FOURTH CHURCH PULPIT
MAY 5, 2002

IS OUR WAY THE ONLY WAY?
John M. Buchanan

If we believe in a risen and living Christ who has been and is at work in the world outside
our Christian circle, we will know that we do not have to “take” Christ to people of other
religious traditions: we go to meet him in our encounters with them. We will expect and
gladly welcome evidence that the grace and truth we have come to know in him has
reached into their lives too. We will be glad to hear them saying things about their God
and their faith that sound remarkably similar to what we say about our God and our faith.
The truth we seek in inter-religious dialogue is not our truth but Ged’s truth....

Shirley C. Guthrie

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A LIGHT IN THE CITY

Fourth Presbyterian Church of Chicago
126 East Chestnut Street, Chicago, IL 60611-2094
(312) 787-4570

IS OUR WAY THE ONLY WAY?
May 5, 2002

JOHN M. BUCHANAN
FOURTH PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH

“Athenians, I see how extremely religious you are. .. .
I found an altar with the inscription, ‘To an unknown god.”
Acts 17:22 (NRSV)

Startle us, O God, with your truth, and open our hearts and minds to your word, through Jesus
Christ, our Lord. Amen.

When President George W. Bush and Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia met two weeks
ago at the president’s Texas ranch, among the topics they discussed was prayer. “Abdullah told
[the president] that he relies on God when he makes tough decisions, and the president said he
prays a lot to God to guide him as well” (Maureen Dowd, New York Times, 1 May 2002).

Which raises the eternal question of the relationship between religions that make exclusive truth
claims. The crown prince is a Muslim. The president is a Christian. Is ours right and all the
others wrong? Is ours more true than others? Or are all religions ultimately equal, each striving in
its own way, with its own history and culturally influenced symbols and institutions, to know the
unknowable? Is our God the only God, our way the only way, all the others counterfeit? Some
think so. It wasn’t all that long ago, after all, that the head of the Southern Baptist Convention
announced confidently that God doesn’t even hear the prayers of non-Christians.

Martin Marty recently offered a helpful reminder that Allah is simply the Arabic word for God.

The Book of Genesis in the Arabic Bible begins, “In the beginning Allah created.” . . .
The Old and New Testaments in Arabic are replete with the word; whether orthodox,
Coptic, Evangelical, or Reformed Christian, they worship Allah. (From a letter to the
editor of World by Helen Louise Hendon, quoted in Context January 2002)

Arabic Christians worship Allah.

So the issue is, when a Muslim and a Jew and a Christian, each speaking Arabic, pray to Allah,
who is listening? What exactly is happening? Are there three deities? Is there one God who hears
all three prayers, or one God who chooses one prayer and hits the delete button for the other two?

The question is no longer purely academic. Two new realities have put us in a new place. The
first is the unprecedented religious diversity of our own culture. The world was always
religiously diverse, and in that wonderful diversity, the United States for two centuries reflected
Western Christianity or at least something called the Judeo-Christian tradition. But with the

impetus of a new immigration policy and globalization, we have become a genuinely religiously
pluralistic culture, the most pluralistic in the world. There is no place quite like us. Harvard’s
Diana Eck begins her recent book, A New Religious America, with a startling description:

The huge white dome of a mosque, with its minarets, rises from the cornfields just
outside Toledo, Ohio. ... A great Hindu temple with elephants carved in relief at the
doorway stands on a hillside in the western suburbs of Nashville. A Cambodian Buddhist
temple and monastery is set in the farmlands southeast of Minneapolis.

Exact numbers are difficult to establish, but Eck says that:

There are more Muslim Americans than Episcopalians, more Muslims than members of
the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), and as many Muslims as there are Jews. .... Los
Angeles is the most complex Buddhist city in the world, with a Buddhist population
spanning the whole range of the Asian Buddhist world from Sri Lanka to Korea, along
with a multitude of native-born American Buddhists. (pp. 1-3)

The second new reality, of course, is what happened to us on September 11. There was more than
religion at the heart of the Al Quaeda zealots who committed suicide while taking the lives of
some 3000 Americans, but a form of radical Islam provided the theological/philosophical context
and ultimately the rationale for what they did. And almost immediately two popular
spokespersons for the radical Christian Right in this country announced that God had allowed the
attack to punish America for feminism, homosexuality, and abortion rights.

