The Speak Life Podcast, sharing Jesus in everyday life. Okay, cool. Brilliant. Hey, yes, thank you very much for braving it. My goodness. You know you're in Scotland, don't you? It's kind of embracing. Brilliant to be here. As I begin talking about other religions, full disclosure, I'm a Christian. So this is where I'm speaking from. And in terms of the sort of the other worldviews that I'm most familiar with, I'm most familiar with, I guess, materialism, I'm most familiar with nihilism, I'm most familiar with Christianity, and I'm most familiar with Islam. I've been involved with interfaith dialogue, particularly with Muslims, for the last 18 years. I've read the Quran multiple times, so that's kind of the religion that I know best outside of Christianity. But if I get one of these world religions wrong in any mischaracterization, I want you to shoot a question our way and correct me because I don't want to, I don't want to get my characterization of any uh of the other faiths wrong. Uh we are thinking about this issue of uh religion, are they all the same? And uh can we have it on the next slide? Um I've I've basically just got three points uh for you all. Uh when it comes to other faiths, everyone thinks they're right, not everyone can be right, and maybe we should be wrong. Okay? Those are my three points. Everyone thinks they're right, not everyone can be right, maybe we should be wrong. That's intriguing, isn't it? Well, you'll have to wait till the end for that one. So, uh everyone thinks they're right. Uh who here has heard before of this articulation of the various faiths, that uh various religions are like blind people feeling an elephant. And different people have laid hold of the elephant, and they think that even though they've only got part of the elephant, they understand the total truth about the elephant. Has anyone heard this kind of characterization of world faiths before? It's actually a very ancient parable, and it exists within Buddhism and Hinduism. It's also to be found in uh the Baha'i Faith and Sufis, um, and it was probably in the West popularized best by a poet called John Godfrey Sachs. And uh he begins his poem in this way. He says, It was six men of Industan, to learning much inclined, who went to see the elephants, though all of them were blind. That each by observation might satisfy his mind. And then he describes how these different people are grasping hold of different parts of the elephant. So one person grabs hold of the tusk and he says, I know what an elephant is. An elephant is like a spear, and then somebody else grabs hold of the trunk and they say, I know what an elephant's like, an elephant's like a hose, and somebody else grabs hold of the ears and says, I know what an elephant like, and an elephant is like a fan. You know, one of those things that the king would be fanned with, sort of thing. Another person grabs hold of the side of the elephant and says, Yes, I know what elephants are, elephants are like wolves. Another person grabs hold of the leg and says it's like a tree or a pole, and someone else grabs onto the tail and says, I know what elephants like, it's like a rope, right? And uh so uh John Godfrey Sachs goes through these different options on how people are trying to grasp the truth of the elephant, and then he concludes it and sort of says, Look, this is a parable about different world faiths. And his concluding stanza is this so oft in theologic wars, the disputants I ween rail on in utter ignorance of what each other mean and prate about an elephant not one of them has seen. Okay? A pretty damning indictment, isn't it? Of the different religions of the world, and we're all grasping after some kind of truth, and let's call that truth God, and we're all partially right, but all mostly wrong, and we're all ignorant of one another and one another's views on God, apparently. Um apparently the religions are ignorant and arrogant because they want to make these totalizing claims about the elephants that are based only on our blind grasping after the truth. Okay? So in this parable, the religions are the ignorant and arrogant ones, but who is the person who sees all? Who is the omniscient one in this parable? I put it to you that John Godfrey Sachs is the omniscient one. He's the one who sees everything. He knows that there is this much larger reality called an elephant, and all these other ignorant, arrogant religions, my goodness, so benighted, aren't they? And they make these totalizing claims about what the elephant is like, but they can't see. John Godfrey Sachs can see, can't he? Do you see how actually in this parable, the arrogant one is not the blind person? That might betray a certain kind of arrogance. If you want to make a totalizing truth and you don't see everything, that's one kind of arrogance. It's a whole other order of arrogance to say that you look down on all faiths and