How can Christianity, be the one true religion?
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A common objection to Christian faith is its claim to exclusivity, to being the Truth. For that matter, most other world religions would make the same claim. And it is certainly true that such convictions have often led to conflict and violence in the name of truth. It’s tempting to respond to this by concluding either that “all religions are equally false” or that “all religions are equally true”. But neither of these responses is satisfactory or helpful.
There are those who would like to outlaw religion and do away with it altogether. But those who condemn religion because of the intolerance it causes are often themselves intolerant towards those believe! “The 20th century gave rise to one of the greatest and most distressing paradoxes of human history: that the greatest intolerance and violence of that century were practised by those who believed that religion caused intolerance and violence.” (Alister McGrath, in his history of atheism.)
Neither is it valid to say that “All major religions are equally valid and basically teach the same thing.” They don’t. On the face of it, this viewpoint appeals by reducing religion to “believe in God and be a good person”, but that itself is a religious viewpoint which differs from what the major faiths teach about God or about goodness. This same inconsistency is also a problem when religious belief is dismissed as being a result of our cultural conditioning, for that point of view is itself a product of our Western cultural thinking. “Sceptics believe that any exclusive claims to a superior knowledge of spiritual reality cannot be true. But this objection is itself a religious belief. It assumes God is unknowable, or that God is loving but not wrathful, or that God is an impersonal force rather than a person who speaks in Scripture. All of these are unprovable faith assumptions... We are all exclusive in our beliefs about religion, but in different ways.” (Tim Keller).
Christianity teaches that Jesus Christ is unique, that Jesus is uniquely able to reveal God to us and to save us from our sins, because he himself is God in human form. (e.g. “God has spoken to us by his Son... The Son is the radiance of God’s glory and the exact representation of his being” (Hebrews 1:1-3). But this gives no basis for Christians to feel arrogant or superior. Rather, Christianity provides a firm basis for respecting people of other faiths, for the Bible teaches (i) that all people are made in the image of God and therefore capable of great goodness, and (ii) that no people are ever put right with God by their own moral effort or virtue, so none of us can boast or be proud about our faith or our goodness.
At the heart of Jesus’s teaching is the claim that he himself is the Truth who alone is able to reveal God to us (John 14:6). But Jesus is not only “full of truth” but also “full of grace” (John 1:14) – Jesus reveals a God who loves us and who calls us to love him and to love our neighbour (Matthew 22:37-39). “We cannot skip lightly over the fact that there have been injustices done by the church in the name of Christ, yet who can deny that the force of Christians’ most fundamental beliefs can be a powerful impetus for peace-making in our troubled world?” (Tim Keller).
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