“Dear God, save us from the people who believe in you,” someone scribbled on a wall in
Washington in the days following September 11. Maureen Dowd wrote in the New York Times:

Forgive me, but something is badly awry. I was taught that religion should invocate
sympathy, patience, compassion, understanding, forgiveness, a love of peace. Instead, the
name of God is used to justify vices that are the opposite of these virtues.

We are in a new time and place, and there is no more critical issue before us than this one: the
relationship of our faith/our religion to the faith and religion of others different from us, but with
whom we must share a country, a culture, a world grown smaller and more dangerous than ever
before.

In or about 55 A.D., a Christian missionary who also happened to be a sophisticated thinker
arrived in Athens. His name was Paul. Athens at the time was several centuries past its days as
the center of the Western world. Socrates had died 450 years earlier. The political focus had
shifted west to Rome, Commerce was spread among other Greek cities. What Athens still
excelled at, however, was philosophy. There were two famous schools of philosophy, the
Epicureans and the Stoics. There was a university in Athens, and in the center of the city at a
place called the Areopagus, an outcrop of rocks, the philosophers gathered every day to debate.
You can still visit it, climb on the rocks, and imagine the lively conversation going on all around

you. The marketplace is not far away, and I can imagine the people of Athens browsing through
the busy market stalls and stopping by the Areopagus to listen in for a moment.

When he came to Athens and spoke first in the local synagogues, Paul was brought to the
Areopagus to make his case. What follows is fascinating. It is, someone noted, a brilliant piece of
classic rhetoric. Paul accommodates to his listeners, acknowledges their interest in religion and
theology, even acknowledges seeing many altars in the city, surely a sign of profound

spirituality. He even names one of them: the altar to the unknown God. Paul knows enough
Greek philosophy to use it in his argument, referring to God as the one “in whom we live and
move and have our being,” a phrase he borrowed from a sixth-century B.C. philosopher by the
name of Epimenides of Crete. “We too are his offspring,” he says, taking a phrase from Aratus of
Soli, who three centuries earlier said that very thing about Zeus: “We are his offspring.” (See
Texts for Preaching, Year C.)

Paul makes two important points, and the way he does conveys his own deep respect for the
views of the Greeks, whom some would have called pagan. They have a big theology, a big God
concept. Even though they have a lot of idols, the one dedicated to the unknown god shows that
they know that God can never be limited by something human beings construct. That puts them
on common ground with a basic premise of Judaism and Christianity, namely that there can be
no idols because an idol limits God and God, in what Jtirgen Moltmann calls God’s God-ness,
cannot be limited—not by an idol made of wood or stone, not by a temple, not by a creed, not by
a theology, not by a church.

The first consequence of belief in one God is theological modesty. It is to know that no one has
all the truth. It is to acknowledge that we put our ultimate trust in God, not things people have
said about God.

And the second consequence is openness to the truth other people and other religions know.
Presbyterian theologian Shirley Guthrie says that when Christians hear Jesus say “I am the way,
truth and the life: no one comes to the Father but by me” (John 14:6), they take that to mean that
because Jesus is the only way to salvation, Christianity is the only true religion. And that has led,
far too frequently, to exclusivism, arrogance, and intolerance.

Guthrie suggests that we ask 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 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 different-believing people who were excluded and rejected by
law-abiding, morally respectable, members of the religious establishment.” Who is this Jesus
who says “I am the way”? He is the one who “believed that caring for the needy, suffering
human beings is more important than conformity to the requirements of moral and theological
orthodoxy” (“The Way, the Truth, and the Life,” The Presbyterian Outlook, 11 February 2002).

Christianity is our religion, our theological and, in many ways, our cultural home. But this is
bigger than Christianity. This is about a God who creates all people and to whom all people are
related and in whom all people live and move and have being. This Jesus is the one who died for

all people and whose resurrection means that he is alive and working—certainly in and through
the Christian church, which is his body, but also in ways that are bigger than that even.

And so, Professor Guthrie argues, we are not only permitted to enter respectful dialogue with
people of other faiths but obligated to listen with respect and to learn the truth they know. And in
our evangelism, we are not to argue the superiority of our religion and the exclusivism of our
truth but to share what we have come to believe and trust and to receive the same from the other.

