What Christians Can Learn from Other Religions

J. Philip Wogaman

• Publisher: Westminster John Knox Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781611643848
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Comparative Religion

Examining other religions provides Christians the opportunity to more deeply understand their own beliefs. Learning about other religions is not the same as learning from other religions, which can have great value to Christians who wish to strengthen their faith. In this book's ten easy-to-read chapters, Wogaman shows readers what Christians can learn from different religions, such as Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, and even from atheism. From these religions Christians can achieve insight into love, sin, ritual, the importance of myth to convey truth, the foundational roots of Christianity, the dark side of Christian history, and many other important ways to see and interpret the world and to understand God. The book concludes with a chapter on what other religions can learn from Christianity. Perfect for church study groups, each chapter ends with questions for discussion.

Chapter 1

Learning from Other Religions

Pitfalls and Possibilities

Jesus said to him, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. If you know me, you will know my Father also.”

—John 14:6

Jesus said to him, “Why do you call me good? No one is good but God alone.”

—Mark 10:18

Before addressing what Christians can learn from other religions, we must ask whether that is even a legitimate topic. Any number of Christians doubt that there is anything to be learned from people who have not accepted Christ and become a part of his church. A favorite scriptural quotation comes readily to mind: “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me” (John 14:6). If Jesus is the way, what could there be in other religions for people who follow the way of Jesus? Don’t people of other religions have to be brought to this light? Isn’t the really important question the reverse of the title of this book, that is, what can people of other religions learn from Christians? And isn’t the basic answer to that question the fundamental one: how they can learn about and come to accept Christ? But not so fast!

There are two reasons why Christians cannot take that passage from the Fourth Gospel as a sufficient basis for rejecting everything about other faiths. The first is that there is more than a little doubt whether Jesus himself ever uttered those words. The Gospel of John was the last of the four Gospels in the New Testament to be written. Most New Testament scholars date the writing to sometime during the 90s CE, at least sixty years after Jesus’ crucifixion. The earlier Gospels and the writings of Paul convey a very high conception of Christ, but they do not offer a view of Christ as the only way to God. Most New Testament scholars doubt whether the apostle John, or anyone else who actually knew Jesus, wrote the Gospel of John. That is not to say that the Fourth Gospel is without merit, but it must be taken for what it is: a theological interpretation of the meaning of Christ. In some respects, the writing is brilliant, but, in common with most theological writings, it must be studied with care.

The other reason for not considering this a basis for rejecting everything about other faiths is that even those who take the words at face value must then ask themselves, what is it about Christ that makes him the most important way to God? For instance, one could interpret the passage to mean that it is the love of Jesus that shows the way. The John 14 passage continues, “If you know me, you will know my Father also. From now on you do know him and have seen him.” To experience Jesus, especially the love of Jesus, is to see what God is like. If God is God of love, then the way to God is through love, the kind of love displayed by Jesus himself. That leads to further questions: Is it possible that something of that love can be discovered in adherents of other religions? And is it possible that one can discover in those other settings insights that might illuminate even the way of Jesus?

John Wesley’s concept of prevenient grace could help here. Wesley considered grace to be, in many respects, the most basic of all Christian doctrines. Grace is the boundless love of God, illustrated most fully in the person of Christ. Those who have encountered and accepted this grace in Christ have experienced what Wesley called justifying grace. Even those who have experienced justification by faith in this grace must continue on a journey of being perfected in love. Wesley called this sanctifying grace. Prior to justification and sanctification, there is prevenient grace, meaning the grace that comes before encountering and accepting Christ. Prevenient grace is a recognition that the God of love is already at work everywhere, not just among Christians.

Christians can ask whether they might learn more about this prevenient grace as it is manifested in other religions—and, taking that a step further, whether a deeper understanding of other religions can contribute to a richer, truer perspective on Christ himself.

