Our God vs. Their God

December 10, 2023

Today is the second Sunday of Advent, the time of preparation for Christmas, just like we have Lent as a time of preparation for Easter.  And it is therefore quite consistent with the story of Jesus that we have a Gospel reading that speaks of the work of John the Baptist, who is reported in the Gospels as the one who was sent to prepare the way for Jesus.

The various passages that we find in the different Gospels give us conflicting ideas about the relationship of John the Baptist and Jesus.  But one thing seems to be clear that though there may have been some competition, about whose master was greater, between John’s disciples and Jesus’ disciples (see John 3:23-26), there seems to be no such competition between John the Baptist and Jesus themselves. This lack of competition between two very different spiritual leaders is something we can see in all genuine religious souls. In this case we have people with quite different spiritual life styles, - on one side the ascetic John who lived on locusts and wild honey, and a more social Jesus who was quite comfortable going to people’s houses for meals and weddings, so much so that there were some who called him a ‘glutton and a wine bibber’.

On the other hand, institutional Christianity has for long struggled with this need to ‘compare’ itself with other religions - and there has been a tendency to insist that ours is not only the best, but also the only way to God.  So, a quick run-through (admittedly very brief)  of this theological struggle of Christianity over the centuries may be helpful.

Christianity evolved out of the Jewish tradition that initially felt the need to ensure that its devotees only worship Yahweh,  as when they entered the land of Canaan (today’s Israel and Palestine) after wandering through the desert for 40 years, they found people worshipping  many other gods, and there was a fear that if the Jews intermarried with non-Jews, these other gods would also take a place in Jewish homes. So the first of the ten commandments states: I am the lord your god… you shall have no other gods before me….you shall not bow down to them and serve them. For I the lord your god am a jealous god..” (Exodus 20: 1-5), and the most superior of these many gods, for “YaHWeH is a great God, and a great king above all gods.” (Psalm 95:3).  Gradually the Jewish tradition stopped accepting any other deities as truly gods, and the Scriptures stress that “Yahweh is  God, there is none beside him” (Deuteronomy 4:35), with the additional teaching that much of the Jewish suffering over the centuries was primarily due to their lack of faithfulness to this Yahweh.

This immense concern about faithfulness to Yahweh, who was the same God that the Christians later called Abba Father, and the danger of worship of other gods led to a strong condemnation of idolatry, i.e. paying obeisance to any other god. Consequently, the first Church Council in Jerusalem (when the apostles were still alive) declared only a few things that new Gentile (non-Jew) Christians had to follow, and the first was that they  should ‘abstain from things polluted by idols” (Acts 15:20). In other words Christians were not to accept the food offered to idols, as this was a common practice in many religions. However, Paul, who saw his mission as primarily to the non-Jews (Gentiles) probably felt he could not completely dismiss all the religiosity of his potential Gentile converts and so he finds a middle path, as it were, by teaching that the altar to the Unknown God that was found in some Gentile dominated places was actually referring to the God whom Jesus had come to teach them about (Acts 16:23) .   

The combination of the Jewish teaching that Yahweh was the greatest God and also the only real God, naturally entered Christianity, which almost naturally began to claim that since Jesus was the Messiah (the saviour) sent by this God, all salvation had  to come through Jesus.

The next development was the realization that the umbilical cord attaching the Christian community to the Jewish faith did not seem to be getting cut, as for many centuries there were many Jews who joined the Christian community by saying that they accepted Jesus as the Messiah of the Jews, but they also saw themselves as Jews, and so they kept up the Jewish practices like circumcision, avoiding unclean foods etc.  The evolving Christian community was not willing to accept this divided allegiance and so we find even as  late as in 787 AD (Second Council of Nicea) the Church felt the need to insist that only those should be accepted as Christians who “have turned away from the Jewish practices”.   

In the 7th century another important event took place - Islam came into existence and here was a third religion besides Judaism and Christianity that claimed Abraham as their father in faith, and so this was a religion that could not be easily dismissed.  So as late as 1076, Pope Gregory VII, writing to a Muslim leader accepts that “we believe and confess one God, although in different ways”.    

But as the Christian community and the institutional Church spread more and more, and interacted with different religious traditions across the globe, combined with the historical fact that some Churches, also having apostolic roots, had separated from the Roman Church, there was felt in the 15th century the need to insist that ‘no one remaining outside the Catholic Church… can become partakers of eternal life”(General Council of Florence, 1442).

