, things known are in the knower according
to the mode of the knower.
But there is
something else important to be said before I finish. There is
a valid sense in which, for those of us who are Christians,
Christianity is the only true religion, the only one
for us. For we have been formed by it. It has created us in
its own image, so that it fits us and we fit it as no other
religion can. And so for most of us who are Christians it is
the right religion, and we should stick with it and live it
out to the full. But we should also be aware that exactly the
same is true for people formed by the other world religions.
They also should stick with the religion that has formed them
and live it out, though in each case gradually filtering out
its ingrained claim to unique superiority.
So the bottom
line, I am suggesting, is this: we should live wholeheartedly
within our own faith, so long as we find it to be sustaining
and a sphere of spiritual growth, but we should freely recognise
the equal validity of the other great world faiths for their
adherents, and we can also be enriched by some of their insights
and spiritual practices. We should not see the other religions
as rivals or enemies, or look down upon them as inferior, but
simply as different human responses to the divine reality, formed
in the past within different strands of human history and culture.
And we should seek a friendship with people of other faiths
which will do something to defuse the very dangerous religious
absolutism that is being exploited in almost all the conflicts
going on in the world today. To support religious absolutism
is to be part of the problem which afflicts humanity. But we
can be part of the solution by setting an example of transcending
that absolutism.
© John Hick,
2001.