you see it all. Do you see how that might actually be the ignorant and arrogant claim to be making? So, so often when we talk about different faiths, what we want to do is we want to take a bird's eye view and we want to step above all the different faiths of the world. And we generally it's quite a Western thing to do. We we tend to want to say, ah, they've all got some things right and some things wrong, but they don't have the whole truth. But as we make those kinds of claims, we're actually claiming to be above them all. And we actually claim to have the God's eye view on everything. So myself as a representative of Christianity, I'm an Anglican minister. People might say of me, Glenn, how arrogant you think you're right. Um, but so often, I've never yet said this back to somebody, but one day I might do. Uh it might it might feel like it's arrogant for me to say that I'm right, but isn't it also arrogant to say that your way of conceiving of all religions is right? Do you see the difference? You know, if someone says to me, You think your religion is right, why don't I have the the right to then say, well, you think your way of conceiving of religions is right? So everyone thinks they're right, right? That's kind of where we're at. Everyone thinks they've got some kind of grasp on reality. And no one has the god's eye view on this, right? In this discussion. And actually to say that you are above the fray is actually to try to assume the god's eye perspective, which might not be the most humble posture. So everyone thinks they're right on this, let's just deal with that. Everyone thinks they're right, but also, uh, secondly, would you be able to advance it? There we go. Not everyone can be right, okay? Um, because there are competing truth claims. Um who here has heard of this illustration of the different world faiths? There's one mountain, and there's lots of paths up that same mountain. And maybe your path is Sufism, and maybe your path is Baha'i, and maybe your path is Orthodox Judaism, and maybe your path is Christianity, and we all roughly are heading in the same direction, and uh there is just this one reality to which all the religions are basically pointed. That's that's a pretty common way of conceiving of world faiths. Uh but again, do you see the arrogance problem here? Do you see the problem? How do you know that all the paths head up the mountain? How do you know that they all land in the same destination? How do you know that some of them don't go over a cliff? You'd kind of you'd kind of have to be on top of the mountain to know that all the paths reach the top of the mountain. Once again, you have to have the God's eye perspective in order to say that all paths lead up the mountain. So once again, I understand where the illustration is coming from, and I understand that it can be presented in a humble way, but there's another way of looking at it, in which, ah, I am standing above the religions, and I see all. I'm the omniscient one. Do you see why that might be a problem? There's another problem with this illustration, and I think the problem with this illustration is there is no mountain. We are just not agreed on what the mountain is, what's at the top, or how you get there. No one is agreed on these things. Not even slightly, not even remotely. Uh G.K. Chesterton, uh the great writer from uh the beginning of the last century, uh, he said it's common to think of all religions as basically the same thing but dressed up in different clothing. So, you know, the Hindu and the Muslim and the Christian, they're they're basically the same, but they're just dressed up in different clothing. And G.K. Chesterton said, no, it's exactly the other way around, actually. All the clothing of the various faiths is pretty similar. It kind of is, isn't it? You know. In Christianity we wash ourselves in baptism, in Hinduism, you might wash yourself in the Ganges River. There are all sorts of similar-looking uh kind of rituals that go along with the various faiths of the world. But actually, when you press into what those faiths are saying, their ideology, uh, that's when you see the real difference. And just to do a little bit of comparative religion with you, um, let's have a look at uh the various world faiths. And uh I find it interesting that actually, if you throw everyone into one of these five buckets, um, basically this accounts for about 90% of the world population. Um so you might not be able to see it at the back, sorry, but uh there's Christianity, Islam, unaffiliated means uh secular, agnostic, atheist, um, Hinduism and Buddhism, add those up together and you're about 90% of the population. Um I I find that interesting, that um it's not as though you have to look into like a thousand different religions in order to know what the world generally believes. Actually, within these five worldviews, you've accounted for the vast