Does it mean that all religions are equal? Of course not. Some religions are toxic. The use of
religion to inspire and motivate suicide bombers is evil. But so was the wanton slaughter of
Muslim people by Christian Crusaders. Christina Callsion, a Presbyterian missionary with
impeccable evangelical credentials who works with Kurdish people in Berlin, says that because
of the “political baggage the word ‘Christian’ has for Middle Eastern Muslims, she doesn’t even
use the word. Instead she calls herself a follower of Jesus” (See “Following Jesus to the
Mosque,” Presbyterians Today, May 2002).

Does it mean that everybody makes it in the end, that no one is lost? Or the reverse, that only the
Christians are going to get into heaven, or more commonly, only certain kinds of Christians, the
Catholics, the Presbyterians, the elect, the Baptists, the Lutherans, the Jehovah’s Witnesses, the
Born Agains. There seems to be a deep human need to know that we’re going to get there, but
they aren’t, or I am but you’re not. And I think we must confess—and this is what I deeply
believe—that we don’t know enough to say that. Or that we do know enough about the mystery
of a God who transcends every human construction, that we do know enough of the God of
creation, the God revealed in Jesus Christ, never to place that sort of limitation around God.

Elmhurst professor Ron Goetz was invited to preach at the funeral of the father of two friends of
his, a man who was an atheist. He said, on the occasion,

I would hope that grace, which God intends for the salvation of all humanity, is not so
fragile that it cannot stand up to human unbelief.

What about people who don’t believe? Or people who believe differently? I don’t think we know
enough to be sure of the mind of God. Professor Goetz said at his unbelieving friend’s funeral,

Surely, God could never conclude that there is no other choice, given the trouble we
make for God, but to damn all but a chosen few to eternal rejection. (“Grace Is Wide
Enough,” Christian Century, 19 October 2000)

Paul honored the Athenian’s search for truth represented by their many idols, and particularly the
altar to the unknown god. There is something honorable about the search itself, something
common to all human beings, something holy about the longing for God. Frederick Buechner
said that here last Monday night. “We do it all our lives—search for God, long for God, in the
hodgepodge that is our lives,” he said. “Thou hast made our hearts restless until they find their
rest in thee,” St. Augustine wrote centuries ago. And he was right. We are restless, we long for
truth, for certainty, for assurance; we search for God in one way or another all our lives.

And what Christian faith maintains, not so much as an intellectual truth to be quoted and recited
as a person to be trusted, is that in Jesus Christ, God has come to the world with mercy and grace
and love and forgiveness; that God wants to reconcile the world and is busy doing that in ways
that are far beyond our ability to see or understand.

Some of us experienced something of that restoration and reconciliation on an unforgettable
occasion right here in this sanctuary. It was Friday, September 14, 2001, and we were ina
community worship service sponsored by Holy Name Cathedral, Chicago Sinai Congregation—
our Jewish neighbors two blocks west on Delaware—and Fourth Presbyterian Church. We were
reeling in the aftermath of the events that had happened three days earlier on September 11. It
was unlike anything any of us had ever experienced before. It seemed that we were suddenly
under attack by people who hated us for being who we are: Americans. People had attacked us,
killed thousands of our fellow citizens for no other reason than they happened to be Americans.
And they had done it in the name of God. And one could not help but ask, “Whose God? What
God?”

The sanctuary was full as it never had been: every seat filled, aisle and narthex crowded with
people standing. I delivered a brief homily. Father McLaughlin said a few words. Rabbi Michael
Sternfield of Sinai Congregation was to pray, and when he stood up to pray he did the most
remarkable thing. He asked us all to pray together, out loud, each in our own voice, our own faith
language. He invited the Jews to pray the traditional Jewish prayer for the dead, the Kaddish, and
he invited the Christians to pray the traditional Lord’s Prayer, taught to us by a Palestinian Jew.
And we did. And our voices mingled—Hebrew, English and, I am sure, some Arabic. Our
prayers wove together and filled this Christian sanctuary and rose together to the one God of us
all, the one God who hears every prayer, the one God who loves each and every one of us and
will never, ever give up on any one of us, and whose grace and mercy exceeds anything you and
I, or any one else for that matter, could ever think or imagine.

Thanks be to God.