James Patten

12/1/2016
Mrs. Copley
Christian Doctrine
Aren't All Religions The Same?
At the beginning of the school year, I believed that all religions lead to God. I was
confident that whatever religion you choose, it would take all people to the same place. I
don't think I could have been more wrong. There can only be one true religion, and
therefore, one way to salvation. If I am wrong, and if there are multiple ways to save
oneself, then all religions are false and pointless. Think about it, why follow any religion
in the first place if you are going to be saved without it? What makes a true religion so
promising and realistic is that it shows its followers not only who they truly are, but
makes their believers realize that the only way to salvation, is through that true religious
faith.
In Timothy Kellers The Reason of God, he explains that he was once invited to
be a Christian representative in a college discussion panel along with a Jewish rabbi
and a Muslim imam. Right away, they agreed that if Jesus was God, then the Muslim
and Jewish faith fail in a serious way to love God as God really is, and vise versa. This
automatically established that only one religion could be right about who God was and
still is today. This angered some of the college students. To insist that one faith has a
better grasp of the truth than others [is] intolerant! (4) said one of the students. These
college students are not the only people to have this kind of mentality. In this day in age,
everyone is beginning to possess entirely unique and opposite truths from one another.
This is not necessarily a good thing. Since everyone has different opinions on what truth
is like, it is easy to offend anothers truth. In most peoples eyes, the easiest way to
avoid this situation, is to either accept all truths, or to simply not talk about it.
When it comes to religion, people like to compare it to the story of the blind men
and the elephant. The story talks about several blind men surrounding an elephant.
Since each of the men touched a separate part of the elephant, they all had different
opinions on what the elephant was like. Therefore, they needed to use each of their
perspectives to find out what the elephant was like as a whole. Sadly, this story goes
directly against what it was originally trying to prove. Sure there may have been blind
men surrounding an elephant, but the story had to have been told from a person who
was not blind. Otherwise, how could the narrator know that the blind men only touched
parts of the elephant? In order to claim that all the blind men were wrong, he must have
seen the elephant as a whole. The same idea goes for religion. Some people try to find
truth by picking favorable parts from different religions, yet in order to actually make this
statement, one has to know the whole truth!
Even if someone managed to combine all of the religions together, the faith
would not make any sense, because most religions core beliefs are entirely different
from each other. As stated in J.I. Packers note Isn't One Religion as good as the
other?, Tribal religions are polytheistic.Hinduism is pantheistic; Buddhism is
atheistic..Judaism and Islam are as strongly unitarian as Christianity is Trinitarian (pg
91). Since all of the faiths have different beliefs, it's impossible to try and put them all
together. It wouldn't make sense! Instead of combining truths together, one must turn to
a single religion to find truth.
So which religion is true? Of all the religions, Christianity is the one that sticks
out. Yet, people don't like it because it can be exclusive. Yet, that's what differs this faith
from all of the rest. Jesus Christ was not afraid to claim that he was Gods son. When
people asked him who he was, he simply claimed, I am the way, the truth, and the life.
No one came come to the father except through me. (John 14:6). While other religions
claim that you will find salvation in your works, Christianity claims that salvation is found
in God. Unlike Judaism or Islam,Christianity states that if someone accepts Jesus as
their Lord and savior, they will be saved. What's amazing about the Christian faith is that
nothing else is needed after that! We are automatically saved. Amidst our brokenness,
the Christian faith claims that we can be whole again. And we can be whole because
God sent his son to die for us.
In Paul Rezkallas If all Religions are True, Then God Is Cruel, Rezkalla talks
about a short film called Most. In it, a bridge engineer and his son lower and raise a
local bridge for trains and boats. Yet one day, a train arrives early with hundreds of
passengers inside. The son tries to lower the bridge, but instead falls inside the
contraption. The engineer has to choose between saving his son, or saving the
hundreds of passengers. He ends up sacrificing his son to save the hundreds of other
people. Like the engineer, God sacrificed his son to give his followers true salvation. So
Christianity is the only way. If there were another religion that could give its followers
salvation, God would be cruel. What kind of God would kill his son, unless it was the
only way to save his people. For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only
son, so whoever believes in him shall not perish, but have eternal life (John 3:16).
Though it may frustrate others, religions certainly differ from one another. Since
they are so different, it is next to impossible to try to find truth by combining them all
together. Likewise, it is hard to find truth in religions that use works to identify their faith.
Faith should only be found on faith alone. Christianity offers salvation through Gods
sacrifice. Through that sacrifice, we can fix our brokenness, and find our truth in God.