{"id":3477,"date":"2017-11-07T03:59:22","date_gmt":"2017-11-07T00:59:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/?p=3477"},"modified":"2017-11-07T03:59:22","modified_gmt":"2017-11-07T00:59:22","slug":"jesus-among-other-gods-the-uniqueness-of-christianity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/3477\/jesus-among-other-gods-the-uniqueness-of-christianity\/","title":{"rendered":"Jesus Among Other Gods: The Uniqueness Of Christianity"},"content":{"rendered":"

Dinesh D Souza, The Greatness of Christianity: Table of Contents<\/a><\/p>\n

Cf. Dinesh D’souza, What’s So Great About Christianity<\/a>, at Amazon<\/p>\n

“In the course of justice, none of us Should see salvation.” <\/em>\u2014William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice<\/em><\/p>\n

S<\/strong>O FAR THIS BOOK HAS EXAMINED CHRISTIANITY <\/strong>largely from a secular viewpoint. I have shown how Christianity has shaped our culture and our world. I have also sought to demonstrate that the central premises of theism in general, and Christianity in particular, are completely supported by modern science and modern thought. In the concluding section of this book I will delineate what makes Christianity different from other religions. Finally I will show how our lives change when we become Christians.<\/p>\n

There are two types of people who allege that all religions are the same. The first group is made up of religious believers, although not of the very fervent kind. These well-meaning folks insist that all religions are equal pathways to heaven\u2014a position that only one major religion, Hinduism, actually endorses. But there is a widespread sentiment in the West that religions are similar in that they are all human pathways to the divine. By this measure it doesn’t really matter very much which religion you subscribe to, and to go around trying to persuade others to adopt your religion is a mark of impoliteness, if not fanaticism.<\/p>\n

The second group that considers all religions to be the same is atheists. This group views all religions as equally false, and some unbelievers also hold them to be equally pernicious. When I write about Christianity I often hear contemptuous responses to thiseffect: “Why are you so down on atheism? You too are an atheist as far as Allah is concerned.” Richard Dawkins himself makes this point in A Devil’s Chaplain: <\/em>“When it comes to Baal and the Golden Calf, Thor and Wotan, Poseidon and Apollo, Mithras and Ammon Ra,” all modern theists are “actually atheists…. Some of us just go one god further.” Arguments that refute one religion are held by Dawkins to be equally telling against other religions. Revelation, from this point of view, is all a bunch of nonsense, so it becomes a matter of hair-splitting whether we are dealing with Christian nonsense, Jewish nonsense, or Zoroastrian nonsense.<\/p>\n

But contrary to what these people say, all religions are not the same. At some level, we all know this. Most religions make exclusive and uncompromising claims about God and the human condition. As these claims are often incompatible, there is no way that all religions can be true. Certainly it is possible for several to contain elements of the truth. If one is comprehensively true, however, it follows that the rest must be false.<\/p>\n

Even so, well-meaning people eager to avoid controversy commonly insist that all religions are different ways of comprehending the same truth. This is an erroneous view, although it contains an element of truth. As we have seen, there is a common morality that the great religions of the world share. Also, the monotheistic religions are attempts to worship the one God and therefore the same God. They differ, however, in their understanding of why man needs God and how man can find Him.
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\nWe can see that religions are not the same by looking at the way in which basic concepts are differently interpreted. Martyr <\/em>is a term common to Christianity and Islam but largely alien to Judaism, Hinduism, and Buddhism. It comes from a Greek word meaning “witness:’ In Christianity; the martyr voluntarily gives up his life rather than his God. The Christian martyr was the man the Romans placed in the lion’s den to be devoured for his refusal to renounce his faith. In Islam, a martyr takes up the cause of jihad and loses his life fighting for Allah. This is the sense in which Khomeini and bin Laden have called on Muslims to be true Muslim “witnesses:’ One term, but two different meanings.<\/p>\n

In his comparative study of major religions, Huston Smith lists some crucial differences among them. Buddhism does not have a concept of the afterlife or God. There is only one other religion that Christianity entirely embraces as divine revelation: Judaism. Christianity views itself as superseding Judaism, Islam views itself as superseding both Judaism and Christianity. Islam considers Moses and Jesus prophets, and Muslims even endorse the concept of Christ’s virgin birth, but they do not regard Christ as the messiah, and they do not believe he was crucified or resurrected into heaven.<\/p>\n

