The Doe of the Dawn: A Christian World View …

THE WORLD’S GREAT RELIGIONS: TRUE OR FALSE?

On my first world tour I stayed overnight in a modest hotel in New Delhi, India, preparatory to a visit the next day to the Taj Mahal in nearby Agra. I watched as an Indian family laid out a cardboard bed in front of the hotel. I learned that they spent every night in this way, foraging for food wherever they could during the day. They were probably Hindus (meaning India), as are 400 million others who live in that country.

Since then I have seen similar scenes around the world. In Bangkok, Thailand school children gathered around me and chuckled over the photos in my billfold as I sat with them on their playground, unable to communicate with them except by signs, which sometimes does wonders. Some of the older students gave me a tour of their shrine, with special attention to the crematory. They were all Buddhists.

In Taipei I have stood (no sitting) with Confucianists in their bare shrines. The stark simplicity is punctuated with words of wisdom from the great Confucius engraved on all four walls. Taiwan is also Buddhist, and I got an inside view of this religion when I spent the night with Buddhist priests in one of their monasteries.

The scenes are not always reflections of poverty, though most of the common folk of the East are very poor. Japan of course is an exception. Their religions are Shintoism and Buddhism, and their shrines are often both ancient and elegant. It was an impressive Shintoist shrine that President Reagan recently visited as a guest of the nation’s head of state. That is the way of the East, where religion and the state are one and where the head of state is often deemed divine. The emperor of Japan was stripped of his divinity by the new constitution following World War 2, but the nation has the ideological capacity to return to this ancient myth.

Then there is Islam (improperly called Mohammedanism), which is one of only three universal religions, Buddhism and Christianity being the other two. The other religions are generally restricted to certain countries and nationalities. Judaism is sometimes considered universal, but its Gentile converts are usually by intermarriage. The three universal religions present faiths free of racial and national limitations so that any person anywhere may belong. Islam, its followers called Moslems, originated in Arabia, but it has spread throughout the world, including the United States, where there are more Moslems than Presbyterians. Islam is the second largest of the world religions, next to Christianity, with over 500 million.

If we look at these religions in terms of numbers, we Christians are, outnumbered better than two to one, for all Christians number about one billion while the other great religions number more than two billion. We are not counting the tribal and primitive cults and minor religions, which would add many millions more. Christians are clearly in the minority, not only in terms of the pagan or non-believing world but even in terms of religions.

This creates a cruel dilemma for the Christian who believes his religion to be the only true religion and that all the other religions are false and their followers lost. He may see it as blasphemy to suppose that the God of heaven would pour out His wrath on the majority of mankind for not having a religion they had never heard of.

Part of my thesis is that as faithful Christians we do not have to believe any such thing as that. We do not have to conclude that Zoroaster, Confucius, Gautama (Buddha), Socrates and other leaders and their followers, all of whom lived long before Christ, are necessarily in hell because they were not Christians, anymore than we need to believe that a good man like Jeremiah was lost since he did not believe in Christ.

But neither can we accept the view that it makes no difference, that one religion is as good as another. The idea of the Tao (the Way) in Taoism, a religion of China, which offers an escape from desire through contemplation, cannot be compared with the ideal of the kingdom of God in Christian thought. The Upanishads, the conglomerate scriptures of Hinduism, which are contradictory and repetitious, cannot be put in the same class with the Holy Bible. Just as the ambiguous theology of Hinduism, which counts gods by the thousands and yet says there is one, pales before “the Lord thy God is one God” of Judaism. Not only does Buddha, the Enlightened One, grow dim when compared with Jesus Christ, but no one in the non-Christian religions even begins to compare to the wonderful Person of the Bible.

To say that the great religions are all the same and that it makes no difference is like saying that all cures for disease are the same or that it makes no difference how a bridge or building is erected, or that one theory of engineering is no better than another.

So, we must avoid both horns of the dilemma by avoiding arrogance on one hand and neutrality on the other. We can believe that the Christian faith is the highest expression of the revelation of God and yet believe that the truths of other religions are also of God. If all truth is of God, then the truths in Islam and Buddhism are as much from God as those in Christianity. And truth always liberates and beatifies. In spite of their mixture with error, the truths of the great religions have blessed their followers. Confucius, Zoroaster, Gautama, and Lao-Tse (Taoism) were blessings to their generation, despite some erroneous concepts. Mohammed, whose followers promoted Islam by the power of the sword (just as some Christians have done!), may be less admirable, but he gave the world the only great religion outside the Judeo-Christian tradition that believes in one God. Allah is one! is basic to the Moslem faith. Mohammed also taught his people to pray five times a day to the one God who is the absolute Ruler of the universe. How many Christians pray five times a day?

So, we can believe that the highest truth is in Christ and yet believe that there are many important truths in the other great religions of the world and that those truths also are from God.

