This is from a Calvin-in-Common discussion I was responding to.

Maybe a good place to begin is by giving you an idea of what I believe we can safely say as Christians about all people, a subset of all people would of course include people of other religions and therefore this can be said of them as well.

Matt. 5:48 says (NRSV) “Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.” The danger of sound bite Bible reading is of course the phrase derives its meaning from its words within the context. The “teleios” of God here is connected to his capacity to love his enemies. This of course is in keeping with the broader Biblical tradition that God is not only holy, but also generous. Jesus exhorts us to mirror God’s generosity. If this is true of God towards all peoples, then by definition it is also true towards people of varying religious traditions and practices. That’s a pretty good place to begin I think.

We should note that God’s generosity is often a source of bitter complaint. Job complained mightily about it, as do authors of various Psalms as well as OT prophets, most notably Jonah. It was of course Jonah’s knowledge of God’s generosity that prompted his disobedience. I don’t think it a stretch to imagine the spirit of Jonah living on in the church throughout the history of the church. One of the most common sources of sin which leads to disaster in our lives and the world is “if God won’t act I’ll have to take matters into my own hands!” This dynamic gets displayed most vividly in the stories of Saul and David and reaches a climax in the story of David and Abigail. In Luke 15 it is precisely the father’s generosity towards the reckless younger brother that draws the complaint and threatened rejection of the father by the older brother.

It seems before judgmental humanity God can’t catch a break. When he judges he is condemned by those who disagree with the judgment, and when he exerts generosity he is condemned for being lenient. Many who wish to quickly dismiss the God of blood and wrath spoken of in the OT with the same tongue condemn the absence of God’s intervention in atrocities perpetrated in our own days. What this reveals is that there is something in the move to judge that presumes a privileged position which capacitates the behavior.

In the Genesis 3 story we find Adam and Eve desiring to know good and evil. This knowing isn’t an abstract analysis, it is a full life familiarity and they get an instant taste of it in the recognition of their nakedness. I think central to the human dilemma is our confusion over good and evil. We seldom set out to do evil, we seek a good but find that even the most scrupulous strivers after good sow the seeds of evil all along the way. It is the story of humanity. We claim the purest motives, but our record which is mixed at best is undeniable.

Is there good in other religions? I would say of course. That goodness is a gift of the creator God. That goodness is God’s investment capital that he sowed into the fabric of creation and his image bearing stewards manifest in cultures of which religion is an inescapable aspect to one day be claimed and collected in that glorious Isaiah 60 vision that Mouw wrote about in his book.
I think we can easily say that God’s goodness seeded in creation is exhibited in many of the thoughts and writings of other religions. The Bible itself bears traces of this. Job and his friends don’t have Hebrew names and it seems was perhaps drawn from a story in the wider region and reshaped by the Hebrews. Wisdom literature clearly assumes profitable conversation from surrounding wise men. Matthew has Jesus’ family accepting the gifts of pagan astrologers who come to worship.

I think as a Christian who seeks to take the Bible seriously all of this gives me a good place to begin. My baseline position is that I am commanded to love people, all the way to my enemies and exhibit the perfection of God in his generosity. I can, even with my confusion over good and evil, hopefully with the Christian canon as my guide, even selectively appreciate the fruit of the traditions of fellow image bearers who used the light offered by general revelation and their minds given by the creator God.

Someone might say “oh, you stopped me short at ‘selective’!” but I would note that I observe the “many paths to God” crowd exercising enormous selectivity as they put together their canon of helpful or enlightened texts and portions of traditions as opposed to those they deem less edifying, such as the bloody parts of the OT and other ancients texts, stories and practices. I have very dear and close friends here who are in leadership at a “unity” church whose services attempt to incorporate elements from a diversity of religions traditions. I have yet to hear of a single animal sacrifice.

You ask about my involvement with other religious groups. I’ve officiated at marriages for probably as broad a group as anyone on this list. Time magazine called Sacramento the most integrated city in America and that has been my experience.

A few years ago a young man who was Sikh asked me to officiate at his engagement ceremony. I was a bit confused. He explained that he will be officially married in the Sikh temple but they wanted to have a more American somewhat Christian ceremony as part of their elaborate Sikh engagement ceremony and he figured since I was a pastor I would know the words. Now I believe that weddings are not church events but family events and so I agreed to help them by figuring out some sort of ceremony for them. I told them that I was a Christian minister and would say Christian things and they said they were OK with that. To me, it’s a terrific opportunity to talk about Christianity’s perspective on marriage. I chose words carefully to not bind them to vows they are not ready to make and to allow them to figure out their vows. I have similarly married people who were very adamant about not being Christian but for other reasons wanted me to do a ceremony for them. I work with them on language that allows me to be clear about who I am and what I think marriage is but also find language to be helpful to them in figuring out their vows. Marriage predates Christianity obviously and I see no betrayal of my calling as long as I don’t have to affirm what I don’t agree with. As a Christian I believe I am following Jesus by helping even non-Christians couples live together in marriage rather than without.

