‍Vince Vitale [00:00:46] I'm Vince. Happy New Year, everybody. 

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Jo Vitale [00:00:47] Yeah. Thanks for joining us in 2025. And tonight is going to be fun. Today we are recording this evening while children are forced to sleep right through the other side of the wall. So we're hoping they're going to stay that way. But if you hear screaming or crying or more voices, that is why. To be fair. 

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Vince Vitale [00:01:08] That's probably not us. But really our children, they normally sleep so well all the way through the night. So the chances of them coming in are really low. So we're not worried about it at all. Right Jo? 

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Jo Vitale [00:01:21] I thought the New Year's resolution was no more lying. But to be fair, it would be more interesting if they came. And they usually have more fascinating things to say than we do about most faith topics. The other day someone asked our youngest, JJ, "What has God been teaching you recently?" And his response was, "Well, I used to run slowly, but now Jesus has given me sonic speed." Which I kind of love. 

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Vince Vitale [00:01:50] Fair point. You're so right. And it's amazing the purity of their thoughts, too. The other thing it just reminded me that JJ said recently was he's thinking about kind of heaven and this idea that he's learned about Jesus having gone to prepare a place for us. And he just said, "Jesus is decorating my room." And we thought, yeah, that makes total sense. That's what you do when you prepare a place in your home for someone else. You set up the furniture and you decorate it and you make their bed and you get it ready. But it's just amazing how he thought of that in such a natural, pure, concrete, tangible way. Whereas, I just think of it very abstractly. I read the sentence and the proposition and I affirm it, but I never really think about the details of it. So yes, if JJ and Raphael show up during this episode, it would be a great thing. 

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Jo Vitale [00:02:40] Yeah, we'll just welcome it. All right. So tonight we're going to be speaking to a question from a Christian student at Stanford University who just emailed this the other day. And I love that she's writing in with the question that she's been getting from both her believing and her unbelieving friends. And these are exactly the kind of questions we love getting from you guys. So just another invitation, please do feel free to keep sending your questions and other people's questions. And we really want to engage with you guys and think through together about what are the kind of topics people are struggling with and asking about just today in normal conversation. So here's the question: one question that comes up consistently with my believing and non-believing friends is the idea that all religions are fundamentally the same and that everyone ends up in the same place in the end. I do not believe this is true, primarily because Jesus tells us that nobody comes to the Father except through Him. However, I feel ill equipped theologically to back my belief beyond that verse and answer these types of questions with both hard truth and ridiculous grace. 

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Vince Vitale [00:03:47] Great phrase there. Ridiculous grace. That's fantastic. Thanks so much for this question. And I really appreciate just the honesty of it. "I feel ill equipped." I also just wanted to really encourage you. I respect and honor the fact that you're looking to defer to Jesus's words rather than your own thoughts. And so often it's not the case today when people are grappling within the Christian church and within the Christian faith with how to think about the things that Jesus said. So I just really appreciate that you said primarily because Jesus tells us that nobody comes to the Father except through him. He says, "I'm the way, the truth and the life. No one comes to the father but through me." In Acts, we also read that there's no other name other than Jesus name by which we can be saved. And when I just read the way you put your question, I just thought, that's a beautiful posture before a God who you know and who you trust. Proverbs 3 came to mind for me. Lean not on your own understanding. You're saying I feel ill equipped. I don't understand it, really. But in all your ways, acknowledge him. And that's exactly what I see you doing here. Acknowledging Jesus's words. Someone whose words are worth trusting because of who he claim to be. And the way he proved that by raising from the dead and the life that he lived and the love that he has. And not just trusting in your own understanding. But in light of that, hopefully we'll also be able to equip you a bit more for these types of conversations. 

