Question: Why do we need such a complicated way of explaining the Word, which creates a lot of tension, hatred, mayhem, death, and complications with different churches, just to explain the same message?
Answer:
This is an important question, which raises several good points. The history of the Christian church is filled with people and events which do not reflect well on Christianity. At different times, heresies have been punished with death, rulers have used violence to subjugate the people that God had given them to govern, clergy led wicked lives, and relations between different Christian groups were uncivil at best.
This is to say nothing of the relationship of Christians to non-Christians, which has often been very contentious. To put it plainly, the people of God, from the fall to the present day, are sinners, and sometimes our sins manifest as religious conflict and intolerance.
Even before the first books of the Bible were written down, God was working to save His people from this sin. In Genesis 3:15, God tells the serpent that “I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and her offspring; he shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel.” (Gn. 3:15, English Standard Version)
Right after the fall, God is already promising to defeat the serpent and the power of sin through the offspring of the woman. This promise is fulfilled in Jesus Christ. The serpent injured Him on the cross, but did not defeat Him. In Jesus’ death and resurrection, however, He crushed the head of the serpent, defeating Satan for all time. This simple message, that God Himself saves us from sin, death, and the devil, is one which has been found in the promises of God from the very beginning.
Because the promise of salvation that God gives us is fulfilled in Jesus Christ, the teachings of the Christian faith are understood in light of the fact that Jesus, the Son of God, was born as a human, suffered, died, was buried, and rose again to redeem creation. We interpret all of the Bible, from the Torah through the prophets, and even the New Testament epistles, with this idea in mind. We do not seek to distinguish between those parts of the Bible which are from God, and those which are from human authors. As St. Paul says in 2 Tim. 3:16, “All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness.” To be sure, the Bible has human authors, but we confess as a matter of faith that those writers were inspired by the Holy Ghost to write just what God intended them to write. The Holy Scriptures, which God inspired, point us to Jesus, and it is through Jesus that we can ultimately understand these Scriptures.
Since Christianity insists that the only way to understand the Scriptures is through Jesus Christ, it follows that we would claim that non-Christian religions misunderstand the promises of God. This is not to say that these religions know nothing of God only that they can not properly understand who God is and what He promises apart from a knowledge of Jesus Christ. When St. Paul preached to the Athenians at the Areopagus, he recognized that all people seek God. “And he made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined allotted periods and the boundaries of their dwelling place, that they should seek God, in the hope that they might feel their way toward him and find him. Yet he is actually not far from each one of us, for ‘In him we live and move and have our being’; as even some of your own poets have said, ‘For we are indeed his offspring.'” (Acts 17:26-28) Paul warns, however, that this seeking ends with Jesus, who will judge all of us. “The times of ignorance God overlooked, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent, because he has fixed a day on which he will judge the world in righteousness by a man whom he has appointed; and of this he has given assurance to all by raising him from the dead.” (Acts 17:30-31)
Unfortunately, Christian claims to a full understanding of what God has revealed to his creation often manifest themselves as intolerance or even violence. This can happen not only against non-Christian religions, but even against Christian groups of varying confessions.
This is not the proper way to bear witness to the promises that God has fulfilled through His Son. We are called to faithfully proclaim the Good News of salvation to all nations, just as the apostles did, but this does not mean that we should coerce people to convert. The unique message of Christianity is important, and it would not be wise to gloss over our differences with other groups, because in doing so, the unique proclamation of the Christian message can be muted or obscured. Our sinful natures make this difficult, on the one hand, we may become intolerant or even hateful of those with whom we disagree, but on the other, we may fail to proclaim the Gospel at all.
Fortunately, in Jesus, God forgives us when we fall into either one of these traps.
The message of salvation that God has given to His people has not changed since the beginning. In Jesus Christ that promise has been fulfilled, and it is through His death and resurrection that we receive the gift of eternal life. This message is unique to Christianity, and it is important that we safeguard it.
