Going back many years when I was a young boy, I harbored a deep fascination with mythology: And not just any mythology, but Greek Mythology. I suppose the interest I developed had something to do with my reading of the dictionary at a young age where I studied the pictures of those terms that where drawn on its pages. Most of all, the strange and intricately fashioned creatures, such as fauns, satyrs and even a number of the Olympian gods, served as some of the earliest experiences of awe and wonder that I can recall. Naturally at the time I had no idea that these images were representative of a pagan tradition that was a stark contrariety to my parents’, and what would be my own, faith. However, in spite of this some years later, I began to think about all the other religions of the world and wonder why it was that my own, Christianity, would be the only true one. After all, I had grown something of a respect for Greek Mythology and its stories, even if they were not true. They had been handed down from generation to generation, presumably (though the authors of many epic mythic works-i.e. Ovid, Apollodorus and others-obviously took artistic liberties with them), and as such were merely tales that were created for the amusement of its hearers: Or were they? Nevertheless, I found it difficult to believe that of all those who put their faith in these myths were wrong in so much as they were anachronisms and thus incapable of exposure to the ‘right’ religion. This goes for all those who are raised in a culture that is founded upon some other foreign religion. In short, why are there so many religions? Certainly God has not allowed these reverential systems to crop up for the purpose of deceiving the majority of the world. What I would like to explore is the question of why we should expect one religion to be right when there are so many others offering contrary, but presumably equally compelling claims? Also, why there are so many religions in the first place and what this has to do with the one and true God?

First I would like to narrow down the possibilities concerning all the religions of the world and their truth claims. I have consolidated them into four simple possibilities. The first is, all the religions of the world are true, which in itself is inconceivable and should be immediately stricken from the other three as illegitimate-since in order for them all to be true they must claim the same thing which they do not. The second is that some of them are true and some are not. This position is that of a subjective reading of religious doctrine. For instance, Buddhism and Christianity involve a self denial, therefore, in this respect, they are the same and reflect a truly profound fact about human nature and the spiritual. But, this assumes that one can pick and choose parts of a doctrine. One must take the whole of it, or none at all, otherwise they are creating their own ‘religion’ (i.e. The New Age Movement). And yet the third option is that all of them are false. An atheist, agnostic or even a deist I suspect would side with this statement. However, this precluding the issue of whether there is a God or not, must make the bold deduction that God does not wish to reveal Himself, and indeed that would be a very confusing and mysterious God. For, the very nature of the Divine is clarity and truth; remember God is not the author of confusion.

The last option is the one I put my money on, it is this, ‘one of them must be right, to the exclusion of all others.’ If God is to reveal Himself, the message must be completely clear and precise, or at least concerning those things He finds it necessary to reveal to us. For if some of them were true, then none of them can be. And if God merely reveals Himself to every heart without the aid of some objective standard, and if the heart of Man is truly corrupt as the Bible says, then there would be no hope of any consistent revelation. One person would say ‘this’ is right, another ‘that’ is right and so forth. So, in conclusion, the fact that only one religion can be ‘right’ is not only the logical one but the traditional one.

As to why God has allowed so many religions to exist may still be a mystery. I think that it is not so that the diligent will ultimately find the ‘right’ one, but that religion is not what we here are discussing. Christianity, in my view, is not a religion in the same sense as Buddhism, Islam, and all the others. This is because religion, as the etymology of the word suggests is to ‘bind back’ or reestablish. It is a human effort, in other words. It is Man reaching up to God, trying to define, not the person through Whom all things have been made, but the absence of what he is missing. In contrast, all the myths of the world, all the religions, culminate into a question, “Who is God?� Some got so far as to tell the tale, as C. S. Lewis mentioned, of the myth of the dying God. And as the author of the beloved children’s book series said in the title of one of his essays is that Myth Became Fact. The mythos, the question Man had, was answered in the chronicles of the savior and a people that were chosen to bring forth this God, the one and true God. So, what we have in Christ Jesus is not ‘a’ religion, but what has already been ‘bound back’; we to Him and He to us.

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