However, Europe was coming out of the dark ages, scientific and philosophical thought was becoming prominent, and even within the Catholic Church this openness to new ideas was spreading rapidly, as exemplified in the Jesuit order’s (which started in the 16c) renewed focus on education and scholarship as essential for fulfilling the mission of the Church. With this mind-set Jesuit missionaries started travelling throughout the world to spread the Gospel message. Unlike their predecessors, like Francis Xavier, who had already carried Christianity to the East, these later Jesuits promoted an active engagement with religious traditions in those countries.  So we find Jesuits like Matteo Ricci and Robert DeNobili travelling to China and India respectively, where they made significant efforts to adapt Christian beliefs and practices to the religious ethos of these countries, to the extent that DeNobili was even accepted as a Brahmin in India, and Ricci as a Confucian Scholar in China.  

So gradually the claim of the absolute necessity of entry into the Catholic Church for salvation was being powerfully challenged, and the philosophical thinking in Europe was veering towards a liberalism that the Church found very offensive to its beliefs.  So Pope Leo XII in 1824 (Encyclical, Ubi Primium) condemns the kind of liberalism that propagated the view that God has given every human the freedom to choose any religion and find salvation through that sect.  This is re-confirmed by Pius IX in 1846 (Encyclical, Qui Pluribus) when he condemns the teaching that ‘there is no difference between religions….. (and therefore) people can attain to eternal salvation by the practice of any religion whatever”.

While these Popes were surely trying to establish the superiority or absolute uniqueness of the Catholic Church in the face of all these challenges to its supremacy, there was, I suggest, a valid insight that one can find in these Papal pronouncements, namely that all religions cannot be considered to be of equal value. The  value of such an insight may be clearer to us today when we realize there are many individuals who claim the title of religion, but are just glorifications of their founder’s ego, like ’ The People’s Temple started by Jim Jones in 1950 and which ended when Jones was being investigated for financial fraud and he motivated all his followers to join him in a mass suicide. 

However, the fact is that by the 19th and 20th centuries the Catholic Church was faced not with unsophisticated, mythological belief systems, but deeply philosophical (religious and rational) challenges to its claims to superiority. These other established religions had sophisticated and extensive Scriptures and philosophical discourses and writings. The dilemma faced by the Catholic Church is perhaps seen clearly in one of my own experiences. When I went to study theology in the USA, my Jesuit Scripture professor found it very difficult to convince me that all salvation could only be through Jesus.  A few months later he was invited to teach for a semester at an Indian Jesuit theologate in Pune, India.  When he came back, he called me aside and said: “You know I still don’t know how to harmonise what the Scriptures seem to be saying, but after going to India, I understand why you find it difficult.”

Like my scripture professor, it was still a struggle for the Church to let go of its own claim about the salvific necessity of Jesus, and so in the First Plenary Council of India (1950) the Indian Catholic Church tried to balance this ‘superiority’ with the obvious experience of the validity of diverse religions in India by stating:  “We acknowledge that there is truth and goodness outside the Christian religion “ but then going on to add: “ … but the inadequacy of all non-Christian religions is principally derived from this that Christ being constituted the one Mediator between God and human beings there is no salvation by any other name”.

Where are we today?  In 1962 Pope John XXIII inaugurated what eventually turned out to be a paradigm shifting General Council of the Church at the Vatican - popularly known as Vatican 2,  The earlier Vatican 1, convened about a hundred years earlier, had come down hard on all attempts to open up the Church to an acceptance of other religions and other Churches, whereas Vatican 2 changed that drastically - changes that many conservatives in the Catholic Church even today find very difficult to swallow.  While  retaining the belief in the uniqueness of Christ and of his mediation, Vatican 2 takes up a clearly much more positive approach to world religions, not only in  Nostra Aetate (NA), a document by the council specifically addressing the issue of the Church’s relationship with other world religions, but also in other documents.  So in Lumen Gentium, another of the documents, the Church acknowledges that those who “seek God with a sincere heart and try under the influence of grace to carry out his Will, in practice, known to them through the dictate of conscience, can attain eternal salvation (LG #16). Based on this new insight, the Church encouraged Christians to acknowledge, preserve and foster the spiritual and moral values (NA #2) found in other religions and religious groups, and thus allows the possibility of learning from them. This new approach to the possibility that salvation was possible outside a belief in Jesus and certainly outside the Church was even incorporated in the Good Friday Liturgy where the Catholic Church prays for Jews, for those who do not believe in Christ, and even for those who do not believe in God, that they may all find God in their own ways.

