One of the many divisive issues that exist in the world is that of religious bias. The contents of belief in every faith community reflect bias. We cannot escape bias, because in our limited human condition, we all have assumptions and presuppositions which in turn generate the set of beliefs that we adhere to. Regardless of our religious affiliation or lack thereof, we are all a product of our environment, and therefore, think and act according the way in which our cultural and social environment has influenced us. Furthermore, we are finite and limited in our thinking, and incapable of mastering the totality of truth.
The Christian faith is no exception to the above-mentioned rule. As Christians we have our own view of other world religions as well as that of groups other than our own who claim to be Christian. Not only do we tend to assume that non-Christian religions are false, but we also tend to operate on the assumption that faith communities other than our own are preaching either a half-baked Gospel at best or are totally false at worst.
The mere fact that we Christians, to a large extent have the attitude that "everybody believes they're right, but I know they're wrong," in itself reflects how biased and prejudiced we are. We absolutize our beliefs by thinking that those who do not believe as we do, are doomed to eternal condemnation and separation from God. In the process of doing this, we arrogantly elevate ourselves to the position of God, and get so entrenched in our mental boxes that we find it hard to extricate ourselves from those boxes, and we believe that if we abandon that box, that we are in effect, abandoning God. We equate our mindset with the mindset of God, and tend to think that the way we see things is exactly the way that God sees things.
A perfect example of Christian bias is our insistence that Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life, and no one comes to God except through Him. That belief, of course, is based on a literal and verbatim interpretation of His own words "I am the way, the truth, and the life, and no one comes to the Father except through me." Well, Jesus did say those words according to the Gospel writers, but then we are faced with the question of what was the meaning of those words? We find a reference in the book of Acts that there is no other name under Heaven given unto humans whereby we must be saved. Then we find statements that Jesus is the only mediator between God and humankind. We interpret those statements literally without bothering to ask if there are other possible meanings to those passages.
These next several essays are written with the purpose of stimulating analytical and critical thinking about the way we might on the one hand maintain our Christ-centered approach to God, and on the other hand, allow our thinking to be broad enough to be open to a more "Cosmic" Christ who is not only the Christ of Christian believers, but also the Christ who is manifested in the different human belief systems of the world.
This writer (yours truly) is a Christian believer, minister, and theologian who believes strongly in the sovereignty of God, who reveals Godself the way in which God wants. Naturally, my own bias will lead me to understand God through the framework of the Christian faith which operates on God's self-disclosure to humankind through Jesus of Nazareth. However, I believe that God's self-disclosure and other actions go over and beyond my biased understanding of that divine revelation.
These essays will focus on the major religions of the world. I will compare both the differences and the similarities between them and our own Christian faith. In the meantime, in preparation for these essays, I invite you the reader to share with us your views concerning the possibility or non-possibility that Jesus the Christ might be present in belief systems other than our own.
As a word of caution, I would like to exhort you not to fall into the temptation of validating or invalidating the claims of other faith groups on the basis of our sacred book, the Bible. Each faith has its own sacred text and therefore a more impartial evaluation of these faith groups can be possible only to the extent that we allow the other claims and the other sacred texts to speak for themselves. In other words, we are to judge the truth or non-truths of other religious belief systems on their own merits, and not on our own biased presupposition that the Bible as a literary text, is the ultimate source of truth. I invite you to adventure, I invite you to open-mindedness, and I invite you to the quest for objectivity. Please tell us, in advance, where you stand on these possibilities.
Grace and peace,
Dr. Juan A. Ayala-Carmona
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