At the end of The Last Battle, the final book in The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis, Emeth the Calormen finds himself face to face with the great lion Aslan who is a stand-in for Christ throughout the series. Emeth is ashamed because he has always worshiped the Calormen god Tash and denied Aslan. But Aslan reassures him: “Child, all the service thou hast done to Tash I account as service done to me.” Emeth asks if this means Tash and he are the same, but Aslan growls and says, “It is false.” He then proceeds to trash Tash for being an evil, false god.
The salvation of Emeth sometimes causes consternation for evangelical Protestants who see in it a weakening of the claim to a unique salvation through Christianity. But the vision of Lewis is perhaps closer to that of evangelicals than that of Pope Francis, who caused controversy with his remarks in Singapore last week:
All religions are a path to reach God. They are — I make a comparison — like different languages, different idioms, to get there. But God is God for everyone. And since God is God for everyone, we are all children of God. ‘But my God is more important than yours!’ Is this true? There is only one God, and our religions are languages, paths to reach God. Some are Sikh, some are Muslim, some are Hindu, some are Christian, but they are different paths.
Unsurprisingly, the pope’s remarks have drawn criticism, but what he said is not substantially different from things said by his immediate predecessors. Pope St. John Paul II was often criticized for his participation in interfaith prayer and dialogue. He said at a general audience in 1998 that other religions are “different routes” that attempt to answer the same human desire for communion with God.
“It must first be kept in mind that every quest of the human spirit for truth and goodness, and in the last analysis for God, is inspired by the Holy Spirit,” he said. “The various religions arose precisely from this primordial human openness to God.”
Pope Benedict XVI understood other religions in a similar manner. In Truth and Tolerance, he wrote: “Salvation does not lie in religions as such, but it is connected to them, in as much as, and to the extent that, they lead men toward the one good, toward the search for God, for truth, for love.”
So that’s it, all religions are basically the same. We can all just slap a Coexist bumper sticker on our cars and be done with it. Right? Not quite.
Catholic teaching about other religions is different from that of many Protestants, but that does not mean it is relativistic. The Second Vatican Council taught that “Christ, present to us in his Body, which is the Church, is the one Mediator and the unique way of salvation.” In this, Catholic teaching not only reflects the teaching of Jesus, but also the teaching of the early Church Fathers, particularly St. Cyprian of Carthage, that extra ecclesiam nulla salus (there is no salvation outside of the Church).
Nevertheless, the council also spoke approvingly of most other religions, regarding them as natural developments in the history of human beings seeking union with God. In the document Nostra aetate, the council specifically referenced Hinduism, Buddhism, and Islam for the elements of truth within them: “The Catholic Church rejects nothing that is true and holy in these religions. She regards with sincere reverence those ways of conduct and of life, those precepts and teachings which, though differing in many aspects from the ones she holds and sets forth, nonetheless often reflect a ray of that Truth which enlightens all men.”
This may seem contradictory on the surface, but only if we think of religion as a kind of institutional branding rather than a natural phenomenon. All religions seek not only the truth of our existence but also relief from the problems of the human condition. They are means of reaching up and out as the human spirit seeks to move beyond itself, and any authentic reaching towards the divine is met by the Holy Spirit, who responds to our prayers — who is, in fact, the catalyst for those prayers in the first place.
Still, while most of the world’s religions reflect an authentic reaching out and seeking of God, in Christianity we encounter the opposite: a movement of God in our direction. Jesus says in John 14:6, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” This is neither him passing judgment on the religions of the world nor his proposing of a new, better religion to replace them. In the Incarnation, God has come to be with us, seeking us out so that he might give himself to us and save us from the results of our narrow-minded, self-destructive attitudes and behaviors. Jesus answers the natural longing of the human heart not with a proposition but with a personal encounter. Jesus is the end of religion, the fulfillment of all that human religion longs for and imperfectly grasps after.
Recognizing that all religions are paths towards God is not the same as saying that all religious teaching is of equal value. Nor does it deny in any way the necessity of Christians to evangelize. On the contrary, this recognition makes the need to share the good news that much more apparent. There is a great deal that we Christians can learn from interfaith dialogue, including — as Pope Francis implies — a different language for describing the common challenges of humanity, new approaches to prayer and contemplation, and even ways of breaking out of the institutional malaise that has crept in across the Christian denominational spectrum. But what we Christians can contribute to that dialogue is continuously to point away from ourselves and to Jesus.
The reason there is no salvation outside of the Church is not because the Church is the best religion, or the one that is the most right, but because the Church is not a religion at all. The Church is the body of Christ, through which the God our hearts long for comes to us and unites himself with us. The Catholic Church is what salvation looks like. Therefore, any sincere expression of the heart’s longing for the divine is in some way a movement in the direction of the Church.
Metropolitan Kallistos Ware expresses this in his landmark work The Orthodox Church: “We know where the Church is but we cannot be sure where it is not.” In the sacraments of the Church, Jesus claims us, uniting us to his life, death, and resurrection. This is the sure path. But God’s love for us is great, despite our divisions and self-righteousness. We cannot say that a person who walks a different path that is consonant with the truth of Christ will not eventually come to the same fount of love and truth.
Did Pope Francis have all this in mind? I have no clairvoyance that would tell me. His words resemble those of past popes, but his predecessors were often quick to add the context I have mentioned, whereas Pope Francis seems content to let that be implied. Some people may see that as a fudge, a kind of special pleading on the pope’s behalf, but it is nothing of the sort.
The Catholic way of receiving any kind of teaching, particularly from the pope, is to read it through the lens of the tradition from which it came, not to excise it into a sound bite and then make assumptions about it. And in the case of Pope Francis, it helps that part of that tradition includes his magisterial teaching that has repeatedly asserted the uniqueness of Christ for salvation.
For example, at a general audience in 2021, the pope said:
[Jesus] is the only Redeemer: there are no co-redeemers with Christ. He is the only one. He is the Mediator par excellence. He is the Mediator. Each prayer we raise to God is through Christ, with Christ, and in Christ and it is fulfilled thanks to his intercession. The Holy Spirit extends Christ’s mediation through every time and every place: there is no other name by which we can be saved: Jesus Christ, the only Mediator between God and humanity (see Acts 4:12).
Unless we think the Holy Father has forgotten all that he has said and believed on the subject, it seems logical to assume that these ideas should be understood together.
All who are saved will be saved by Jesus Christ, in and through his Church, but many who practice other religions may not know it. Like Emeth, their faithful following of their religion has been leading them in the direction of the true God all along without them realizing it. But unlike in Lewis’s view, in which this happens almost by accident, despite the evil of other religions, in the Catholic view this happens because the seeds of truth are already there in other religions. A good Hindu, or a good Buddhist, or a good Muslim — they do not need to become Christians because the Christians are right and their religion is wrong, but the ones who hear the good news and become Christians will do so precisely because the good things they found in their religions have compelled them to see that only in Christ is all they have ever longed for fulfilled.
