27 September 2026

A Middle Way with World Religions

1 Timothy 2:1-7

We read from 1 Timothy, chapter 2, verses 1-7:

2 First of all, then, I urge that supplications, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgivings should be made for everyone, 2for kings and all who are in high positions, so that we may lead a quiet and peaceable life in all godliness and dignity. 3This is right and is acceptable in the sight of God our Savior, 4who desires everyone to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth. 5For
there is one God;
   there is also one mediator between God and humankind,
Christ Jesus, himself human,
  6who gave himself a ransom for all
—this was attested at the right time. 7For this I was appointed a herald and an apostle (I am telling the truth, I am not lying), a teacher of the Gentiles in faith and truth.

As most of you know, I grew up in Singapore. My parents were Southern Baptist missionaries there for over 30 years, including my formative years, so I was surrounded from my earliest memories by world religions: Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, and a mixture of Confucianism and Taoism that Singaporeans just called “Chinese Religion.” In fact, you could say that the presence of all those religions was why my parents were there. The underlying assumption behind their appointment as missionaries was that all those people were going to hell unless they became Christian. I never heard my parents express it like that, and what they actually did was to present Christ in love and friendship rather than with threats of hell – but that was still the assumption. I certainly believed it. I had no doubt that all those other religions are at best misguided superstition and, at worst, evil. And I saw things to confirm that opinion. I remember the little shrines in people’s homes, or at the side of the road, burning incense sticks to appease the ghosts of the ancestors. I remember the Thaipusam festival, where people impaled their cheeks and tongues with skewers or carried a heavy shoulder brace attached to their chests with fish hooks – all to fulfill a vow to the gods. I remember the “Feast of the Hungry Ghosts,” where tables of delicacies were spread out to buy the favor of evil spirits who, for a certain time, were thought to be roaming the earth doing mischief. I remember massive funerals at which paper mansions filled with phony money were set afire, so as to give the deceased means of support in the bleak spirit world that awaited. I saw non-Christian religions as silly superstition, based on fear and bargaining, and nothing at all like the gospel of grace that is taught by Christianity. 

But here’s the weird thing. You’d think people in those religions would see the superiority of Christianity and rush to join us, but it didn’t happen. The only converts to Christianity were secular people – those who had already abandoned their former faith if they’d ever had one. People who were faithfully following their own tradition somehow didn’t see it as dark superstition. Very curious. Some even seemed to find joy and fulfillment there. For several years we lived down the street from a mosque, and I clearly remember the crowds of faithful Muslims streaming there for Friday prayers, filling the streets with their freshly washed, smiling faces as they joined in devotion. One day, when I was thirteen, I went as a tourist to the Sultan Mosque, the largest in Singapore, where I fell into conversation with an old man sitting on the front steps. He wore the white cap that signified that he had made the pilgrimage to Mecca, and he was evidently spending his old age in the courtyard of his place of worship, like Simeon and Anna in Luke 2. He welcomed me with a smile and, after a minute, asked if I were a Christian. I said yes. My heart was pounding, because although I was only thirteen I knew it was my duty to witness to this man, to save his soul from hell. His smile grew broader, and he said, “Good! You worship one God. I worship one God. We are brothers!” What did he have to go say that for? How do I lead from that into, “Did you know you’re going to burn in hell?” Even to my ears, that would make his religion sound more generous and loving than mine. So I didn’t witness to him. I just talked with him and liked him.

A few years later, I was back in the states to finish high school and start college. It was 1980. There was some political function at which representatives of several different religions gave opening prayers. There was a Muslim and a Jew and a Christian – Reverend Bailey Smith, president of my Southern Baptist Convention. Before he prayed, though, Bailey Smith added his own comment, saying, “Kind of funny to have these other folks praying here, since God doesn’t hear their prayers.” Anyone here remember that? 

