The Unique Jesus — John Stott

I hope that you had a nice cup of coffee and got to meet other people and have a good chat. For our second talk, John Stott is going to talk to us on the unique Jesus. Now, John really needs very little introduction.

I think it's suffice to say for today that John is president of the Institute for Contemporary Christianity and is the rector emeritus of All Souls Church. So, John, we very much look forward to hearing what you've got to say to us.

How kind. Thank you very much. Well, let's pray together. Our Father, we thank you that it is the chief delight of your Holy Spirit to bear witness to your Son, Jesus Christ. And we ask for his gracious ministry as we continue to think about Jesus together.

Illumine our darkened minds, we humbly pray that we may begin to see Jesus in his divine human fullness and in the satisfactoriness of his saving work. We pray that everything we say and think together today may be pleasing in your sight.

The Challenge of Religious Pluralism

For the glory of the same Jesus Christ, our Lord. Amen. I would like to begin with a couple of scenarios in order to set the scene for our discussion of the uniqueness of Jesus Christ. The first took place a number of years ago in Lagos, the capital of Nigeria, when a social worker was visiting a young man in one of the back streets of the city.

The man was out, but on his bedside table the social worker found an interesting pile of books. A copy of the Bible, of course, of the Book of Common Prayer from 1662, a little anomalous perhaps in 20th century Nigeria.

A copy of the Koran, three copies of Watchtower, the magazine of the Jehovah's Witnesses, a biography of Karl Marx, a book of yoga exercises, and what I think the young man needed more than anything else, a popular paperback entitled How to Stop Worrying.

That is typical of the syncretistic mood of today. I bring you from Lagos into London, and on Commonwealth Day, the 24th of May 1966, the first multi-faith service was held in St. Martin-in-the-Fields in London.

I'm sorry to say in the presence of Her Majesty the Queen and of the Duke of Edinburgh. In this service, Hindus, Buddhists, Muslims, and Christians took part on a supposedly equal footing. They made four affirmations of a supposedly common faith.

They gave four readings of their sacred scriptures, the Buddhist scriptures, the Bhagavad Gita of Hinduism, the Koran, the Old and the New Testament, and then they pronounced four blessings, in only one of which the name of Jesus was mentioned for the first and the last time.

The secular press was, of course, enthusiastic, hailing it as, quote, a significant milestone in religious history. The Christian press, however, had the courage to say that it was a betrayal of the Christian faith.

Even the Church Times, which is not known for its evangelical bias, commented, it is impossible to reconcile with the Bible any attempt at religious indifferentism, any neglect of the Christian affirmation that salvation is through Jesus Christ alone.

Now, that was 25 years ago. That language of the betrayal of the Christian faith would emphatically not be used by the Church Times today. I think it probably would by the Church of England newspaper, but things have moved in these last 25 years.

So, those two scenarios, one from Lagos, the other from London, are symbolic of the world's increasingly pluralistic societies. The word pluralism is used nowadays in several different senses. I'm using it just to begin with at its simplest.

It denotes the fact that there is a plurality of races and of religions in most societies of the world today. Now, to refer to society as pluralistic does not in itself necessarily make a value judgment on any of the different religions that make up the religious background of the country concerned.

It simply acknowledges the existence of a multiplicity of faiths, or as they are sometimes called, a multiplicity of faith communities. That's the plurality of religions. Pluralism nowadays, however, has a much more sinister meaning.

It signifies not just the acknowledgment that there are different communities, but the affirmation of the validity of all religions. I'll come back to that later. So, our question together today is how has this situation arisen, and how should Christian people respond to it with sensitivity and with faithfulness?

I hope, by the way, you've all got—yes, I think you have—an outline. It's a rather bare outline or skeleton, I'm afraid, and I need to clothe it with a good deal of flesh because it covers both lectures.

I begin then first with the multi-faith challenge. There are three particular moods or movements which have contributed to the situation in which we find ourselves today. A is the global village, that is, the shrinkage of the planet owing to modern communication systems.

B is the spirit of the age that magnifies tolerance. And C is the appeal of syncretism, namely the attempt to amalgamate the best or noblest elements of different religions without having the disagreeable necessity of having to choose between them.

