Are all religions the same? The Dalai Lama often refers to the ‘oneness’ of all religions, the idea that all religions preach the same message of love, tolerance and compassion. But are all religions essentially the same? They certainly have a common moral standard, more or less, that we ought to live by. But they differ in how to resolve our failure to live up to this standard. According to author Stephen Prothero, to claim that all religions are the same is to misunderstand that each attempts to solve a different human problem. In his book God Is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions That Run the World-and Why Their Differences Matter he shows that religions vary significantly, because they see humanity’s plight as different problems, with different solutions: Confucianism: the problem is chaos / the solution is social order Hinduism: the problem is reincarnation / the solution is spiritual liberation Buddhism: the problem is suffering / the solution is awakening Islam: the problem is pride / the solution is submission to Allah Judaism: the problem is exile / the solution is to return to God Christianity: the problem is sin / the solution is salvation by faith How can we know which one is right? They can’t all be right, because they’re not all addressing the same root problem. Despite some aspects of truth being found in many religions, which one addresses the core issue of mankind’s problem? Is faith always the way of salvation? Christianity says that the problem is rooted in sin, and that salvation is through faith alone. But then, others say that faith is believing the unbelievable! Isn’t faith a leap that is disconnected from reality? Isn’t faith believing without evidence, as some atheists would say? On the contrary, faith is believing the evidence. Faith that is not based in reality is faith in faith, not faith in truth. Faith in faith was very popular after World War II. Mark Pinsky comments in an interview on his book The Gospel According to Disney: Faith, Trust, and Pixie Dust that: Will Herberg’s book Protestant, Catholic, Jew, … was written in 1955. His thesis was that America’s civic religion was faith in faith—that is to say, faith in a nonspecific, non-sectarian faith. Or, as Eisenhower put it, “I don’t care what you believe in as long as you believe in something.” When people say; “Just believe” or “Have faith,” we can’t just believe that faith itself is the solution. It is who or what we are believing in that matters. The faith that produces results But how can we know what to believe in? And how can we know that it is the right belief? This is the question that the Apostle John answers in 1 John 5:1-12. Following on from his teaching in the previous chapter that the evidence of godliness in the lives of believers shows that they are God’s children (see last week’s podcast), John takes a different tack, based on the same evidence. In 1 John 5:1-12, he not only tells us that we ought to accept the testimony of God above that of what people say is true, by pointing to the dual witnesses of Jesus’ baptism and his death to disprove a heresy that was present in his day. He goes further and shows that the faith that overcomes worldliness, the faith that produces evidence of changed lives, the faith that has life from God, is the faith that works in reality. He shows that Jesus is the one we should believe in if we want to see evidence of faith that works, religion that changes lives towards godliness. While John’s argument in 1 John 4:7-21 is that the evidence proves that a believer is a child of God, in 1 John 5:1-12 his argument is that the same evidence validates the message that Jesus Christ is the one we should have faith in. The work of the Holy Spirit in the lives of God’s children is a third testimony to the truth of the gospel. The real and tangible evidence of lives where the life from God can be seen in practice not only validates that believers in Christ are God’s children, but that belief in Christ is what results in life from God: And this is the testimony: God has given us eternal life, and this life is in his Son. He who has the Son has life; he who does not have the Son of God does not have life. (1 John 5:11–12, NIV84)