🌍 World Religions — Unit 1: Introduction to World Religions

Orientation

Every pastor will eventually stand where Paul stood on Mars Hill — surrounded by people who worship something, but not the living God. In Cuba it may be a neighbor who keeps a small altar to Santería's orishas alongside a photograph of Jesus. In Mexico it may be a curandera down the street, or a family that mixes rosary prayers with rituals passed down from before the conquest. In your own congregation it may be a new believer who still is not quite sure how the Christian gospel relates to the Buddhist meditation practice she grew up with, or a young man wrestling with what his Muslim coworker actually believes, or a widow who has begun attending a Jehovah's Witness Bible study because a neighbor was kind to her in her grief. A pastor who has never thought carefully about other faiths will either dismiss these encounters with contempt, or drift into vague generalities that satisfy no one and answer nothing. This course exists to prepare you for something better than either response.

We study world religions not because all paths lead to the same place — Scripture does not teach that, and this course will not pretend otherwise — but because love for our neighbor requires that we understand what he actually believes before we speak to him about Christ. Ignorance is not humility. It is simply ignorance, and it makes for bad shepherding. A doctor who refuses to learn what disease he is treating is not being modest; he is being negligent. The same is true of a pastor who refuses to learn what beliefs are actually shaping the people God has placed in his care.

This first unit lays a foundation for the eleven units that follow. We will not yet examine any single religion in detail — that begins with Judaism in Unit 2. Instead, we will ask three foundational questions that will govern our approach to every religion this course studies: Why do human beings worship at all? How should a follower of Christ approach an unfamiliar religious system? And what framework will help us compare very different religions fairly, without either flattening their real differences or losing sight of what makes the gospel unique among them?

I. The Universal Religious Impulse

Wherever you find human beings, you find worship. Virtually no culture has ever been documented with no religious practice at all. Every people group that has ever been studied has believed in something beyond itself, has offered something to that something, and has shaped its life around that belief — its calendar, its ethics, its rites of passage, even its architecture. This is not an accident of history, and it is not, as some modern skeptics claim, a mere byproduct of evolutionary psychology that clever people eventually outgrow. Scripture's own explanation is that it is a signature left by the Creator on every human heart. Ecclesiastes 3:11 says that God "has put eternity in their hearts." Paul, writing to the Romans, says that what can be known about God "is evident within them, for God has shown it to them," because His invisible attributes "are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even His eternal power and Godhead" (Romans 1:19–20).

A Jewish legend about the young Abraham captures this well. Abraham's father, the story goes, kept an idol shop, and one day left the boy in charge while he ran an errand. A woman came in wanting the strongest idol in the shop, one able to guard her household. Abraham told her to return in an hour, and when she did, she found the shop smashed to pieces except for one idol, a stick placed in its hand. Abraham explained that the idols had fought over which among them was greatest, and this one had won. "It's made of stone," the woman objected. "A statue couldn't do such a thing." "Why worship it, then?" Abraham replied. The legend illustrates a truth Scripture teaches directly: man is not first and foremost homo sapiens, thinking man, but homo adorans, worshiping man. Worship, once diverted from its rightful object, does not simply vanish; it finds another. That single insight underlies every religion this course will study.

This means every religion in the world, however far it has wandered from the truth, began with a true instinct: that there is something greater than ourselves, and that we owe it something. Missionaries and anthropologists have documented this again and again in the most unlikely places. Don Richardson's account of the Sawi people of New Guinea, cannibals who prized treachery as a virtue, tells of tribal legends that spoke of a coming "peace child" whose exchange between warring villages would guarantee lasting peace — a myth God had apparently used to prepare that very tribe to understand the gospel of Christ, the true Peace Child, when missionaries finally arrived. What differs from religion to religion — and differs enormously — is not whether the impulse to worship exists, but what that "something greater" is understood to be, and what is understood to be owed to it. A course in world religions, rightly taught, is not a course in relativism. It is a course in taking seriously what Paul himself took seriously in Athens: that the nations, groping in the dark, are nevertheless reaching for something real, "though He is not far from each one of us" (Acts 17:27).

II. Paul at the Areopagus: A Model for Studying Other Faiths

Acts 17 gives us the finest model in all of Scripture for how a follower of Christ approaches an unfamiliar religious system. Paul arrives in Athens, a city Luke tells us was "given over to idols" (Acts 17:16), and his spirit was provoked within him. Any pastor who has walked through a market lined with Santería supply shops, or driven past a roadside shrine to Santa Muerte, knows something of what Paul felt that day. But notice carefully what Paul does next, because it is not what many of us would do in his place. He does not stand on a street corner shouting condemnation at people he has not bothered to understand. He walks the city. He looks carefully at the objects of their worship. He even reads their inscriptions — including one dedicated to "the unknown god" — and quotes their own poets back to them by name, citing both Epimenides and Aratus (Acts 17:28). Only after this careful, patient, respectful observation does he open his mouth to speak.

And when he finally speaks, he builds a bridge before he ever delivers the confrontation. "I perceived that in all things you are very religious," he tells them — not mockery, not sarcasm, but a genuine acknowledgment of their real spiritual hunger, however misdirected. He starts from what they already believe and moves patiently toward what they do not yet know: the God who made the world and everything in it, who does not dwell in temples made with hands as though He needed anything, who has determined the times and boundaries of every nation so that they would seek Him, who commands all people everywhere to repent, because He has fixed a day in which He will judge the world in righteousness through the Man He raised from the dead (Acts 17:24–31). Paul's method was not compromise of a single doctrine. His conclusion — repent, because judgment is coming through the risen Christ — was every bit as exclusive and urgent as any sermon he ever preached in a synagogue. But his method leading up to that conclusion was respectful, informed, and relational before it was ever confrontational. That is the model for this entire course, and we will return to it again and again as we study each new religion.

