I meant to write something about this earlier in the week but never really got around to it. Anyway, the preacher at Ivy on sunday had a “revolutionary” message for us all, the broad essence of which was “Stop treating mission like a fight that Christianity has to win, it doesn’t work”. Okay, I can see some people probably wouldn’t have heard anything like that before, but if you’ve paid any attention to the developments of the Emergent church and “Missional” approaches it probably won’t be anything new.

Anyway, he quoted that bit from near the end of A Generous Orthodoxy: Brian McLaren talks about the Christian child who asks her mother why a muslim woman is wearing a veil. The mother responds that it’s the muslim woman’s way of showing she loves God, just like they show they love God by going to church and reading the Bible. The next time they see the muslim woman, the little girl points and says “Look, mummy! That lady is showing she loves God!”; the muslim woman comes over, embraces the child and tells the mother “If only other people understood and taught their children so well”.

The story resonates because in the modern church we have a deep-seated fear of syncretism: that is, the merging of different religious ideas to assert an underlying unity – or, more simply, the idea of “One God, Many Paths”. But I think what happens is that in embracing the idea of Jesus being the only way to the Father, many Christians then go one step further and embrace the Greek mindset of there being things that are “of God”, and things that aren’t: and therefore anything that doesn’t directly and explicitly emphasise the idea of Jesus being the “only way” is bad and evil and wrong and, moreover, should be publically identified as such. This is sad, and I think it leads to people being unable to appreciate the divine in the world. When we hear of someone of another faith (or no faith at all) doing good in the world, do we see that as a reflection of the divine? When we see the muslim woman showing her devotion to Allah by wearing the veil, do we see that not as someone who’s “got it wrong”, but rather as someone who has recognised the divine and seeks to embrace it, irrespective of whether we think she’s worshipping the “wrong” God or not?

By claiming to have the sole claim on all that is good in the world, the Church puts up barriers and makes itself confrontational. This does not encourage people to seek out Jesus. Rather, we should seek to be a witness to the divine wherever it may be found, and through that, hopefully point to Jesus.

One final and tangentially related thought: when Jesus said that “No-one comes to the Father but by me”, I’m not sure he was actually speaking in the context of Christianity being the One True Faith: rather, in context this passage seems to be speaking about the duality of his nature, being both fully human and fully God. We approach Jesus in his full humanity, and in seeing that, we come to see his divine nature also: he restores the connection between humanity and God by taking on the nature of both, and that is why no-one comes to the Father but by Jesus – not because all the other religions have “got it wrong”.

This entry was posted on Friday, November 3rd, 2006 at 1:29 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.