In more than one field, it appears, reality can be too strange for logic to map, and when logic and evidence clash, it is prudent to stick with evidence, for this holds the prospect of leading to a wider logic, whereas the opposite approach closes the door to discovery.

*Huston Smith. The Soul of Christianity.

Seeing I am dealing here with different religions, and their ways of knowing Truth, I will introduce with two facts that might surprise many of my readers. This concerns the early Christian teaching of apokatastasis, a reference to the ultimate salvation of all persons.

First, interestingly, of the six schools of theology in the initial five to six centuries of the Church era, only one held the now “evangelical orthodox” position of eternal separation and torture from God of persons who do not accept the Christian way in this life. Four were universalistic – seeing the final salvation of all persons – and one was annihilistic – seeing that only those who accepted the Christian way would enjoy eternal life after death, all other persons would be annihilated.

*En.wikipedia.org, “Universal Salvation,” Original source, The Schaff-Herzog Encyclopedia of Religious Knowledge.

Likewise, one of the most famed of the Fathers of the Church, St. Gregory of Nyssa (d. c. 385), along with some other Church Fathers, among them the acclaimed orthodox St. Clement of Alexandria, held to universal salvation, or Christian universalism – which is not the same universalism as practiced in the Unitarian Universalism sect. Yet, St. Gregory has never been condemned by the Catholic Church for the teaching, and he continues to be esteemed by it as an orthodox theologian true to the Catholic Church – indeed, a Saint.

We cannot separate, as I will claim below, beliefs about other faiths from use of language, and the intent of religious language. In one usage, we can judge the whole world except one faith as condemned to eternal torture. In another usage, we can see all persons as ultimately one in God, in Love, always.

*For a scholarly treatment of Universal Salvation in the Early Church, see Steven R. Harmon. Every Knee Should Bow: Biblical Rationales for Universal Salvation in Early Christian Thought. Lanham, Maryland: University Press of America, 2003.

So, before I write on, let me be clear. This writing is a personal testimony of a journey. I have, after years of prayer, struggle, experience, and study, abandoned the position that only one faith Path is the one right Path. The Christ I love cannot fit in a religious box - any religion or spirituality.

I see God in many faith Paths, as the Living Wisdom guiding us to grow and learn, and love. Ultimately, what I believe about salvation and faith is a product of many experiential factors, one being: What can I hold and go to bed at peace at night?

One evidence that most Christians who believe in a hell – they claim - and all but Christians going there, really do not believe in such, but are fooling themselves, is they can believe in such a literal, forever hell that even those among family and friends will go to, yet, they can enjoy a television show and sleep well at night. A “God” who could say, “You're going to eternal torment, because you didn't agree with me and give me my due," would not be a “God” I would find worthy of adoration.” He, or She, would be as selfish as those judged, or more so. Such a “God” sounds more like a cosmic hitler than the One I call Love. Such a paper idol deserves no respect, and needs to be thrown in the history trash can, for it is a relic unworthy of where God is leading us as one humankind, one creation, and one vision embodied in many ways – poetically imaged in the New Jerusalem, and embodied in Jesus of Nazareth, the Word, the Christ.

Some of my more conservative brothers and sisters might say, “How can you be so blasphemous?” I reply, “How can we continue to teach such a small-minded, small-hearted God?” I say what I say, for I love God and Truth enough to say it, and I do not bow to a religious code, I do not give my heart to religious authority. And I love people enough to want to share Truth that will inspire them to be free in Love, and away from institutionalized forms of simply awful, godless theology and unloving treatment of others of unlike ways of knowing the Divine. So, if I am being heretical according to some, let it be. I would rather be a heretic of loving truth, than an orthodox of unloving falsehood. If heaven were a place for a few persons who all agreed while the rest of humanity went to hell, that is not the heaven I would want to be in. I would want other options.