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Jo Vitale [00:05:13] Yes. We're going to jump in at just addressing the first part of your question, this thought are all religions the same? And I totally get the appeal. I think we all do, don't we? Of why it's an attractive thought to be able to say this. At the end of the day aren't they all just the same. You grew up in your part of the world. I grew up in mine. We all start in different places, but ultimately we're all headed in the same direction. And it just feels comforting to be able to say that because then we don't have to tell anybody that they're wrong. And honestly, who wants to do that? We're divided enough as it is in the world. Everyone's fighting about everything. The thought of having to engage in more disagreement with people, especially people that you love, your friends, people that you're hanging out with on a daily or weekly basis. It's just uncomfortable, isn't it, to not just be able to jump in with the sentiment that everybody expresses of, well, they're all just the same anyway. So does it really matter? 

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Vince Vitale [00:06:10] And you can see that Jo here grew up in England. If you were an Italian who grew up in New Jersey, what are you talking about? It's like our pastime- disagreeing with each other. We love disagree with each, but I guess most people around the world that is less comfortable than it is for Italian-Americans from New Jersey like my family. 

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Jo Vitale [00:06:25] Yeah. It's extremely uncomfortable. I was once suggested by one of my professors in seminary that I go for assertiveness training. But I wasn't assertive enough to go. So yes, I don't enjoy disagreement. But unfortunately, disagreement in this life and as with many things but also when we're talking about faith, it's just inevitable. Whenever you're talking about anything that has anything to do with truth, it is simply the nature of truth that as soon as we open our mouths about anything of significance, it's basically inevitable that we are going to affirm some things and deny or disagree with other things. There's just no way around it. 

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Vince Vitale [00:07:06] Yeah, that's right. It just reminds me of one of our former colleagues who was speaking at an event, and afterwards someone came up to him and said, “Well, I don't I don't think it's my place to disagree with anyone.” And then our friend said, "Sure you do." And he said, "No, I don't." And then he's our friend said, "Well, you just did." So even in the act of saying that someone doesn't think it's their place to disagree with anyone, you wind up doing the very thing that you've said you are not willing to do. 

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Jo Vitale [00:07:37] Yeah. And so there's a kind of irony to it, right? Because when you make the statement on aren't all religions the same, you think you're bringing people together, but actually, anybody who's saying that they're pretty much disagreeing with almost everybody because that is just not what major religions say about themselves. Like any major religion you dig into, is going to say, actually, well, I really disagree with all these other ones. So effectively what you're saying is, well, you're all wrong. The statement all religions are the same is really kind of another way, a polite way of saying you're all equally wrong at the end of the day. And so in trying to avoid arrogance in some way, you're just being equally arrogant to make that statement because you are basically saying I know better than all of you because I know that you're all wrong about your truth claims. Because at the end of the day, I'm the one who has the correct perspective on this and you don't. So my point is no matter where you stand on is, there's just no getting around disagreement. 

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[00:08:33] And I think it digs into this more fundamental issue we have that I think we get nervous about believing or being certain or confident in anything. I think we think it's always arrogant today to really believe something and to tell people what you believe. We assume it's arrogant to strongly say, "Well, this is my viewpoint and I think it's actually true." But, of course, it would only be arrogant if what you were actually saying was I know the way to heaven and it's me. Like, that would be arrogant if you were saying like I am the way. But the point is, as a Christian, you're not actually saying I'm the one who's figured it out. I'm the one who's going to save you. What you're saying is, actually, let me tell you about this God that I've met and the work that they have done. 

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Vince Vitale [00:09:14] Okay. That's really interesting because we think saying all religions are the same is sort of this humble position to take. But actually in order to take it, we have to set ourselves up above all of the major religions because they don't make that claim about themselves. But we need to put ourselves in a position to say, actually, we know about your religions better than you do. So that's really interesting. So I think the person that asked the question for today, great question. Thank you. And I think you're right, therefore, that the point is not to try to agree with everyone, but to ensure that when we do have to disagree, we do so with grace with, as you put it so nicely, ridiculous grace. As the Bible says, with gentleness and respect, Jesus being full of grace and truth, one of the most beautiful depictions of Jesus that he refuses this ultimatum that our culture so often puts in us between either truth, either being committed to truth or being committed to love. We can have one or the other. We can affirm people and we can love them. And we can just brush truth to the side or we can be strong in the truth and then we wind up offending everyone. Jesus refused the ultimatum. He was committed to not compromising on either because really desiring for someone to know the truth rather than just telling them what they want to hear or what may be easier or more comfortable for us to say, it is actually a form of loving another person to be willing to walk through that on comfort with the ridiculous grace and hopefully persuade someone to come to believe and be impacted by the truth. 