majority of people. Um let's just ask three basic questions of these different faith positions and see what they believe about things. Let's we'll work from the from the ground up. Okay, Buddhism uh is largely a non-theistic religion, right? Most schools of Buddhism um don't believe in God. There is, you know, God is not at all central to the tenet of Buddhism. Which that's that sounds really odd to a Westerner, doesn't it? It certainly had sounded odd for many centuries of sort of Western development, and we decided that when we were going to categorize all the rest of the world, we decided that religion means God, right? And the rest of the world went, huh? Religion doesn't mean God in in in our way of thinking. Um it can it can be a really actually Western imperialistic way of categorizing things, isn't it? Can't it? To actually think religion, think God. Because so many people who are religious uh don't believe in God. Uh Buddhism, most schools are atheistic. Hinduism, I mean, I've put polytheistic there, but but actually um above the many gods is Brahman, uh an impersonal one. So you could characterize Hinduism as monotheistic. Um there are some schools of Hinduism where God does not exist except in the mantra. Um and actually, technically, you'd probably call those people atheistic, atheistic Hindus. So you could be you could be called an atheistic Hindu, a polytheistic Hindu, a monotheistic Hindu. Um, and it's again this Western imperialistic idea. You know, when the Raj is in charge of India, all of a sudden people on the subcontinent are being told that they have a religion. And it's news to them. They didn't think they had a religion. They just lived life the way they'd always lived life, and yes, there are rituals, and yes, there are certain beliefs about things. But to have what has now come to be called Hinduism codified into this thing called a religion, I wonder if that is a kind of a leftover from Western imperialism. I wonder. Anyway. So there's Hinduism, polytheistic, unaffiliated, sort of secular, agnostic, atheistic, no commitment to believing in a god there. Uh in Islam, Allah alone, and if you read through the Quran, it is absolutely crystal clear that Allah has nothing to do with this Christian doctrine of the Trinity that I'll uh speak to you about in a second. Um so it is emphatically and decidedly anti-Trinitarian. Allah alone, Allah is an individual, a monad. And then in Christianity we've got this idea of Trinity. You might have noticed that you've got these John's Gospels on your tables. If you haven't yet picked one of these up, these are our gift to you. We'd love you to take this and read it. And the very first verse of this book says, In the beginning was the Word, a person called the Word who was with God and was God, and he was with God in the beginning. It's who Jesus is. He is the eternal word, the eternal son of God who's been filled with the Holy Spirit from before the world began. In John chapter 17, verse 24, Jesus says, Father, you loved me from before the foundation of the world. That is the most foundational Christian doctrine of God. A father always loving his son, Jesus, in the joy of the Holy Spirit. If you ask Jesus who is God, his most foundational definition of God is Father. You go to Islam, and emphatically that is denied. God is absolutely not a father and he has no son. So, who is God? Well, it depends. And these different religions are saying wildly different things on this question of who is God. Is there one mountain and we're all heading to the same place? Uh second question: what is the future? What is the future? Uh in Buddhism, uh nirvana, uh literally it means being blown out, um, being blown like a candle blown out. Okay? So detachment in the now and detachment dissolving into the ocean of being like a drop of water in the sea, um, that it that is uh the great goal, and that that is bliss. Okay? That's nirvana. Uh moksha is I want to get off the samsara, the birth and rebirth, the birth and rebirth, and I want to be released from this cycle of birth and death and birth and death and birth and death. Again, there's not a physical future in Hinduism. That's not to be hoped for. Okay, you want you want to get out of these physical conditions. Uh if you don't believe in God, I guess there's death, and that's that's the future. The death of you, the death of the solar system, the heat, death of the universe, it's death. Um in Islam, there is the hope beyond death, but it is not planet Earth. Um, planet Earth does not have a future within Islam. That that will be judged, and paradise is an unearthly place, not on Earth. Uh in Christianity, um, God comes to Earth, anchors himself to Earth, and pledges himself to planet Earth forever. So that the future is this world redeemed, this world renewed. So, what's the future? What are we all heading towards? Are we all heading up the same mountain