The Parable of the Soda Can

            Imagine that two men are sitting on the patio of a run down café in the dry heat of late July. Both are staring intently at the same can of soda, studying it as best as they can, but neither one of them is moving. Their field of view is limited to one side of the can. Roger, the man on the left, observes that the can is aluminum and has a flashy label. Benjamin, the man on the right, also sees that the can is aluminum, but he sees the boring list of ingredients. If we were to interrupt their bizarre obsession and ask them what the can was, they would give us different answers.            

            “Well, it’s aluminum and has citrus breeze written on it in bold letters,” Roger might say. Benjamin would quickly contest Roger’s description.

            “It’s not as simple as that, Roger. I agree that our can is aluminum, but it also contains carbonated water, corn syrup, and something I can’t pronounce. There’s a little chart here that shows daily nutritional values and a sign that says please recycle inside a circle of arrows.”

            “Where in the world are you getting that?” Roger would demand. Hopefully, there aren’t people who debate what a pop-can looks like, but this example illustrates a problem with world religions. Some have used this analogy to assert that all religions point to God in an abstract way, a sort of divine jigsaw puzzle called true religion or the community of faith. It’s an attempt to combine all that’s been theorized about God, particularly the nice parts, so that people like Roger and Benjamin will stop fighting. The result of this is a hazy confusion of religious concepts, western materialism, and eastern mysticism. No reasonable person can be expected to hold such a view. Instead, there may be a religion that already exists that fits all the important views, that reconciles our conceptions of God with reality. 

              To find this religion, we should brainstorm a few of the characteristics given to God’s name throughout history. For example, God is one, God is many, God is love, and God hates. God is holy and God is human. God is peaceful and God is militaristic. God is a creator and sustainer, local and universal. He gives morality, wisdom and order.

            With a general idea of how humanity has seen God, we should look at the specific religions and philosophies these ideas are derived from.

            The Greeks once held the greatest empire in the known world, and their mythological religion was as extensive and complex as their conquests.  From this Mediterranean culture we see the perspectives of God’s humanity, and that He is many.  Zeus, Apollo, Diana, Poseidon, Hera, Ares, Artemis, and Athena are just a few of the gods the Greeks revered.  Intertwined with this concept of many gods was the comical un-divinity of Olympus. The gods were often shortsighted, short-tempered, lustful, stupid, and often thwarted. They tricked each other, humans, and got tricked by humans and demi-gods. The scandals and drunkenness of the Greek pantheon show us gods who are more human than divine.

Polytheism has dominated the religious world in many societies.  The Canaanites had various versions of Baal, the Chinese had their gods, the Greeks had their heroes, and tribal people groups had animistic spirits. The less common view of God as a trinity, not to be confused with polytheism, occurs in Hinduism and Christianity. All of these express the idea that God is many.

There is a common theme in human religion that God is local, related to the people who He made. Yahweh, the God of the Jews, best demonstrates this. He is a God who makes promises to specific bloodlines and curses other bloodlines. Many polytheistic deities are tied to certain cities or nations. The trend that manifests is that all cultures see God as exclusively their God.

In reaction are the ideas of a universal God, like what new age philosophy has proposed. This perspective says that God is above locality and the divisions of geography and ethnicity humans place on each other. Those who advocate this position often seek for a basic unity of living things, going as far as to desire absolution into a mystical force.

            From the topic of unity, we can come to the two seemingly opposite conceptions of God. God is peaceful and God is militaristic. Islam presents itself as the most potent representation of a militaristic God whose followers seek to establish a theocracy, the Caliphate. Islam’s history is as bellicose as military marches, and understandably so. We find military religion offensive, but it was once true that almost all religion was military. The sons of Abraham drove out the Canaanites in the name of Yahweh and Alexander the Great razed cities in the name of Hellenism. Both Egyptians and Romans fought for a deified king, and the Norsemen fought for the ancestors they worshipped.

On the other side are the Quakers, a Christian pacifist group, who emphasize God’s will for peace. Non-violence is a prominent force in a number of the world religions. Some see violence as evil in itself while others see it as circumstantially justifiable, but repugnant.

            God is also presented as being holy and being one. Holy here isn’t defined as having to do with religious form or moral excellence, but with peculiarity. Judaism and Islam represent this view well. God is in every sense strange, other than, unlike anything that exists.  Here God’s separation from humanity is promoted. Abraham’s descendants refused to indulge in sculpting and the engraving of images of God so to avoid the idolatry of imagining God is like us. Judaism and Islam are also fiercely monotheistic; it’s heresy in Islam to make God anything other than a singular unit.

            All religions portray God as the creator of the universe. This has different insinuations in the different faiths, but it communicates that the universe had a purposeful beginning.

            The role of religion most recognized by western society is its identity as a giver of morality. Even this is being minimized and libeled as society moves away from reasonable faith to muddled, sociological mysticisms, but the majority of humanity throughout history agrees that morality comes from God. In contrast, of course, is the cult of explanation that’s enthroned in colleges and institutions of narrow research. They contend that morality comes from environment and upbringing alone. I won’t debate the merits of such a chicken and egg philosophy here, but it must be included as a consideration.  