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Jo Vitale [00:10:46] Yeah, I find that personally very challenging. If I'm not willing to become uncomfortable for somebody, do I really love them?

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Vince Vitale [00:10:57] Is that not the gospel? The uncomfort and then so far beyond that that Jesus was willing to go through in order to communicate the truth. No dichotomy between love and truth whatsoever in the act of lovingly suffering for us. He presented the truth to us. 

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Jo Vitale [00:11:19] And it makes me feel very weak where I'm like, wow, Jesus literally died to do that for us. And I don't like dying of embarrassment. That's the challenge here. So let's think about it. How are religion's different here? People often assume that religions are superficially different, but fundamentally the same. But the more you study this area, I think what you actually find is the total opposite. The religions are at best superficially similar, but fundamentally they are actually very different. For example, it's really quite meaningless to say that all paths lead to God. A phrase you hear all the time. When the foremost popular world religions alone disagree on whether the God that they lead to is one God. For example, if you're Muslim. Or a trinity of one God in three persons, if you're Christian. Or any number of gods numbering up to 330 million, if you're Hindu. To no God at all, if you're Buddhist. And that doesn't even take into consideration the character of that God or gods or whether it's meaningful to talk of personal characteristics of God at all. Those are not minor differences. As nice of an idea as I might seem, all religions, they're just not the same. And so we're doing a disservice to all of them when we come together as if they were without respecting those differences. 

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[00:12:31] But once you realize that this whole project of comparative religion is so vast, it can seem quite paralyzing because there's just so much to learn. And I think the trouble is that we sit back when we start looking at it and we think, gosh, how am I ever going to know enough about all of these major world religions to then be able to properly compare and contrast them in detail and to be able to determine all of the significant ways in which they're different and then to decide which one is actually true. Nobody has time for that. We don't time to go away and learn all the original languages and study all the original documents and the sources and try them all out. And so what do you do I think it's easy to get overwhelmed and think you need to be an expert in every religion to make an evaluation. And so no wonder then I think we throw our hands in the air and we just get attracted to agnosticism like, well, who knows? At the end of day, who knows? There are too many choices and therefore let's just not even think about it at all. Let's just give up on this search before we've even started, because how do I make an informed decision? Let's just say I don't know and leave it at that. 

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Vince Vitale [00:13:37] Yeah, I certainly resonate with that because when I first began to study the different faith systems, you begin to study and you think, okay, I'm going to get my head around this. And then the more you study, the more you realize there is to know. And it's like this ever receding finish line and you realize I'm never going to be an expert or even competent in all of these different areas. So that can feel quite paralyzing. And I think that's right, that sometimes pushes people in the direction of saying, well, I guess we just can't know. But here's my suggestion. Rather than starting by trying to make some comprehensive list of every similarity and difference between religions, I would say start instead by asking what is the most radical claim that Christianity makes? What is the most distinctive and central and unique aspect of the Christian faith? And you might then find that this one thing, or maybe there's two or three, makes such a difference to the comparison that you're thinking about. That all of the other differences become much more secondary by comparison, and the choice actually becomes clear even if you don't have expertise in every detail. So that might sound a little confusing. Let me try to sort of open up the approach a bit more. I have this analogy in my head and I really don't know if it's a good one. All analogies break down. 

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Jo Vitale [00:15:03] We'll let you know.

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Vince Vitale [00:15:04] This one might break down even more than most of my analogies, but hopefully it will at least allow us to start to grasp towards this idea. So, Jo, imagine that we are choosing a home to buy. And we're looking at a certain neighborhood. And there's a bunch of homes in the neighborhood and it's a big neighborhood. So there's lots of homes that we could look at. And there's all these different similarities and differences. And it's like all of the homes are on sale. New neighborhood. Okay. We get first picked-- throw that in the analogy because it's already breaking down. 

