(10-MINUTE READ) — If you have been breathing on this earth for more than about 30 seconds, you have heard the maxim captured in the headline above. And, to explain the application, there were five blind men describing the same elephant.

You know how it goes: The first blind man touches the elephant’s front leg and declares the animal to be a tree. The second blind man touches the elephant’s trunk and is convinced he is handling a huge snake.

Then there is the third blind man, who felt a tusk and declared it to be a spear. The fourth blind man? He touched the elephant’s ear and thought he’d found a huge fan. Finally, the fifth blind man touched the elephant’s tail and told his colleagues they were all wrong, that there was nothing more than a rope.

Where is this going? According to Biola University Professor Craig Hazen, writing for the Apologetics Study Bible from Holman, the five blind guys are corrected when a truly wise man, a Rajah standing above them and watching this scene from a balcony, sets them right, declaring “they were each encountering only one small part of the magnificent whole.”

The familiar application here is that each of the major religions — Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Mormonism, etc. etc. — sees only a part of the whole. Even so, each of them provides at least a partial truth that is required to get to the whole truth.

Thus, according to the myth-makers, all the religions are basically the same, they are merely different routes to the same destination:

“It is easy to see the appeal of this unifying approach to the broad spectrum of religious beliefs. After all, exclusive claims to religious truth are seen by many to be the root of so much violence and suffering in the world as believers in one tradition fight those of other traditions, sometimes for centuries,” Hazen points out.

“If, at their core, all religions are the same or each is heading toward the same end, then there is no real reason for a conflict or quarrel,” Hazen notes.

But don’t miss the aspect of the blind men and the elephant fable that is typically ignored when modern critics of Christianity use it to push the notion that religious differences aren’t important, what is really significant is what they all share:

The guy who has to clear things up for the blind men is above them. He sees the whole truth of the elephant because he sees all of it, he’s not limited to his sense of touch and inability to see everything at once.

“How do the blind men discover the truth about their encounter with the elephant? It is revealed to them from above. The Rajah steps out on his balcony and from his transcendent perspective, and with his intact sense of sight, communicates to those below the full picture of their experience.” Hazen tells us.

“The more profound real-world question that emerges from the fable is where is our Rajah who can see all and reveal to us the truth that is not accessible from our limited perspective?” Hazen writes.  

There are some important commonalities among the world’s religions, perhaps most notably that, while they differ in their specific directions on how to reach “heaven” or whatever is described as the ultimate destiny of humans, all of them require each of us to perform certain acts in order to merit eternal acceptance.

They are all, in short, religions based on “works” that humans must perform. I will come back to this crucial point. But first, let’s see that there are other shared characteristics among the world’s major religions.

“Compare, for instance, Mormonism, Buddhism and Christianity on the critical question of what is ultimately real. Mormon scripture teaches that ultimate reality is material or physical and that even God and spirits are material objects whose constituent matter has existed for all eternity,” Hazen explains.

“Mayahana Buddhists believe that ultimate reality is emptiness (‘sunyata’) or beinglessness (‘nisvabghava’), no gods, no matter, no spirit, no self. Christians, by contrast, see ultimate reality in God, who is an eternal, personal, triune Being who created all there is, both physical and non-physical from nothing.”

Those are huge differences, like night and day, darkness and light, sweet and sour.

And the differences proliferate as soon as other fundamental questions are raised, like what constitutes a human being, what is the purpose of existence, what happens to us when we die, why is the physical world here, must there be pain and suffering, and so forth.

“Given the deep divergences on such timeless questions, it is completely legitimate to wonder if the essential unity of all religions is really just a noble wish or a pious hope. Indeed, without a word from the Rajah to tell us that the contradictions among the great faiths can be overcome. the notion that all religions are the the same seems utterly untenable,” Hazen said.

In other words, it absolutely reasonable to conclude the claim that all the world’s major religions are merely different routes to the same ultimate destination is, well, illogical and false.

Now, what about that little matter I said above I would come back to, namely, the fact that, while they differ on the details, the world’s religions all prescribe a formula of works that we humans must perform in order to merit spending eternity in the heavenly place?

That is where Christianity is fundamentally different from all the rest of the major religions (and the minor ones as well!): Jesus Christ tells us at John 10:10 that “The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy. I came that they may have life and have it abundantly.”

John also tells us at 3:16-17 that: “For God so loved the world that He gave His only Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send His Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through Him.”

The Apostle Paul puts it this way at Ephesians 2:8-10 that “For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God,  not a result of works, so that no one may boast.  For we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them.”

And Paul further tells us at Romans 10:9 that “if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, you will be saved.”

See the difference? The world’s religions tell us to “do this, do that, this way” and we will earn salvation. Christianity is the exact opposite – salvation comes through God’s grace, not our works, and that grace is given to us through a daily relationship with the risen Jesus.

And the tomb He left empty three days after His crucifixion and death proves that Jesus is exactly who He claimed to be: “Before Abraham was I AM.”

Want to know more? Email me at: mark.tapscott@hillfaith.org.

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