What About Other Religions?

How a person who takes one religion seriously can think about the others.

This is one of the hardest questions, and I do not want to give a slick answer. Let me say what I actually think.

The world contains many religious traditions, many of which have existed longer than Christianity, many of which contain real wisdom, many of which have been the home of genuinely good people for centuries. Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Islam, the indigenous religions of every continent. The Christian who pretends these are all empty error is, in my reading, not being honest with the evidence of his own eyes.

So the question is not are other religions completely worthless — the question is are they all on equal footing?

I do not think they are. Here is why.

What makes Christianity different

There is one feature of the Christian claim that, as far as I can tell, no other major religious tradition shares.

Christianity stakes its entire claim on a historical event — the death and resurrection of a specific man, in a specific city, in a specific decade — that the earliest believers said you could check.

Every other major religion either does not make a comparably falsifiable historical claim, or makes one that is much less defensible. The Buddha’s teachings, the truth of Hindu wisdom, the Qur’an’s revelations to Muhammad — these are teachings that stand or fall on their internal merits. They do not, structurally, stand or fall on whether a specific event happened.

The Christian claim is different in kind. Paul says it directly: if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith.¹ The Christian movement is, by its own admission, a historical wager — and you can win the wager or lose it on historical grounds.

This makes Christianity uniquely vulnerable. It also makes it uniquely verifiable. If you find that the historical case for the resurrection holds, you have not just learned that some religious ideas are true; you have learned that a specific event happened, and the implications of that event are not negotiable.

What about the wisdom in the other traditions?

The Christian theological tradition has a phrase for this: all truth is God’s truth. Wherever you find genuine moral insight, real philosophical depth, authentic compassion — it belongs to God, whether or not the person who articulated it knew the name. C. S. Lewis worked this out at length in The Abolition of Man, where he collected moral teachings from a dozen cultures and showed how remarkably they converge on a shared moral framework he called the Tao.²

A Christian can hold that the moral wisdom of the Stoics, the psychological insight of the Buddhists, the rich theological discipline of Judaism, the call to submission in Islam — all of these contain real things. The Christian claim is not that these traditions are all wrong. The Christian claim is that they are incomplete, because they do not have the one thing only Christianity has: the historical event in which God himself entered the world to put things right.

So is everyone in the other religions damned?

This is the question people are actually asking, often, when they ask what about other religions. Let me say what the New Testament actually teaches, and what it does not.

The New Testament teaches that salvation is through Christ alone — that it is through what he did, on the cross and in the resurrection, that the broken relationship between us and God is restored. It does not teach, anywhere, that only people who have heard of Christ during their lifetime can be saved.

The Bible affirms that God is just and that he judges fairly. It affirms that he reveals himself in the natural world (Romans 1) and in the moral conscience (Romans 2). What happens to a person who never had the chance to hear the gospel — a hunter-gatherer in Australia in 8000 BC, a child who dies in infancy, a Jain monk in medieval India who sought truth all his life with the light he had — the Bible does not fully answer. It tells us that the judge of the earth will do right.³ It does not tell us, in detail, how.

What it does tell us, and what it is unambiguous about, is what you and I are responsible for: to respond honestly to the truth we have been given. If you have heard the Christian claim, taken time to look at the evidence, and concluded that it is true — the call is to come. If you have heard the claim and concluded that it is not true, the responsibility is to be honest about why you concluded that.

The question is never what about everybody else. The question is always what about me. The other religions are God’s problem to sort out, not mine, and not yours.

For the case that Christianity is the true one, in the historical sense: the minimal facts is the place to start.