Pitfalls in Comparing Religions

Is it even possible to compare religions? In a sense, it obviously is possible—and in this book it is necessary. But there is one immediate problem. How can the adherents of one faith know enough about other religions to arrive at accurate comparisons? Isn’t religious knowledge possible only from the inside? That may be so, at least up to a point. People of one religion seeking to characterize another cannot know what it is like to experience the other faith. Will the criteria of judgment be drawn from one’s own faith experience? Does that distort the lens?

If religions are offered as universal, then some understanding of faiths other than one’s own cannot be entirely excluded. One should be able to locate points of agreement and disagreement that are not entirely off the mark. As in this book, it should be possible to explore the points at which one can learn from other traditions, even while retaining commitment to one’s own.

There is another hazard to be avoided. Sometimes, when criticizing other religions, we compare the best in our own faith with the worst in others. If we compare “our” ideals with “their” practices, we will have unfairly judged the other faith tradition. In his insightful portrait of Muhammad, Omid Safi states this point emphatically: “One of the most common mistakes made in cross-religious conversations is that people end up comparing the loftiest and noblest aspects of their own tradition with the most hideous aspects of others.” He asks how Christians would feel if their faith tradition were defined by the closing words of Psalm 137, “Happy shall they be who take your little ones and dash them against the rock,” or the reference in Numbers 15:36 to a man who was stoned to death for gathering sticks on the Sabbath, or the lines in Ephesians 5 and elsewhere requiring women to be subservient to men. Most Christians would say that such passages are taken out of context or that they do not represent what the faith is really about. But couldn’t representatives of other faiths make the same point about similarly objectionable quotations from their scriptures?

Every one of the world’s religions has enough truth and goodness in it to have been attractive to large numbers of followers. Every one of them has also had a dark side, fueled by fanaticism and, sometimes, by self-interest. We must not compare the bright side of our faith with the dark side of others.

Or the other way around. In the emerging interreligious dialogues of our time, some participants have thought that to sustain the dialogue they must be entirely negative about their own faith traditions to demonstrate their tolerance in conversation with others. But openness toward others does not require rejection of one’s own tradition. Real dialogue is from strength of conviction, combined with respect for and openness toward the convictions of others.

Then there is the pitfall of out-and-out syncretism, the notion that it is possible to blend all religions and emerge with something better than any of them taken singly. Such efforts are often so bland that the end product is somewhat less than what the various religions, taken on their own terms, have to offer. A case in point is the Golden Rule—do unto others as you would have them do unto you. That idea, with some variations, can be found in most of the great world religions, and that point of convergence is to be celebrated. Still, there is more to the various religions than that, including the differing theological contexts. We can welcome common values and beliefs while remaining skeptical that complete synthesis of different religions will ever be possible. Certainly the present volume does not anticipate such an outcome. Perhaps even more to the point, the differences within each of the major religions frustrate efforts at synthesis beyond one’s own faith.

Further, as we seek to learn from other religions, we must remember that some beliefs and practices that we associate with another tradition are often an expression of social customs and political forces having little or nothing to do with the religion itself. Attitudes toward women in a number of Muslim countries and the caste system in India may illustrate this problem, as would the medieval Inquisition in predominantly Christian lands. It can be difficult to assess the interplay between religious views and political and cultural commitments.

Such issues were discussed vigorously in the early to mid-twentieth century. A robust Christian missionary movement had developed during the nineteenth century, with thousands of missionaries going from Europe and North America to countries such as China and Japan and the largely colonial territories of Asia and Africa. The intent was to convert the millions of Asians and Africans from other religious backgrounds. The Student Volunteer Movement, inspired by John R. Mott, motivated large numbers of college students to set aside other career objectives and enlist as missionaries determined to evangelize the world in one generation. An ecumenical missionary movement gave rise to world missionary conferences in 1928 (Jerusalem) and 1938 (Tambaram, India) at which there were serious reappraisals of Christian missions and their relationship to other world religions.

