I wrote this in a discussion on Calvin-in-Common responding to the article I posted from Newsweek on “We are all Hindus Now”.

I think it’s interesting that as a culture we find it fashionable to offer inclusion into our concept of heaven and hell. We feel embarrassed by any whiff of exclusivity but we’re completely blind to the cultural imperialism of establishing the landscaping and the furnishings. To me this illuminates a key facet to our new brand of western hinduism, the wholesale gutting of traditional religions while never admitting we’re doing so. Our pattern has been to implicitly read our religious values onto other religious beliefs and to rather condescendingly correct them by saying “what you meant to say was this”.

What interests me is how on one hand we can simply dismiss (or conveniently chose not to hear) enormously contradictory assertions by different religious groups by basically asserting “it really doesn’t matter”. Somehow after we die and are no longer able to vote (except in Afghanistan, New Jersey and Chicago) whatever we’ve said or done in this world is received by the great divine sea, a deity or the community of the gods as being inconsequential while on the other hand we fight like cats and dogs over health care, women’s rights or global degradation. Is history consequential or isn’t it?

The assumption that “all religions are basically the same” is of course an assertion for which I think finds little evidential support. The more I read the Bible the more I realize that the passages people stumble over, passages about creation, food, wars, women or gays, the passages that many people in our context elevate as deciders for their metaphysical menu selection are nothing compared to hosts of passages that simply say the most outlandish things. My canon of outrageous claims include:

“blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth”
“all authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me”
Ephesians 1:20-23, Colossians 1:15-20.

Really, every week in my line of work as I work on a text I am amazed and astounded by the boldness of the assertions. Two weeks ago I looked at Jesus’ story of the great dinner in Luke 14 which follows up on the nicely glib declaration in 14:15 about “blessed is anyone who will eat bread in the kingdom of God” with a story that Jesus’ audience could not have liked. (And if your squeamish you’d better avoid the Matthew 22 cotext.)

Either the modern re-writers of religious history are not taking seriously the people and texts where they are finding such commonality or they are simply lying through their teeth (as this guy says Karen Armstrong does . I don’t know enough history to evaluate his critique of Armstrong but I certainly never heard that Columbus was a Jew!)

As a Calvinist it is easy to acknowledge that we’re all getting plenty wrong, and that God’s valuation of our conduct likely doesn’t fall neatly along the factional lines we draw, but not taking seriously all of the murder, pain, abuse, war, savagery and corruption of human history seems an odd way to bring peace on earth. I think Miroslav Volf in Exclusion and Embrace deals with this handily.