The Speak Life Podcast, sharing Jesus in everyday life. 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 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 uh 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 is 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 and apparently the the religions are ignorant and arrogant because they want to make these totalizing claims about the elephant 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 that 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. 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 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 has agreed on these things. Not even slightly, not even remotely. Uh, G.K. Chesterton, uh the great writer from 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 in the world. But actually, when you press into what those faiths are saying, their ideology, 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's 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, so 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 now 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 tenets 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 or you 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, or monotheistic Hindu. Um, you know, 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 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. Um, 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 gifts 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 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. Uh 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 not on 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 no. 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 and Buddhism are karmic religions, um, is very key to how you get to the good stuff, how you get to enlightenment. It is 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. 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 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 is 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 commitments. I'm gonna raise up this world. We tend to think of spirituality as just like Novicane 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. And maybe I was wrong. Surprise, here comes Jesus. And then thirdly, how 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 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 th 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. Why don't you on your table groups uh talk about whatever question you might want to shoot my way? Uh, can I also flag up? We've got these uh uh explore courses that are coming up on four Sunday nights. You can ask any question you like, no question will be asked of you, you won't be put on the spot at all, and you can wrestle through these things. We will feed you and you can talk about the deeper issues in life. Why don't you sign up for those explore courses by picking up one of these cards, ticking a box, and leaving a detail there? That would be great. But why don't you generate your questions and in a second you can ask them of me?
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