In this chapter, I am not trying to prove that Christianity is the best religion, but I am trying to show in what respect Christianity differs from all other religions and is, in this sense, unique. All religions are an attempt to solve the dilemma Pascal outlined in the Pensees. <\/em>Pascal notes that for thousands of years man employed great intelligence and effort to solve certain basic problems. We want to have peace in the world. We want to live in harmony with one another. We want to raise our children well. We want our lives to matter. Pascal says we have been at this for a very long time, so why haven’t we solved any of these problems? Why does the pursuit of happiness remain largely a pursuit? For leading atheists like Dawkins and Harris, the simple answer is that man is ignorant, and science is the way to dispel that ignorance. The religious person knows that this is a half- truth. Ignorance is only half the problem; the other half is the problem of good and evil. Moreover, science is only one way to achieve knowledge, and it is a certain kind ofknowledge. Science provides no answer to the questions raised above. To reduce all knowledge to scientific knowledge is to condemn man to ignorance about the things that matter most in life.<\/p>\n

How, then, can we understand the problem of good and evil that is such an obstacle to our happiness? Pascal noted that man is simultaneously heroic and wretched. He is capable of noble and wonderful thoughts and deeds, yet he also plots and performs horrible actions that are unworthy of even the lowest animals. Indeed, part of man’s greatness is that he can use his faculty of reason to recognize his baseness.<\/p>\n

The situation can be described another way. Man has very high standards, but he is constantly falling short of them. He knows what is good, but he will not do it. He is captive to selfish and evil desires, and he gives in to those desires because his will is weak. All religions seem to agree in diagnosing the problem in this manner. And just about every religion agrees that the solution is to give man codes, commandments, and instructions for how to raise himself above his inclinations so that he can come within the reach of God. Religion in general is man’s strategic manual for how to reach God.
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\nBut Christianity is not a religion in this sense. Christianity holds that man, no matter how hard he tries, cannot reach God. Man cannot ascend to God’s level because God’s level is too high. Therefore there is only one remedy: God must come down to man’s level. Scandalous though it may seem, God must, quite literally, become man and assume the burden of man’s sins. Christians believe that this was the great sacrifice performed by Christ. If we accept Christ’s sacrifice on the basis of faith, we will inherit God’s gift of salvation. That’s it. That is the essence of Christianity. To some it may seem ridiculously simple. In this simplicity, however, there is considerable depth and richness. We can appreciate all this better if we put it into slow motion, so to speak, and examine each of its central tenets more closely.<\/p>\n

The first premise is that the propensity to sin is in man’s nature. In other words, selfishness, acquisitiveness, lust, and greed are part of who we are as humans. I think Darwin would have agreed with this. Indeed the Darwinian portrait of man is a remarkable corroboration of the Christian doctrine of original sin. Darwin’s unflattering view of man is much more realistic and accurate than Rousseau’s na\u00efve view that man is by nature good and society is responsible for his problems.<\/p>\n

Darwin understood that man is closer to the beasts than to the angels. In some ways man is worse than the animals because they simply do what comes naturally, while man sins willfully and deliberately.<\/p>\n

So man must pay the wages of sin, and the wages of sin is death. This is the second premise of Christianity. The Bible equates death in the biological realm with sin in the moral realm. Some people will find this unduly harsh, but let me show why it is duly harsh. Sin structures our personalities and defines our thoughts and behavior. Sin is built into our habits so that we sin routinely, almost unthinkingly. Sin is not peripheral to humans, something we occasionally do, but is much more intrinsic to our identities. So does sin deserve a heavenly reward? Should God, who is eternally just and holy, compromise that justice and holiness and offer us salvation despite our hatred for Him and our desecration of His laws? It seems only fair that we who sin both against God and man should pay for our sins. This means that sinners cannot enter the kingdom of God.<\/p>\n

How, then, are we to have salvation? For most religions, man must take the active role. Hinduism and Buddhism offer solutions that are remarkably similar: Through meditationwe confront our selfish desires and recognize that the “self” is the core of the problem. So we strive, in various ways, to eliminate this self and achieve its extinction. In effect, we seek to become nothing. We can advance toward this goal not merely through meditation but also through disciplined self- renunciation: renunciation of possessions, renunciation of sensual pleasure, and so on. This is a supremely difficult project. Among Buddhists only the monks claim to even approach nirvana. I believe the awareness of the chasm separating holiness from human weakness has produced, in Hindu and Buddhist cultures, their distinctive fatalism. Many Hindus believe fate will decree whether they reappear as a prince, a dog, or a flea in the next life.<\/p>\n