Even our own Scriptures may allow for this. “Other sheep have I which are not of this fold,” said our Lord in Jn. 10:16, which is understood to be referring to the Gentiles. This being the case, would not these other sheep have prophets and revelation of some sort—light from God? In Acts 14:16 Paul says that “In the generations gone by God permitted all the nations to go their own ways,” which would surely include these ancient nations of the East (all these religions but Islam existed for centuries when Paul said that). But the apostle goes on to say: And yet God did not leave Himself without witness. While Paul refers to this witness as God’s benevolence in nature, that witness could also be in the person of these world prophets. In any event our own Scriptures never condemn the unbeliever (the one who has never heard) but only the disbeliever (the one who hears and rejects).

When Heb. 1:1 refers to God speaking to the fathers by way of the prophets “in many portions and in many ways,” must these prophets necessarily be limited to the Hebrew prophets? How about the many other nations? Was God without witness among this vast majority of the earth’s population. Could not Zoroaster, who was the first prophet of any religion to speak of the devil, be a witness of God among the Persians (so as to prepare the Magi for the Christ child!) as Isaiah was among the Jews?

It can be argued, as Paul Tillich has done, that the old religions were “anticipations of Christianity,” which, he added, should lay to rest all our theological arrogance. We are more dependent on each other than we might suppose, and, despite the great diversity, we have considerable in common. In listing some of these “anticipations” we can see how Christianity is the fulfillment of all the shadowy implications in the old religions.

There are striking parallels between Christ and Buddha, who was born about 563 B.C. Both had miraculous births, Buddha being conceived when his mother was smitten on the side by a white elephant. Both were tempted by the devil, Buddha being offered great empires by Mara the Prince of Evil. Both performed miracles, Buddha doing such things as leaping over broad rivers on horseback. Both were poor, itinerant teachers, walking from village to village, though Buddha was born rich. Both had a band of disciples, though Buddha was sometimes followed by 12,000 disciples. Both were persecuted and both returned good for evil, and both remained silent in the face of abuse. And both had a sense of humor! .

Moreover their teaching was strikingly similar in some areas: “Let a man overcome anger by kindness, evil by good” is from Buddha, but it could have come from Jesus as well. “Hatred ceases by love” could have been emphasized by Christ as much as it was by Buddha.

This should remind us that we follow Christ not so much for what he taught, for much of what he taught was not unique, but because of what Christ was and is. And this is the great difference between Christ and Buddha. While Buddha claimed to be enlightened, he did not claim to be inspired; he did not claim that any god was speaking through him or that he was in any sense divine. In fact Buddha was an atheist, in his mind at least, maybe not in his heart.

Buddha’s religion was ethical and of this world, not metaphysical and of another world. He was in fact radically pessimistic, basing his religion on the belief that birth itself is evil and that it is far better not to be born. This is the mission of Buddhism: to so live that you will not have to be punished by being born again and again in the endless flow of reincarnation. It is the law of Karma: souls are continually born as punishment for their previous evil lives. So Buddha, discovering this, brought to mankind the “gospel” of so living that you will never have to live again!

After meditating for seven years, much of it under the Bodhi-tree, he became enlightened in the principles of perfect justice by which one overcomes the evil cycle of birth and death and thus attains Nirvana, the Buddhist “heaven,” which is the perfect peace of ceasing to exist. So Buddha gave to the world “The Four Noble Truths” and “the Eightfold Path,” which identified man’s selfish desires as the cause of human suffering and ways to control such desires. The Eightfold Path is very demanding: right views, right motives, right speech, right action, right living, right effort, right mindfulness, right concentration.

If I were a missionary to the Buddhists, I would not repudiate their religion, but I would begin with these great truths, recognizing them as given by the God they do not yet know, and seek to show that their own laws given by Buddha, as does all law, condemn them as sinners, for no Buddhist, including Gautama himself, can measure up to such an ethical code. All those under law must turn to God’s grace for “perfect justice,” which we believe to be in Christ.

Poor Buddha, he lived to be 80, always teaching, always urging his monks to live by a code too lofty for sinful man to attain. At the very end he urged his disciples to “hold fast to the Truth,” always an impersonal truth, and insisted that they should look only to themselves for help. Like all legalistic systems, it is an impossible religion to live up to. But still God used Buddha as a stepping-stone to something higher. He taught mankind the reality of sin and evil and showed them that their sufferings are caused by their own greed. He stressed the importance of truth and the quest for truth. And he gave them laws that reflected the universal laws of God. As we reach out to them as Christians we can start there and point to the grace of God as revealed in Christ.

Confucius, founder of a religion that now numbers around 400 million, mainly in China, was unlike Buddha, Socrates, and Christ, who never wrote anything that has been preserved, in that he wrote voluminous classics. While he was an agnostic like Buddha, his writings reflect his master passion, morality, and morality is religion socially expressed. He spoke of the Golden Rule 550 years before Christ, though he stated it negatively. When a disciple asked about perfect virtue, Confucius said: Not to do unto others as you would not wish done unto yourself And when he was asked to reduce the rule of life to one word, Confucius responded with reciprocity, by which he meant the virtuous person will not only return good for good but also good for evil.

Despite his suspicion of anything supernatural, one could not teach as he did about “the Way of the Higher Man” and not be close to God. He saw sincerity as the basis of character. He insisted that rulers should be moral examples and that the role of the state is to produce gentlemen, and to Confucius that meant gentle men. Like the framers of our own Constitution, he taught that a nation is to be ruled by laws, not men.