towards the same goal? Um. I really, I really don't think we are. And that's okay, we can still love each other. But I don't I don't think we're all paths heading in the same direction. Um third thing, um, how do you get there? Uh in Buddhism, you've got the Eightfold Path, there's right speech and right action and uh right mindfulness, and and and really, you know, karma, both uh Hinduism and Buddhism are karmic religions, um, is very key to how you get to the good stuff, how you get to enlightenment. It is down to you and is down to how you live rightly in this world. Hinduism again, karma is what you put out, you get back. There is a moral grain to the universe, you go against that moral grain, you get splinters, you go with it, and things will be better for you. Um there's karma. Uh, unaffiliated, it's it's very enfranchising. There's death for everyone. Everyone gets the same future, okay? Um, doesn't matter how you live, you know, Mother Teresa, Pol Pot, you get the same, okay? Death for everyone. Um in Islam, how do you get there? The five pillars, and uh and within Islam, uh, there's very much the doctrine, not so much of salvation. In fact, the word salvation is not there in the Quran. Probably the closest parallel to the Christian doctrine of salvation in Islam is the doctrine of success. Um, you are successful as a Muslim, or you are, and different translations put this differently, but you are a loser. And like in modern English, that doesn't come across as particularly spiritual to say loser, but it it I'm sure it comes across much better in in Arabic. But you are either successful at living in submission to Allah's will, or you are not successful living in submission to Allah's will. Okay, and that that is how you get the future. Be submissive to Allah's will in your life. Okay? And then Christianity, how do you get to this great future? Um, in this book, in John chapter 6, verse 28, a whole bunch of people come to Jesus and they say, What must we do to be doing the works that God requires? Do you see how they've set up the question? And they've set up the question in the way that every other religion speaks of, right? What must we do to do the works that God requires? And then Jesus responds. He's been asked in the plural and he responds in the singular. He says, The work of God is this, to believe in the one he has sent. That's Jesus Himself. The work of God is this, to receive Christ, who has come down from on high and has met us in our pit. That's Christianity. We are saved by God's Son, who comes down and does not save the successful. He saves the losers, like you and me. Okay? Which is why for a Christian, actually, the mountain and trying to ascend the mountain is just really not a good explanation of what Christians believe at all. Within Christianity, it's not about me climbing the mountain, it's about God coming down into the valley of the shadow of death. Actually, that's how you get the good future. So, do we think that pretty much the religions are all different paths heading in the same direction? Once again, I suggest to you that that is a leftover from a kind of a colonial spirit that basically says, okay, we in the West, we've grown up under the under the shade of church spires. So when we go and you know take our beliefs out to the world, they probably believe pretty much the same as Christianity, but it's just dressed up a little bit, right? And it's it's it's got this real imperialist tinge to it, I think, to conceive of all the religions as basically believing the same things. The religions disagree over what a religion is, like really profoundly. Okay? So I just don't think there's one mountain, I don't think there's one mountain, and we're all trying to get up to the top. I think it's far more like there's one mountain here, there's one mountain here, there's one mountain here, there's one mountain here. Which mountain are we really on? Which it which is the real one? And if I go towards this one, I am moving away from these two. And if I go towards that one, I'm moving away from these ones. That's just the nature of the case, okay? Not everyone can be right. There are these mutually exclusive beliefs. So everyone thinks they're right. Not everyone can be right, but then here's my final point. Maybe we should be wrong. Maybe we should be wrong. Okay? What do I mean by that? Well, we've asked those three questions: who is God, what's the future, and how do we get there? Well, actually, I think foundational to Christianity is to say, who is God? We all get it wrong. Like, totally. We like me, naturally, I don't have a baldy about who God is. I don't I don't know. I don't know who God is. And then when God showed up, you can read about in this book, when God showed up, he showed up under our nose, he was born in a manger, he lived in poverty as this penniless preacher, and he ends up strung up on a piece of