M. Thomas Thangaraj, in his inclusive treatment of faith Paths, Relating to People of Other Religions, tells the following insightful story:

Several years ago, when my daughter was twelve years old, she raised an unexpected question during one of our conversations: “Daddy, are you religious?”

I was taken by surprise and shock. “What a strange question to ask her father. Doesn't she know that I am a minister of the Church of South India and a Christian theologian? What is going on here?” I thought to myself. So I asked her in return, “What do you think?”

She surprised me again by telling me, “You are not, Daddy!”

“Really? What do you mean?” I pursued.

She said, “You know what I mean. You are not a kind of fanatic, a religious fanatic!”

“Oh, thank you. That is very helpful. But I am a minister, you know, and so if I am not religious, what do you think I am then?” I asked.

She was quick to say, “You are spiritual, Dad! You are not religious!”

Thangaraj relates that the above conversation unveils the emerging popular use of the word “religion.” He rightly notes: “Religion has had bad press!” Indeed, he is right, in that religion implies for many persons dogmatism and uncritical acceptance of concepts and thought. At worst, religion is seen as superstition, at best misplaced concreteness. One basis on this popular misrepresentation of religion is a sort of popular scientism, Thangaraj concludes, which decides that what we cannot see, hear, touch, smell, or taste cannot rightly be affirmed as true.

Thangaraj appeals to his Indian tradition to speak of three avenues of knowledge. Exploring these can help us discern the different ways of knowing, and how each are valid and cannot exclude the others. I will define each and use Thangaraj's example of fire on top of a mountain.

1)Kaatchi - Perception or experience.

You are in a wood on a mountain. You look up and see a fire and smoke rising off the mountain, and you feel the heat of the fire. You directly experience the fire and, therefore, there must be a fire.

2) Karuthal - Inference.

You are in a wood on a mountain. You look up and see smoke rising from the mountain. You, therefore, infer there is a fire on the mountain. The logic is: “Where there is smoke, there must be fire.”

3)Urai - Authoritative testimony.

You are in your house, reclining and reading the newspaper. In the morning headlines, is an article on a fire on a mountain. You conclude there must have been a fire on the mountain, after all, that is what the newspaper reported.

So, we have three sources to knowledge of matters religious, or spiritual. Religious belief is arrived at and sustained by direct experience, logical-inferential conclusions, and the authority of scriptures and other written and spoken sources.

Popular “scientific” approaches, which covers most of modernistic times, is open to the first two avenues of knowledge, but is not open to the last. Therefore, both inside and outside religion, to many persons the sayings “I believe this because I experienced this” or “I affirm this for I had experiences that warrant this conclusion” are not seen as logical – not when the devotee holds a strongly scientific-modernistic worldview.

That leaves us with authoritative testimony. Yet, scripture and religious authorities are held with little confidence outside the circles of their own devotion. So, for a Christian or Hindu to quote Scripture or a great saint will typically hold little appeal to the general public.

Where does this leave us? The breakdown of the modernistic-scientific dominance of human thought. Generally, even scientific fact is now seen to be theoretical, poetic language and imaging that points to a truth, but cannot define it in itself. So, the reality pointed to is grasped beyond the mind, outside of the circle of reasoning.

Our goal, then, in relating to our own faith Path and that of other Paths, is to integrate the three ways of knowing. Anyone, of any faith can seek the logic of experience, inference, and testimony.

Yet, this does not solve the problem posed by each source. Many in faith Paths come to radically different conclusions based on each of the above ways of knowing. Even within the same Path, diverse sects claim radically different conclusions. A case in point is experience. One person says, "I sense the presence of Mother Mary, and I know she hears my prayers to her.” Another persons says, “It is idolatry to pray to Mary, and she has gone to heaven, so, there is no way to sense her presence.” Like differences apply to each way of knowing.