Judaism and Islam offer a different formula, although they lead their adherents down the same path. Judaism and Islam are religions of law. Both have elaborate rituals and codes: Pray five times a day. Pack up and go to Mecca. Sacrifice a lamb or a goat. Wear a long beard. Keep kosher. The great Jewish jurist Maimonides even argues that circumcision is essential for salvation: “Whoever neglects the covenant of our ancestor Abraham and retains the foreskin … will have no portion in the world to come.” The rigor of these rules has caused many Jews and Muslims to ignore many of them and simply follow a select few prescriptions they can live with. These are the “reformed” Jews and Muslims, who seem to have given up trying to live up to the full rigor of their legal codes. They are basically living in hope that God is not a stickler for details.
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\nBut God is not a lenient tradesman willing to accept 30 percent payment; His justice demands full reimbursement. Still, it is hard not to sympathize with the slackers. They are actually correct that it is too difficult to render adequate recompense to God. I even sympathize with Christopher Hitchens, who complains that if God wanted man to live up to these high standards, “he should have taken more care to invent a different species.” Christianity agrees with Hitchens that the standards are difficult. Indeed Christianity says they are more than difficult; they are impossible. Not only is it impossible to stop sinning\u2014even the most devout Christians cannot stop sinning\u2014 but it is also impossible to atone for one’s past sins. How would you go about atoning for them? Can you locate everyone you have wronged and make them whole? Yes, you can resolve to live a subse- quent life of goodness, but this is no atonement; you should be doing this anyway.<\/p>\n

Christianity raises the bar even higher than other religions by insisting that in order to enter God’s kingdom we must be perfect. Not good, but perfect. Being good is not good enough. As no one is perfect, Christians have the saying that “the ground is level at the foot of the cross.” My brother may be a better man than I am, and you may be a better man than he is, but ultimately none of this matters because none of us will make it under our own steam. The only solution is for us to “die to ourselves” and become totally different people, morally pure in the eyes of God: “for unless the grain of wheat die to itself, it shall not produce fruit.” So Christianity agrees with Hinduism and Buddhism on the need to extinguish the old self. It disagrees by declaring in advance that this project is impossible.<\/p>\n

So how can a salvation be reconciled with divine holiness and justice? This is posing the question in the right way. The Christian answer is that God decided to pay the price himself for human sin. Not just this sin or that sin but all sin. God did this by becoming man and dying on the cross. I want to reflect for a moment on God’s incredible sacrifice. I am not referring to Christ’s crucifixion. I am referring to God’s decision to become man. No other religion can even conceive this. The Greek and Roman gods of antiquity oftendisguised themselves as mortals, but they would not actually become mortal. Mexican author Carlos Fuentes writes that when the Christian missionaries first presented their doctrines to the Aztecs, the Aztecs were totally uncomprehending. Fuentes writes, “In a universe accustomed to seeing men sacrificed to the gods, nothing amazed the Indians more than the sight of a god who had sacrificed himself to men. Yet what other religions hold to be absurd and scandalous, Christianity holds to be true.<\/p>\n

Richard Dawkins writes that “atonement, the central doctrine of Christianity, is vicious, sadomasochistic, and repellent.” This criticism makes sense only if you presume that the Christians made the whole thing up, which would be horrible of them to do to their God. Christians view the atonement of Christ as a beautiful sacrifice. Somehow God not only became man but took on all his sins and burdens in order to make him eligible for the heavenly kingdom. As San Diego pastor Bob Botsford puts it, “Christ paid a debt he didn’t owe because we owe a debt we cannot pay.” Christ on his cross literally assumed all the darkness, loneliness, and sin of the world. Thus, through the extremity of Golgotha, Christ reconciles divine justice and divine mercy and provides man with a passport to heaven. The bridge man was unable to build to God, God has built for man.
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\n“Christ offers us something for nothing,” C. S. Lewis writes. “He even offers everything for nothing. In a sense, the whole Christian life consists in accepting that very remarkable offer.” So what is the difficulty? The difficulty is in realizing that we are sinful and that there is nothing we can do to solve this problem. A related obstacle is accepting God’s authority and His plan for our life. The obstacles, in other words, are those of human pride. Better hard liberty, one of Milton’s devils truculently asserts, than “the easy yoke of servile pomp.” The serpent’s temptation in the Garden of Eden was also lethally directed at human pride: Why should you serve? Why not choose your own future, which will perhaps be a better future than the one God has planned for you? Why obey God when you can be as a god, a law unto yourself?<\/p>\n