            As we know, different religions emphasize the various viewpoints brought up above, but there is one religion that includes them all, a sort of panoramic view of God. While Islam, Buddhism, and Judaism certainly have admirable aspects, they are incomplete. It’s as if they are separate parts of a symphony, and they miss the whole point of the composition. Those religions can’t possibly contain all those characteristics and seemingly paradoxical positions. The following that does and has is the faith of a Galilean craftsman, murdered on trumped up charges. It’s the belief in a Jewish man who claimed deity, a belief in Jesus.

            The God of the Bible is one and many; in fact, He is the only God who can make that claim. Allah who sits in solitary confinement can’t and won’t claim to be more than one, and the roaring, tumbling confusions of the gods the Hindus support are anything but one. Father, Son, and Spirit, the three powers yoked into one alone satisfy this requirement. As for the thousands of lesser deities that other religions have named, Christianity presents an alternative view. Angels and demons satisfy the observation that beings beyond humans, but lower than God, are at work.

My God is also love and hate. We see these as contradictions because we, like the Greeks, view love through a primarily romantic lens. Granted, familial love still has a place in our society, but it’s greatly underemphasized. As anyone knows, the love for family is not very romantic, and familial love is closer to the love of God than any valentine’s card can come. Love is an act of humility and goodwill, and isn’t always accompanied by compassion. The greatest love is love that’s given in the absence of compassion. To pray for one’s enemies, to bless those who curse you is real love. It can’t be better displayed than the words of Jesus the Christ, “Father, forgive them. They know not what they do!”  Who has greater love than He who asked God to forgive his murderers, who offers His kingdom to thieves, criminals, and traitors? Therefore, God’s hatred, His flaming anger against wicked men only serves to stoke the fires of His love. The deeper the offense against God, the more extravagant is His offer of redemption.

            Christianity is further proven as the most complete religion by the fact that its God is both Holy and human. Allah is too sovereign, distant and cold to be loved. The gods of the Greeks are too human and flawed to be worshiped. The Christian God claims a higher status than any other religion. He claims to create, sustain, and direct the universe according to His will. Yet, Jesus is also offered to us as the picture of the Father. What man was more humble than Jesus? I defy anyone to find an example. Even our own revered saints, St. Francis, Mother Teresa, John the Beloved, pale in comparison. Yet again my God fulfills both requirements where others can only fit one. Jesus is more human than any other deity presented in other faiths. He’s a man of the working class, a Jewish man, and the kind of man that children love. We profane Jesus by making Him a stoic philosopher. He is a man who weeps, who overturns tables in fury, a man of physical strength and of no particular attractiveness except His profound kindness. He is all this while He is the being who was present at the beginning of the world, a being uncreated. By His actions He reveals just how unlike He is to us. We curse our enemies and spit insults at each other, but He suffered and gave no threats to His abusers. We thirst for the recognition lavished on philanthropists, while He embraced the hatred and disgust given in response to His care for the poor. He is holy, unlike us, yet like us.

            More controversially, the God of Christianity is both peaceful and militaristic. The same Jesus who allowed evil men to kill him is the Messiah Isaiah prophesied as trampling the wicked in His wrath. The shepherd who made a way for the sheep also warned that the goats would be cast into eternal fire. Here, though, I must make a strong distinction. In one sense, Islam and Christianity have the same end. They both seek to establish a worldwide theocracy, but Islam puts the responsibility on Muslims while Christianity puts the burden of the work on Jesus. That’s why the Christian faith can be both militaristic and peaceful, while Islam is only militaristic. Christians don’t have to conquer lands because Jesus will do it when He comes back to the earth. We don’t have to frighten with death because we can offer life that supersedes the threats of thugs and terrorists. Our God is the God of armies, but is also the God who restrains His anger, the Prince of Peace.

            The Christian God is creator, sustainer, universal and local, and the source of wisdom, morality, and order. He created the processes that form life, that adapt to life, and His hand keeps the universe from breaking down. He is God of the Jews, but also God of the Gentiles. From His mouth comes sound wisdom and straight morals. He is a God who makes laws and rules, from gravity to the Ten Commandments. Yet, out of the order creativity and innovation flow, like improvisation in a jazz combo. Christian morality is by far more useful than other religions because it operates on principles that apply to every generation regardless of the time period in which they live. The man who says the Bible is irrelevant either hasn’t read it, or he hasn’t read it honestly. Christian morality has weathered every storm of ethical fads, imperial perversions, backward western progression, eastern mystic pitfalls, and violent pagan superstition. Even though our society is trading the polished silver of Christian ethics for the dung caves of philosophers, it will be proven truer, as it always has been. 

            The last way that Christianity proves itself to be the most complete religion, which I didn’t mention above, is by its honest inclusion of doubt. Job’s lamentations, the agony of David, the pessimism of Solomon, and the words of Jesus prove this. A Christian who can’t sympathize with the questions of the atheist isn’t very far along in their faith. This is perhaps the most astonishing quality of our God; He has felt the ache of abandonment that all humans feel. “My God, why have you forsaken me?”

            The parable of the soda can is this; Christianity fulfills the desire to find the full truth, it is the culmination of human religion, the pinnacle. All of the partial perspectives that humanity has seen are summed up in Father, Son, and Spirit.