The Global Village and the Growth of Religious Contact

I begin then, A, with the global village. We should know that that is a phrase invented by Professor Marshall McLuhan, the Christian layman. I don't think he's still alive. I forget when he died. But about 20 to 25 years ago, he was well known as a professor of communications in the University of Toronto in Ontario, Canada.

And it's he who talked about the global village, the shrinkage of the planet into a little village owing to these complex communication systems. They've caused the world to shrink. And as we travel to other countries and other people travel to ours, we now meet people of different faiths, which we did not do so much previously.

Television also introduces us to them. And the comparative study of religions, which is very common in schools today, makes us familiar with the many religions of humankind. Previously, other religions belonged to the rather remote places of the earth.

Today, they are on our very doorstep. We meet adherents of these different religions on the street and in the supermarket. The global village, the shrinkage of the planet. In the United Kingdom, for example, there are now about a million Muslims who share our little island with us.

The second largest Hindu community in the world outside India is Leicester. The first one is Durban in South Africa. The second outside India itself is Leicester. There are Hindu temples in six, seven, or eight of the major cities of Britain.

Mosques are springing up everywhere, rather prestigious ones paid for by Arab petrodollars in the Middle East. And about a quarter of a million Turban Sikhs are also found in many of our cities, while devotees of modern cults are also flourishing.

Legal, Social, and Intellectual Tolerance

So, in this global village, there is an increasing plurality of religions, ancient and modern. B, I move on to the spirit of the age. Once people began to grasp Einstein's general principle of, or theory of, relativity, they began, probably unwarrantedly, to apply it outside science where it belongs, to ethics, and to every other situation in our society.

Now, almost nothing is absolute any longer. Everything is relative, or thought to be relative, to everything else. And in a relativistic age, the most prized virtue is tolerance. I don't think there is any virtue in the Western world, at least, that is more popular than tolerance.

So, the question is, is it a Christian virtue or not? I, myself, found it helpful, in reflecting about the meaning of tolerance, to see that there are, in fact, at least three different kinds of tolerance.

First, there is legal tolerance, which defends minority rights and protects people's freedom to profess, practice, and propagate their own religion or ideology. Now, if we're talking about legal tolerance, the protection of the rights of minorities, I have no hesitation in saying that Christians should be in the forefront of those who are demanding such freedom.

Indeed, Christians give far more freedom and protection of a Muslim minority in this country than Muslims give to Christians in any other Muslim country of the world. So, we are in favor of legal tolerance.

Secondly, there is what might be called social tolerance, which encourages mutual respect and good neighborliness in the community. Again, Christians should surely promote this. It arises from our recognition of the humanness of people of all faiths.

It reminds us that every human being is a creature of dignity and value made in the image and likeness of God himself. So, social tolerance is good. But then, thirdly, there is intellectual tolerance.

Intellectual tolerance is to cultivate a mind so broad and so open that there is no keeping anything in it or out of it. And that is not a virtue but a vice. It is the vice of the feeble-minded who have no convictions of their own.

It can degenerate into an unprincipled confusion of truth with error and goodness with evil. And Christians who believe that God has revealed himself in Christ and has revealed the meaning of truth and goodness in his incarnate Son cannot possibly come to terms with intellectual tolerance of that kind.

G .K. Chesterton, who is the lover of the Bourne mot, as I'm sure we all know. I expect you are lovers of Chesterton, too. He, too, once said, I haven't brought it with me, so of course I'm likely to forget it.

But he said, what did he say? Lord, help me to remember. You know, the trouble when you get to my age, you're positively geriatric. Your memory plays you the most fearful tricks. But it's about the open mind.

I'll come back to it. I'll come back to it. You must forgive me. I must remember to bring these things with me and not rely on my memory. So we move on, see, to the appeal of syncretism. I guess that total intellectual tolerance, that is having no convictions at all and being tolerant of everybody else's, total intellectual tolerance is a pretty rare phenomenon.

Most people feel able to disagree with something and even positively to affirm something or other. But more popular, therefore, than total tolerance is syncretism, which is the fusion of different beliefs into a single harmonious system.

Dr. Wisse Tooft, who was the first secretary general of the World Council of Churches, a very distinguished Dutch Christian gentleman, in his fine book No Other Name, published in 1963, gives this definition of syncretism.

