All Religions Express Prayers to God?

Here We Go Magic - Make up your mind

Jesus Christ is not in the ether, and he is not the name of a kind of experience. When Paul calls himself a slave of Christ he means he owes his very life to a specific man that did something in history to save us.

We don't believe that the Holy Spirit inspires people to worship idols. The vague religious impulse to which many quasi-relativists appeal is prior to the Spirit prompting us to worship Him alone; otherwise, the Spirit would be in all pagans as well, moving them to cooperate, and their cooperation would be no more or less licit than Christian worship because it would be divinely-inspired. Pagan religions are not expressions of the Spirit but of needing Him. Jealousy is an expression of lovelessness, too—in both cases, the natural and uninspired impulse is from a lack of relationship with God because the inspiration from the Spirit is absent in pagans.

The many paths argument depends on the premise that all prayers are ultimately directed to the one Creator. However, this is not a question of where those prayers are directed, but of who is directing them because we know the former by the latter. Since we believe that the Spirit of Christ is the One who moves us to prayer, and that prayer is participation in the trinitarian mystery (and nothing else), it therefore is a mistake to say that even pagan religions offer prayers to God.

One objection might be the following. “It is question-begging to claim that, because prayer is participation in the trinitarian mystery, pagan religions therefore don’t offer prayers to God (i.e., that pagan prayers aren’t actually trinitarian begs the question). In other words, the hidden premise in your argument is that only the baptized respond to the grace that moves us to prayer. But the Spirit isn’t only working in the already baptized; He is also free to work elsewhere moving others toward baptism and prayer.”

I answer that it isn’t enough to address our prayer to the gods of the philosophers in order for that prayer to be issued from within the trinitarian relationship—even if our God and their gods have some of the same names and attributes. “On that day many will say to me, 'Lord, Lord…’ And then I will declare to them, 'I never knew you; depart from me, you evildoers'" (Matthew 7:21-23).” What makes a prayer a prayer is that it’s carried to heaven. Addressing our prayers to the same name may establish a horizontal ecumenical connection between people of different religions, but it doesn’t have a vertical reality (between God and man). We also encounter the problem that if pagan worship is implicitly something other than what it outwardly claims to be, then even Christian worship may be something other than what it outwardly claims to be as well. Finally, we may not know comprehensively what a thing is by its outward expression, but we surely can’t teach that when something is pagan it may also be not-pagan. In other words, if we can’t see that I’m holding up two fingers, we can’t claim therefore that if I am holding up two fingers I may also be holding up three instead. If pagans offer prayers to pagan idols, we may not know what they’re actually doing, but we can’t teach in good faith that if it is pagan worship, it may also be not-pagan.

The question then arises: how do we have the Holy Spirit? Faith comes by hearing. If we don’t teach then they won’t hear, and, therefore, they won’t pray to the one true God in faith. In my opinion, we all need to take a step back and ask ourselves what percentage of what we teach relies on the doctrine of invincible ignorance of the gospel instead of relying on the inviolable and sacred promise of the final victory of the truth that goes marching on with or without us wringing our hands, grieving over it. This is hard to do but we have to do it.