Category Archives: World Religions

Is Christianity a European Religion?

Dan Vander Lugt
Christianity, World Religions, ,

Far from being a European religion, Christianity’s origins were in the Mideast, a place far from Europe but just next door to Egypt and North Africa. Jesus and His followers weren’t blue-eyed and light-skinned. They were Semitic people, dark-skinned and dark-eyed. For that matter, Scripture itself declares that the religion of Jehovah and Christ is a universal religion ( Genesis 22:17-18; 26:4 ; Psalm 72 ; Daniel 2:44 ; Mark 16:15 ; Acts 8:27-38; 17:22-28 ; Revelation 11:15 ).

When the Christian gospel first began to spread about 2,000 years ago through the lands that bordered on the Mediterranean Sea, the peoples of the subcontinent that today is known as Europe were living a tribal existence, divided by hundreds of tribal languages. Just like other tribal peoples, Europeans were animists who worshiped and feared the spirits and sometimes practiced human sacrifice to appease them. They told and retold the legends of their gods and ancestral heroes around their night fires.

Although many of them had already been forced to submit to Roman authority, the European tribes in those days were much like African tribes today, or Native Americans at the time of Columbus. Among the warriors captured in battle and sold in Mediterranean slave markets were tall, blond Germans (then known as Goths), red-haired Celts and Britons, and short, dark-haired Iberians (from the regions we know as Spain and Portugal). More than a thousand years of tremendous cultural, social, linguistic, and political change would occur before the scattered, warring European tribes would be consolidated into the great modern, nominally Christian nations of Europe.

All people, whether African, Asian, Native American, or European,have tribal beginnings. Christianity was essential to the civilization of Europe. But Christianity isn’t unique to European civilization. Christianity is a religion of all mankind, a tree that has its roots planted among people of every race and culture.

We don’t know why God chose the Jews as the people through whom He revealed Himself. Their racial characteristics are as unlike Europeans as they are unlike Africans, Asians, and Native Americans. Certainly, the central location of Palestine was important to the spread of the gospel. But the pagan tribal peoples of Europe were civilized through a gospel that came to mankind in the person of Jesus Christ, a dark-skinned Semite who lived His entire life in a small area of the Mideast, far away from the Europe.

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What Are the “Gnostic Gospels”?

Dan Vander Lugt
Christianity, World Religions, , , ,

Prior to the 20th century, the main source of information about gnostic writings were the church fathers (Irenaeus, Tertullian, and others), who referred to gnostic beliefs in the process of refuting them. In 1945, however, at Nag Hammadi, Egypt, a peasant discovered a large earthenware jar that contained a large number of ancient documents in the Coptic language. Among these were Christian gnostic documents that may have been among those mentioned by the church fathers.

Some of these documents are called “gospels” because they contain a few stories about Jesus and some of His (purported) sayings. However, they lack the detailed chronology and description of events in the canonical gospels, and while they borrow heavily from the canonical gospels, there is no corroborating evidence showing that they date earlier than the second century.

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Wasn’t Jesus Merely One of Many Divine Messengers?

Dan Vander Lugt
Christianity, World Religions, , , ,

Even if Jesus was a messenger from God, why shouldn’t I believe He was merely one of many divine messengers, like Rama, Krishna, or Buddha?

As Eastern philosophy and religious ideas become more popular, many people are attracted to the idea that while Jesus may have been a divine being in human form, He was not unique. Nor could He—a divine being—really have died on a Roman cross.

The Hindus have a word for a divine being who appears in human form to bring enlightenment to mankind. This word is avatar, meaning “God-manifestation.”

Probably the closest biblical equivalent to this Hindu concept were the theophanies of the Old Testament, in which God revealed Himself to people in a variety of forms: to Moses in the burning bush (Exodus 3:2); to Jacob as a man with whom he struggled on the night before his reunion with Esau (Genesis 32:24); and to Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego (Daniel 3:24-25) as a divine-like figure in the midst of Nebuchadnezzar’s fiery furnace. If these were indeed manifestations of God, and not angelic appearances, in such manifestations God never changed His essential nature. He simply assumed a form that allowed Him to communicate directly to people.

It is beyond the purpose of this article to speculate further about the exact nature of the Old Testament theophanies or to evaluate the validity of Hinduism or its avatars.

The point this article is making is that Jesus was not just a divine manifestation. He didn’t come merely to impart knowledge or a special sense of awe or consciousness of God’s presence. Our race needed much more from God than mere knowledge and wonder. As victims of our own fallen natures, knowledge alone could never help us.

The witnesses of His life, death, and resurrection declare that in Jesus Christ, God became a genuine human being. In Christ, God merged His identity with fallen creatures of flesh and accomplished what none of them was capable of doing—living and dying in a way that not only set a flawless example for humanity, but also destroyed the power of Satan and evil.

In Matthew 1:20-21, the angel of the Lord said, “Joseph son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary home as your wife, because what is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. She will give birth to a son, and you are to give him the name Jesus, because he will save his people from their sins.” There might be many avatars who, like the angel of God in the Old Testament, come to impart wisdom or strength, but there could be only one incarnation in which God not only “appeared” to us, but fully became one with us in all of our weaknesses and limitations (Hebrews 4:15). Having lived and died on our behalf, Jesus Christ was raised from death triumphantly, His task completed for all time (Romans 6:9; Hebrews 10:10-14). His sacrifice was on behalf of the entire human race (1 John 2:2), and He was proven the “Son of God with power” (Romans 1:4 NKJV). He is the one to whom everyone will some day bow and confess as Lord (Philippians 2:10).

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How Can Christianity Claim To Be the Only Way to God?