III. A Framework for Comparison

To keep from getting lost in the fascinating but overwhelming details of any single religion, it helps to ask the same four questions of every system we study in this course. Every religion, whether its own adherents could articulate it this clearly or not, gives some kind of answer to each of these four questions, and comparing those answers side by side is what will let this course move beyond mere trivia into genuine pastoral usefulness.

First, what is ultimate reality? Is it a personal God who can be known and who speaks, an impersonal force that simply is, many gods each with limited power, or no god at all — only matter and energy? Second, what is the fundamental human problem? Is it sin against a holy God who has been offended, ignorance of a truth that was always available, disordered attachment and desire, karma accumulated across past lives, or simply the absence of enough willpower or right technique? Third, what is the path out of that problem? Is it grace received by faith in what Another has done, right conduct accumulated through a lifetime, correct performance of ritual, enlightenment achieved through meditation, submission to a set of laws, or relentless self-effort? Fourth, what is the ultimate destiny of a human life? Is it bodily resurrection and eternal, conscious fellowship with a personal God, absorption into an impersonal cosmic whole where individual identity dissolves, an endless cycle of rebirth governed by one's accumulated karma, or simple extinction at death with nothing beyond it?

Christianity's answers to these four questions are not simply one option among equally valid others sitting on a shelf — Scripture is emphatic that Jesus is "the way, the truth, and the life," and that "no one comes to the Father except through" Him (John 14:6). But asking these same four questions of every religion we study, unit by unit, will let you see with real clarity exactly where each system agrees with the biblical picture on some point, where it borrows from a true instinct planted by the Creator but then distorts or corrupts it, and where it departs from the biblical picture altogether. That clarity, developed carefully over the course of this semester, is what will make you genuinely useful in an actual pastoral conversation with a real person holding real beliefs, rather than merely informed with facts you cannot apply.

IV. The Christian's Posture Toward Other Faiths

Serious, Bible-believing Christian thinkers have long debated exactly how to understand the eternal status of those who have genuinely never heard the gospel, and how boldly or how gently to engage the sincere, often devout adherents of other faiths we meet in daily life. Three broad positions are commonly discussed in the literature, and you should be able to explain all three clearly, even though this course will not force you into any single camp on the finer points. Exclusivism holds that explicit, conscious faith in Jesus Christ is necessary for salvation, and that general revelation, while entirely real and leaving all people without excuse before God, is not by itself sufficient to save anyone. Inclusivism holds that Christ's atoning work on the cross remains the sole and only ground of salvation for anyone who is ever saved, but allows for the possibility that God may apply the benefits of that atoning work to some who respond in genuine faith to the limited light they have actually received, even without explicit historical knowledge of Christ's name or gospel. Pluralism holds that many different religious paths lead equally and validly to God, or to whatever one wishes to call ultimate reality — a position that runs directly against the plain sense of passages like John 14:6 and Acts 4:12 ("nor is there salvation in any other, for there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved"), and one that this course does not treat as a live theological option for a Christian minister to hold, though you should certainly be able to explain clearly why a pluralist believes what he believes when you meet one.

This course will not attempt to resolve every question the exclusivism-inclusivism debate raises for us — faithful, Bible-believing pastors across many denominations have disagreed sincerely on its finer points for generations, and our final unit, a full theology-of-religions capstone, will treat that particular debate far more fully than we can here in an introductory unit. What every single unit in this course will hold in common, without exception, is confidence in the uniqueness and sufficiency of Christ, genuine respect for the actual people who hold other beliefs, and scrupulous honesty about what those beliefs actually teach — not a caricature of them, not a strawman easy to knock down, but what thoughtful adherents of that faith would themselves recognize as a fair description.

V. Why This Course Matters for Pastors in Cuba and Mexico

This is not an abstract academic exercise for the pastors this course was specifically built to serve. In Cuba, decades of official state atheism did not succeed in eliminating religion, as its architects had hoped — it drove much of it underground instead, and left Santería, Espiritismo, and other Afro-Cuban traditions deeply woven into the fabric of daily life, often practiced quietly alongside a nominal Catholic identity, or even alongside a genuine evangelical profession of faith that has never fully confronted these older loyalties. A pastor who assumes his congregation is free of such influences simply because no one speaks of them from the pulpit is very often mistaken.

In Mexico, indigenous traditions blended centuries ago with Catholic practice brought by the conquistadors to produce distinctive and enduring forms of folk religion — the widespread veneration of Santa Muerte, the ongoing ministry of the curandero or curandera in nearly every town, syncretistic festivals that layer indigenous ritual beneath a thin Catholic surface — forms of belief and practice a pastor will meet in nearly every congregation he ever serves, whether it is openly discussed from the pulpit or quietly present in the background of family life. A pastor who cannot correctly name what he is actually looking at will very often misdiagnose it, treating a case of ancestor veneration as simple superstition, or a genuine spiritual bondage as mere cultural quirk — and a misdiagnosed spiritual condition rarely heals, no matter how sincerely the pastor prays over it.

This course will give particular, sustained attention, later in our study, to exactly these traditions your own ministry context is most likely to actually encounter — not as a brief footnote tacked onto the end of the semester, but as core material woven throughout, given the same careful treatment as the major world religions every seminary course of this kind is expected to cover. Our aim throughout is neither contempt for those who hold these beliefs, nor a soft-pedaled tolerance that refuses to name error as error, but the same disciplined combination Paul modeled at the Areopagus: patient understanding joined to a clear and urgent proclamation of the risen Christ.

— Dr. Wayne Cook
Chapala Theological Seminary

Submit Exam & Check Pass Reset