All Religions Are Different Paths...

But to where?

Do all religions teach the same thing? Or, do they at least lead us to the same end? Long ago, before human beings had discovered fire, I taught World Religions in a community college. The text we used was a standard in such courses, Huston Smith’s The World’s Religions. Smith thinks of the various religious traditions of the world as wisdom traditions. Each imparts its own particular brand of wisdom, and that is where the value of these traditions lies.

It was an appropriate text for a state school because it privileged none of the traditions it discussed. It placed them on equal footing, describing their history and major claims. Most of my students were Christians, and they struggled with this approach to religion. To be honest, I did, too, but I tried my best to be even-handed in my teaching.

I never liked teaching in this way because it felt dishonest to me. I couldn’t speak truthfully about matters of faith in the classroom. I’m grateful for the experience, though, because it helped me to clarify my vocation. I wouldn’t be happy doing this kind of teaching for the rest of my career. I wanted to speak about matters of faith as a Christian. Thankfully, God placed me in the context of a seminary a few years later.

Christianity is not simply a wisdom tradition. There is great wisdom in Christianity, and there are texts specifically devoted to the Wisdom tradition in our Scriptures, such as Proverbs and Ecclesiastes. We might think of the Letter of James as a Christian Wisdom text. Yet Christianity is not about general truths we can exchange like pieces of a Lego set with other traditions. Christianity is centered on a particular person—Jesus—and upon God’s work in history through that person. Despite the insistence of some nineteenth and twentieth-century scholars of theological liberalism, if you take away the historical particularly of Christian faith claims, you destroy the faith, full stop.

Christianity involves specific claims about God and the work of God in history that no other religion affirms. Our views on the Holy Trinity, Jesus Christ, atonement, and the kingdom of God are central to the way we understand God, ourselves, and other people. It was befuddling, then, when Pope Francis offered the following remarks at an interreligious gathering of young people. I’ve transcribed his statements below the video.

Because every religion is a way to arrive at God. Sort of a comparison, an example, would be there are sort of like different languages in order to arrive at God. But God is God for all. And if God is God for all, then we’re all sons and daughters of God.

“But my God is more important than your God!” Is that true? There’s only one God, and each of us is a language, so to speak, in order to arrive at God. Sikh, Muslim, Hindu, Christian… they’re different paths.

As Archbishop Charles J. Chaput points out in First Things, “Since his comments were extemporaneous, they naturally lacked the precision that a prepared text would normally possess, and so hopefully what he said is not quite what he meant.” Fair enough. Nevertheless, the imprecision of the remarks (and let’s hope that was the problem) invites further reflection.

Photo by George Bakos on Unsplash

First, the Pope refers to “every religion.” In addition to the major world religions he mentions, there are thousands of religions across the globe. In an article on world religion distribution, Pew mentions

African traditional religions, Chinese folk religions, Native American religions and Australian aboriginal religions. An estimated 58 million people – slightly less than 1% of the global population – belong to other religions, including the Baha’i faith, Jainism, Sikhism, Shintoism, Taoism, Tenrikyo, Wicca and Zoroastrianism, to mention just a few.

It’s doubtful that the Pope means that all of these religions lead to God. He probably meant to refer to the major (or “axial” religions) of the world, such as Judaism, Islam, Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism, Taoism, and Shintoism.

Another issue is what he could possibly have meant by “God” in these statements. Christians mean something very specific when we use the term God: the Holy Trinity—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. We affirm one God in three persons who became incarnate in Jesus Christ. The other two Abrahamic faiths, Judaism and Islam, reject this vision of God, believing it compromises God’s oneness. Each of these faiths, however, does insist on a distinction between God and creation. God is holy—set apart, different. God exists necessarily. Creation exists contingently. Put differently, it is impossible for God not to exist, while it is entirely possible for creation not to exist.

Eastern religions, by contrast, tend to view the world through the principle of nonduality. Let me offer one example. I will no doubt demonstrate the clumsiness of my facility with Eastern religions here, but perhaps I’ll be able to make my point. Hindus believe we are all part of Brahman, the “world soul,” which, when speaking to Westerners, they might call “God.” They hold the differences between ourselves and other people, and between people and God, are illusory. We are all one. We are reincarnated again and again until we reach that point in which our jiva, the part of the self that is entangled in this world, disappears, and we are simply Brahman. Smith uses the analogy of bubbles in a teakettle. The bubble ascends until it reaches the top and then is released. This release is called moksha.

If this sounds like an entirely different understanding of the world than Christianity teaches, it is. The notion of God in Hinduism is extraordinarily complex and multifaceted, but one way to think of God is as the Brahman who is in all things, and, in fact, is all things. The three-one God of Christian faith is emphatically distinct from creation, and the central point of contact between God and creation is the incarnation of God in Jesus.

Hinduism and Christianity also involve different notions of the problems of life. In Hinduism, it is our entanglement in the illusion of particularity in this world and the accumulation of bad karma that causes our problems. In Christianity, it is sin, our rebellion against the moral order God has established. Because Hinduism and Christianity identify different problems in the human condition, they posit different goals of existence. In Hinduism, the goal is moksha, unity with Brahman. In Christianity, it is salvation—reconciliation with God, new life in the present, and eternal life in the age to come. It should be apparent that these two religions do not teach the same things about God, the human condition, or the goal of existence.

This is to say nothing of Buddhism, by the way, which is a non-theistic tradition. In other words, there is no god in Buddhism. To say that this religion leads to god is to mischaracterize its teachings.

The statement, “All religions are pathways to “God,” is vacuous unless we first specify what we mean by “all religions” and “God.” Once we begin to drill down into the meaning of these terms, it becomes clear that the statement is nonsensical. It’s like saying, “All college courses lead to a knowledge of mechanical engineering.” You might respond, “But I’m an English major,” to which those committed to the proposition might respond, “Grammar, engineering, horticulture, equestrian studies… It’s all the same.” But we all know we don’t want the English major building bridges. We don’t want the horticulturist practicing dressage with a cactus.

To say that all religions are basically the same is not only incoherent, but disrespectful to the adherents of different traditions. Muslims and Sikhs do not believe the same things. Jews and Jains do not believe the same things, nor do Christians and Taoists. Let’s remain cognizant of the differences and try to find peace with one another. Yes, there will be tensions, but mischaracterizing different religious traditions doesn’t help.

Speaking as a Christian, I believe it’s important that we get these things right. Christians believe Jesus Christ is the very embodiment of truth, the incarnate Logos (Word) of God. We believe the truth makes us free, and we want others to know that truth. Out of God’s great love for us, he became one of us, and died on the cross for our sins. If all religions lead to God, the incarnation and crucifixion were unnecessary. There was no need for God to assume human flesh and die an atoning death for our sins. One possible conclusion we might draw, then, is that these central doctrines of our faith are simply part of the collection of myths devised by humans to address the mysteries of existence. They aren’t true. They are simply explanatory.

Further, if all religions are headed in the same direction, there is no point in the work of evangelism. Everyone will end up in the same place, so why bother to bring them to faith in Christ? In this scenario, evangelism is actually harmful because it falsely presupposes the importance of the particular claims of the Christian faith, wastes time and resources, and creates unnecessary conflict. So much for the martyrs across the centuries who gave their lives for the salvation of the lost.

My point here isn’t to throw shade on the Pope. He does, however, seem often to make confusing comments. This is one such occasion. We can respect the innate human dignity of people of other faiths without participating in the illusion that all faiths lead to God. Perhaps he meant something different than this. One can hope.