In the Bible, God makes exclusive truth claims (John 14:6), because a central message of the Bible is our need for God alone (Ex. 20:1-6; Deut. 6:4-5, 13-15).  People have always had trouble with this message, because ever since the fall we have been idolaters seeking a “truth” that is different from the one that God has given.  But the ways in which people have rebelled against God’s declaration that there is a single truth have changed over time, so to address a contemporary skeptical objection to exclusive truth claims, we need to use discernment to figure out exactly what the skeptic’s objection is and what particular presuppositions might have led to the objection.

In the ancient Mediterranean world, pagans did not object to the claim that the Lord (Yahweh) existed, but they did object to the claim that the Lord was the only God.  In fact, even many Israelites objected to this claim.  In their view, gods were local rulers and forces of nature, and there were many gods.  Their view of truth was pragmatic; they tended to follow whatever gods seemed to grant them what they wanted.  (See Jer. 44:15-18 for an example of this pragmatic approach to religion among the Israelites).  Much of the Bible’s discussion of God’s exclusive right to be worshiped is directed against this false worldview of pagan religious pragmatism.

Some people whom we meet today might take a similarly pragmatic approach to religious truth claims.  Their view is that truth in religion can be measured by what works for an individual person, so if a particular religious practice has pragmatic value, who can argue against it?  Just as the people of Jeremiah’s day refused to agree to worship the Lord exclusively because they thought that sacrifices to the queen of heaven achieved practical results, so some people today wonder how theologically conservative Christians can assert that Jesus is the only way to God if other non-Christian religious practices produce practical benefits, too.

But the modern objection to exclusive religious truth claims can also take other forms than mere pragmatism.  Two of the major American and European groups that have questioned Christianity’s exclusive truth claims in recent centuries include:

• The 18^th-century deists. The deists believed in an objective, universal truth, but they rejected the idea of special revelation, because this form of revelation was not accessible to everyone.  Instead, they believed that knowledge of God was equally accessible to everyone via reason alone (what the Christian would call the “general revelation” of creation).  Exclusive religious truth claims that were based on special revelation (e.g., the Bible) led to religious wars, they thought, and they were irrational, because they could not be adjudicated via reason.
• Liberal Protestants of the 19^th and 20^th Liberal Protestants believed that the essence of Christianity was morality, along with religious experience.  Because they could find good people, with similar moral beliefs, in non-Christian religions, and because they noted the similarity between Christian religious experiences and the religious experiences of many non-Christians, they eventually decided that all religions offered a path to God.  (One favorite text of this group was William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience, published in 1903).  In the mid-20^th century, the litmus test for liberal Protestant religious tolerance was a person’s view of Mohandas Gandhi; if a professing Christian thought that Gandhi, as a moral, religious person of great insight, was going to go to heaven, along with good Christians, that person was probably a religiously tolerant liberal Christian.
• The postmodernists of the late 1960s and beyond. In the late 1960s, during a time of widespread skepticism about the American government’s (lack of) truth-telling during the Vietnam War, the idea that truth claims are power claims began gaining ground in some humanities departments, and today that idea is widespread.  For several centuries following the 15^th-century Renaissance (and especially the 18^th-century Enlightenment), the dominant intellectual trend in the West was modernism, which, among other things, argued that reason and the scientific method could produce objective, certain knowledge.  The postmodernists of the late 20^th century voiced skepticism about this idea.  Not only did they question exclusive religious truth claims, they also questioned all absolute truth claims, because they questioned humans’ ability to perceive truth with any degree of absolute certainty.  In other words, for the postmodernist, even if there is truth (which is questionable), we have no way of knowing for sure if we’ve found it.  And if someone does claim to have the truth, that person is probably going to use that claim to exercise power over someone else, which is a good reason to be suspicious of the claim.  Christianity and the concomitant argument that the West had the truth while the rest of the world did not were principal justifications for imperialism and oppression, they argue.

Today skeptics who question religious truth claims are influenced by all of these ideas, but in most cases, the skeptics are likely to fall into one of two very different categories.  Thus, the first task in talking with someone who questions Christianity’s exclusive truth claims is to figure out which category their objections belong to.  I have labeled these two categories of objectors to Christianity’s truth claims:

• Religious skeptics; and
• Religious pluralists.

Religious skeptics – Religious skeptics, in the way that I’m using the term, are usually atheists, agnostics, secularists, or modern deists.  (By “modern deist,” I mean people who are willing to grant the possibility that some sort of creator started the process of creation, but they reject the idea of a personal God who can be known directly).  These people are usually “modernist” in their approach to truth – that is, they believe in objective, absolute truth when it comes to observable phenomenon, but they are highly skeptical of truth claims that cannot be verified scientifically.  They consider themselves children of the Enlightenment, and thus take a view of truth that is very similar to that of 18^th-century deists, except that instead of believing that God can be known through reason, they are often confident that through reason they have ruled out the possibility of God’s existence at all.  In their view, there are two categories of knowledge claims – the “real,” which is the empirical and the scientific – and the religious / mystical, which cannot be verified.  Scientific and empirical knowledge has led to great gains for humanity, whereas religious claims have led to endless controversies and divisions, and they have not produced any concrete evidence in their favor.  If you go to the science section of a typical bookstore, such as Barnes & Noble, you will find numerous books written by religious skeptics that adopt this view of truth.  Richard Dawkins would certainly be in this camp, and so would most other atheist scientists.

