Are World Religions Halfway to God?

In Jules Verne’s Round the Moon (1870), a group of nineteenth-century gun enthusiasts creates a bullet-shaped rocket that takes them to the moon. Unfortunately, the astronauts’ pet dog dies on the way, and they need to dispose of the body. Their space expert assures them that as long as they move fast, they can shove it out the window and all will be well. They accomplish a quick open and shut of the hatch, and the dog floats away into space.

We understand the vacuum of space better today. The result of such an error would be more like what happened to Matt Damon’s character Dr. Mann in the film Interstellar. He releases the airlock despite an imperfect seal to the hatch, and catastrophic results follow. As the other characters in the film remark, “What happens when you blow the airlock?” “Nothing good.”

There are certain mistakes that undermine an entire system and leave it vulnerable to collapse. The extremes of space, or of deep-sea exploration, make this clear to earthbound creatures such as us. There is no “small” crack in a spaceship or “insignificant” leak in a submarine.

The Christian gospel asserts that every other religion comes up short. But how do the errors in world religions affect their integrity? Are these shortcomings disposable elements that can be replaced, or are they integral parts of a system in danger of collapse? Paul’s choice to engage the Athenians on the altar to the “unknown god” indicates the latter. By paying attention to his approach, we learn how best to engage with friends and neighbors of other religions.

Unknown Gods

If we had visited Athens in the first century, we could not have missed its devotion to the Greek gods. Contemporary accounts speak of temples and altars in every direction, and there exists today both literary and archaeological evidence for altars dedicated to the “unknown” god or gods.

When the apostle Paul arrived in Athens, he discussed the gospel in the synagogue, in the marketplace, and with the Stoic and Epicurean philosophers (Acts 17:17–18). When the Areopagus council then called on him to declare his intentions and the god(s) he proclaimed (Acts 17:19–20), he began with Athenian religion.

In his speech to the Areopagus, he points out this “unknown god”:

As I passed along and observed the objects of your worship, I found also an altar with this inscription: “To the unknown god.” What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you. (Acts 17:23)

We might feel inclined to see this altar as a bridge (or perhaps an airlock) connecting the Greek mythological idea of god to the Christian God — as if the Greeks had come halfway to God already. Indeed, Paul draws on hints from Greek philosophy about the true nature of God. He quotes conventional Greek wisdom — “In him we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28a) — to show that most people acknowledge a transcendent realm of god or of the gods. “We are indeed his offspring” (Acts 17:28b) points to our origin as creatures. Thoughtful Greeks here recognized God’s “eternal power and divine nature” (Romans 1:20). And even today, though neither Confucianism nor Buddhism explicitly affirms a supreme deity, most people in Vietnam acknowledge “Ông Trời,” or Grandfather Heaven, above everything else.

But while the Greeks understood something real about the divine realm, Paul asserts that Greek religion cannot come close to describing God in his fullness. Rather than a docking station linking Greek religion to Christianity, the “unknown god” points to an open window and a catastrophic failure in the Greek system.

Unknown Gods Leave Unknown Gaps

The unknown god indicates that pagan religion contains a gap of unknown size and unknown significance. “How big of a deal is it that there are gods we do not know?” The honest answer among pre-Christian pagans had to be, “We don’t know.”

By choosing to highlight the unknown god, Paul draws a decisive picture of the religious world. “This whole pantheon,” he seems to say, “gives the impression of a comprehensive knowledge of the divine. Surely this multitude of gods is sufficient for knowing the supernatural, right? And yet, within your own system, there is a chink in the armor, a camel’s nose under the tent.” Or there is a window left open to the vacuum of space.

To worship an unknown god indicates that your system is incomplete, that this religion has not attained a true knowledge of divinity, not even halfway.

“To worship an unknown god indicates that your system is incomplete.”

This insight is confirmed when we consider that Paul had plenty of other gods or goddesses to choose from for his comparison. He could have picked any of the other altars. Why not the altar to Zeus? He could have said, “You worship Zeus as the head of the gods, but I proclaim to you the true Zeus, the real head of all the gods.” Why not an altar to Apollo, who speaks the truth? Or to Athena, who gives wisdom?

Instead, he picks a gap in their knowledge and exploits it. If the Athenians had drawn the realm of the divine as a pie chart, they might have left a 1 percent sliver for the unknown god. But Paul announces that by leaving the unknown god in their system, they revealed that they really had no idea how much of the pie chart he occupies, no idea who or what that god is. They may have thought of this unknown god as confined to one area of life, such as the time Athenians made offerings to a god called “Fever.” But, says Paul, this unknown god may be the God over all, the transcendent God who is not served by human hands, the God who cannot be placed in the same category as the other so-called gods.

Not Halfway There

The Athenians may have been living on a prayer to the unknown god, but they were not, as Paul explains, halfway there. While their quest for the divine was genuine, their religious system had no place for the true God who transcends all others. And the same should be said about contemporary world religions. The quest to engage with other religions and worldviews as a Christian witness is not primarily a quest to find common ground but a quest to show how the gospel undermines the certainty, or exposes the compromised airlock, of those worldviews.

While Paul uses Athenian religious vocabulary to point to God, the burden of his speech in Acts 17 is to show that the Christian God undoes other ideas about God. When Christians approach Islam, Buddhism, and Hinduism, they would be wise to remember Paul’s conclusions: that unbelievers are “alienated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them” (Ephesians 4:18). There is an ignorance of the true God in unbelievers, “who do not know God” (1 Thessalonians 4:5). One task of the Christian evangelist is to bring this ignorance to light.

This leads to an evangelistic practice that looks for how a person might see and feel an inconsistency in their own beliefs. For example, Nabeel Qureshi felt a contrast between Muhammad’s claim to be a prophet of peace and his actual practice. This let the air out of Qureshi’s confidence in Islam.

If we use Paul’s speech at Athens as a model, we will view world religions as flawed systems vulnerable to collapse. Though they may have glimmers of truth, their errors and unresolved questions cannot be solved by simply duct-taping the open spaceship window. An entirely new spaceship is needed.