Over the last six decades since Vatican 2, many Christian theologians (including Catholic ones), immersed themselves in studies and even experienced the spiritual paths proposed by other religions.  As a result they were able to reflect at significant depth on this issue of the Christian tradition and its relationship with other religions, and there are many strands of teaching that reflect this theological exploration. Our progress in respectful religious dialogue has been so marked that we even have Pope Francis officially stating in a joint statement with Muslim clerics in February 2019, that God WILLS other religions, which of course implies that these other religions also are valid responses to God’s call.  In 2023 in one of his talks  Pope Francis (Vatican Hall, Jan. 11. 2023), teaches that “to be a missionary, to be apostolic, to evangelize, is NOT the same as proselytizing,” which in effect downplays the importance of baptising people into the Christian faith.  All these reflect a theological pilgrimmage that evidences that the Church has moved a long way from the earlier condemnation of all other non-Abrahamanic religions. 

Finally, as far as the belief claim that Jesus is the ONLY WAY to God, there is the interpretation that derives from the parable of the Last Judgement that our salvation, our path to God, is dependent not on which institutional Church or religion one belongs to, but on whether one is living one’s life as Jesus showed us how to.

So we are still on pilgrimmage.  What we perhaps do need to remember, is that just as John the Baptist and Jesus did not feel the need to establish which of their ‘ways’ was superior, we too do not need to establish our own superiority over others.  However, as we are constantly bombarded in today’s world by a huge multiplicity of religious ideas, we can use Jesus and his teachings of love and forgiveness as a fail-safe touchstone to help us sift between the chaff and the wheat. In THAT sense only can we see the uniqueness that Jesus brings to our own lives.  

First Reading: Isaiah 40: 1-5, 9-11

Comfort, O comfort my people,  says your God. Speak tenderly to Jerusalem, and cry to her that she has served her term that her penalty is paid, that she has received from the Lord’s hand double for all her sins. A voice cries out: “In the wilderness prepare the way of the Lord;  make straight in the desert a highway for our God. Every valley shall be lifted up, and every mountain and hill be made low; the uneven ground shall become level, and the rough places a plain. Then the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together, for the mouth of the Lord has spoken.” A voice says, “Cry out!” And I said, “What shall I cry?”  All flesh is grass;  their constancy is like the flower of the field. The grass withers; the flower fades, [[when the breath of the Lord blows upon it; surely the people are grass. The grass withers; the flower fades,  but the word of our God will stand forever. Get you up to a high mountain, O Zion, herald of good news; lift up your voice with strength, O Jerusalem, herald of good news; lift it up, do not fear; say to the cities of Judah, “Here is your God!” See, the Lord God comes with might, and his arm rules for him; his reward is with him and his recompense before him. He will feed his flock like a shepherd; he will gather the lambs in his arms and carry them in his bosom, and gently lead the mother sheep.

 

Second Reading: Second Peter 3: 8-14

But do not ignore this one fact, beloved, that with the Lord one day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like one day. The Lord is not slow about his promise, as some think of slowness, but is patient with you, not wanting any to perish, but all to come to repentance. But the day of the Lord will come like a thief, and then the heavens will pass away with a loud noise, and the elements will be dissolved with fire, and the earth and everything that is done on it will be disclosed. Since all these things are to be dissolved in this way, what sort of persons ought you to be in leading lives of holiness and godliness, waiting for and hastening the coming of the day of God, because of which the heavens will be set ablaze and dissolved, and the elements will melt with fire? But, in accordance with his promise, we wait for new heavens and a new earth, where righteousness is at home. Therefore, beloved, while you are waiting for these things, strive to be found by him at peace, without spot or blemish;

Gospel: Mark 1: 1-8

The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ. As it is written in the prophet Isaiah, “See, I am sending my messenger ahead of you, who will prepare your way, the voice of one crying out in the wilderness: ‘Prepare the way of the Lord; make his paths straight,’ ” so John the baptizer appeared in the wilderness, proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. And the whole Judean region and all the people of Jerusalem were going out to him and were baptized by him in the River Jordan, confessing their sins. Now John was clothed with camel’s hair, with a leather belt around his waist, and he ate locusts and wild honey. He proclaimed, “The one who is more powerful than I is coming after me; I am not worthy to stoop down and untie the strap of his sandals. I have baptized you with water, but he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.”