The Uniqueness of Christianity: 12 Objections Answered

The Uniqueness of Christianity | Peter Kreeft | From Fundamentals of the Faith

Ronald Knox once quipped that “the study of comparative religions is
the best way to become comparatively religious.” The reason, as G. K.
Chesterton says, is that, according to most “scholars” of comparative
religion, “Christianity and Buddhism are very much alike, especially
Buddhism.”

But any Christian who does apologetics must think about comparative
religions because the most popular of all objections against the claims
of Christianity today comes from this field. The objection is not that
Christianity is not true but that it is not


the truth; not that it is a
false religion but that it is only a religion. The world is a
big place, the objector reasons; “different strokes for different
folks”. How insufferably narrow-minded to claim that Christianity is the
one true religion! God just has to be more open-minded than that.

This is the single most common objection to the Faith today, for
“today” worships not God but equality. It fears being right where others
are wrong more than it fears being wrong. It worships democracy and
resents the fact that God is an absolute monarch. It has changed the
meaning of the word honor from being respected because you are superior
in some way to being accepted because you are not superior in any way
but just like us. The one unanswerable insult, the absolutely worst name
you can possibly call a person in today’s society, is “fanatic”,
especially “religious fanatic”. If you confess at a fashionable cocktail
party that you are plotting to overthrow the government, or that you
are a PLO terrorist or a KGB spy, or that you molest porcupines or bite
bats’ heads off, you will soon attract a buzzing, fascinated,
sympathetic circle of listeners. But if you confess that you believe
that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of the living God, you will find
yourself suddenly alone, with a distinct chill in the air.

Here are twelve of the commonest forms of this objection, the odium of elitism, with answers to each.

1. “All religions are the same, deep down.”

That is simply factually untrue. No one ever makes this claim unless
he is (1) abysmally ignorant of what the different religions of the
world actually teach or (2) intellectually irresponsible in
understanding these teachings in the vaguest and woolliest way or (3)
morally irresponsible in being indifferent to them. The objector’s
implicit assumption is that the distinctive teachings of the world’s
religions are unimportant, that the essential business of religion is
not truth but something else: transformation of consciousness or sharing
and caring or culture and comfort or something of that sort—not
conversion but conversation. Christianity teaches many things no other
religion teaches, and some of them directly contradict those others. If
Christianity isn’t true, why be a Christian?

By Catholic standards, the religions of the world can be ranked by how much truth they teach.

Catholicism is first, with Orthodoxy equal except for the one issue of papal authority.
Then comes Protestantism and any “separated brethren” who keep the Christian essentials as found in Scripture.
Third comes traditional Judaism, which worships the same God but not via Christ.
Fourth is Islam, greatest of the theistic heresies.
Fifth, Hinduism, a mystical pantheism;
Sixth, Buddhism, a pantheism without a theos;
Seventh, modern Judaism, Unitarianism, Confucianism, Modernism, and
secular humanism, none of which have either mysticism or supernatural
religion but only ethics;
Eighth, idolarity; and
Ninth, Satanism.

To collapse these nine levels is like thinking the earth is flat.

2. “But the essence of religion is the same at any rate: all religions agree at least in being religious.

What is this essence of religion anyway? I challenge anyone to define
it broadly enough to include Confucianism, Buddhism, and modern Reform
Judaism but narrowly enough to exclude Platonism, atheistic Marxism, and
Nazism.

The unproved and unprovable assumption of this second objection is
that the essence of religion is a kind of lowest common denominator or
common factor. Perhaps the common factor is a weak and watery thing
rather than an essential thing. Perhaps it does not exist at all. No one
has ever produced it.

3. “But if you compare the Sermon on the Mount, Buddha’s Dhammapada, Lao-tzu’s Tao-te-ching, Confucius’ Analects, the Bhagavad Gita, the Proverbs of Solomon, and the Dialogues of Plato, you willfind it:  a real, profound, and strong agreement.”