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Jo Vitale [00:15:39] It's very unrealistic. 

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Vince Vitale [00:15:42] New neighborhood, we get first picked. I don't know why, but you could feel like how am I ever going to make a rational decision here? Like there could be so many small similarities and differences and then I need to evaluate them all and somehow aggregate all the pluses and minuses, etc.. But now imagine knowing what you know about me, imagine only one house in the whole neighborhood has a pool. 

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Jo Vitale [00:16:05] Okay. Yes. 

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Vince Vitale [00:16:05] Okay. So now which house am I going to choose? It's very likely I'd choose the house of the pool because I just love the water so much. I love being in the water. I love swimming. Our oldest just learned to swim. That was like such a sense of joy. In other words, there's this feature of one house that is not true of any of the other houses that is so significant that at least as a starting point you're going to say, okay, that changes the situation. Vince is no longer thinking about is the kitchen open plan or not. 

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Jo Vitale [00:16:43] Jo is. 

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Vince Vitale [00:16:43] Jo certainly is. But Vince is just like there's a pool. There's one house with a pool. Everything else pales in comparison to the pool. Okay, so this whole analogy is just quite skewed towards my subjective preferences. But you get the idea. There could be a feature of something which is so significant with respect to your choice of it that even if you don't know every detail about everything else, it could really give you quite a bit of confidence that you're making a good choice. And I would say that when we think about the Christian faith, the incarnation is one of those things. Only Christianity speaks of a God who came down to dwell among us fully God and fully human. That is a radical, distinctive claim of the Christian faith. And there are three distinct lives that follow from that. And I think about this visually. They all follow from this idea of God. If you think of him coming down from heaven to earth, and even in that visual depiction of coming down, it reminds me of these three distinctive features of the Christian faith that I love to be able to share with people. One, that it's a highly historical faith. It's founded on a historical life and a historic public miracle of the resurrection in history, the life that Jesus lived, the prophecies that he fulfilled in history, his resurrection in history that's so concrete and waiting to be explored because God came down and lived a human life in history. 

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[00:18:23] And so we can look at these first century texts and we can look at the creeds from the time and we can actually explore and investigate this. Secondly, because God came down, it's radically distinctive of the Christian faith that God himself suffered with us and for us. If Jesus isn't God, if God didn't come down in the incarnation and live a human life, then God didn't join you in your suffering and he didn't make a sacrifice of his life for you. Instead, he chose to keep his distance on his heavenly throne while you suffered. And I think that's really problematic as a conception of God. Because I can suffer alongside you if you're my friend. I can come alongside you in your suffering in certain ways. I could even give my life for you in some ways. But then how could I love you in ways that is better than God Himself love you? If God did not incarnate, if he did not come down and live that human life, then my love for you in certain respects could be better than God's love for you. And then I would say, but then that's not God. Then that's not a perfect being. And I think it's very telling that in Islam it's another person that took Jesus's place on the cross. The idea of an appointed prophet of God dying in the place of sinners is unthinkable. It's shameful. 

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[00:19:51] But in Christianity, Jesus took our place and for our sakes, he scorned that shame of the cross. So Jesus, he came down, therefore he suffered with us and he suffered for us. And then thirdly, again, because God comes down, the whole trajectory of salvation is about God coming down to us out of grace, not about us working our way up to Him by our works. Again, you can picture that visually. The direction of salvation is God coming down, not us climbing up. In Christianity, salvation is a matter of what God does, not what we do. It's about the perfection of his faithfulness, not ours. Salvation is primarily a gift that he extends to us, not a reward that we achieve. Getting what we deserve and trying to earn rewards, that's the narrative of every manmade religion and philosophy. You get what you deserve. On some fundamental level, you get what you deserve. We need to earn, earn, earn, compete, strive, win, achieve. And it's never enough. We can always do more. Jesus completely turns this on its head. If you ask the question, how can we be saved? Many religious systems will answer by telling you about what you need to do. Christianity answers by telling you about what God has already done. 