It is the view that there is no unique revelation in history, but that there are many different ways to reach the divine reality, that all formulations of religious truth or experience are inadequate expressions of that truth, and that it is necessary to harmonize as much as possible all religious ideas and experiences so as to create one universal religion for mankind, for humankind.

Again, he writes, syncretism is essentially a revolt against the uniqueness of revelation in history. That, I think, is a very good definition of what is meant by syncretism, and you'll already see that it's very different from pluralism.

Pluralism is affirming the validity of each religion, while syncretism is taking what you may regard as the best and noblest portions and forming a kind of religious cocktail out of them. Now, the spirit of syncretism is not new.

Syncretism in Hinduism, Theosophy, and Islam

If I may go on about it for a little bit longer, the natural home of syncretism is India. And the greatest exponent of it, probably, was the 19th century Hindu mystic Ramakrishna Paramahansa, who reached the conclusion that all religions are, in their innermost content, one and the same.

He was followed by that well-known religious reformer, Swami Vivekananda, who made a great impression in the first Parliament of Religions in 1893, whose centenary has just been commemorated, as you will have seen, in Chicago.

And Swami Vivekananda, who, among other things, in his speech at the Parliament of Religions said, it is a sin to call a man a sinner. You are not sinners, he said. You are angels. You are children of God.

And that is typical of Hinduism, the refusal to call anybody sinful and unable to encompass their own redemption. And Vivekananda also taught that all religions are paths to the one supreme reality. Then, in 1875, the Theosophical Society was founded in New York.

Its chief founder was Madame Blavatsky, its best-known teacher, Annie Besant, and its teaching that Jesus was one incarnation in a long succession of incarnations down the history of the world. And then, in 19th century Muslim Iran, the Bahá 'í Faith emerged, founded by Bahá 'u'lláh, and it stresses the essential unity of all religions.

So, I say again, the spirit of syncretism is not new. It actually pervaded the Hellenistic world of the first century A .D. There were gods many and lords many in those days, as that's a phrase you may remember from the pen of the Apostle Paul in 1 Corinthians chapter 8.

So there were gods many, lords many, saviors many, and these many deities tolerated one another in amicable coexistence. But the early Christians were of a very different frame of mind from modern syncretists.

They repudiated what one might call the spiritual polygamy. As the Old Testament prophets were outspoken in their polemic against heathen idolatry, so the New Testament apostles insisted on the absolute uniqueness of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.

If I may quote Visser Tooft again, he said,. And it is high time that Christians should rediscover that at the very heart of their faith is this, Jesus Christ did not come to make a contribution to the religious storehouse of mankind, but rather that in him God reconciled the world unto himself.

Christian Attitudes Toward Other Faiths

So that is just an introduction to syncretism. Let me come on to my second main section, which is Christian attitudes to other faiths. Many books are being written in our own generation, which are attempting to suggest different approaches to these other religions and ideologies.

And an increasing number of scholars today are calling us to change our attitude. And perhaps the most radical example is the symposium that was published in 1987, edited by Professor John Hick and Professor Paul Nutter, both working in the United States, entitled The Myth of Christian Uniqueness.

Now, John Hick edited a book in 1977 called The Myth of God Incarnate. The second myth he is trying to explode is The Myth of Christian Uniqueness, 1987, and this year he has published another book called The Metaphor of God Incarnate, saying that the idea of an incarnation of God taking humanity to himself in the historic person of Jesus of Nazareth, that is purely metaphor.

There is no reality behind it at all. It's just a metaphor for the incarnation of, not of God, but of humanness. We see in Jesus a human being who is intensely open to God, but was himself in no sense divine.

This is, you see, what is being said by somebody, Professor Hick, claims to be a Christian professor. He teaches in a Christian seminary in Southern California, and we're going to hear a lot more of this kind of talk in days to come.

Anyway, The Myth of Christian Uniqueness, which I think I've read carefully, calls us to give up the idea that Christianity is superior, let alone unique. It calls us to renounce all thoughts of world evangelization, that we should proclaim Christ throughout the world and persuade people to come to him.

