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Response

There’s a serious problem with this question, because not all religions are trying to ‘lead us’ to God.  When people speak of “religion” they often mean some sort of fellowship or intimacy with the divine.  The fact is many religions have no such aim.  There’s a whole multitude of different religions with a wide variety of objectives.  Let’s look at some examples.

First there are occult religions such as witchcraft, magic and some elements of the New Age.  These are concerned with spirits, often evil spirits that need to be placated or manipulated.   Occult religions are not about God, let alone intimacy with Him.

Second, there are what you might call imperial religions.  They are not about God either.  They are about the highest political authority, which demands total allegiance – from the divine kings in Egypt and Mesopotamia, through the Caesars of the Roman Empire, to the Shinto emperors of Japan – together with the more recent examples of Hitler, Mao and Stalin. 

Third, there areascetic religions, such as Jainism, Buddhism and some strands in Hinduism.  They are not about God either, but about self-renunciation.  The self is renounced and mortified in order to diminish its grip and to rid the person of being tied to this world.  Sometimes, as in Buddhism, it is supposed to lead, after many lives, to the final elimination of the self, which is absorbed into the impersonal One or Monad.  It has nothing whatever to do with intimacy with God.  Indeed, in most branches of these ascetic religions there is no God to be intimate with!

Fourth, there are the bourgeois religions, which feed the religious instincts of the leisured classes and cost their adherents nothing apart from massive financial contributions.  They are bodies like Christian Science, Spiritualism, Scientology, Theosophy and many of the self-improvement cults.  They are all about man, not God and intimacy with Him.

Fifth, there are prophetic religions, which arise from the dynamic leadership and moral challenge of a great leader and tend to sweep across the world within a century of their origin.  Islam, which made enormous inroads into the Middle East and North Africa within a few decades of the death of Muhammad, is one example.   However, even Islam, despite its high view of God, does not offer the worshipper intimacy with God: “Allah reveals his message.  He never reveals himself.”  The worshiper prays to him but cannot be said in any way to know Allah or have intimacy with him.

Then there are the revelatory religions.  There have only been two (closely connected) religions in world history that teach that God can be personally known by the believer.  Only Judaism and its “child” Christianity maintain that God has given a reliable and personal disclosure of Himself to humankind.  Judaism tells of God’s revelation of Himself through His mighty deeds of deliverance for Israel and through the words of the prophets.

The other faith that developed this strain of divine revelation is Christianity – or rather Jesus Christ.  He claimed to be the fulfilment of all God’s promises to Israel and to be the final revelation of God to humankind.  He was Emmanuel, “God with us”.  The apostle Paul claimed, “In him the whole fullness of deity dwells in bodily form” (Colossians 2:9).  And so the Christian can say with the apostle Paul, “I know whom I have believed”, or with apostle John, “by this we know that he abides in us, by the Spirit which he has given us” (2 Timothy 1:12; 1 John 3:24).  Intimacy with God is what the Christian faith is all about.  That cannot be claimed for any of the others.

It really is ludicrous to suppose that all religions lead to God, when Buddhism does not believe that there is any God at all, when Islam makes him so far removed and when Hinduism offers extinction after many incarnations.  How can all religions lead to God when they have such different beliefs about God, the afterlife and how one can attain it?

Further Reading

But don’t all religions lead to God, Michael Green (Sovereign/IVP 2002)

FAQ Disclaimer:

FAQ responses are designed to promote clear biblical thinking about subjects that are often difficult and confusing. The responses are all considered to be compatible with the Evangelical Alliance’s basis of faith but beyond that should not be assumed to represent the Evangelical Alliance’s ‘official standpoint’ on any particular doctrine or issue.