In the service held at Westminster Abbey on 11 March to mark Commonwealth Day, 11 representatives of other ‘faith communities’ were present alongside the representatives of the Christian churches, and at the tip of the service blessings were offered for the Commonwealth on behalf of the Hindu, Jewish, Jain and Muslim communities in addition to on behalf of the Church. This reminds us of the incontrovertible fact that we live in a world through which there are a selection of various religions and the query which this fact raises is why that is the case.
The Bible tells us that the unique religion of humanity was the worship of the one creator God described in Genesis 1 and a pair of, the God who subsequently revealed himself to Israel as Yahweh, or in English versions of the Bible ‘the Lord.’ It was this God, who had made himself known via personal revelation to the primary ancestors of the human race (Genesis 1:26-30, 2:15-24, 3:8-19, 4:1-7) who was worshipped when corporate worship was instituted within the time of Seth (Genesis 4:26).
In the nineteenth century this picture of the origin of faith got here to be widely rejected by Westerns scholars. They contended that religion was a purely human construct that had steadily evolved as a part of the overall development of human culture, with the faith of early human cultures being primitive and polytheistic, and monotheism being a late development which emerged as a response against this primal polytheism.
In Western secular culture this understanding of human religious development has something that ‘everybody knows.’ However, it doesn’t do justice to the discoveries in regards to the religious beliefs and practices of indigenous peoples around the globe made by students of ethnography from the nineteenth century onwards. Such peoples have cultures which preserve elements of early human culture that predate developments in later and more sophisticated cultures, and when their religions have been studied it has turn out to be clear time after time that their religions are marked by an awareness of the existence of a single, good, creator god.
In addition to the evidence provided by the cultures of indigenous peoples, scholars also found evidence for an original belief in a single god by studying the later development of language and culture around the globe. For example, as Robert Brow notes, study of the Indo-European language group shows an awareness of the one creator God amongst all of the Indo-European peoples: “His first name was Dyaus Pitar (‘divine father’) which is identical because the Greek Zeus Pater, the Latin Jupiter or Deus, the early German Tiu or Ziu and Norse Tyr. Another name was ‘the heavenly one’ (Sanskrit varuna, Greek ouranos) , or ‘the friend’ (Sanskrit mitra, Persian mithra). By metaphor and simile other names were added. God known as ‘the sun,’ ‘the powerful one’ and ‘the guardian of order.'”
The peoples involved eventually became polytheistic, however the linguistic evidence for an original monotheism stays.
In similar fashion, the evidence from China indicates that the earliest type of Chinese religion that we find out about involved the worship of the one supreme sky-god often called Shang-Ti or Hao-Tien. As Chinese religion developed, the worship of Shang-Ti faded into the background, but sacrifice was offered to him 3 times a 12 months by the Chinese Emperor right until the tip of Imperial China in 1911.
These type of examples of evidence for primeval monotheism from all around the world were compiled by the Scottish scholar Andrew Lang in his book The Making of Religion, first published in 1898, and were then set out in exhaustive detail by the Austrian Catholic scholar Wilhelm Schmidt within the 11,000 pages of his twelve volume study, The Origin of the Idea of God, which was published from 1912 onwards. Further study since their time has confirmed slightly than overthrown their findings. The evidence of historical, ethnographic, and linguistic study confirms the biblical concept that the unique religion of mankind was the worship of 1 creator god.
The existence of this evidence raises the problem of the final word origin of this religion. We comprehend it existed, but why did it exist? As now we have seen, the biblical answer is that God revealed himself personally to the earliest human beings, and this biblical answer is supported by the ethnographical evidence which period after time says that the primary ancestor(s) of the people in query learned about God from God, after which passed this information on to their subsequent descendants.
To quote Schmidt: “The bottom line is that the reports now we have from the adherents of the oldest religions themselves aren’t only merely disinclined towards the supposition that the religions were created by looking for and searching human beings; slightly, worse yet, they don’t even mention it with a single word. All their affirmative responses are directed to the side of divine revelation: it’s God Himself Who taught humans what to consider about Him, how one can venerate Him, and the way they need to obey the expression of His will.”
If the evidence shows that the earliest religion of humankind was monotheism based on direct divine revelation, then why is there the range of religions and philosophies that we see today. What happened?