The hubristic resistance that many people feel to God’s authority is eloquently conveyed by Hitchens: “It would be horrible if it were true that we were designed and then created and then continuously supervised throughout all our lives waking and sleeping and then continue to be supervised after our deaths\u2014if that were true, it would be horrible…. It would be like living in celestial North Korea. You can’t defect from North Korea but at least you can die. With monotheism they won’t let you die and get away from them. Who wants that to be true?” Hitchens helps us understand the psychology of atheism, which is often based not on inability to believe but unwillingness to believe. That is why the atheist embraces the scientific way of knowledge as the only way, not because this is necessary to operate his cell phone or iPod, but because this is how he can deny the supernatural, on the basis that it doesn’t show up in any laboratory experiments.<\/p>\n

The atheist basically wants to shut himself off from God, and this helps us see why heaven is not closed to atheists. Nor is hell the fiery pit into which atheists are flung for their misdeeds. Heaven is God’s domain, where He is eternally present. Hell is where God is eternally absent. God doesn’t reject the atheist; the atheist rejects God. God doesn’t dispatch the atheist to hell; the atheist wishes to close his eyes and heart to God and God reluctantly grants him his wish. In a sense, the gates of hell are locked from the inside.<\/p>\n

The Bible says that salvation is the gift of God. Many people\u2014even many Christians\u2014 understand this to mean that God is offering us salvation as a gift. But the Bible doesn’t say that salvation is the gift from God. Rather, it says that salvation is the gift of God. GodHimself is the gift. Heaven is best understood not as a place but as a description of what it is like to be with God. To be with God requires that we want to be with Him, that we accept His present of Himself. In a lovely book on faith, J. Gresham Machen writes that we become Christians not by accepting that Christ died to save others or that he died to save mankind but that he died to save me. This is what it means to be a “born again” Christian.<\/p>\n

For some, the Christian concept of a “second sailing” or a “new life” will continue to sound absurd and offensive. Whatever the rewards promised by Christianity, it is humiliating to have to admit that we are sinners helpless to solve our human problem through our own efforts. Aristotle would have found it incomprehensible that a totally degenerate person could have his life transformed. Yet Christianity not only says that this can happen, but that it must happen to each and every one of us, if we are to be with God. Evangelist D. James Kennedy says it is significant that Christ specifies the requirement of being born again to Nicodemus, who is neither a thief nor a prostitute but rather a learned and righteous man. Kennedy’s point is that even righteousness is not enough. The only person who we know made it to heaven is the penitent thief hanging on the cross by Christ’s side. “Lord, help me,” he said, “for I am a sinner.” And Christ replied, “This day you will be with me in paradise.”<\/p>\n

What an encouragement this is for us, because once we have confronted our pride we realize that we don’t have to do anything to earn our heavenly reward. In fact, there is nothing that we can do to earn it. What is denied to us by effort is supplied to us through grace. So when around us we see the decay of our life, when every earthly hope of redemption has failed us, when those whom we love cannot help us, when we have tried everything and there is nothing else to try, when we have tossed our last log on the fire and all the embers have flickered out, it is at this point that God’s hand reaches out to us, steady and sure. All we have to do is take it. This is the uniqueness of the Christian message.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Dinesh D Souza, The Greatness of Christianity: Table of Contents Cf. Dinesh D’souza, What’s So Great About Christianity, at Amazon “In the course of justice, none of us Should see salvation.” \u2014William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice SO FAR THIS BOOK HAS EXAMINED CHRISTIANITY largely from a secular viewpoint. I have shown how Christianity has […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_disable_autopaging":false},"categories":[6702,6707],"tags":[6832,7284,7511,4399,7512,7513,7514,7515,469,4960,7495,4902,7045,7516,2443,7517],"class_list":["post-3477","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-thechrist","category-studies-thechristcontents","tag-ammon","tag-dinesh-d-souza","tag-fanaticism","tag-golden-calf","tag-impoliteness","tag-jesus-among-other-gods","tag-merchant-of-venice","tag-mithras","tag-modern-science","tag-modern-thought","tag-religious-believers","tag-richard-dawkins","tag-theism","tag-uniqueness-of-christianity","tag-william-shakespeare","tag-wotan"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3477","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3477"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3477\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3477"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3477"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3477"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}