Ultimately, we are to seek the way of compassionate willingness to respect the diverse ways persons may experience the Divine. The inability of our ways of knowing to lead us to agreement may say to us that Spirit is not interested in our logical, or reasoning, agreement, but wills to relate with us within the graced freedom to know the Divine in different ways, with different rites, and by different words. So, religion would be intended to lead us outside, or beyond, itself to a greater revelation of Truth. Most religion, however, keeps in a circular, self-validating reasoning, not seeing the higher way of a self-validation that is more so due to its self-transcendence and embrace of a more whole inclusion.

Likewise, the disagreement and diversity in faith may say something about the Nature of God. Could it not be that dynamic, ever-expanding diversification is an expression of God? That God, as Love, encompasses the Will and Tendency to expand richly in a diversification that in its differences contains a higher Expression of Truth than would be otherwise?

As a Christian, then, I do not discount the faith handed down to me. Yet, I can see it as a fully authentic, self-validating way of revelation, without moving to the conclusion: “Therefore, since this is true, this is the only way.” And my openness to other ways of knowing the Sacred enhances and enriches my own Path, rather than being a loss of conviction or heresy. I see the other as my eternal kin, not someone who must agree with me or go to some hell, or be damned in some other way by my God.

We need to ask the question: “Why are many Christians so angry and defensive with the kind of compassionate openness I share here?” Well, one reason, they have been taught to be afraid. When you believe your way is the only way, then, of course, you will be reactive against anyone who says differently. But, when you do not hold that presupposition, you will feel no reactivity, for you will not feel you must be right, and all others wrong. You will fully appreciate the ways you know the Spirit, and you will appreciate the way other persons do.

And you can remain lovingly discerning, for not all under the name religion or spirituality is truthful or sacred. And not all religions are equally beneficial. So, for example, to say the popular Hinduism that sacrifices chickens is as matured a faith-expression as that in higher expressions of non-dual Hinduism, flowing from the matured experience of the Upanishads, would not be logical or wise. So, I am not speaking here of a radical pluralism, a no-conviction way that fails to discern higher and lower expressions of Spirit. Not all vehicles are equal, or shoes, or boats, or sandwiches, or painters, or politics - not all religious expression either.

Now, how would history read differently if we had been humbly open and respectful enough to practice this? Can anyone say this way is not higher than the way generally expounded in Christian circles?

But, generally, clerical leaders, past and present, are accountable for this no-other-than-us phobia. Such thinking is not intelligent or spiritual, it is narrow-minded and legalistic. Translated, tribal thinking in matters religious is not loving – thus, not Christlike, or godly.

Also, the matter of language pertains integrally to our subject. We are linguistic creatures, and we “know” our world, inner and outer, only through language. Language is shaped by many factors, and shapes many factors in a dynamic inter-relationship. Therefore, rightly does the Pastor, Robin R. Meyers write that the way we utilize language is a moral issue (Saving Jesus from the Church).

Language of religious faith is richly textured, is poetic, and is metaphorical – as are the rites of faith communities. When we materialize it, making it concrete, we reduce the free, open Mystery to word-boxes. We try to hem in what keeps refusing hemming in. We try to reduce the Truth to our truths.

Therefore, the fire on the mountain is and is not a fire – and the same applies to the heat and the smoke. This all the great mystics, of all the great religions, keep telling us – but to the unloving hurt of others and ourselves, most clerics keep ignoring this and keep teaching a mentalist-tribal religion. In the dualism between truth and untruth, we find ourselves lost. In such a linguistic game, our solidified boundaries to once poetically-evocative linguistics becomes a propositional rule of belief to include a few and condemn everyone else. We remain the bully left standing on life's playground – so we think.

With the church, for example, the evocative and mediating-grace sacrament of the Eucharist becomes an eating of flesh and drinking of blood – a cannibalism and rekilling of Jesus over and over, and all by the loss of the poetic rite and metaphorical linguistics of a shared meal between Jesus and his first followers about two-thousand years ago.