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Jo Vitale [00:21:14] When you think about it, it's actually staggering, isn't it? I'm just thinking, listening to, I'm like, wow, that's really significant. As if I hadn't heard that before, but I think we can hear about Jesus so much in church on a Sunday. We just kind of get a bit numbed to how radical this actually is. I mean, my goodness, God becoming human and stepping into history and suffering like one of us and doing that. It's wild. It's absolutely wild. And it begs the question, like, what motivates that? And I think when we think about the uniqueness of the incarnation and all that is flowing from it that is so distinctive, I think taking a step back, if you just want to pick one thing, this gets us back to what I think is really the most fundamental distinctive of the Christian faith, which is what motivated the incarnation in the first place, and that is the distinctively Christian conception of love. And we take this for granted, this idea that God is love or that people should be loving. But it's actually really not. Before Jesus came along, this was not an assumed idea. This was not the premise of human interactions. This was not how cultures formed and understood, well, yeah, we're supposed to love people. People didn't think that way. And I think we forget that in part because Os Guinness talks about as being a cut flower society; the idea being that we kind of grew up with Christian roots and now we've been cut off from these roots, but we're still these wilting flowers and the thing of not realizing yet that actually we're cut off from the thing that was like pouring life into us in the first place. 

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[00:22:51] But, yeah, so many of the fundamental things that we assume in our culture today came out of Christianity. And I think the love of God is one of those think about that statement, which is often the first one Christians learn, but we get so numb to it again. John 3:16, "For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only son that whoever believed in him will not perish, but have eternal life." That is why Jesus came. For all good and our salvation. And a universal, unconditional love is just absolutely staggering. The kind of love that doesn't depend on people loving you back. Think about Jesus statement in his Sermon on the Mount when he says what good is it if you were to love those who only love you? Even the pagans do that, but love your enemies and pray for those who persecute Jesus' love is not limited to people who love him back or people who are family or people who he's predisposed to like because they're similar. The gospel is that while we were still sinners, while we were God's enemies, it says in Romans, Christ died for us. Many other worldviews they don't ascribe to this type of love. 

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[00:23:57] We have a friend who grew up in the Islamic faith, and one of the things that really led him to become a Christian was actually when he started thinking about the love of his human father and how his father loved him and then comparing it to the love of Allah who speaks about how he does not love the prodigal. And then just thinking, but if I rebelled against my earthly father or I did something wrong, I know he would still love me. So how could it be that my Heavenly Father wouldn't? And that is just so distinctive to the Christian vision of God, which Jesus himself tells a story about a prodigal, about a father who sees his son who has betrayed him and run away and rebelled and coming home ready to repent. But even far from the horizon he sees and he comes running towards him. Before he can even get the words out of his mouth to apologize, he's thrown his arms around him and welcomed him home. So that is a picture of the gospel right there. Just radically distinct. 

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Vince Vitale [00:24:55] Yeah, I think this is so significant. If Jesus ever did a Ph.D., I think his thesis statement on the first page would be love everyone always. And as you said, Jo, that's something that we just take for granted to be a virtue and to be something that we should be striving for. But actually people didn't say that before Jesus did, let alone live it and actually believe it. And it's telling also that Allah is never once referred to as a father in the Koran as compared with hundreds of times in the Bible that unconditional love of a father, let alone being referred to as a friend or family or beloved or even husband, that husband and wife, spousal imagery metaphor that runs all throughout the scriptures. In Islam, you can have the relationship of servitude between humans and God, that relationship of a hired servant. 

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[00:25:55] But there's not the same conception of a relationship of friendship or intimacy and how radically different from a God for whom intimate relationship was exactly what he thought was worth dying for. And this stark difference in terms of the conception of love, it makes sense because whereas love is a contingent feature of Allah, but it's intrinsic to the identity of the Christian God. Because the bible says God is love and the bible can say God is love because God is trinitarian. There are three persons in one God. And so there is a family relationship that is inherent within the trinitarian God. God in Christianity does not need to wait until he creates someone else in order to then express love. He is love and that love is expressed eternally from all time in the context of the community of God himself. 