And these books have popularized a threefold classification of Christian attitudes, which you will notice does not include syncretism. Syncretism has now been left behind. A to A is exclusivism. It's an unfortunate word, but it is used nowadays to describe people, I think, like us.

Now, this position has been held almost universally throughout the Christian church or churches until today, until this century. It affirms that Jesus Christ is the only way to the Father, and that Christianity is unique and discontinuous from other religions.

There is a fundamental break and difference between the Christian faith and other religions. In this century, it's particularly associated with the name of Karl Barth of Switzerland, and it declares the finality, the absolute supremacy of our Lord Jesus Christ.

Now, I don't like the word exclusivism because we don't want to exclude anybody. We want to include everybody in submission to the Lordship of Christ. Nevertheless, that is the word they're using. Now, the second is inclusivism, by which they mean that, yes, God did supremely reveal himself in the historic Jesus, but there is no need for people to become Christians in order to benefit from that revelation of God in Christ.

God can bring and is bringing salvation through Christ, indeed, but to adherents of other religions, so that he brings salvation to the sincere Hindu or the sincere Muslim, yes, on the basis of Christ, but it includes everybody.

There's no need to become a Christian in order to receive salvation from Christ. Christianity thus completes other faiths and is continuous with them rather than discontinuous. Then the third attitude they propose is pluralism, called by Chris Wright, the new principal of All Nations Christian College, the supermarket mentality.

I've already suggested that plurality simply recognizes the fact that there are many religions, but pluralism denotes a particular attitude to them, namely that all religions are simply different cultural understandings of the one true God.

There is God, unknown and unknowable, but there are different cultural expressions of his reality in different parts of the world, and indeed religions are all cultural. Hinduism belongs to India, and Islam belongs to the Arab world, and Christianity belongs to the West, and Judaism belongs to Israel, and so on.

They're just different cultural understandings and expressions of the divine reality. So they go on in pluralism. We must affirm the independent validity of every religion. We must accept what they call this wider ecumenism and give up the naive attempt to convert everybody.

I don't know anybody who's poured more scorn on this idea than—unfortunately, I'll remember to bring it this time— than Ronald Knox in a wonderful book called Essays in Satire. He was a Roman Catholic, you may remember, in Oxford, very distinguished in his day, and in an essay called Reunion All Round, subtitled, and a plea for the inclusion within the Church of England of all Mohammedans, Jews, Buddhists, Brahmins, Papists, and Atheists.

And Ronald Knox goes on, And having dealt with differences between Christians and theists, he comes finally to the problem of reunion with the atheists. In their case, he says, we have only one single quarrel to patch up, namely as to whether God exists or not.

So he proposes to the theologians that as we believe God to be both imminent and yet transcendent, we should also be able to reconcile ourselves to the last final antinomy that God is both existent and nonexistent.

And he ends, thank God in these days of enlightenment and establishment, everyone has a right to his own opinions, and chiefly to the opinion that nobody else has a right to theirs. It's a wonderful irony, as I think you'll agree.

But you know, people are doing that. You've read in the papers in the last few weeks about, is his name Anthony Freeman? In the Chichester Diocese, and the Bishop of Chichester, he's written this book called God in Us, saying that there is no absolute God, there is no objective supernatural deity, that all God is is our own feelings.

It's an attempt to interpret theology in terms of anthropology, and we have nice feelings from time to time and love and quest for truth, and that is God. So Anthony Freeman actually says, if I can remember it, he says, I believe in God, and chiefly I believe that he doesn't exist.

Now that is the kind of contradiction to which they are now coming. So how do we respond? Well, having gone in my second section through these different Christian attitudes to other faiths, I want to come to my main section three, the case for the uniqueness of Christ.

The Uniqueness of Jesus Christ

So let us be clear what we are claiming uniqueness for. Not for Christianity in any of its empirical manifestations. We are not claiming uniqueness for the church in any of its particular cultural expressions.

We're not even claiming uniqueness for theology in any of its many traditional formulations. We are claiming uniqueness for Christ, for the person and work of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. Because to us, Jesus Christ is not one of many religious leaders.

He is not one of Hinduism's 330 million deities. He is not one of the 40 prophets acknowledged by Muhammad. He is not just the best in the language of religious devotion, as Professor Paul Knitter suggests, that just as a husband says of his wife, she's the best woman in the world.