I should also add that my neighbors in Sacramento who are nearly as close to me as family here (we celebrate birthdays together, kids grow up in each others homes, Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Years, summer parties, etc. etc.) are not Christians. Of the 5 adults 4 are decidedly post-Christian, one in fact growing up Dutch Reformed in the Netherlands and fleeing it. In their homes are shrines, altars, statues. They say prayers to various beings, some use Tarot cards to get in touch with the source, the speak about positive energy, they are into astrology and over Thanksgiving one very seriously remarked how she was not from this planet. They are all good, decent, loving, kind, generous friends and I am proud to be with them. Before we eat we say “a blessing”. My friends have lots of ways they do this, I pray in Jesus’ name.

Do I believe my friend’s religious practices do them a lot of good? Sure. Many of them had a lot of chaos in their lives and their religious embraces have helped bring a lot of order and generosity into their lives. It’s pretty hard not to say that’s a good thing. Do they teach me about how to love and be generous? Sure.

Let me make this one observation about their religious practices, it all tends to be about securing a blessing, spreading (generic) positive things (energy often) and establishing for themselves wonderful spiritual experiences. What do I find lacking? Specific and rigorous hope. There’s a lot of talk about things turning out OK and everything going to be alright, but deep within their religious traditions I find a pragmatism (religion is all about what I can gain from it), specific less purpose and the need to use religion to take control of your experience to get the most out of life. To be honest I find many of these same traits in Christians of various stripes. The Bible and God are all about acquiring and securing.

One day I was sharing with my good friend how I emotionally process regret by leveraging my hope in the renewal of all things. I was struck by how he immediately grabbed onto this idea as something he had never heard of before. He was raised a cultural Catholic and spent time in a Pentecostal church, the nephew of a Pentecostal minister who once expressed a desire to become a minister himself. I thought of despite all of the differences of names and practices today his religion is from his previous Christian manifestations how similar the nature of the exchange he works today is from forms of Catholicism and Pentecostalism I see today. Yes there is deep commonality in the practice of many religions in terms of what people seek and how they seek it.

This is where I return to the Bible and look again at a book like Colossians. The dramatic assertion of the claim that all creation is claimed by this Christ, the head of which is Jesus of Nazareth, is renewed and reconciled through his story: incarnation, life/teaching, suffering, death and resurrection. Our participation in this flows through our conscious following and participation in his suffering, death and resurrection.

Paul’s sermon in Acts 17 I think stands as a model. He affirms words of pagan poets but asserts that the cloudy lens through which they have been looking is made clearer in Jesus.
I like the fact that the book of Acts is honest about the response. The clouds don’t open, the heathen don’t fall all over themselves to get saved (that does happen to the Jews in Acts 2 with Peter), but a few want to hear more.

You ask about the competitive game. Again I would ask back whether it really makes sense to embrace the competitive game in lesser things (health care, foreign policy, war in Afghanistan, global warming, etc.) but to say that it does not bind for that of which all of those other issues are subsets. Again, I believe that what Jesus said and did was announce the end of the age of decay, drive a stake through its heart on the cross, and begin the age to come on Easter Sunday morning, in which we find the beginning of that which health care seeks to address but is incapable, of the peace on earth that no reasonable person imagines the Secretary of State can accomplish and the renewal of the world to a degree that no international climate agreement would dare to claim.

You are exactly right when you note that Christians have ground upon which to claim privilege over others. Everything we have has simply been a gift. Any light, any good thing, any idea, any human capacity has come to us from others, from our language, our culture, our genetic material, 100%. I would go further to add that it is the joyous doctrinal inheritance of a Calvinist to add to this that by profession all that we say, do, or try to accomplish is encumbered, limited, hobbled, and suspect by virtue of diminished and limited capacity due to sin. In a sense we are religiously endowed with a certain low expectation of our accomplishments. At the same time when I read the New Testament the engine of the Christian life is a vision of being enormously endowed with that which we cannot claim but really only receive. Paul in Ephesians and Colossians grounds our capacity for generosity to love our enemies (the goal of Jesus’ in Matt 5 above) as coming from our understanding of the accomplishments of Christ on our behalf. It is concrete, it is specific, it is, however, only realized and fleshed out through faith that the full process of the pathway behind Jesus, suffering, death and resurrection are more real than the prison stocks of Philippi or death by Roman soldier.

I am happy for my friend that he has found a lot of peace and meaning in his vision quests, in his Tarot cards, in his Four Agreements. These things have obviously brought order to his life and a tangible sense of well-being. He regularly through prayer and meditation attempts to maintain conscious contact with his source which he often generously translates when talking to me as God.

What do I want for him? I’d love something for him that in my opinion is more specific, more concrete, more vivid, more hopeful, in the end more outstanding than how I perceive what he is giving to himself right now. I also fully realize that he may well feel exactly the same way about me and that’s OK with me. I know that if he does he is doing so because he wants the best for me and I trust that he understands that in hoping what I hope for him he knows I do so wanting the best for him. I think that is exactly what motivated Paul in Acts 17.

The question of hell obviously comes up in this conversation. I am commanded by Jesus to love not only my friend but also my enemy. I’m not commanded to judge him, I can’t do that. What I will do out of love for him is obviously respect and affirm all I can and see as good within my understanding in the context of our relationship. Part of that respect, also, is to let him know what I believe when conversation arrives there. He does the same with me and I expect it from him because he does so wanting the best for me.