Likewise, the Bible loses its power as a book inviting us to join the journey of those still growing and changing in the faith. Now, we have a Bible that is a rule book, a propositional text, that sets down in perfect form exactly what must always be believed and done – though oddly those who claim this have killed each other in wars over disagreement on these matters -, with no possibility of agreement, for change, for seeing substantially an emergence of Divine revelation. The Bible, richly-textured and evocative, a wonderful Story to enter with our stories, has become flat-land and prescriptive, a magical book full of words that dropped right out of the mind of God, devoid of the beautiful imperfections of men and women seeking truth, and not getting it all right any of the time.

And the church – well, what do we have? Any number of sects claiming they represent the fullest expression of divine truth. One says seven sacraments, another two, and both claim they are right. But, with a we-must-be-right mentality, then, all others must be wrong. How convenient for those in-the-right! Better, how childish such infantile reasoning. So, the Church has become the holders of the keys of the kingdom, the only keys, the only kingdom, the only Church. And we have set up guardians to protect the faith, as though true faith is so impotent it needs such protection.

Concluding, there is no reasonable evidence to suggest anything other than God is free of all boxes – be they national, political, religious, spiritual, … God, another poetic word, is not confined in any one way of seeing and experiencing Spirit. God is, has never been G-o-d, anymore than Christ is C-h-r-i-s-t or the Church is C-h-u-r-c-h.

I believe Jesus was clear on this, and we need to get clear on it if we want religion to be a major means of unity in our emerging, ever-changing world. For many have rejected all religion, and logically, they feel, for they have seen that the narrowness of tribal faith is too narrow to be sensible for a world rightly emerging into a global, even creation, consciousness.

We are moving quickly to an integral spirituality, while the kids of religious sects keep kicking each other's sand castles down. But if the house is falling, no matter how loud you yell otherwise, it is falling. And the tidal wave of Truth will not bow in obeisance to the prejudices of small minds.

I would agree that religion and the human spirit share an evolution that becomes more mature, more embracing of diversifying, and more capable of integrating apparent opposites in the beautiful paradoxes of faith – the dualisms are deadly to lively faith. So, what Ralph Waldo Emerson says of the human, applies to the potential of religion:

The life of man is a self-revolving circle, which, from a ring imperceptibly small, rushes on all sides outwards to new and larger circles, and that without end.

*The Spiritual Emerson. "Circles."

This leads me to one conclusion. The defense of any one circle – or stage of emergence – becomes a defense against the growth and additional embrace that is built into the human and society as the only means to avoid the decay and death that is inevitable when we say “No” to the widening of the circle – the Embrace of Love. This widening is the Nature of Spirit - Spirit is in process with the universe, in one holy Embrace. Amen.

1)How do you see the use of the different ways of knowing in your faith? Your view of other faiths?

2)In what ways do you see our world changing, inviting us to widen our circles of religious experience and challenging our thoughts and attitudes toward other religions?

3)What does it mean to say religious language and rite is poetically evocative, not propositionally journalistic?

*OneLife Ministries is a ministry of Brian Kenneth Wilcox, SW Florida. Brian lives a vowed life and with his two dogs, Bandit Ty and St. Francis, with friends and under a vow of simplicity. Brian is an ecumenical-interspiritual leader, who chooses not to identify with any group, and renounces all titles of sacredness that some would apply to him, but seeks to be open to how Christ manifests in the diversity of Christian denominations and varied religious-spiritual traditions. He affirms that all spiritual paths lead ultimately back to Jesus Christ. He is Senior Chaplain for the Charlotte County Sheriff's Office, Punta Gorda, FL.

*Brian welcomes responses to his writings or submission of prayer requests at briankwilcox@yahoo.com . Also, Brian is on Facebook: search Brian Kenneth Wilcox.

*Contact the above email to book Brian for preaching, Spiritual Direction, retreats, workshops, animal blessing services, house blessings, or other spiritual requests. You can order his book An Ache for Union from major booksellers.