wood, bleeding to death, and he says, I'm God. You're like, well, that's surprising. That's I that that's if I was just to climb up to a notion of God, that's not the gods that I would have imagined. And actually, Jesus comes to the world to say, You're all wrong. You're all wrong about God. If you were here last night, uh you would have heard the story of Nicodemus in John chapter 3. Here's a guy who'd been studying the Bible all his life, he was rich, righteous, respectable, and Jesus says, You've got everything wrong. You need to be born again, Nicodemus. You've got everything wrong. He's a Bible guy, he's probably memorized more Bible than you've read in your life. And Jesus is like, No, you're totally wrong. You're totally wrong. Jesus shows up on planet Earth and he declares all of us wrong. And he says, I'm a surprising kind of God, the God who would die for you. What's the future? We tend to think that spiritual means non-physical, non-earthly, right? And Jesus comes to planet Earth and he says, Oh, I've got plans for this world. I've got eternal plans, eternal commitment. I'm gonna raise up this world. We tend to think of spirituality as just like Novakane in the ninth dimension, just spiritual groovy vibes all the time, right? And Jesus comes and he's like, no. He rises from the dead and he goes for long country walks with his friends, he goes fishing with his mates, it's barbecues on the beach, it's physical earthy. That's that's the future according to Christianity. And that's surprising. That's not that's not what I would have thought of, right? And maybe I was wrong. Surprise, here comes Jesus. And then thirdly, how do we get there? I mean, everyone. I remember being 11 years old and inventing a religion, okay? Did you ever do this? And you kind of thought to yourself, you know, if I do enough good deeds, I'm gonna, you know, tick the boxes and earn my brownie points, and if I do too many bad deeds, it's gonna way up. I I invented that religion, and I I'm not alone in that, I don't think. I I'm I I reckon you've probably invented a religion that's pretty much like that. You do good and you go up, you do bad and you go down, and that's kind of how it is. And and and Jesus just surprises us all. And he just comes down into the midst of our pit and he says, You're all losers, you've all got it wrong, and I love you anyway. Well, that's surprising. Maybe we were wrong. And maybe Jesus has good news for us. I'll leave that for you to think about. But those are my three points. You can think about them on your table. You can text in questions. Everyone thinks they're right. Not everyone can be right. Maybe we should be wrong. Um, I'm sure you've got loads of questions.
SPEAKER_02Uh, first question: where and what is the biblical evidence for the Trinity? Uh, you mentioned God and Jesus as being one in the love of the Holy Spirit, but how do you know the Holy Spirit is divine?
SPEAKER_00Ah, how do you know the Holy Spirit is divine? Um, read John's Gospel. Um, that's my answer to every question. But uh, between John 14 and John 17, um, Jesus is the night before he's going to die, and he keeps on talking about there is another counselor who's going to come, another comforter, and uh he will be with you just as I have been with you. And he speaks of the comforter with a capital C in a way that isn't entirely personal. Uh so throughout the throughout the Bible, the Holy Spirit is uh said to grieve, the Holy Spirit is said to uh rejoice, um he is a person and is described in personal terms. And the way to kind of wrap your head around him is really to read through John chapters 14 to 17 and see that really kind of Jesus is like the Spirit's life with skin on. And the Spirit is another comforter, another counselor like Jesus, who will be with you, who will be in you. Um, how do we come to the doctrine of the Trinity as a whole? You kind of read through the scriptures, and actually the simplest, most clarifying doctrine of God, when you when you actually take the text seriously, is that God is a loving union of three. Actually, when you don't have a doctrine of the Trinity, that's what complicates your life. But when you understand, okay, who is God? He has always been a father, loving his son in the joy of the Spirit, and that's what then helps you to understand the texts. Um, without that doctrine of the Trinity, you end up having to like rip out that verse or rip out that verse, and you chop and change and mold God into your own image. But no one wants to mold God into their own image, right? Um, what we do is we receive who God is. Jesus comes and he says, Father, you loved me from before the foundation of the world. So that's our Christian doctrine of God, the love of the Father for the Son in the joy of the Spirit. And when we have that doctrine of the Trinity, I don't think it complicates things, I think it actually clarifies.
unknownGreat.
