Christ is Unique - Christopher Lamb

The Christian claim is that Christ is unique: Christianity is not. Christianity can be classified under all the normal headings of a study of human society and religion. It has a long and complex history, leading exponents, a massive literature, distinctive rituals and characteristic social forms. All these can be paralleled by the communities of other world faiths, especially Judaism and Islam, and scholars have com-pared the ‘truth-claims’—for example, the finality of the Qur’an—which are made in the different religious traditions.

This study of comparative religion has alarmed some Christians because in it the features of different religions have been placed side by side and their essential similarity examined. When this process moves from the externals to the inner core of religious faith, Christians often feel their faith is being ‘relativized’, reduced to the common level of human experience.

Christianity and religion

I believe Christians need fear this kind of study as little as a loving married couple fear the sociologist who tells them they belong to the same sub-group of society and have been culturally conditioned in the same way, and that is why they are happy. They know there is more to it than that! And Christians know that they belong to the human race and that God’s creative power has made them one with all other human beings in the way that their minds and bodies and their social natures work. Therefore, it is foolish to resist the idea that, as historians and sociologists look at it, Christianity is one more of the religions of the world. But history and sociology is not the whole story, though it may be told as if it is.

© "The World’s Religions" published by Lion Publishing plc, Sandy Lane West, Oxford, England. Reprinted with permission.

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