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In the days since Sept. 11, there have been many inter-faith prayer services. Many leaders have been careful to stress that Islam is not responsible for the terrorist attacks because only a few Muslims actually support terrorism. That is sound advice because the last thing we need now is intolerance and prejudice.
However, some have taken “tolerance” to the point of saying that all religions teach peace and love and end up in the same place, that all religions are essentially the same. That is not tolerance but a denial of the very real differences between religions.
Many Eastern religions do not believe in a personal God but conceive of God as an impersonal force. They see life as a long series of reincarnations from which one can only hope to escape into nothingness.
Many aboriginal religions around the world do not believe in one God but in many competing gods who are limited in their power and confined to a specific territory, and who are cruel, capricious, inconsistent and immoral.
In North America, there are also many people who hold a secular view of the world. For them, whether God exists or not is irrelevant. God, if He exists, is distant, and the universe develops by a process of evolution. In this view, human beings are just well developed animals and like other animals evolved through “natural selection” or “survival of the fittest”. The problem is that in a world where progress is achieved through fierce competition, there is no morality. When terrorists kill 3000 men, women and children, they are really only following the Darwinian requirement to ensure their own survival through eliminating weaker creatures. In such a view, there is no God or anything else to say that killing 3000 human beings is wrong, and indeed much to say that such killing is perfectly justifiable.
In all the welter of conflicting beliefs, there are only three main religions that believe in one God who created the universe, who is all-powerful and who practises and teaches such moral virtues as truthfulness, faithfulness and love. Those religions are Judaism and the two religions descended from it, Christianity and Islam. Yet even here there are significant differences. Judaism, as revealed in what Christians call the Old Testament part of the Bible, presents God as He is: the eternal and holy Creator of the universe. It stresses the moral nature of God. It reveals that God has established the universe in truth, honesty and justice and that He requires human beings to act truthfully, honestly, faithfully and justly. It also announces that the penalty for failure to live up to this high ethical standard is death.
The difficulty with this is, as has already been stated, we human beings do not live up to this high ethical standard that God requires. As individuals, we may be ethical in some areas, but we fall down in other areas. We may love our children most of the time, but occasionally become unjustifiably angry with them. We may be scrupulously honest in our business dealings, but make a total mess of our personal relationships. In short, we do evil things. Therefore, there are indications (hints, symbols, suggestions and direct statements) throughout Judaism and the Old Testament that something more is needed.
This “something more” was brought by Jesus Christ who founded Christianity 2000 years ago. Jesus was God but became a human being to bring to humanity love, forgiveness and mercy. “Jesus” means “God saves” because in Jesus God saves human beings from the dilemma of being unable to live up to God’s high moral standard. “Christ” means “the anointed one”, the “something more” that Old Testament Judaism promised would come to solve the problem of humanity’s failure to live up to God’s standard of morality.
Islam, the third major religion, was founded about AD 600 by Mohammed. In some senses, Islam is a return to Judaism. It has a similar understanding of God as the all-powerful, holy Creator. It also is similar to Judaism in its strong stress on morality. But like Judaism, Islam has a weak concept of forgiveness. The contrast between Mohammed and Jesus is quite striking. Mohammed was a warrior who led his armies to conquer his enemies, imposing the Islamic religion by force and slaughtering those he considered to have fallen short of God’s holy standards. Jesus, however, allowed His enemies to kill Him, asking in the process that God would forgive those who were killing Him. One Muslim scholar, commenting on the extensive pacifist movement in Christianity, said recently, “There is no peace tradition in Islam.”
The main articles in this issue of Encounter were written by Jim Coggins, editor of Encounter, and James Toews, senior pastor of Neighbourhood Church in Nanaimo, B.C.
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