SPEAKER_01Thank you. Another question, Glenn. Um, would you say that kind of faith, religion in general is universally arrogant?
SPEAKER_00Um no, because I think you can't get out of bed without faith. Um everything you do is a venture of faith. All your studies are a venture of faith. I mean, everything, you know, even if you're a scientist, you haven't done all the experiments that you're depending upon. You're you're depending on the witness of others, the testimony of others, which you trust. And if you do science, then you know you trust that the rationally ordered, rationally comprehensible laws by which you are doing this stay the same, and they stay the same now, and they were the same back in the 17th century, and they were the same back millions of years ago, or whatever. Like, like you are always venturing in some kind of faith. Uh we we always have a working doctrine of of reality, okay? Which is why it was it was pretty scandalous, wasn't it? I actually put atheism up there on the board. Did you notice that? That was scandalous. There's probably there's probably all sorts of questions about that. You know, that actually, you know, to not believe in God is is a certain kind of conception of ultimate reality. Um so I so the way I'm using faith in this sense uh is not that you've signed up to a creed, uh, it's that you have some kind of working definition of what life is and how you're going to live it. In that sense, faith is inescapable.
unknownThank you.
SPEAKER_02So, what about the many denominations in Christianity? Um, this person says, I feel that some of those aren't compatible. Speaking as a high Anglican in a Presbyterian world, for example, how does Christianity sort of deal with that tension?
SPEAKER_00It'd be really great to talk about uh, you know, I'm an Anglican myself and I I live in lots of different worlds. Um my job is really to speak in a whole range of different churches around the UK and around the world, actually. And what's fascinating for me is that even if I'm in a a church in Malawi or I'm in a free church in Scotland or a Southern Baptist church in the States, or where wherever I am, um there is a there is a core doctrine that Christians believe. And it depends on how you count the numbers, but but some people might say there's 40,000 denominations in the world. Um that's that's that's quite a um that's that's chopping people up very, very finely to say that there's 40,000. But even within that 40,000, every single one of those 40,000 actually believes the creeds. They actually believe the Apostles' Creed of the 2nd century and the Nicene Creed of the 4th century, um, which is a pretty detailed explanation of what Christians believe. And it's far more detailed than anything that I've said this week. Okay, I've I've spoken for a couple of hours now, maybe three hours of stuff that I've given you, and I haven't given you as much detail as what's in the creeds that 40,000 different denominations believe worldwide. Um so I actually think, yeah, there are differences, but I think the real headline story is the unity between these two billion people on planet Earth, and how do you account for that? Um but I understand that there's difficulties in practice. Um we can talk about that privately.
SPEAKER_01Um about the kind of after-life Christian thing. Um, and the question is that was a really bad explanation. Um the resurrected world be a new world, um, 2 Peter 3 says, the day of the Lord will come as a robber comes, the heavens will pass away with a loud noise, the sun and moon and stars will burn up the earth and all that is in it will be burned up.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. So new heavens and new earth, let's let's go, okay, this is this is a geeky question, so let me go geeky. Alright, so the the word new is kinos, not neos. It's not a whole new world, but it's a kinos, which is the same as kind of, or have I got that the exact word wrong way around? No, I think that's the right way around. Um when that word is without um without a noun, when it's just left as an adjective, that just means the new moon. So the the mu the moon is not replaced every 28 days. Uh the moon is renewed every 28 days. And actually, this world will be renewed. And yes, you know, Jesus went down into the grave and he rose up again, and there's different stuff about him, and people struggle to kind of recognize him, and something's gone on in that path, but it is the same Jesus. Jesus did not leave a body behind in the tomb and rise up again with a whole new body, okay? He was renewed through death and now at the other side, and that's the pattern in Christian theology. The pattern is that everything's going to be raised up the way that Jesus was raised up. So he didn't leave a corpse in the grave and then raise up as this new guy, okay? He was passed through death and came out new on the far side of that fiery judgment. And I think it's the same in the Bible. The whole world is going to be pulled through that trajectory, through a fiery judgment, into a renewed heavens and a renewed earth.