The discussions and writings of this period prior to the Second World War anticipate, to a striking degree, today’s debates. The major difference between that time and today is the transformation of former colonial territories of Africa and Asia, with more than a billion people changing their status from colonial subjects to citizens of new nations. Major non-Christian religions that had been on the defensive gained new self-confidence. Christian missions continued, but now there were also representatives of Hinduism and Buddhism establishing a presence in North America and Europe and spreading their influence in so-called first-world settings.

Changing Perspectives on the Christian Mission

The earlier twentieth-century discussions about the relationship between Christianity and other world religions remain strikingly relevant as representatives of different religions face one another on a more equal footing, although not many Christians today are familiar with those discussions.

The Laymen’s Foreign Missions Inquiry of the late 1920s and early 1930s, headed by Harvard philosopher William Ernest Hocking, attempted a sweeping review of the Christian missionary enterprise to non-Christian parts of the world. Its conclusions, published in 1932, were not hostile to missions, but they did break new ground in their positive attitude toward other religions. The report by the inquiry’s Commission of Appraisal concluded that all the world’s religions have values that should not be rejected, even though Christianity remains unique. God is present everywhere, so we must not disregard that presence in religions other than our own. The report called for a renewal of Christian life as a living faith and a relative de-emphasis of abstract doctrine and exclusive conceptions of the institutional church.

The inquiry stated the attitude of Christians toward other faiths in a new way: “The mission of today should make a positive effort, first of all to know and understand the religions around it, then to recognize and associate itself with whatever kindred elements there are.… It is clearly not the duty of the Christian missionary to attack the non-Christian systems of religion—it is his primary duty to present in positive form his conception of the way of life and let it speak for itself.” Far from denying what is essential to Christianity, however, the Laymen’s Inquiry sought “with people of other lands a true knowledge and love of God, expressing in life and word what we have learned through Jesus Christ, and endeavoring to give effect to his spirit in the life of the world.”

The conclusions of the Laymen’s Inquiry were not accepted by everybody, of course, and they would remain controversial today. The Dutch theologian Hendrik Kraemer illustrates the negative reaction during the mid-twentieth century with his sharp contrast between Christian faith and all other religions. According to Kraemer, the various religions represent human striving. They are a human achievement, often very impressive, even noble. But, like ventures in philosophical thinking, they ultimately fall short because they do not provide an answer to the deepest human problem. The fundamental problem is that we are sinners; in our darkness, in our despair, we cannot create our own way out of the pit. In Kraemer’s view, Christian faith alone promises real hope in our hopelessness. It is faith not in our ability to think or create or act, but in the revelation that God has initiated our salvation through Christ. God’s action, not ours, is our only hope.

These contrasting points of view about non-Christian religions are still present in twenty-first-century Christianity. The main purpose of this book is to test whether other religions have anything to offer Christians. Clearly, the way we view this question has important implications for Christian missionary activity. Should the primary effort of missions be to proselytize, or are there other purposes?

I was briefly involved in the Methodist missionary movement in the early 1960s. That was a time of rapid, even revolutionary, change in parts of the world where most of the missionary activity was located. In 1960, my wife and I had accepted the invitation to serve as missionaries in Cuba, where I was to be a seminary professor. Because of the Cuban Revolution led by Fidel Castro, we weren’t able to take up that post. Instead, we returned to New York, where I assisted in the development of a program of long-range planning for our Board of Missions. Thus, I had a front-row seat on the possibilities and dilemmas of missionary thinking during an unusually turbulent era.

In a few short years, a billion people had changed their political status from colonial domination to independence. Sometimes independence movements emphasized indigenous non-Christian religions. Often missionaries were rejected as tools of colonial domination. Some missionaries were able to adjust creatively; others were not. When one of our executives returned from an extended visit to missions in Africa, he asserted that half of the missionaries there were doing more harm than good; fortunately, he believed, the other half more than made up for the others. The church, however, was already planted almost everywhere. So the missionary task was less one of making new converts and more one of providing assistance to existing churches. In non-Christian settings that could mean participating in inter-religious forms of cooperation. I do not recall that any of us felt particularly threatened by that.