Well, he can't say that because he hasn't investigated all the others. But, I mean, it's the language of devotion. And just as he says of her, she's the best, we say of Jesus, he's the best. Because he's the best we happen to have come across for the time being.

No, we don't accept that. Nor do we accept that he is the great, as we may say that Alexander the Great, or Napoleon the Great, or Charles the Great. We don't talk about Jesus the Great. He is the only.

And nothing can be added to him. He has no peers, and he has no rivals, and he has no successors. That is our firm confidence as the followers of Jesus. I hope it's clear then that whatever there may be in Christianity that is unique, the uniqueness we are claiming is in the person of Jesus.

Witnesses to the Uniqueness of Christ

I bring three witnesses together. One from Asia, one from Africa, and one from Europe. My Asian witness is that remarkable man, Sadhu Sundar Singh, converted to Jesus through a vision when he was 15 years old, brought up as a Sikh, and he became a Sadhu, a holy man, an itinerant Sadhu until he disappeared one day.

Nobody knows what happened to him in the Himalayas. He once met an agnostic professor of comparative religions in a Hindu college who asked him what he'd found in Christianity that he'd not found in Sikhism, to which he replied, I have found Christ.

Oh yes, I know, said the professor rather impatiently, but what particular principle have you found? What particular doctrine have you found that you did not find before? The particular thing I have found, said Sadhu Sundar Singh, is Christ.

So I bring you now my African witness, Professor John Mbiti, in his distinguished book on African religions and philosophy, published in 1969. He simply said the uniqueness of Christianity is in Jesus Christ.

Or I come to Professor Stephen Neal as my European, the late Professor Stephen, Bishop Stephen Neal, he was as well as a professor in his Christian faith and other faiths. The old saying, he writes, that Christianity is Christ is almost exactly true.

The historical figure of Jesus of Nazareth is the criterion by which every Christian affirmation has to be judged and in the light of which it stands or falls. Later he goes on, rather eloquent, Christians must persist in their earnest invitation to true dialogue.

They must exercise endless patience and refuse to be discouraged and the burden of all their invitation must be, consider Jesus. He goes on to lament how hard it is to persuade Muslims even to listen.

But our task, he says, is to go on saying to the Muslim, with infinite patience, sir, consider Jesus. It is not the case that the Muslim has seen Jesus of Nazareth and rejected him. He has never seen him.

And the veil of misunderstanding and prejudice is still over his face. So it's the uniqueness of Christ. And wherein is the uniqueness of Christ? Well, Jesus Christ, as you know, is given numerous names and titles in the pages of the New Testament.

In recent years, several scholarly studies of the names and titles of Jesus have been published. The commonest words applied to him are plain Jesus and plain Christ. Often, however, the word, the title Hercules, the Lord, is added.

He is the Lord Jesus, the Lord Christ, or the Lord Jesus Christ. But when his name and title are spelled out in their fullness, as they are particularly in the second epistle of Peter, we have our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.

For example, 2 Peter 3, verse 18, grow in grace and in the knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. And I want to suggest to you that that full title of Jesus bears within itself a threefold affirmation to which we need to remain faithful.

Jesus Christ Is Lord

The first is that Jesus is Lord. If he's our Lord and Savior, he is Lord. He is Savior, and he is ours. We mustn't miss the personal possessive which is added. So first, Jesus is Lord. I hope all of us know the very earliest Christian creed is two words in Greek, Kyrios Iesus, Lord Jesus, or Jesus Lord.

And when anybody acknowledged the Lordship of Jesus, he or she was identified as a Christian and baptized and thus received into the Christian community. Because it was recognized, as Paul wrote in Romans 10, if you confess with your lips Kyrios Iesus, Jesus Lord, and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.

Then it was also recognized in 1 Corinthians 12, 3, that nobody can say Kyrios Iesus, Lord Jesus, except by the Holy Spirit, the Spirit who bears witness to Jesus and opens our eyes to see the truth as it is in Jesus and enables us to confess that he is Lord.