Yes, but this is ethics, not religion. The objector is assuming that
the essence of religion is ethics. It is not. Everyone has an ethic, not
everyone has a religion. Tell an atheist that ethics equals religion.
He will be rightly insulted, for you would be calling him either
religious if he is ethical, or unethical because he is nonreligious.
Ethics maybe the first step in religion but it is not the last. As C.S.
Lewis says, “The road to the Promised Land runs past Mount Sinai.”

4. “Speaking of mountains reminds me of my favorite analogy.
Many roads lead up the single mountain of religion to God at the top. It
is provincial, narrow-minded, and blind to deny the validity of other
roads than yours.”

The unproved assumption of this very common mountain analogy is that
the roads go up, not down; that man makes the roads, not God; that
religion is man’s search for God, not God’s search for man. C. S. Lewis
says this sounds like “the mouse’s search for the cat”.

Christianity is not a system of man’s search for God but a story of
God’s search for man. True religion is not like a cloud of incense
wafting up from special spirits into the nostrils of a waiting God, but
like a Father’s hand thrust downward to rescue the fallen. Throughout
the Bible, man-made religion fails. There is no human way up the
mountain, only a divine way down. “No man has seen God at any time. The
only begotten Son who is in the bosom of the Father, he has made him
known.”

If we made the roads, it would indeed be arrogant to claim that any
one road is the only valid one, for all human things are equal, at least
in all being human, finite, and mixtures of good and bad. If we made
the roads, it would be as stupid to absolutize one of them as to
absolutize one art form, one political system, or one way of skinning a
cat. But if God made the road, we must find out whether he made many or
one. If he made only one, then the shoe is on the other foot: it is
humility, not arrogance, to accept this one road from God, and it is
arrogance, not humility, to insist that our manmade roads are as good as
God’s God-made one.

But which assumption is true? Even if the pluralistic one is true,
not all religions are equal, for then one religion is worse and more
arrogant than all others, for it centers on one who claimed, “I am the
Way, the Truth, and the Life; no man can come to the Father but by me.”

5. “Still, it fosters religious imperialism to insist that your way is the only way. You’re on a power trip.”

No, we believe it not because we want to, because we are
imperialistic, or because we invented it, but because Christ taught it.
It isn’t our way, it’s his way, that’s the only way. We’re just being
faithful to him and to what he said. The objector’s assumption is that
we can make religion whatever we want it to

6. “If the one-way doctrine comes from Christ, not from you, then he must have been arrogant.”

How ironic to think Jesus is arrogant! No sin excited his anger more
than the arrogance and bigotry of religious leaders. No man was ever
more merciful, meek, loving, and compassionate.

The objector is always assuming the thing to be proved: that Christ
is just one among many religious founders, human teachers. But he
claimed to be the Way, the Truth, and the Life; if that claim is not
true, he is not one among many religious sages but one among many
lunatics. If the claim is true, then again he is not one among many
religious sages, but the Way, the Truth, and the Life.

7. “Do you want to revive the Inquisition? Don’t you value
religious tolerance? Do you object to giving other religions equal
rights?”

The Inquisition failed to distinguish the heresy from the heretic and
tried to eliminate both by force or fire. The objector makes the same
mistake in reverse: he refuses to condemn either. The state has no
business defining and condemning heresy, of course, but the believer
must do it-if not through the Church, then by himself. For to believe x
is to condemn non-x as false. If you don’t believe non-x is false, then
you don’t really believe x is true.

8. “I’m surprised at this intolerance. I thought Christianity was the religion of love.”

It is. It is also the religion of truth. The objector is separating
two divine attributes. We are not. We are “speaking the truth in love”.

9. “But all God expects of us is sincerity.”

How do you know what God expects of us? Have you listened to God’s
revelation? Isn’t it dangerous to assume without question or doubt that
God must do exactly what you would do if you were God? Suppose sincerity
were not enough; suppose truth was needed too. Is that unthinkable? In
every other area of life we need truth. Is sincerity enough for a
surgeon? An explorer? Don’t we need accurate road maps of reality?