I suppose I should be grateful to Bailey: he confronted me with my own assumptions, and they weren’t pretty. Has God really cut off communication with the entire non-Christian world? So, if I had been born to devout Buddhist parents and had become a Buddhist monk instead of being born in a devout Christian family and becoming a Christian minister, God wouldn’t listen to me? And I’d be doomed to hell because of the accident of my birth? It’s not just that that doesn’t sound fair; it’s that it doesn’t sound like God. Listen again to 1 Timothy 2: After telling the Christians to pray for “everyone,” the author says, This is right and acceptable in the sight of God our Savior, who desires everyone to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth. For there is one God; and there is one mediator between God and humankind, Christ Jesus, who died for all. God loves everyone and wants everyone to come to know God. It was for that reason that God sent Christ. If that is so, then it simply strains credulity to say that this loving God who desperately wants all to come to him, nevertheless has cut off all communication with most of them. Really? We’re to picture God in heaven watching millions go to hell because they were born into the wrong tradition. “Darn! Lost another one! Sure wish those missionaries would hurry up! But what can I do?” That God is either not very smart or not very loving. If this is God, then God is not love.

Most of you have wondered about this at some point. My own kids asked me about this by the time they were eight. It’s a huge dissonance in traditional Christian teaching, this idea that God loves everyone but only saves us. So you can understand why some Christians have gone to the other extreme and taken refuge in a generalized statement that really, all religions are the same. They’re just different paths to the same place. They all have the same teachings. Which would perhaps be comforting it were true. But it isn’t. Yes, there are some shared teachings. But no, world religions are quite different. I have read the scriptures of all major world religions. I have found much wisdom in them, and my own faith has been greatly strengthened by many of those texts. I have encountered God especially in the Hindu Bhagavad Gita and the words of the Taoist sage Chuang Tzu. But in the end, no one else teaches such a mind-bendingly audacious story as ours. God became human, just like us – so that we could be reconciled to God. Then that God-in-flesh died, just like we will, but overcame death by rising again – so that we too can have life beyond time. Christ is what God-is-love looks like, and this is our unique good news. I think this is the greatest story anywhere, the ultimate expression of a God that really is love. No one else teaches anything like it.

So here we are again stuck between extremes. Is there a middle way between the exclusive “only our group goes to heaven” crowd and the watered-down, “everything’s really all the same” crowd? Here are some suggestions from my own journey. First, God is at work in all the world, not just everywhere that there are missionaries but everywhere that there are people, because God loves people. And whether those people will be reconciled to God depends on God, not us, and will be based on love, not on whether they have a stamped and valid Christian passport. Christ said, “All who seek will find.” I believe that those who truly seek God – regardless of what name they seek that God under – will find God. 

Second, Jesus Christ is the ultimate expression of that loving God. By his death and resurrection, the barriers between us and God were torn down and reconciliation was made possible. And that reconciliation was offered to everyone, not just those who have heard of him. Yes, Jesus said, “I am the way, the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father but by me.” But he did not say, “no one comes to the Father except by knowing about me and saying the sinner’s prayer and joining a Christian church.” What Christ did changed reality for everyone, not just for us who were born among Christians.

Third, even we who believe that Christ is the ultimate image of God can learn much from what God has taught other faiths. I wish to God that we Christians could be half as disciplined about daily prayer as Muslims, half as open to the inner working of the Spirit as Buddhists, half as respectful of God in creation as indigenous religions everywhere. 

And fourth, the way to achieve that interfaith understanding is not to water down our own faith. Too often, we mainline liberals adopt that approach, thinking if we can sweep the most radical claims of our faith under the rug – things like Christ’s resurrection – then we could have a real dialogue. But that’s crazy. Would we ask any other religion to give up their defining belief in order to dialogue with us? The Christian writer Brian McLaren told this story at a conference I attended. He was at an interfaith dialogue, assigned to a small group with clergy from three other faiths. When he arrived to represent Christianity, they asked if he was an evangelical or a liberal Christian. He said, “Well, basically evangelical.” They replied, “Oh, thank goodness. It’s so much easier to have a dialogue with someone who will actually admit that he believes something.” That’s a good model for us: Know what we believe. Claim the good news of Jesus Christ. And then sit down to listen to anyone else who is seeking the God whose love is bigger and kinder than we can imagine.