Don’t Bite the Book That Feeds You, Part III:
The Exclusivity Bugaboo
In the pluralistic West, aversion to the Bible’s insistence on “one true God” is endemic. Our democratic mindset as regards governance is partially to blame. The American Constitution, a transcendent breakthrough in governmental architecture, guarantees the right to worship or not to worship the god(s) of our choosing. Which is, of course, a great thing. But it’s quite a leap to infer that that is also God’s policy. It may seem charitable to say that all religious paths lead to the same mountaintop, but that approach ends up sacrificing spiritual truth on the altar of niceness.
It actually is quite presumptuous to assume God accepts any belief or the lack thereof regarding his nature and ways to worship Him. In pagan antiquity, the “Shema” pronouncement, “Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one,” was truly groundbreaking as a frontal attack on the worship of multiple gods that was the existing and unchallenged norm. Clearly, the self-existent, omnipotent, omniscient, immutable, and eternal One isn’t okay with us playing around with cheap counterfeits. He is a jealous God who wired us to worship Him alone in “spirit and truth.” Believing in false gods drag us down, as our spiritual forebears learned time and again.
Christianity, like pretty much every other religion, proposes a single path to God. The existence of a single all-powerful God isn’t forbidden by logic. Logic only forbids the existence of more than one omnipotent sovereign of the universe, a problem multiculturalists don’t seem to have noticed.
In his terrific apologetic book, The Reason for God, Tim Keller sheds light on how skeptics who recoil at exclusive religious claims actually are believers in their own singular “faith”:
Skeptics 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. In addition, their proponents believe they have a superior way to view things. They believe the world would be a better place if everyone dropped the traditional religions’ views of God and truth and adopted theirs. Therefore, their view is also an exclusive claim about the nature of spiritual reality. If all such views are to be discouraged, this one should be as well.
If you approach the bible with a hardened belief that there cannot possibly be one true religion, you’ve already embraced a religious belief — one for which there exists very little or no evidence. Accordingly, as soon as you encounter the Shema, you’ll conclude, “well, this God isn’t for me,” because he contradicts your pre-existing faith in a God who would never exclude anyone based on how they define and worship Him. That’s why openness to a system of belief other than “anything goes” theology is an essential precondition to engaging the God of the bible.
Is the identity and nature of God really up to us? We may wish God were many things. It’s quite common today to hear professional and amateur religionists proclaim from their personal Mt. Sinai an eleventh commandment: We shall all go to heaven. Unfortunately, when we project our own (often self-serving) wishes and beliefs onto the Almighty, we take a deep dive into the self-reflective pool of narcissism.
End of Part III (Stay tuned for Part IV: “Your Family and Culture Made You a Christian!”)
SpoofsandProofs.com is written and produced by David Culver Brenner. To learn more about his recent novelette exposing the dangers of socialism, visit UnsocialistChickens.com. For a free subscription to SpoofsandProofs.com, enter your email in the “Subscribe” box on the right sidebar.