SPEAKER_02So this question is: do Christians believe that Anne Frank is in hell? Which I think raises a larger question of like, if you're a good person and you just picked the wrong religion or got it wrong, are you out of luck?
SPEAKER_00Right, right. Um, I haven't read Anne Frank's diary in ages, but um, yeah, loved it when I first read it. What do Christians think about her? Well, Christians think we don't know which person's going up and which person's going down, because that's the job of the judge, right? But the the one the one audacious claim we do claim to know is we claim to know who the judge is, and and I claim to know that the judge is Jesus. Okay, that that's arrogant enough by itself, but let's let's go with that, okay? I claim to think that that the judge of all things is Jesus, and he's the judge who put himself in the judgment dock on the cross and took the harshest judgment there's ever been, so that people need never go to hell. Okay? If people want Jesus, they can have Jesus. And I don't claim to know how things work at the very end of things, okay? But what I do claim to know is if you don't want Jesus now, I don't see why you're going to want him later. And if you have rejected him now, then I don't see anything in the Bible that will tell me that you're going to want him later. So do you want Jesus? You know, I I think it's it's as simple as that. You know, um Jesus is the judge that I trust with the salvation of the world. Um there isn't a gracious judge on any of the other world views. Death is not a gracious judge, it's relentless, right? Um Allah will judge you according to your deeds up or down, right? Um but there is no mercy promised from Allah. If you're successful, you're successful. If you're not, you're not, right? With karma, it is down to you. There is not a merciful judge in any of these other worldviews, but I think Jesus is the merciful world, uh, the merciful judge. So I think if you got to vote for a judge at the end of all things, you don't. But if you got to pick, I think you would pick Jesus. And I entrust, and Frank, and the whole world, to that righteous and merciful judge.
SPEAKER_01And I think one quick last question, you kind of mentioned a little bit about it. But what about the people that grow up or are born in places where there are no Christians at all, um, and have never heard of Jesus or Christianity or anything. So, what does Christianity say about their salvation?
SPEAKER_00Um, a lot of what I said sort of counts for that. But I mean, it's interesting that on the very first page of your John's Gospel, you'll see that Jesus is described as the true light who gives light to everyone. Okay? I think part of what can seem so arbitrary is if you imagine that Jesus is just this little narrow figure from history, he's just this prophet from 2,000 years ago. And it sounds like, therefore, Christians are then saying, you've got to come to this guy, this narrow little guy, in order to get to that thing over there called salvation. But that's not the Christian doctrine. In John chapter 17, verse 3, Jesus says, this is eternal life, to know God through knowing me. And he actually, he actually, there's this cosmic definition of who it who Jesus is. And salvation is not this narrow thing of going through this tiny door called Jesus in order to get this other thing called eternal life. Jesus is the light that enlightens the cosmos. He did come in time and space, and I'm very glad that there's a particularity to Jesus, because it means we can get to know him. But he is the light that enlightens everyone. And again, what happens to people at the end of all things and those who haven't heard of Jesus? I don't know. The Bible's not written for those who don't have the Bible. The Bible's written for you who do have the Bible. So the big question for you is, what are you going to do with Jesus? Because you have heard something about Jesus. And he is offering you his light. You know, do you want that? You you can't claim to be in this position of I don't know. You now have heard something. So I just urge you to keep on investigating this Jesus and make sure, make sure if he's not who he says he is, make sure he's not. But if he is who he says he is, he's offering you so much more than just this narrow figure from history. He's offering you everything, he's offering you God.