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Jo Vitale [00:26:56] Awesome. So we want to skip on a little bit to the second part of your question and this thought that again we hear often that everyone is ultimately just going to wind up in the same place. I remember hearing an ancient proverb a few years ago that puts it this way There are many paths to the mountain, but the view from the top is the same. We're all going to get to the top. We're all going to see the same thing when we get there. And I find that interesting because again it sounds so comforting, but it's a visual metaphor that assumes quite a few things. Firstly it assumes we have to get up the mountain and it assumes it's possible to get up the mountain and actually assumes the mountain is relatively easy to climb if we're all going to make it. Hence there are many paths to get to the top. And notice that we're all going to be there. There's no notion of justice. So it's an interesting thought. Should everyone be at the top? I mean, it's an interesting question, isn't it? There's a lot that's assumed about it. 

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[00:27:49] And I would just want to question it. Like, is it really that easy to climb our way up to God, to get ourselves into right standing before God? It's hard enough to get myself into standing with Vince sometimes, with our friends or people that we work with. And yet we think we can so easily pick any old path and skip our way up to God. Trying to attain rightness before perfectly holy God, it kind of makes Mount Everest look like a molehill. How are we actually going to do that? And once again, I think we need the Christian faith to invert the whole picture here. We don't need to climb up to God because he and his love has come down the mountain to us. This mountain is completely unscalable. The Scripture talks about if you kept a record of sins, who you could stand? It's just not possible, but for the incarnation. 

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Vince Vitale [00:28:42] This idea of everyone winding up in the same place. Another way I hear that spoken of sometimes is that all paths lead to God. And again, there's an interesting assumption in this phrase that the stated goal of all of the major religious paths is to get to God, but actually only Christianity even claims to lead us to God. That's not the claim that Islam makes. It's not inviting us into relationship with Allah. Allah is not particularly present from the descriptions of Paradise. Lots of different carnal pleasures in the context of Paradise. But I would say, boy, I've sort of tried that and that didn't work. That's partly why I came to Christ, because I tried all that kind of just the visceral pleasures of the world had to offer and they didn't work. Christianity specifically is an invitation to God into relationship. Again, Buddhist traditions, they claim to lead to a state of enlightenment or nirvana, characterized by the ceasing or the extinguishing of desires. It looks different in different Buddhist traditions. But again, it's not an invitation to God. 

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[00:30:03] So do all religions lead to God? Well, no, I would say they don't even necessarily claim to lead to God. And we massively take for granted how unique Christianity is in saying that the goal of life is God himself, intimate friendship with God himself. He has gone to prepare a place for us, as JJ would remind us, and many rooms in his father's house. He's decorating our room. We're going to get to live with him. That's where all of this is headed. Literally to God, into his arms. He's going to wipe every tear from our eyes. We take way too much for granted when we assume that the goal of all religions is to lead us to God. Yet, it's so interesting that many of us would assume that. And I think that because the desire to be with God, to get to God, it's hardwired into us, it's what we long for most to be fully known and fully loved by God himself. And I believe that does point to the fact that we were created by a God who also desires that most. And that is a very unique claim of the Christian faith. 

