Cody asked a couple of questions I really like concerning my previous post. Since I don’t think I can answer them briefly, I’ll do it in at least a couple of different posts. Here’s the first question:

Do you find the Word of God (or word of God) in other sources as well (ancient or modern)?

This could refer to at least two different kinds of sources: non-biblical sources from within the Christian faith, and non-Christian sources from other religions. For this post, I’ll try to address the latter. Basically, do other religions reveal the Word of God?

To begin with, I should say that I consider this an open question. I feel like you have to say that God can reveal Godself in any way at any time, assuming we believe in a God who is free. Some people try to get away with limiting God’s revelation by claiming that God has already announced, in Scripture, that Scripture is God’s final revelation; they would judge, then, that they’re not limiting what God can do but only holding God to God’s word, as it were. (I wish there were a less cumbersome way to write in gender-inclusive language…) This is an attractive idea, especially since it would limit the amount of data theologians have to work with. However, since Scripture appears to contradict itself in any number of places, insisting that God always behave in agreement with Scripture (as if it’s monolithic) is hugely problematic.

Because of this, I’m convinced that there may well be truth from God revealed outside of Scripture. This is hardly a stretch for a Christian, since at least one passage in the Bible says God is revealed outside of Scripture. Paul writes in Romans 1:19-20: For what can be known about God is plain to [the wicked], because God has shown it to them. Ever since the creation of the world his eternal power and divine nature, invisible though they are, have been understood and seen through the things he has made.

Do other religions reveal the Word of God?

Although I am open in theory to other sources of revelation, practically speaking I don’t think the Word of God is found elsewhere. That’s my short answer.

For my long answer, I’ll start out by kind of showing my cards, and then afterwards I’ll explain what I ground my view in.

First, I’m decidedly not a pluralist. Part of the reason I place so much weight on the Christian scriptures is that I believe God indeed intends for the Gospel of Jesus Christ to be the truth by which all experience of God is mediated. So in addressing other religions, I would follow the view that seems to be endorsed by Paul in Athens in Acts 17. We should seek common ground for discussing God with people of other faiths, but to the extent that their understandings of God differ from the God revealed in Jesus Christ, we should regard them as wrong.

This favoritism toward the Christian tradition, I think, pretty much constrains my answer as to whether the word of God is revealed in other religions. Claiming that Jesus is the ultimate revelation of truth is tantamount to saying that God isn’t revealed in other religions, since their claims to truth would have no independent claim to credibility. If they’re only true when they happen to agree with the Bible, then they don’t have any real credibility. They may be interesting texts to reflect on, but that hardly means they contain God’s special revelation.

Personally, I would claim that the world’s religions are human efforts to understand God based on natural theology, human experience, reason, and creativity. The natural theology those religions engage is fine, as far as it goes, but their human efforts to further define the truth about God, I would say, are more or less futile. Beyond recognizing the existence of a transcendent God who created the world, we are hopelessly reliant on God’s own self-revelation to learn anything true about God. Judaism, in this reading, is based on scriptures that are true but incomplete. The Koran’s truth, I would say, is basically derivative from the Jewish and Christian traditions is uses.

That, essentially, is how I view the relationship between Christianity and the other world religions. No offence is intended, of course, and I assume that many adherents of other religions would make claims about my faith that are similar to those I have made about theirs. If you’re not a pluralist, it’s kind of the nature of the beast.

To say that other relgions involve human efforts hardly gets me off the hook in defending Christian theology. It appears that the Bible is also a product of human thinking and work, so someone might ask whether we can sift the truth from it any better than from the Koran. Exactly how to get at that truth contained in the Christian scriptures is an exceedingly complicated process, and I think (as many do) that ultimately it depends on study, prayer, and discernment within Christian communities.

The best I can do for now is explain why I think it’s reasonable to see the Christian faith as claiming universal validity as, roughly speaking, the one true religion. Basically, I’ll try to show why I think the Bible is incompatible with religious pluralism.

How could it be the only truth?

One difficulty with my position is that I can’t deny that God can reveal Godself in other religions, even in ways that contradict the Christian scriptures. The reason I still argue that God doesn’t reveal Godself in other religions is that pluralism appears to contradict not just occasional passages of the Bible, but rather the major presuppositions concerning the person of Jesus Christ throughout the entirety of the Christian canon. The problem is the combination, consistent in the New Testament writings, between (1) Jesus’ historical particularity and (2) Jesus’ universal significance.