This situation of a half century ago has been reinforced by developments in subsequent years, particularly as the mainline denominations and ecumenical movements have continued to reassess the missionary task and the possibilities of interfaith dialogue and cooperation. No longer do these churches and ecumenical bodies think of the central missionary task as gaining converts from other faiths. That is not exactly the view of more evangelical and Pentecostal churches. Indeed, one of the most striking evidences of this is the growth of such churches at the expense of Roman Catholicism in Latin America.

Another new phenomenon is the increasing number of missionaries from other countries at work in North America and Europe, establishing something of a two-way street. Representatives of non-Christian religions, especially from Asia, are gaining converts and establishing communities of faith in North America and Europe.

What Is Religion?

Basic to the current differences of opinion among Christians is the very definition of religion itself. Should we, following Hendrik Kraemer, sharply contrast religion with Christian faith? The problem here, as any student of world religions will recognize, is that claims of revelation are not unique to Christians, although the forms of revelation claims vary from one religion to another. For example, Muslims emphasize God’s direct revelation to humanity through the transmission of the Qur’an (literally word by word) to Muhammad, and Buddhists speak of the Buddha’s moment of enlightenment.

If unique revelation claims are the basis of comparison among religions, how are we to know which claims are true and which are misleading? Christians can appeal to God’s ultimate disclosure in God’s own time or to the Romans passage that says, “When we cry, ‘Abba! Father!’ it is that very Spirit bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God” (Rom. 8:15b–16). We are left then with spiritual discernment, which may indeed be the decisive evidence in support of any faith. But the role of the mind in sorting out the differences among revelation claims cannot so easily be dismissed. Any number of conflicting religious traditions—some of which cannot stand the test of time or moral adequacy—have been deeply satisfying to their adherents’ spiritually.

Paul Tillich defined religion as our “ultimate concern,” and that is not a bad way to frame a definition. Religion is what concerns us ultimately; it is what we care about most deeply; it is what matters most to us. In a similar vein, partly derived from Hebrew tradition, we can define our religion in terms of what we value most, which is to say, what we worship. By such definitions, it is evident that to be human is to have some form of religion. So religion cannot be defined by any particular conception of God or of gods, and, as we have suggested above, even atheism can be described as a religion. Indeed, a person’s professed religion may not even be his or her real religion! A person could profess belief in God (as expressed in the Bible or other sacred scripture) while actually being more devoted to nationalism or even crass materialism. In The Prince, Machiavelli offered the cynical advice that a ruler must, above everything else, appear to be religious. But it is clear that the real religion of the aspiring ruler would be gaining and holding power. Are there people of our time whose passion in life is the gaining and holding of great wealth? Or status? Or power?

Another important twentieth-century theologian, H. Richard Niebuhr, explores how all of us have a “center of value” that defines all our lesser values. The highest value, to him, is “radical monotheism,” in which our center of value is also the source of all being. But he notes that many people are activated by what he calls henotheism, which is worship of one’s own group. That could be one’s family, one’s nation, one’s racial or ethnic group, and so on. It could even be one’s church, if that is a group to which one is devoted while excluding all others.

The point here is that what we profess as our religion may not be what we value most. Some of the most murderous interreligious conf...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Chapter 1. Learning from Other Religions: Pitfalls and Possibilities
• Chapter 2. Learning Afresh from Primal Roots
• Chapter 3. Learning from Judaism
• Chapter 4. Learning from Islam
• Chapter 5. Learning from Hinduism
• Chapter 6. Learning from Buddhism
• Chapter 7. Learning from Chinese Religion
• Chapter 8. Learning from Smaller Groups with Special Memories
• Chapter 9. Learning from Atheism
• Chapter 10. Can Other Religions Learn from Christianity?
• In Summary: Fifty Points to Consider
• Notes and Sources