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Jo Vitale [00:31:09] And this also explains why Jesus is the only way to heaven or the only way to eternal life. And people often react against what they perceive to be the exclusivity of that statement. But that's a very simple reason for that truth. Jesus is the only way to eternal life, because Jesus is eternal life. Eternal life is relationship with him. That's what it is. Now we have some wrong ideas about heaven where we think it's just some like theme park in the sky or just some pleasure cruise. Why can't you just give everybody a ticket? But heaven's not a theme park. We're not going to get our tickets off of God and then go different ways. Heaven is about being in flourishing relationship with God. And so that's why Jesus says that eternal life is to know Him. And yet at the same time, just think of the fact that far from that being an exclusive thing, he's actually making that invitation to everybody. That invitation to relationship with him, no one's left out from that. Just even look at the life of Jesus and who he chooses to interact with and the people he wants to spend time with and the people he's pursuing. And the first invitation he gives is to the criminal dying next to him on the cross. He goes out of his way to interact and love not just his own people, but the Samaritans who are hated by his people, the enemies of his people, the Roman soldiers who are oppressing his people, the religious leaders coming to him secretly in the night, women who are being rejected and excluded the unclean, the lepper, the poor, everybody who everyone else didn't want to be around. Those are the people Jesus is inviting. So, yes, people look at it and say it's exclusive, but it's because it's to Jesus that the invitation is for. And yet the invitation is coming from him to everyone. 

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Vince Vitale [00:32:56] And, therefore, Jesus is the only way to Jesus in the same way that Jo is the only way to Jo. Like say my relationship with Jo is not doing well because I haven't been around and I say, no, don't worry, I've been spending a lot of time with my buddy Tom. Well, that's nice and great for me and Tom, but that's not going to help. And it's also not going to help if I say, don't worry, Jo, I've been doing lots of good things with my time. I've been helping people. I've been learning things. I can't be in relationship with Jo by being in a relationship with someone else, spending time with someone else. I also can't be in a good relationship with her by just doing good things apart from her. Jo is the only way to Jo. I can't deepen a relationship with her by spending time with someone else. I can't deepen relationship with her by just doing good things. If I want Jo, I need to go to Jo. That's not arrogant or exclusive in some sort of unfair sense. That's just the nature of relationships. And Christianity is about relationship. I can only be in good relationship with Joe by spending time with her. And the same is true with Jesus. We can't find the eternal life we were created for, deep relationship with him by spending time with others or by just doing good things apart from him. Doing good things doesn't put me in relationship with God any more than it puts me in relationship with anyone else. There are two different categories, so we need to pursue the person- Jesus himself and a relationship with him. 

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Jo Vitale [00:34:24] And just to clarify, if you have a choice between spending time with Jo or with Jesus, [inaudible] go with Jesus. He really is what it's all about and he is what makes Christianity distinct. And he's what makes it beautiful. When you think about what has kept me all of these years through highs and lows, even through seasons of doubt or disillusionment, like epic disappointment, when I think about, well, what has kept me a Christian sticking with it through it all, the answer is Jesus. It's this God who's made himself noble, personable, who suffered with me in the really hard things, and he's gifted me with a relationship with him. And that is such a different thing from when I've had friends who are seeking God and trying to figure out spirituality and often along that journey I've had them talk about God is sort of like a force or an energy. And to be able to say something so distinctive from that, that God isn't just an intangible force that's out there that I'm just trying to plug into like a charger in a wall socket, but he's a person who I can actually have a relationship with. It's such a different thing. As we draw to a close, I think it's important to think about the differences between religions, not just abstractly, but in concrete, practical terms. 

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[00:35:46] And I want to say that this question and the themes that we've discussed, they do make the most enormous practical difference. It's not just theoretical differences. They will make a tangible, absolute difference to your life. And this is really where the rubber meets the road. And when I say that, what comes to mind for me, Vince, is, when I think about when you had the opportunity to sit with the father of one of your best friends when he was dying and in that conversation he expressed to you in that hospital room his great fear of what comes next because he was just being really honest as he was looking into his heart. He was scared of what it would mean if his future and his eternal life were based purely on his works or what he had done with his life. And which one of us wouldn't be afraid in that moment. But when those moments come, when we're sitting with somebody in a situation like that, at the end of the day, what do we have to say to them? And I just think the bottom line is that should never be a situation like that where the fundamental truth of the universe leaves us with nothing to say. 