The answer appears to be that the current state of affairs emerged in several stages.
First, there was the emergence of polytheism, a development which saw the one god of monotheism turn out to be a part of a pantheon of various divine beings. Thus, Zeus, the divine father, was still worshipped, but became only one amongst a variety of Greek deities and the identical was true of Tyr who ended up as a reasonably minor Norse deity. Alongside this development there was also the event of idolatry as each people (corresponding to the Egyptian Pharaohs), and created objects, corresponding to statues, got here to be seen because the places where the gods manifested themselves on earth, and due to this fact became the objects of worship in their very own right.
Secondly, within the sixth century BC there was what has been described because the ‘axial age,’ a time which saw the emergence of Vedanta Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism in India, Zoroastrianism in Persia, and Confucianism and Taoism in China.
These religions all appear to have emerged because of this of a revolt against the religious teaching, and in addition the economic and political power, of the priesthoods of the prevailing polytheistic religions in India, China and Persia. They introduced a variety of various religious ideas and practices, but none of them marked a return to an easy creational monotheism. Instead, these latest forms of faith were marked by pantheism, atheism, or agnosticism, or, within the case of Zoroastrianism, a dualism between the great creator god Ahura Mazda and the co-equal and co-eternal evil deity Ahura Mainyu.
This sixth century revolt against polytheistic religion also seems to have sparked off the revolt against polytheistic forms of faith which will be present in Greek and later Roman philosophy, a revolt which, while difficult existing types of Greek and Roman religion, once more failed to supply a return to creational monotheism.
Finally, Islam, which can have had its roots in ancient Arabian monotheism, and was influenced by Judaism and Christianity, emerged within the seventh century AD as an uncompromisingly monotheistic response against Arabian polytheism and within the fifteenth century AD Sikhism emerged as a monotheistic development of the Hindu tradition.
This leaves us with Judaism and Christianity. To understand their emergence, we’d like to notice that each the Christian faith, and a variety of primeval religious traditions from around the globe, bear witness to the incontrovertible fact that the creative activity of the only good creator God has been undermined by the work of an evil spiritual power, with the result that the world because it now exists isn’t the way it was originally meant to be.
What the Bible tells us is that with the intention to rectify the disharmony introduced into his good creation by this evil power (what Christian theology calls the Devil), the creator God revealed himself to Abraham and established a covenant relationship with him and his descendants (the people of Israel) through which all of the families of the earth could be blessed (Genesis 12:1-3).
The Old Testament then tells us that this same creator God subsequently appeared to Moses on the burning bush (Exodus 3:13-15, 6:2-4), rescued the people of Israel from Egypt, and established them within the land that he had promised Abraham that he would give them. The remainder of the Old Testament is the story of how this God maintained his relationship with the people of Israel despite their constant insurrection against him, and the way he spoke to them through a series of prophets who warned them to worship God alone and to live in obedience to God’s laws, and who also promised that God would act in a latest method to fulfil the promise of universal blessing made to Abraham.
The New Testament tells the story of how this promise was fulfilled. The creator God took human nature upon himself within the person of Jesus Christ (John 1:1-18, Hebrews 1:1-14). This began a technique of cosmic renewal through Christ’s death and resurrection and the pouring out of the Holy Spirit on the day of Pentecost (Romans 8:1-25), a process which can culminate in the approaching of a ‘latest heaven and a latest earth’ (Revelation 21:1), Here God’s people, drawn from all of the nations of the earth will dwell with him without end, and ‘death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning nor crying nor pain any more, for the previous things have passed away (Revelation 21:4).
The distinction between Christianity and Judaism is that Christians accept the New Testament witness that God’s guarantees have been (and can be) fulfilled in Christ whereas adherents of Judaism don’t.
From the Christian perspective the evidence summarized above signifies that the reply to the query of why there are a selection of religions is a story of degeneration and regeneration. It is a story of degeneration in that it tells how the knowledge of the one creator God has steadily turn out to be lost through the course of human history. It is a story of regeneration in that it tells how God has acted to revive and deepen this information through the history of Israel, the incarnation of Jesus Christ, and the work of the Spirit, as a part of his overall regeneration of the created order within the face of its corruption by the activity of the Devil and the human alienation from God that has resulted from it.
