Not for the first time, the head of the Roman Catholic Church sparked debate earlier this month after apparently preaching religious pluralism to crowds gathered in the southeast Asian nation of Singapore.
“All religions are a path to God,” Pope Francis said, according to a Sept. 13th report from The Catholic Herald. He added, “They are like different languages in order to arrive at God.”
According to the news report, the pope used “similar language at an interfaith meeting during a 2022 trip to Kazakhstan” – and, apparently, previous criticisms haven’t discouraged him from speaking this way again.
Unfortunately, the pope isn’t the only person today who has affirmed religious pluralism – that is, the belief that all religions lead to God. Increasing religious diversity, postmodern skepticism, and extremely individualistic attitudes have left many people in Western society susceptible to the appeals of religious pluralism.
Benjamin Hawkins, editor of The Pathway
And this is apparently true even in evangelical churches. According to a 2022 LifeWay study, nearly 6 out of 10 evangelicals agree with the statement, “God accepts the worship of all religions, including Christianity, Judaism, and Islam.”
Of course, the challenges of religious diversity and religious pluralism aren’t new to the modern church. The earliest Christians lived in an age of extreme religious diversity. As Luke, the evangelist, tells us in Acts 17, the apostle Paul “was deeply distressed” in the Greek city of Athens, because “the city was full of idols” (v. 16). A few verses later, Luke writes, “Now all the Athenians and the foreigners residing there spent their time on nothing else but telling or hearing something new” (v. 21). The Apostle Paul goes on to call the Athenians “very religious,” noting that they’d even set up an altar “to the unknown God” to avoid passing over some deity or another (vv. 22-23).
Religious pluralism, according to church historian Robert Louis Wilken, is “the oldest and most enduring criticism of Christianity.” Wilken added, “All ancient critics of Christianity were united in affirming that there is no one way to the divine.”
Whether in an ancient or modern guise, however, religious pluralism is flawed, according to Harold Netland. Netland, a professor at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, is author of several helpful resources, including Encountering Religious Pluralism: The Challenge to Christian Faith and Mission (IVP, 2001). He offers much insight about these issues in a 2008 pamphlet published for the Christ on Campus Initiative and titled “One Lord & Savior For All?”
Religious pluralism, he writes, fails as a “general theory about the relationship among the religions” because of “internal inconsistencies” and because of its incompatibility with the exclusive claims of Christianity.
In particular, religious pluralism stumbles over Scripture’s exclusive claims about the Lord Jesus Christ:
• “There is one God and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus,” the apostle Paul writes (1 Tim 2:5).
• Speaking of the Lord Jesus, the apostle Peter declares, “There is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved” (Acts 4:12).
• And, of course, the Lord Jesus tells us that He alone gives us access to God: “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me” (John 14:6).
Those who try to defend the claim that all religions lead to God are forced to redefine, reject or simply ignore the Bible’s teachings about Jesus. This becomes particularly clear when they compare Christianity and Islam.
Many years ago, I had the opportunity to help a Muslim friend by driving him to various homes, where he could express gratitude for the help people had given him while he was in college. One of our stops was the home of a local, non-Baptist pastor. During their conversation, this pastor shared that Christians and Muslims should appreciate one another, since both of their religions point to the same God and offer valid paths for salvation.
The pastor’s comment took me by surprise, and I had no idea how to respond at the time. So I said nothing. But, as the scene replayed through my mind in the years that followed, I became convinced that I needed to do something. As such, I messaged my Muslim friend and shared the gospel as clearly as possible. I told him that, in the person of Jesus Christ, God himself became a human and died on a cross on behalf of sinful humanity.
We had a good interaction and remain friends today. But my Muslim friend, in keeping with his religion, was convinced that Jesus is not God and cannot be God. On the other hand, I’m convinced that Jesus alone is our one, true, incarnate Lord, God and Savior. We can’t both be right – and that’s precisely why religious pluralism can’t be true.
So, no matter what the pope or anyone else may say, all religions are not valid paths to God, and Jesus alone is the way, the truth and the life.