Dan Vander Lugt
Christianity, World Religions, , , , , ,

Although there are numerous groups in every major religious tradition, there are relatively few major religious traditions. Probably the oldest religious tradition is that of Animism, found mostly among the so-called “primitive” peoples of the world. Animism teaches that the world is populated by a myriad of spirit beings that can be appeased and manipulated through ritual and magic.

The Hindu religion has its center in India. In the form of Buddhism, it has spread all throughout East Asia. This ancient tradition teaches that all living beings are caught up in a cycle of reincarnation. It maintains that the only way to achieve salvation is to be freed of one’s burden of “karma.” Only then can one escape the cycle of reincarnation, lose one’s individuality, and merge with the Being of God like a drop of water in the sea.

Islam is the religion of Muhammad, a warrior/prophet who was born approximately 700 years after Jesus Christ. Islam is similar to Judaism and Christianity in some respects, upholding the authority of the Old and New Testaments and believing in one God. Its holiest book is the Koran. Like Judaism and Christianity, Islam despises idolatry and believes in the reality of eternal punishment or eternal reward in the next life.

The only other great religious traditions are those of Taoism in China and Shintoism in Japan. These religions are pantheistic like Hinduism, but they also have a number of animistic characteristics.

Although there are elements of truth in all of the religious traditions, the Bible teaches that there is only one way that we can be saved. In John 3:13 Jesus stated clearly, “I tell you the truth, no one can see the kingdom of God unless he is born again.” In Romans 10:9 we read, “If you confess with your mouth, ‘Jesus is Lord,’ and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, you will be saved.” Jesus Himself said, “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through Me.” ( John 14:6 ). We know that all salvation is accomplished through the sacrificial death of Jesus Christ and His atonement for the sins of the world.

(See the ATQ article Are All Who Haven’t Heard of Christ Damned?)

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Are All Who Haven’t Heard of Christ Damned?

Dan Vander Lugt
Christianity, World Religions, , , ,

In John 14:6 Jesus declared, “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through Me.” Jesus’ words make it clear that He alone has brought God’s gift of salvation to the world. But do His words also mean that everyone who hasn’t heard of Him will be condemned to hell?

Abraham lived long before Christ. When he told Isaac that God would provide a sacrifice, his words were strikingly prophetic, but he didn’t understand their true significance. He knew nothing about the Lamb of God who would die on a cross nearly 2,000 years later. People like Abel, Enoch, Noah, Job, Melchizedek, Abraham, Sarah, and Jacob never heard the gospel, yet Hebrews 11:13 leaves no doubt that they will be in heaven.

No one in Old Testament times had a clear understanding of the role that Jesus Christ would someday play in atoning for sin. But centuries before the gospel was revealed, the faith of Old Testament believers was already “credited to them as righteousness” ( Genesis 15:6; Psalm 106:31; Galatians 3:6 ).

One of the most remarkable missionary stories of this century was the martyrdom of five young missionaries in Ecuador and the conversion of the Auca Indians. The first convert from the Auca tribe was a young woman named Dayuma. Remarkably, Dayuma was predisposed to accept the gospel because of her father’s influence. Although he had never heard the name of Jesus, he spoke out against the blood feuds and murder that were an Auca way of life. Unlike the others of his tribe, he was deeply conscious of his sinfulness and knew that he and his people needed forgiveness. He told Dayuma that some day God would send a messenger to the Aucas to tell them the way of salvation. Like Old Testament believers, Dayuma’s father was still living by faith when he died ( Hebrews 11:13 ). The witness of his life implies that he would have been overjoyed to hear the gospel, but he died before missionaries came.

Does Scripture give us grounds for insisting that Dayuma’s father is any different in God’s eyes than the believers of the Old Testament? Clearly, Dayuma’s father, like Abraham, would face eternal damnation apart from Christ’s shed blood. Apparent, too, is the desperate spiritual need of those, like the Auca people, who live in fear and spiritual darkness. The fact that Christ is the only way to God places on us the responsibility to make Him known to all.

Paul, the apostle to the Gentiles asked:

How then shall they call on Him in whom they have not believed? And how shall they believe in Him of whom they have not heard? (Romans 10:13-14).

But there isn’t a passage of Scripture that definitively proves that God looks upon Dayuma’s father differently than He looked upon Old Testament believers who had only a faint idea of the nature of coming redemption. (See the ATQ article, How Could Old Testament People Be Saved?) The apostle Paul may have had this issue in mind when he wrote the first chapters of Romans, declaring that God has revealed Himself in creation ( Romans 1:18-20 ) and in human conscience ( Romans 2:12-16 ). Paul said that each individual will be judged according to his response to these two revelations of God. To those who respond positively, God gives more knowledge—as He did to the Ethiopian eunuch and the Roman centurion, Cornelius (see Acts 8,10 ). Those who are lost will be judged according to their response to the spiritual light they have received ( Hebrews 4:12-13 ). 1

It may be that God will extend His grace to Dayuma’s father on the basis of Christ’s shed blood, just as He did to Enoch, Melchizedek, Job, Abraham, and Sarah—people who had only the faintest intimation of the means by which God would provide for their redemption. In the final analysis, we must leave this matter in God’s keeping. He is both just and loving. We can be assured that the Judge of all the earth will do right ( Genesis 18:25 ).

(See the ATQ article, How Can Christianity Claim To Be the Only Way to God?)

  1. Jesus made it clear that those who had little light will be punished lightly:
    That servant who knows his master’s will and does not get ready or does not do what his master wants will be beaten with many blows. But the one who does not know and does things deserving punishment will be beaten with few blows. From everyone who has been given much, much will be demanded; and from the one who has been entrusted with much, much more will be asked ( Luke 12:47-48 ). Back To Article
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