Is God Too Big to Fit onto Your Bumper Sticker?
A couple of weeks ago I ran across a new slogan for our age of relativism. On the bumper of a Subaru I saw: God is too big to fit into only one religion . I had not heard this idea said in quite this way before and it took me awhile to figure out how to respond to it tactfully. Usually I hear pluralism presented as ‘many paths to one God’.
I would like to suggest that replacing the word ‘religion’ with ‘theology’ might improve the clarity of this post without diminishing the overall meaning of the bumper sticker. Since the defining characteristic of a religion is their concern with the Deity/deities it is probably a good idea to approach it this way. I could be wrong about this, however.
I’d like to make a simple yet profound observation: the claim that God (Theos) is too big to fit into only one theology is itself an exclusive theological claim about God—thus the claim refutes itself. The most fundamental law of logic is the Law of Non-contradiction. At face value this bumper sticker cannot both be true and not true at the same instant and is therefore in violation of the Law. (This is the usual problem that relativistic/pluralistic claims face).
I also need to point out some specifics. This argument takes advantage of ambiguities of its claim. Its brevity lends itself to a kind of common sense interpretation that I will try to handle portion by portion.
1. God is
Since the sticker is arguing in favor of a certain view of God, this begs the question from where does your knowledge of God come from so you can use the three letter word G-O-D in this way? Is this God eternal or temporal, include the world or not, does conclusion he have knowledge of the world?
2. too big
The ‘too big’ builds on the nature of God in the above (#1) and suffers the same fallacy of petito principii. In what sense is God too big? Is he like a fat Santa Clause unable to go down a particular chimney? Too big in the sense that he is infinite and we are finite?
3. to fit into
Notice this is not saying ‘to be fit into’. In what sense ‘fit into’? This seems misleading. If the sticker is appealing to an understanding of God as infinite and human knowledge as finite, then one might easily agree with the assessment that fitting the infinite into anything less than infinite is automatically illogical. In what way are religions providing a container for an infinite understanding of God? The Christian claim is that God has revealed himself fully in Christ (fullness of the Godhead bodily). In this way God has fit himself into a person-Jesus.
4. only one religion.
If all religions taught that their way to God was not fully adequate I suppose this sticker would be redundant or at least self-evident. However it is not the case that all religions teach theology this way. There are certain religions which make exclusive claims about God (including the bumper sticker’s theology itself!): Islam, Christianity, Mormonism, atheism, etc. Whereas others such as Confucism, Taoism, New Age and others at least on the surface are not missionary-minded religions in believing that they are a way but not necessarily the way.
In an interview with Dr. John Warwick Montgomery, the first question addresses the question of “Aren’t all religions saying the same thing?” Interview Here (Large Quicktime movie. You may want to right-click the link and ‘Save to Disk’.)
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