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[00:36:44] If we find ourselves in that situation that really begs the question to me, like, what are you actually believing in and what are you holding on to here? And I think no other religion or worldview gives us anything to say in that situation. When someone's dying in front of you and they have no time left to undo their wrong deeds or to balance bad deeds with good deeds. Or when someone is suffering desperately, who's going to see them through that? Who can relate to that? Who's stepping into that with them? In the most critical moments of life, does your worldview have anything to say? In that moment, atheism wouldn't have had anything to say to him. There is no future hope. Other religions based on eternal destiny or the circumstances of rebirth being dependent on the works in your life, that would have left you with nothing to say in that moment. But as a Christian, there is so much to say. Christianity is just so unique that we always have a hope to share. 

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Vince Vitale [00:37:38] I think that's really good, Jo. The most important truth of life should always give us something to say in the most important moments of life. And that also it brings to mind this conversation I had with a college student. This was at Portland State University. He said, "I think there's a universal human longing for peace." And I thought that was an insightful comment. And then he said, "And I think that points to the reality of something that can fulfill that longing." And again I thought, okay, that's really insightful, too. He says, sort of like how hunger points to the reality of food. Without probably having read it, he's reflecting some of [inaudible]. But then he concluded, he said, "So I think it's a good idea to believe in something, whatever that is." 

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Jo Vitale [00:38:25] Okay. 

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Vince Vitale [00:38:26] And he had this assumption that all big picture worldviews or major religions would somehow meet this universal human need for peace, more or less equally well, that the practical payoff would be more or less the same. And hopefully we've clarified to some extent on this episode, or at least given you starting points for continued learning. That's not true. Any old God will not do. The ancient Greek gods were fickle in their dealings with humankind as likely to bring anxiety as to bring peace. In our opinion, Allah will not bring peace but rather a fear of judgment, because you can never know whether you've done enough to merit Paradise. Even Muhammad, he couldn't know the indifference of a deist god. Another option that will not bring peace. You worry about your bad karma and being reborn in a worse state than you're currently in. That will not bring peace. Those who have most successfully worshiped even the gods of this world sex and power and money, those very people testified that those gods will not bring peace. But being forgiven by the God who has the authority to forgive all sins and cleanse you from all unrighteousness, that brings peace at the deepest level. And it makes such a practical, concrete difference. 

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[00:39:50] If your religion says your value is based on your good works, what will you do when you wind up in a conflict with your spouse or your friend? This is where it gets really practical. It gets really concrete. What will you do if your value is based on you being good and you being right? There's a lot at stake there. And you will fight and fight and fight to convince the other person and yourself that you're right and you will rationalize and rationalize and rationalize that you are good and that you are deserving because you have to. And the conflict will just grow and grow and grow until the relationship breaks. But what if your value is not based on your own good works, but on being forgiven? What if that's the most important thing about your identity, about who you are? Then you're free. You're free to see where you messed up. To call it like it is. To just humble yourself and ask for forgiveness and to again be at peace in that relationship. This makes a practical difference. The reason I get so excited about the uniqueness of the Christian faith is because it's not just the right answer on a page; it changes lives. I think about the difference it makes to your emotional health when you can believe that you can live from love rather than for love. Love is something you already have. It's a gift that you've been given. It's not a reward that you need to go out and try to achieve. God's greatest desire is not for you to be good. His greatest desire is simply for you. 

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[00:41:19] God does not love you because you are good. God loves you because he is good. And therefore, again, everything gets inverted. We don't need to kill ourselves trying to earn God's love because he loved us so much that he was the one who was killed on our behalf. That's so freeing. Security in identity that come from knowing you are unconditionally loved by the creator of the universe and therefore you can stop competing to be loved and just start enjoying it. The difference that it makes when you can have assurance of that. Assurance that God is with you in this way. That's what I want for every single one of you who are listening. In so many religions, we can never know if we have done enough. But in Christianity, the Holy Spirit comes to live within you in the most real and visceral way. A deposit guaranteeing the scriptures say what is to come, transforming you from the inside out in ways that you can testify are not from yourself, that you could not have done yourself as God's Spirit testifies with your spirit that you are God's child. Only relationship with your Creator brings true peace. And that is what Christianity alone offers to every single person. 

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