The objector’s implicit assumption here is that there is no objective
truth in religion, only subjective sincerity, so that no one can ever
be both sincere and wrong; that the spirit does not have objective roads
like the body and the mind, which lead to distinct destinations: the
body’s physical roads lead to different cities and the mind’s logical
roads lead to different conclusions. True sincerity wants to know the
truth.

10. “Are non-Christians all damned then?”

No. Father Feeny was excommunicated by the Catholic Church for
teaching that “outside the Church, no salvation” meant outside the
visible Church. God does not punish pagans unjustly. He does not punish
them for not believing in a Jesus they never heard of, through no fault
of their own (invincible ignorance). But God, who is just, punishes them
for sinning against the God they do know through nature and conscience
(see Rom 1-2). There are no innocent pagans, and there are no innocent
Christians either. All have sinned against God and against conscience.
All need a Savior. Christ is the Savior.

11. “But surely there’s a little good in the worst of us and a
little bad in the best of us. There’s good and bad everywhere, inside
the Church and outside.”

True. What follows from that fact? That we need no Savior? That there
are many Saviors? That contradictory religions can all be true? That
none is true? None of these implied conclusions has the remotest logical
connection with the admitted premise.

There is a little good in the worst of us, but there’s also a little
bad in the best of us; more, there’s sin, separation from God, in all of
us; and the best of us, the saints, are the first to admit it. The
universal sin Saint Paul pinpoints in Romans 1:18 is to suppress the
truth. We all sin against the truth we know and refuse it when it
condemns us or threatens our self-sufficiency or complacency. We all
rationalize. Our duty is plain to us—to be totally honest—and none of us
does his duty perfectly. We have no excuse of invincible ignorance.

12. “But isn’t God unjust to judge the whole world by Christian standards?”

God judges justly. “All who sinned without [knowing] the [Mosaic] law
will also perish without the law, and all who have sinned under the law
will be judged by the law” (Rom 2:12). Even pagans show “that what the
law requires is written on their hearts” (Rom 2:15). If we honestly
consult our hearts, we will find two truths: that we know what we ought
to do and be, and that we fail to do and be that.

Fundamentalists, faithful to the clear one-way teaching of Christ,
often conclude from this that pagans, Buddhists, et cetera, cannot be
saved. Liberals, who emphasize God’s mercy, cannot bring themselves to
believe that the mass of men are doomed to hell, and they ignore, deny,
nuance, or water down Christ’s own claims to uniqueness. The Church has
found a third way, implied in the New Testament texts. On the one hand,
no one can be saved except through Christ. On the other hand, Christ is
not only the incarnate Jewish man but also the eternal, preexistent word
of God, “which enlightens every man who comes into the world” (Jn 1:9).
So Socrates was able to know Christ as word of God, as eternal Truth;
and if the fundamental option of his deepest heart was to reach out to
him as Truth, in faith and hope and love, however imperfectly known this
Christ was to Socrates, Socrates could have been saved by Christ too.
We are not saved by knowledge but by faith. Scripture nowhere says how
explicit the intellectual content of faith has to be. But it does
clearly say who the one Savior is.

The Second Vatican Council took a position on comparative religions
that distinguished Catholicism from both Modernist relativism and
Fundamentalist exclusivism. It taught that on the one hand there is much
deep wisdom and value in other religions and that the Christian should
respect them and learn from them. But, on the other hand, the claims of
Christ and his Church can never be lessened, compromised, or
relativized. We may add to our religious education by studying other
religions but never subtract from it.

Peter Kreeft, Ph.D., is a professor
of philosophy at Boston College who has written over forty books, including C.S.
Lewis for the Third Millennium, Fundamentals
of the Faith, Catholic
Christianity, Back
to Virtue, Three
Approaches to Abortion , and The
Philosophy of Tolkien .




His most recent Ignatius Press books include Socrates
Meets Descartes , You
Can Understand the Bible , The
God Who Loves You , and Because God Is Real:
Sixteen Questions, One Answer .





A complete list of Ignatius Press books
by Kreeft can be viewed on his IgnatiusInsight.com
author page.)