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Let me expand on my challenge to the church in my last Blog to give up its insistence that Jesus is the only way to God, a claim that makes Christianity the only valid religion in the world.

First, what I believe begins with God. I choose to believe God exists, that God is real. I underscore the fact that this is a choice. It is not based on fact, but on faith. No one can prove God exists, and no one can prove God doesn’t exist. In the end you have to choose which one you believe. I believe God is real.

Second, I believe in Jesus because I believe in God. It is not the other way around. I don’t believe in God because I believe in Jesus. God is the focus of my faith, Jesus is the focus of my life. I want to live as I understand him to have lived, and follow what I understand him to have taught. Not that I do so very well, but it is the object of my intentions. But if I did not already believe in God, Jesus would mean nothing to me. God comes first. Nothing else and no one else. As I understand Judaism, this is the fundamental claim it makes. As a Jew Jesus must have believed the same thing. It makes no sense to me that he would have wanted his followers to believe something different, to put him ahead of God or to make him equal to God. That would have been blasphemy to him, and to every Jew of his day, so it is not something I will do now, even though it is what I was taught to do by my church.

Third, if God is real, if what I believe is true, then by necessity God must be bigger than anything I or anyone else believes about God. If God is only what I say God is, in truth God is simply a projection of what I believe.

These are the basic convictions that lead me to believe in a God who is bigger than Christianity, bigger than Jesus, and bigger than all the theologies that have been written and all the creeds that have been codified and all the myths the church has proclaimed through the centuries.

Of course, what I have said up to this point is a result of human reasoning. Now I want to put human faces on it, specifically, two faces. Rabbi Morris Shapiro and Muslim scholar Khaled Elabdi. Morris served Agudath Sholom Syngague in Lynchburg, Virginia. While I was Chaplain and taught at Lynchburg College we became good friends. He preached at the College chapel. I preached at Synagogue. He was in the Jewish tradition “a good man,” one of the best, I believe. He was a man of God. Khaled is a Sufi Muslim who is a teacher by profession. He translates books written by his Sufi teacher from French to English. We have become the best of friends as well, and like Morris Shapiro, he is a good man, also one of the best, indeed, perhaps the most Godly man I know.

If God’s heart is too small to love Morris Shapiro and Khaled Elabdi as I believe God loves me, if God does not see both of them as people who have lived and are living a life well pleasing to God, as the Apostle Paul said we should (Romans 12:1-2), then God is smaller than I am. How could I believe in a God like that? Why would I? Why would anyone? If the human heart can reach beyond religious barriers, surely the heart of God can and does.

I, therefore, choose to believe God is bigger and better than I am, that God is One who loves more than I love and sees in people more than see. The God I believe in is simply too big to be limited to one understanding of God. Thus, I believe God is too big for one religion, and why even though Jesus is for all Christians the way to God, he cannot be the only way without making God too small for the world all people of faith say God created.