Religious pluralists – Religious pluralists are generally much more postmodern in their views.  They don’t restrict the idea of “truth” to empirical or scientific knowledge, and they are perfectly willing to grant the idea that “truth” can be found in religion and in mystical or transcendent experiences.  But they dislike the idea of exclusive, objective truth; truth can never be known definitively or absolutely, they think, and there is some truth (though only partial truth) in all major religions.  One of the most prominent religious pluralists in recent years was the liberal Protestant philosopher John Hick, whose book The Myth of Christian Uniqueness: Toward a Pluralistic Theory of Religions (1987) argued that since all of our claims to knowledge are shaped by historical experience, any claim that we make about God is shaped by historical experience and therefore cannot be an absolute truth claim.  In other words, religious pluralists are not skeptical about the existence of the spiritual realm, but they are skeptical about our ability to know anything about that realm with absolute certainty, so they think that it’s more likely that all religions have a little bit of insight and truth rather than that any single religion has all of the truth.

How should the Christian approach someone in either of these camps?  As with all dialogues with skeptics, I think that the essential starting point is to identify the presuppositions that have led a person to a particular conclusion, and then try to have a dialogue about those presuppositions.

With the religious skeptic, I think that we need to get the person to question the assumption that there is a stark divide between scientific knowledge and religious knowledge, and that all truth can be found in the realm of the scientific and empirical.  One key to doing that is to introduce the concept of “worldview,” and to explain that all people, regardless of whether they are conscious of it or not, have a worldview that explains who they are, where they came from, and what their purpose is.  Christianity offers one worldview, and secularism offers another.  Both worldviews make claims that are not directly empirical.  For example, secularism’s confidence that science and empiricism tell us everything that we need to know about reality is not something that can be verified empirically or scientifically.  Furthermore, most secularists make values claims (e.g., human rights claims) that are not a product of a purely scientific or empirical worldview.  If that is the case, perhaps the skeptic would be wise to be open to the possibility that something outside of the strictly scientific is at work in their lives.  But in addition, the skeptic might have been too quick to assume that Christian truth claims cannot be tested empirically.  Christianity is not a mystical, “upper-story” religion that exists only in the realm of the subjective; it is based on some historical claims that can be investigated to at least a certain extent.  Unlike most other religions, it is based on a claim that a particular historical event happened – in this case, the resurrection – and it claims that that event could be examined objectively and was supported by witnesses.  And Christianity, upon closer examination, also appears very different from other religions; it’s not fair to simply classify it in the general category of “religion” and then dismiss it from further investigation on the ground that the category of “religion” has not produced any verifiable knowledge.

None of these points are sufficient to prove the truth of Christianity, but they do raise enough questions about the religious skeptic’s assumptions to suggest that Christianity merits a closer look.  The Christian can commend the religious skeptic for their commitment to reason and the discovery of truth, but can then raise questions about whether the religious skeptic has really been reasonable in assuming a priori that Christian truth claims can be excluded from further investigation on the presupposition that they belong to a false category of knowledge.

What about the religious pluralist?  How should the Christian approach a conversation with someone who adopts a postmodern, religious pluralist model of looking at truth?  I think that the Christian should commend the person for correctly recognizing the limits of human knowledge.  Modernists have been far too confident that they can arrive at absolute, objective knowledge of the truth through unaided reason, and postmodernists are right to be skeptical of this claim.  But despite their professed tolerance for all points of view, religious pluralists might have inadvertently introduced their own truth claim as an unstated assumption – the assumption that they can be confident that any God that exists has not revealed himself in any sort of definitive way to one particular group of people.  The religious pluralist views all religions as human efforts to ascertain the truth, and because human minds are finite (while God is infinite), no human-created religion can arrive at more than a very partial view of God.  At best, then, each religion has some of the truth, but no religion can insist that its view of God is the only truth.

The religious pluralist’s view would be very plausible if we could be confident that all religions (including Christianity) were merely human constructs – that is, human attempts to figure out what God is like.  But if God has actually spoken directly to at least one group of people and has guided their understanding of who God is, the religious pluralist’s a priori rejection of all absolute religious truth claims no longer makes quite as much sense.  If one grants the possibility of God speaking to people, one has to grant the possibility that one group of people might have access to absolute truths about God that others might lack.

In dialogues with both the religious skeptic and the religious pluralist, I would recommend steering the conversation away from truth claims in the abstract toward a discussion of Jesus’s claims in particular.  Christianity makes exclusive truth claims not because we as Christians believe that we have discovered truths that no one else has, but because God has come to earth in the form of Jesus and has given us a truth that is available only to people who believe in Jesus.  Christianity’s claim to exclusive truth stands or falls on the claim of who Jesus is.  Once we convince a religious skeptic that they can’t rule out Jesus’s claims without investigating them historically and empirically, we can proceed to an examination of those claims.  And once we convince a religious pluralist that if Jesus really was God in the flesh, he might have revealed absolute truths that are available exclusively in Christ, we are likewise ready to proceed with an examination of Jesus.  This centers the discussion where a Christian should want the discussion to be focused – on the question of Jesus himself and the truth of the gospel.