The Challenge of Islam to Christians by David Pawson

Author:David Pawson [Pawson, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton
Published: 2015-03-11T16:00:00+00:00

8

Reality

‘All the religions in the world could be wrong but only one can be right!’ These were the words with which I began to address a grammar school assembly of 850 boys, having been pressed to respond to a buzz of interest in Islam, following the visit of a Muslim speaker. I spent the rest of my talk focusing on the ‘real’ issues and received a spontaneous ovation.

The real question is, to quote Pontius Pilate: ‘What is truth?’ ‘Truth’ and ‘reality’ are synonyms in any English thesaurus, but they are also the very same word in the biblical languages of Hebrew and Greek and may be interchangeably translated. When Paul talked about ‘the only true God’, he meant: ‘the only real God, the only God who really exists’. The answer to Pilate’s question was standing a few feet in front of him, for Jesus claimed to be ‘The truth’. He was not just saying: ‘I’m for real,’ but: ‘I’m the Reality behind all other realities,’ the kind of statement that forces you to decide whether he was mad, bad or God!

‘Truth’ has other synonyms, such as ‘actuality’, ‘accuracy’, ‘authenticity’, all of which highlight the vital issue of discerning which claims to truth correspond to the real facts of our existence. It does matter whether our universe is the result of chance or choice, whether there is a God or not and whether we are responsible to him or simply to ourselves and each other.

The search for truth is hindered by our preference for fantasy rather than fact, illustrated by our leisure pursuits when we can choose our interests and activities as over against our daily work in the ‘real’ world. Books and films such as Lord of the Flies and Lord of the Rings are greater attractions than anything about the Lord of the universe. Attention has shifted from objective reality ‘out there’ to subjective reality ‘in here’. But ‘true’ religion must be primarily concerned with the former rather than the latter.

However meaningful and supportive any religious faith may be to its adherents, we must still insist that this is no more than a placebo unless its tenets correspond to the realities of life in the universe and are in that sense ‘scientific’. Otherwise we are living in delusion, which is ultimately self-deceptive and self-destructive. We need to find the truth that is as true for everybody as for anybody, and the truth that remains true whether it is believed by anybody or nobody.

It does not necessarily make much difference whether we believe in a divine being called ‘God’ or not. Far more significant is the question: ‘What kind of God do you (or do you not) believe in?’ It has been said that we should never condemn an atheist until we have found out what kind of God he was told to believe in! When we ask this, we soon discover how radically different the major religions are from each other, the mutual contradictions preventing all but the naïve and ignorant from thinking of them as basically the same.

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