Is Christianity the true religion?

Joseph Ratzinger, C.S. Lewis, and why the answer is yes.

Christianity and World Religions - I’ve always been interested in this question, of course, but I think it’s important for me to try to wrap my head around it a bit more, given the subject matter of my most recent book which is at least implying a unique role for Christianity - if not that only then also a unique truth.

U2 frontman Bono on the band’s Co-Exist tour. Bono pointed to his headband, displaying a crescent, a Star of David and a cross, repeating in a rhythmic pattern the words “Jesus, Jew, Mohammed. It’s true.”

I’d like to share a couple of insights.

The first chunk is from Joseph Ratzinger, later Pope Benedict XVI, from his book Truth and Tolerance: Christian Belief and World Religions.

We tend to see “religion” as one big mass of different beliefs that can’t be easily sorted or differentiated from each other. But, there is, in fact, a historical progression in religion that can be observed quite easily.

The first stage is the primitive experience of humanity. These are the scattered experiences and intuitions of pre-civilisational man, as he intuits something of the spiritual mystery of the world around him. It’s fair to say that this is the beginning of paganism. I don’t mean the term in a pejorative sense. Paganism is, in this sense, the attribution of holiness or sacredness to the natural world. In lieu of the revelation of something beyond nature, man instinctively worships nature.