The other day I had an email from someone who came to the Free to Believe web-site through Wikipedia. He found there - and took exception to - the statement "that any religion which imagines it has a monopoly of truth is dangerous; Claims of exclusive access to God can soon become demonic."
In response he quoted, yes you guessed it, John 14:6. “No one comes to the Father except through me”. Below is my reply. As I never heard from him again, I like to think he was convinced...
Dear Friend
1) Do I understand that you think that religion never becomes demonic when it is arrogantly of the view that it alone has a monopoly of the truth? If you think of the Inquisition torturing Protestants, or the Christians slaughtering all the Moslems when they captured Jerusalem, or Saudi Arabia refusing to allow Christians to worship (just to take 3 examples of the several million one might have chosen), I think the statement is almost impossible to deny!
2) I presume your point is that Christians (or at least some Christians?) do have an exclusive monopoly of the truth. I don’t know your denominational background but I assume you are not a member of a Reformed Church. One of the most helpful, but least known, of our Reformed doctrines is called “common grace”. Common grace helps explain what to some people seems strange - the fact that I keep meeting people who do not know Christ, yet are more Christ-like than I am. If you are an honest Christian, you will admit that’s true in your life as well. Even Jesus once exclaimed that he saw more faith in a pagan Roman centurion than he did in all the house of Israel; and made a member of another religion the hero of one of his parables. The evidence of our eyes is that there is an experience of the grace of God given to us all as part of our common humanity and it would be churlish (if not stupid) not to see God present in the life of say, Gandhi or many Jewish or Moslem people I know.
3) As for John 14: 6, “No-one comes to the father but by me”, it is important when dealing with Scripture not to ignore the context. The situation in this case is not related to whether there is any truth outside Christianity, but concerns Jesus speaking to Thomas’s personal need with what are intended to be words of comfort. If you want an actual discussion about inter-faith questions the obvious place to start is Paul’s speech in the multi-faith context of Athens (Acts 17). There, as you know, he makes the case for common ground (all human beings have experience of God) and directly quotes from 2 Greek pagan philosophers - even quoting a text that was first used of Zeus! I think like the Apostle Paul we should celebrate the good we see in all the world’s religions.
4) Returning to John 14, think about it for a moment.
Who is this Jesus who says “I am the way”? He is the one who also says, “I have other sheep that do not belong to the fold. I must bring them in also. So there will be one flock, one shepherd” (John 10:16).
Who is this Jesus who says “I am the way”? He is the friend of sinful, unbelieving, or outcast people who were and are excluded and rejected by the respectable religious establishment.
Who is this Jesus who says “I am the way”? He is the one who believed that caring for needy, suffering human beings is more important than conformity to moral and theological orthodoxy.
Who is this Jesus who says I am the way? He is the one in whom God has come to the world with mercy and grace and love and forgiveness; that God who wants to reconcile the world to himself. The God who hears every prayer, the God who loves each and every one of us and will never, ever give up on any of us. The God whose grace and mercy exceeds anything you and I could ever think or imagine.
How awful if we were to turn his way of inclusion into something exclusive!
Best Wishes
Martin