By T.C. Lo (盧天賜); December 7, 2015
After the San Bernardino shooting on December 2, 2015 where 14 people died and 21 were injured by a radicalized Muslim couple, one of my readers asked me this question, “What has happened to religions? This wasn’t an innocuous question. He intended to discredit Christianity as a rational belief system. To his question, I wrote this article to defend the gospel and more importantly to build a bridge for evangelism.
Let me first make a shocking statement to the readers: Christianity is NOT a Religion. Let me explain:
Supposing I have five symbols in front of me: 5, +, 2, =, and 7 and now I put these five symbols together in any order until I exhaust all their permutations:
• 2+5=7
• 5+2=7
• 7=5+2
• 7=2+5
• 7+2=5
• 7+5=2
• =7+25
• And so on
You see only the first four orders make sense; the rest of the permutations do not at all make sense. Yet the first four orders are mathematically equivalent. In other words, there is only ONE way that make sense and this ONE way has four representations.
Why I am telling you this? Let me get to the point I try to make:
Both religions and Christianity have things in common. They all possess three important components:
• Salvation—concerning how to go to Heaven, or Nirvana, or Paradise.
• Merit—concerning ones Good Deed, Merits, or 功德. They belong to the category of Morality.
• Worship—concerning one’s inner reverence paid to God or a sacred personage, or any object regarded as sacred.
Now let us apply the principle of order:
The starting point of all religions is Merit. One has to do good first in order to EARN one’s salvation. Once you have done enough good deeds, you begin to squeeze out from your heart all your sincerity to worship your God. After you have accumulate enough good deeds (積功) and sincerity (誠心) in any order, you will then hope you will go to heaven—This is the essence of Religions.
The merit based religions inevitably have the following problems:
• You will never know whether you have done enough and therefore you will never have certainty you can go to heaven or not. The only way you can gauge your goodness is by comparison. Yet this relativistic morality is not without problem.
• If you are better than your neighbor, you may cultivate a secret spirit of pride. Pride is not virtuous and hence your good is bad good. You try to be good but you end up no good.
• If you find yourself worse than your neighbor, you may become dejected and disappointed and eventually you lose your self-worthiness and your good is bad good not good good. See, you try to be good but you end up no good but you think you are good which is even worse.
But Christianity is different. Christianity’s starting point is salvation. Out of God’s love and mercy, he accepts us as we are and grant us salvation and we become the children of God. This process is called “born again” which is all God’s outworking of grace and hence human beings have nothing to boast. After we are saved, God is not content with our moral condition, God transforms us by giving us the moral laws. After we have been saved and have a transformed heart, then we can begin to worship God with clean hand and pure heart. If you read the redemptive history recorded in the Bible, this concept becomes evident. God first saved the Israelite from the tyranny of the Pharaoh of Egypt by crossing the Red Sea (Salvation); then they came to Mount Sinai and God gave them the Ten Commandments through Moses as their moral framework (Morality); And finally, God instructed them to build the Tabernacle as a place symbolizing God’s presence so the children of God may worship him (Worship). Salvation in Christianity means God gives people a new life. British philosopher and writer C.S. Lewis said, “Jesus didn’t come to make bad people good, but dead people live.” Religions are all about making bad people good. I do not like calling Christianity 基督教; strictly speaking, it is a sociology term. The accurate way to say about Christianity is “The Gospel”. If I must call Christianity 基督教。I must clarify to mean 基督的教訓 rather than 基督的教派。
Because Christianity and all other religions have the same set of elements—Salvation, Morality, and Worship, people mistakenly say that “All religions (including Christianity) are fundamentally the same and only peripherally different.”
How can they be fundamentally the same? The order are markedly different:
• Religions: Morality –> Worship –> Salvation
• Christianity: Salvation –> Morality –> Worship
Therefore, I say, “All religions (including Christianity) are fundamentally different and only peripherally the same.”
Both religious people and Christians may do very bad things. Yet there is a cardinal difference one needs to take note:
• When religious people did heinous things in the name of religion (as we watch on TV every day), they did those things in conformity with their doctrine of their belief.
• When Christians did heinous things (as some that had been recorded in history), they did those acts in direct violation of Christ’s teachings.
This distinction is utmost important. In light of the aforementioned reasoning, I should make a statement as saying: “Christianity is NOT a religion.” In fact, I should further qualify the statement by saying, “Christianity is NOT a religion but a RELATIONSHIP” because it is all about one’s personal relationship with Jesus Christ not about ritual.