First, let’s consider Jesus’ historical particularity. If we were only talking about God in the abstract, and not Jesus the historical person, we could say that different religions simply had access to different parts of the truth about God. But historically speaking, it seems clear that the other world religions don’t have equal access to facts about Jesus. Islam is the only other religion I know of whose scriptures have any doctrinal claims about Jesus, but the Koran can only make claims as a work written by a later interpreter, in contrast to the authors of the Christian scriptures, at least some of whom had access to eyewitnesses of Jesus’ ministry.

Some would claim that other early Christian groups had access to true traditions about Jesus, and this is certainly possible. Various traditions later condemned as heretical, such as Gnostic groups, may have been founded based on teachings of people who were as closely connected to Jesus as the authors of the canonical Gospels. The problem is that efforts to connect any of the extant Gnostic texts (i.e., those we have copies of) to real historical traditions independent of the New Testament are questionable; in other words, most Gnostic texts appear to be simply re-interpretations of the New Testament. It is commonplace these days for people who resent Christian orthodoxy to gravitate to Gnostic texts and lend them more historical credibility, it seems to me, than they merit. While their hypotheses could be correct, a responsible historian lends more credibility to the best available evidence.

And as boring as it sounds, the New Testament writings are probably the most credible historical sources, by far, for Jesus and his disciples. That doesn’t make them pure history by any means, but it does suggest they have a credibility that later writings lack. If the earliest Gnostic groups had their own real traditions that they could trace back to Jesus, it appears that those traditions aren’t available (or at any rate, identifiable) to us anymore. And it’s quite possible that those traditions simply didn’t exist until later, and that they have no real link with the historical Jesus or his immediate disciples.

The second point I mentioned above is the universal significance that the New Testament ascribes to Jesus. Almost every book in the NT is written from an apocalyptic perspective, anticipating a universal end of time with Jesus as the key figure. Modern theology tends to set this aside by emphasizing Christianity as an existential religion, whose goal is more about experience of God, finding meaning in life, and improving / redeeming the world around us. But from the apocalyptic perspectives of, e.g., Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, Paul, and the author of Revelation, religion deals with an objective reality that includes a coming day of judgment that all people will face.

The closest thing to a non-apocalyptic perspective among the NT Gospels is John, which in certain senses de-historicizes salvation by making it present now rather than focused on the future. However, it still speaks of the last day (e.g., John 6:40), on which humans will be raised to be judged. Furthermore, even if salvation is somewhat de-historicized, Jesus remains decidedly historical as the Word of God who became flesh at a real point in time and lived a genuine human life. John has that historical Jesus make claims such as, “I am the Way, and the Truth and the Life. No one comes to the Father except by me.” If the Exclusive Way to the Father became flesh in a particular place, it is difficult to see (by the definition of exclusive) how another religion could claim to reveal other ways to that same Father.

The point of this is not to use proof texts to make a point, but rather to suggest that the basic perspectives of the New Testament writings point to a universal application of the story of Jesus that is difficult to reconcile with pluralism. Jesus was a real historical person, so we can’t envision him as an idea that is revealed in different ways in other religions. Yet all the earliest interpretations of his person and ministry (at least those that are still extant) saw him as having a universal significance that leaves little room for interpreting him as just one of a variety of religious figures such as Buddha or perhaps Gandhi.

Other ways out

We could simply say that the New Testament is wrong on these points, that these interpretations of Jesus’ person and mission were simply created by early interpreters and used to shape the scriptures. But if those foundational elements are inaccurate, it is difficult to say why any of the NT’s teachings should carry continuing validity.

In the end, many people will conclude that the Christian tradition is deeply flawed and yet wish to keep what they can of it. For me, however, this amounts to wishful thinking––picking and choosing religious beliefs according to what appeals to us and then suggesting they are most likely true.

Whether my own beliefs are wishful thinking as well remains to be determined. However, I still think there are very good historical reasons to conclude that Jesus’ New Testament interpreters drew their primary ideas (such as apocalypticism) from real teachings of Jesus, and that a great deal of what they wrote is trustworthy historically and not just as a faith tradition. To make the case more specifically, I’ll have to put off for future posts.