Do all roads lead to God?

Many people believe God can be reached by any number of different paths. The usual picture is a mountain with God at the summit and a different route winding up each face. The Hindu climbs one side, the Muslim another, the Christian a third, and somewhere near the top the paths meet and everyone discovers they were heading for the same place all along. Nobody is shut out.

The view has a name. It is called religious pluralism — the belief that every religion is a genuine route to the same God, and that the differences between them are matters of language and culture rather than substance. It is often confused with universalism, which claims something else again: that in the end everybody is saved. A person can hold either one without holding the other.

It is a generous picture, which is why so many people find it convincing. But it only works if the climbers agree about the mountain. They do not, and what they disagree about is not the scenery.

Take one question that has a plain answer. Did Jesus die on a cross? Christianity says He did, and rests everything on it. Islam says He did not — that it was only made to appear so, and that someone else was crucified in His place. Those are not two routes up one mountain. They are two accounts of whether a particular thing happened.

Ask the same sort of question anywhere else and the same thing happens. Is God a person who speaks, or an impersonal force running through everything? Is the human self divine, or fallen and needing rescue from outside itself? Has the Messiah come, or is He still awaited? These are not different emphases within one faith. They are opposite answers to identical questions.

But the routes are not the real problem. Every version of this picture assumes the same thing about the climbers: that they can climb. Paul says they cannot, and he says it about every one of us:

Ephesians 2:1 (NKJV)

And you He made alive, who were dead in trespasses and sins,

Paul is writing to living readers about what they were before God reached them, so he plainly does not mean they had stopped breathing. He means that where God was concerned there was nothing in them — no pulse, no appetite, no movement towards Him at all.

And dead does not mean idle. That is the part which matters here, because the paths on this mountain are crowded with people doing a great deal. A man can pray at fixed hours every day of his life, fast, give generously, study hard and travel a thousand miles to a holy place, and still be exactly what Paul is describing. Religious activity is not the same thing as spiritual life.

Paul also chose his word carefully. He did not write lost, or sick, or misdirected. A lost man is on the wrong road and can be redirected. A sick man is on the road and struggling, and can be helped along it. A dead man is on no road at all, and never was. He cannot pick a better one, because picking is precisely what he cannot do.

So the question, put the way it is usually put, cannot be answered with a straight yes or no. The trouble was never that we chose badly among the religions on offer. The trouble is that we were in no condition to choose anything. Every religion in the world is a set of directions for a journey, and directions are no use to a corpse.

Christianity does not offer a better route. It reports that Someone came down.

Ephesians 2:4–5 (NKJV)

But God, who is rich in mercy, because of His great love with which He loved us, even when we were dead in trespasses, made us alive together with Christ (by grace you have been saved),

Look at the turn Paul makes. He names the condition once more — dead in trespasses — and then the sentence turns on two words: “But God.”

Every action after those words belongs to God. He is rich in mercy. He loved us. He made us alive. The man in the sentence does nothing at all; he is the one it is done to.

That order is the answer to the question. A man is not made alive because he believed. He believes because he has been made alive. God gives the life first, and everything the man does afterwards — trusting Christ, turning from his sin, praying — he does with a life he did not give himself.

Nobody climbed. God came down.