Now, to say Kyrios Iesus sounds pretty harmless until you begin to dig into the implications of that affirmation. Now, we need to remember particularly that when Jewish scholars in Alexandria in Egypt, which had a very large Jewish population, and many Jews had become Hellenized and no longer spoke Hebrew but Greek, there was a great demand in 2nd century BC Alexandria for them to have the Old Testament in Greek and not in Hebrew.

So when the scholars translated it from Hebrew to Greek in what came to be known as the Septuagint, they were immediately confronted with the problem, what would they do with the sacred name Yahweh or Jehovah, as we often call it?

They didn't feel at liberty to transliterate it. They didn't feel at liberty to translate it. So all they could do with this sacred name that they didn't even feel able to pronounce was to use the paraphrase, Ho Kyrios, the Lord.

And that is why in our English Bibles today, in the place of Yahweh or Jehovah, we have the phrase, the Lord. That's not an exact translation of the Hebrew, but it is following the same tradition of calling Yahweh Ho Kyrios, the Lord.

I'm no lover of biblical numerology, and I've never worked it out myself, but I'm told it comes 6 ,560 times in the Old Testament or in the Septuagint that he is called Ho Kyrios. Now, the point is this.

The early Christians knew this very well. They were familiar with the Septuagint. They knew that Ho Kyrios was a divine title. It was equivalent to Yahweh. But although they knew that, they didn't hesitate to apply it to Jesus.

They called Jesus Ho Kyrios. And to call Jesus Ho Kyrios is tantamount to saying that Jesus is Jehovah. He is Yahweh. He is God. Indeed, when you come to that great passage in Philippians chapter 2, verses 9 and 11, that God highly exalted him, gave him the name above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Ho Kyrios, the Lord, to the glory of God the Father.

Now, there are three wonderful things in those three verses. The first we've already dealt with, a, that Paul gave Jesus a God title. He called him Ho Kyrios. But he not only gave him a God title, he transferred to Jesus a God text from the Old Testament.

That is to say, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow and every tongue confess, etc. Now, there is a very clear allusion to Isaiah 45, verse 23, when Yahweh soliloquizes, talks to himself and says, to me every knee shall bow and every tongue shall swear by my name.

See, every knee, every tongue acknowledging Yahweh. Now, with this amazing audacity that was given either to Paul or maybe to the authors of a song that Paul was citing, doesn't really matter which, with the amazing audacity given to them by the inspiring Spirit, they reapply Isaiah 45, verse 23, from Yahweh to Jesus.

They say that it is the will of Yahweh that every knee should bow to Jesus and every tongue should swear by his name. It's amazing, isn't it? And they go on doing it. Whoever calls on the name of Yahweh shall be saved, in Joel chapter 2.

Peter, on the day of Pentecost, applies it to Jesus. So does Paul in one or two passages in his epistles, like Romans 10. Whoever calls on the name of who? Yahweh or Jesus? They make no difference. They identify Yahweh with Jesus.

So Paul applies to Jesus a God title, he applies to Jesus a God text, and he demands for Jesus God worship. Every knee shall bow to him. Now, bowing the knee to somebody, prostrating yourself before somebody there, is, of course, worship.

Now, to worship Jesus, if Jesus is not God, is idolatry. That is why the crucial question to ask people is, do you worship Jesus? These people who are engaged in pluralism and so on. Do you worship Jesus?

They may believe in their six Jesuses that Hélène introduced us to in the first session this morning. The cosmic Jesus, the Palestinian Jesus, the feminist Jesus. Yeah, but what about the divine Jesus?

Do you worship Jesus? That's the test. Some of us, after the publication of The Myth of God Incarnate, with its seven contributors, invited a group of evangelical scholars, invited them to meet with us for a day conference.

Four of the seven came. And I shall always remember speaking to Don Cupid of the Sea of Faith fame, during the lunch break. Don, do you ever worship Jesus? Oh, no, he said immediately. Now, out of his own lips, we have to say, then you're not a Christian if you don't worship Jesus.

Indeed, he now calls himself a Christian Buddhist, as I'm sure you know. Now, there is Jesus is Lord. Now, there is nothing like this in any other religion. Early or classical Buddhism, for example, had no God at all.

Buddhism is not a theistic faith. It had no God, no worship, no religion. Divine honors were not attributed to the Buddha until about 500 years after his death, which makes it impossible to accept what Professor John Hicks says, namely that Buddhology and Christology developed in comparable ways.