Living in a time of China’s moral decadence, Confucius insisted that an immoral nation cannot survive, and to be moral a nation must constantly pursue truth and virtue. War comes when nations are improperly governed, and it is greed that makes a nation unclean. Like the prophets of Israel, he cried out for justice and compassion for all, including a fair distribution of wealth. He stressed such simple virtues as courtesy, respect for others, and affability. And he placed the moral law (of God?) above all man-made laws.

Generations later Chinese leaders sought to minimize his influence by ordering his writings destroyed. But the power of the pen proved mightier than the sword and Confucianism not only survived in China but lived on to give the nation such stability that she has withstood all cultural invasions, usually shaping her invaders into her own image. It is questionable even today if Communism with its immoral statism, can ever penetrate the soul of China, born of Confucius.

But the most impressive and one of the most ancient of the prophets was Zoroaster, who preached one God, Ahura-Mazda (the Lord of Light), to the Persians (now Iran), as early as 700 years before Christ. He, too, was miraculously conceived (he laughed aloud on the day of his birth!), tempted by the devil, and was given a Bible, called the Avesta, which contains a lofty ethic, which he was to preach to mankind.

The scriptures preached by Zoroaster contain familiar elements: good and evil spirits, with every soul having a guardian angel; heavenly paradise and purgatory, where one might suffer only 12,000 years before rising to heaven; a last judgment. The worst sin is unbelief and the highest virtue the Golden Rule, expressed negatively as with Confucius. All good people will join Ahura-Mazda in paradise.

Zoroaster arrived on the Persian scene when the land was steeped in crude idolatry: the worship of animals, ancestors, the earth and the sun. Mithra, the sun god, and Anaita, the goddess of fertility, were the chief deities. Zoroaster, shocked by the drunken orgies dedicated to such gods, cried out against such idolatry, and, like the prophets of Israel, preached that there was but one God who was Creator and Lord of the world. Like all good prophets he was ridiculed and persecuted, and he might have been forgotten if Darius the king had not seen in his religion the ideals that would inspire the nation, and consequently declared war on the old cults and made Zoroastrianism the religion of the state.

The old prophet appears as modern as San Francisco when we find him preaching such virtues as purity and honesty and condemning such vices as sorcery and sodomy. The God he preached was the totality of all the forces in the universe that make for righteousness.

As evident in Iran today, the evil forces in time destroyed the heart of Zoroastrianism, so that once more there was the cult of Mithra and numerous deities. Zoroaster was conquered by the cultic priests and remembered only as one of the Magi. But small communities of true Zoroastrians survive today in both Iran and India, and they are known for their excellent morals and character. It might well have been that from such ones came the Magi, who saw that star in the East, to visit the Christ child. Zoroaster, their ancient prophet who proclaimed God as the loving heavenly Father, had all but foretold Christ’s coming.

If one is inclined to dismiss these religions as inconsequential, he should realize that but for the accident of birth he might well have been a Moslem or a Confucianist. How would I want the matter judged if the roles of the family camped on the New Delhi sidewalk and my family living in Denton, Texas, were reversed, with us as the Hindus and they as the Christians? As a Hindu I would believe in the Absolute (Brahman), even if my teachers argue whether this God is personal or impersonal, and I would believe in a disciplined life that leads to illumination. If you as a Christian dismissed my religion as having no spiritual value, I would see you as one ignorant of a quest for truth that dates back 5,000 years. But should you understand my religion and realize that the Absolute I seek cannot be comprehended in either words or concepts, then I might listen, as the ancient Greeks listened to the apostle John, as you tell of the Logos or the Absolute that has become flesh and dwelt among men.

And you should not be judgmental toward me for believing in reincarnation, basic to both Buddhism and Hinduism, when your own Christ was not startled when it was supposed he was a reincarnated Old Testament prophet, nor did he think it strange that his own apostles supposed that a man born blind was in that condition because of sin in his previous existence. Multiplied millions in this “believing world” are reincarnationists, including the wisest men of antiquity, so don’t put me down too quickly. My religion is also true— at least partly true, and I will settle for that, seeing the trauma with which truth comes.

It should at least humble us to realize that we are “Christians” by the fortunes of history. One historian refers to Zoroastrianism as “the religion that might have been ours”— if the Persians had defeated the Greeks at the pass of Thermopylae instead of the other way around, for then Europe would have had Persian culture rather than Graeco-Roman. But God was over-ruling history, we say, and so we became the true religion in time while the others became “false” religions. It may not be that simple.

As for me, I have an answer that serves my world view, though it, too, may be simple. I will walk with all these believers as far as the light they have takes them, and I will thank God for the walk and that these many paths are there. From that point on I will seek to lead them on to greater light, the Light that enlightens every person born into this world, which obviously includes them. And they will see, one day if not now, that the cosmic Christ, not just the Christ of the Judea-Christian religion, is Lord of heaven and earth and the Lord of glory.

He is the One that all the great religions of the world have been looking for, whether they realize it or not. —the Editor