That's a Hickian phrase. But they didn't. People were calling Jesus Lord during his lifetime, and certainly immediately after his death and resurrection, but they didn't call the Buddha Lord until 500 years later.

There is no comparison. So Hinduism, it is true, claims a number of avatars, an avatar, literally a descent of God, of the God Vishnu, in historical people like, if they were indeed historical, like Rama and Krishna, as you can read about so-called the Lord Krishna in the Bhagavad Gita.

But once again, the word incarnation is a misnomer as a translation of the word avatar for several reasons that I could quickly give you. The first thing is that their historicity is not only dubious, but to Hindu people unimportant.

Hinduism is a collection of ethical and philosophical ideas, and Hindus are not interested in history. It doesn't matter to them if there was no historical incarnation. Then, the next thing is that these avatars in Hinduism are plural.

There were a number of them, they believe. But, of course, it is of the essence of our Christian belief that God became man in Jesus of Nazareth once and for all and forever. Another difference is that these avatars, well, they came and went.

Once Vishnu came into Rama or Krishna and then went. But when God took humanity to himself in Jesus of Nazareth, well, who is at the right hand of God today? The man Christ Jesus, the glorified man Christ Jesus, the glorified God man.

He took human nature to himself forever when he became flesh in Jesus. So, you see, there are fundamental differences between Hindu claims and the Christian claim. Then, Islam. Well, of course, Islam does believe in God, Allah.

But in the Quran, Muhammad dismisses with scorn and even horror the concept of divine sonship. God forbid that Allah should ever have a son. But, of course, Muhammad never understood what was meant by the sonship of Jesus and thought that Yahweh had had sexual relations with the Virgin Mary to produce the Son of God.

You know, some crude understanding. He never understood the eternal sonship of Jesus Christ. So, here is the first aspect of the uniqueness of Jesus. He's Lord. He is God's eternal personal word or son made flesh.

And in him, the fullness of the Godhead dwells in bodily form. He is the sovereign ruler of the universe and the church. And our place is on our faces at his feet. He is Lord. Now, I need, I think, to move on, secondly.

I was going to talk about the claims of Jesus. I wonder whether to or not as time is going so rapidly. I think not, if you'll excuse me. I think if I have any time, I'll come back to it at the end, if there's any time over.

But I want to come on to 3b, then number four, the proclamation of Christ, will be the second lecture after the lunch break. But I hope to finish section three and give you time for questions. So, 3b is Jesus is not only Lord but Savior.

Jesus Christ Is Savior

He is our Lord and Savior. And he is presented to us in the pages of the New Testament, not only in lordship but in saviorhood terms. Indeed, the divine Lord came to be the divine Savior. Now, we all know that the vocabulary of salvation is very unfashionable and unpopular and sometimes embarrassing, even in sections of the Christian church.

But we cannot possibly give it up. We may want to win people to Christ by a gospel that doesn't use these traditional words of a traditional Christian vocabulary. We may want to present salvation in freedom terms, which I would like to do in a moment.

But we cannot get away from the fact that Christianity is fundamentally a rescue religion, a religion of salvation, that Jesus came into the world to seek and to save that which was lost. Now, let me talk about salvation as freedom.

Salvation is freedom from the just judgment of God upon our guilt, and it is freedom from that guilt and from a guilty conscience, freedom into a new relationship with God in which we become his forgiven children and call him Father.

Now, in every aspect of freedom that I'm going to develop, you'll notice it's both negative and positive. If you look up the English dictionaries, you'll find they all define freedom negatively. Freedom from oppression, freedom from constriction, from this and that.

But witnesses to the meaning of salvation is that you cannot understand it in only negative terms. You have to go on to the positive counterpart, not only what we're saved from, but what we're saved for or what we're saved into.

So the first is from the judgment of God, from guilt and a guilty conscience, into sonship and daughterhood, being a child of God and addressing him as Father. Next, salvation is freedom from the bondage of meaninglessness into God's new society of love and meaning.

Again, it is freedom, salvation is freedom, from the—I talked about meaninglessness— from the horror, the futility of pain, death, and decay into a new world of immortality, beauty, and unimaginable joy.